Artie Lange, who recently blamed his collapsed nose on years of drug abuse, revealed that an injury he received when he was allegedly kidnapped 11 months ago is also partially responsible.
“I still gamble a lot. That was my worst vice for a long time was gambling because it led to everything else. I’m the kind of guy, it just escalates,” Lange said on a recent episode of the podcast “Are We Still Talking About This?” “I owed a bookie 62 grand, and a kid who worked for a bookie, we’ll call him an African-American, he was collecting, and he thought I was a billionaire because he saw me on TV and he kidnapped me.”
The 51-year-old comedian explained that he was on his way to his truck when he heard someone call his name before getting hit in the nose.
“The kid, right here, boom … knocked me out for, like, 10 minutes,” he said. “I woke up in his van.”
Lange told the 19-year-old, who planned to get $100,000 from him, that he should think about what he was doing since he was friends with the bookie and had known him since he was 12 years old. The warning seemed to work.
“‘You’re just a kid, like, this was a dumb plan,'” the comedian explained. “Like, I actually felt bad for him and he got kind of scared and he left. He left me in his van.”
Soon after, when Lange was in jail last year on drug-related charges, he said his bookie called him and asked how they should handle the kidnapper.
“I go, ‘Nothing. I don’t want anything to happen. Just keep him away from me,’ and he goes, ‘Yeah, we tuned him up. We sent him to North Carolina.’ I’m like, ‘You want to announce any other felonies on the jail [phone?]'” he laughed.
The former “Mad TV” star then said the attack was partly to blame for his now-deformed nose.
“It destroyed my nose,” he said. “The septum from the abuse from the years of drugs and this hit broke it and I’ve had two operations and you know, it’s just in bad shape … It’s a scar from years of s–t.”
In December, Lange tested positive for cocaine use but was spared jail time for violating his probation.