Don Rickles Quotes

“Gallo and his party laughed along with everyone else at Don’s insults—sadly, there is no record of Don zinging Crazy Joe—and, after the show ended, they headed over to Umberto’s Clam House in Little Italy for Crazy Joe’s big birthday party. At around 4:30 a.m., as Gallo sat at his table, a middle-aged gunman calmly walked up and pumped two bullets into him before escaping in a getaway car. Crazy Joe, mortally wounded, staggered after him before collapsing in the street. The gangland slaying triggered a bloody mob war that lasted two years.”
― Michael Seth Starr, Don Rickles: The Merchant of Venom

“Rickles, to his dying day, constantly reminded me that when his son was born, I went to a sports store and bought every piece of sporting equipment you could think of. I mean, literally everything,” recalled actor James Caan, who met Don through Don Adams and struck up a lifelong friendship with The Merchant of Venom. “The baseball crap, the hockey stuff . . . there were two big boxes and I handed them to him and I said, ‘This is to make sure the kid grows up straight.’ He never forgot it. Twenty years later he would still bring it up.”
― Michael Seth Starr, Don Rickles: The Merchant of Venom