You wouldn’t like him when he’s angry.
Richie Incognito is the NFL’s Incredible Hulk, a rampaging behemoth whose history of violence was born in childhood and nurtured throughout his life by a hard-nosed father and a tough mother — who, according to shocking documents unearthed by The Post, threatened to put a bullet in her husband’s skull just five months ago.
From a husky boy with anger issues in New Jersey, to the big terror on campus at the University of Nebraska, to the divisive dean of the Miami Dolphins lockerroom, Incognito has always left a mark on the football field and off — sometimes with his fists.
The offensive lineman’s recent troubles — he was suspended for viciously bullying teammate Jonathan Martin — could end a career whose job requirements matched his inner rage.
“He’s what you want for an NFL guard — the nasty grinder,” said college buddy Nick Rubek. “His personality and the position he plays go perfectly together.”
Not the Brady Bunch
Family lore has it that when Incognito’s grandfather was being processed through Ellis Island, he didn’t want to keep his surname — so he was given the name Incognito. It certainly didn’t fit this clan.
His parents, Richard Sr., a cigar-munching Vietnam veteran from German and Italian stock, and mom Donna were a force to reckoned with at their son’s games in sports-crazed Bogota, N.J..
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“His parents were definitely psychotic. You understand why Richie is the way Richie is,” said Jim Moore, 65, Bogota’s recreation director who coached youth football when Incognito was a boy.
Another coach, Joe Casper, described the elder Incognito, a stone and marble mason, as a “loudmouth on the sidelines.” Others said he mercilessly pushed his son to perfection.
And Donna was an overprotective enabler. “She’d complain, ‘Oh, he punched my kid.’ She was always whining to the referees,” Moore said.
The man once voted the NFL’s dirtiest player by his peers was a softie early on, crying on the sidelines when he was roughed up on the gridiron.
“He got pushed around frequently on the football field. At times, he’d come back to the sidelines crying,” recalled Casper, 58, who coached the 10-year-old on the Bogota Bucks of the Bergen County Junior Football League. “There would be welts all over him. He was getting beat up.”
Parental rage
Donna and Richard Sr. also took that anger out on each other — with Richard Sr. granted a one-year order of protection against his wife in Arizona after a vicious row.
Richie Sr. alleged in June that his wife told him “to put a bullet in a gun and put it to my head and pull the trigger,” according to court documents.
“After I said ‘Never,’ Donna Incognito said she would put the bullet in the gun and put it to my head and pull the trigger.
“She said that way she could collect insurance and she said she was the beneficiary. I told her my son Richard Jr. is my beneficiary not her.”
When asked for comment, Donna, who lives in Cresskill, N.J., told The Post, “You put out whatever you need to put out, but trust me, I’m coming back at you, buddy.”
Richard Sr., who now lives in Peoria, Ariz., and filed for divorce on Oct. 31, did not return repeated messages seeking comment. The couple lost their Glendale home to foreclosure in 2012.
Richie Incognito (left) in Little League with his father (back).
From bullied to bully
For the most part, Richie was unassuming — a good kid. Still, there were signs something was amiss.
“The kid had anger issues … he destroyed all his toys,” said Bob Mühlhahn, 48, who lived across the street from the Incognitos and eventually bought their old Elm Avenue home. When he took down the wallpaper, he said, he found holes in the walls consistent with punching and kicking.
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The oversized Incognito was often moved up to play ball with older boys. That caused problems.
“If he struck out, he’d be upset. He’d cry. That led the other kids to make fun of him. Kids are pretty cruel at that age and Richie was pretty thin-skinned,” said Little League coach Kerry Deutsch. “If you’re the biggest kid on the team and you cry, for the other kids on the other team, you’re a mark.”
And then bullying came to an end.
“There was a smaller kid who was picking on Richie,” recalled Seth Bendian, a baseball coach in Englewood who knew both kids in 1993. “I found out there was a resolution. Richie did what he could do, which was kick this kid’s butt … I’m pretty sure the teasing stopped after that.”
Richie kept growing, and when he was 11, the family moved to Glendale, Ariz., where his high school football coach Jim Ewan told The Arizona Republic that Incognito wasn’t a natural born leader, but was the biggest and strongest kid in school who worked hard in the weight room.
“I don’t think he would have ever been voted Mr. Congeniality, but he got along with everyone,” he recalled.
College chaos
Things were different at the University of Nebraska, where Incognito’s reputation preceded him.
He was First Team All Freshman in 2002, but was ejected in a game against Penn State for fighting, and was seen spitting on another player. In spring 2003 he was suspended — the team never said why— and sent to the Menninger Clinic in Topeka, Kan., to be treated for anger management. By the fall, he was reinstated on the team.
Little changed. When he wasn’t suited up, he was still getting into brawls — found guilty of misdemeanor assault in after “one of those parties in a Van Wilder movie” in February 2004, a former student told The Post.
“I had to use the bathroom, and I knocked, and heard there were two people in there — and they weren’t happy I was knocking,” recalled the former student.
“I waited, and then suddenly, out comes Richie and his girlfriend. He was irate.”
Eventually, Incognito, like an uncaged beast, “tried to pin me on the bed,” as Cornhusker pals joined in, he continued. “I felt something hit me on the side of my face and my head went into a wall — it was Richie taking a cheap shot. “At that point he was threatening to kill me.”
The 6-foot-3, 320-pound lineman — who was punching holes in the walls when he couldn’t find a chin — finally left the party, but not before cold-cocking a poor sap who happened to be standing by the door. “He took his cell phone, threw it, and then punched him on his way out,” the former student said.
Cornhusker blues
Incognito was set to play his junior year for new coach Bill Callahan, but was unceremoniously suspended from the nationally ranked squad, a move thought to be precipitated by the February brawl.
The Daily Nebraskan, the school newspaper, applauded the news in an editorial written by Van Jensen.
“He was one of the worst people I ever interacted with,” Jensen told The Post. “It was just so extreme and unrelenting. There was no sense that he learned from anything when he got in trouble.”
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Jensen said he nearly came to blows with Incognito after his editorial was published.
“We were both in line at Wendy’s and he was standing over me . . . staring at me, ” he recalled. “He eventually just grunted and walked away.”
Officially, Callahan said at the time, “We have team rules. They’re very simple to follow. If they’re not followed, and they’re not complied to, then (you) suffer the consequences, unfortunately.”
But a former student told The Post the reason he heard from “inside the locker room” was that Incognito “tried to charge Bill Callahan.”
Callahan could not be reached for comment.
Meanwhile, the Incognito family made excuses for their son.
“Richie won’t take crap from anyone. He’s a hard-nosed kid, and Nebraska doesn’t want hard-nosed kids anymore,” his father told the Lincoln Journal Star.
No redemption at Oregon
Incognito left Nebraska for Oregon, but never played a game down there.
“He was talented, but came with issues. He claimed they were in the past,” head coach Mike Bellotti said at the time. “We set a code of conduct he had to meet. He failed that before fall camp.”
And yet with all the baggage, the NFL jumped at the chance to sign the troubled washout. Icognito went in the third round of the 2005 draft, the 81st pick overall.
He soon cemented his claim as the NFL’s dirtiest player — with a league-high seven personal fouls while playing for the Rams.
St. Louis cut ties with him in 2009 after he head-butted two opponents in a blowout loss to the Titans. That same year, Incognito — who has admitted to doing drugs during his time in St. Louis — was charged with misdemeanor attempted possession of drug paraphernalia in Arizona, according to court records.
After a pit stop in Buffalo, he took his talents in 2010 to South Beach, where he reportedly convened offensive-line meetings at a strip club — hardly shocking for a player who at 16 ordered up strippers while attending a Nebraska football camp for high schoolers, according to ESPN.
Miami Vice
In Miami, he kept up his hulking frame by gobbling up prodigious breakfasts at his regular spot near his home in Fort Lauderdale, the H & E Marina Deli, where his usual is a bacon and cheese omelette, pancakes and a bagel, a worker there said.
Despite boasting about being a new man on the anti-anxiety drug Paxil, Incognito was still involved in scraps, most recently in the pre-season with Texans’ Antonio Smith, who tore off the lineman’s helmet in a nasty stand-off.
But even when the cameras were on him in the locker room, he was still a jerk.
On last year’s HBO series “Hard Knocks,” Incognito figured out the password to rookie Michael Egnew’s iPad and posts messages on his Facebook account. “I was going to put something up there rude, but then I saw the picture of your girlfriend — and felt bad,” Incognito said.
And last August, Incognito was involved with a fight with a security guard at the posh LIV Nightclub in Miami Beach.
“His group of friends were getting too close to the stage and security asked them to step back. Then they were all belligerent and yelling obscenities and a fight broke out. That’s when Richie jumped into the mix and things just went downhill from there,” said a club employee.
“He was cussing a lot saying f— you and f— that. You know, he’s a football player. He thinks he’s better than everyone else and he just couldn’t understand why we were kicking him out,” said the staffer. Incognito was not arrested in the brawl.
“Since then he always comes to me to hook him up with tables and bottles. We always give him a low minimum. I think his last bill was in the neighborhood of $5,000 and he usually just splits it with whoever he’s with,” the staffer dished, adding that Incognito — who’s base salary this year was $4 million — is partial to Grey Goose vodka or Johnny Walker Black.
But it’s clear he can’t handle his liquor.
In May 2012, Incognito reportedly harassed a female volunteer at a team-sponsored golf tournament by touching her privates with a golf club.
“After that, he proceeded to lean up against her buttocks with his private parts as if dancing, saying ‘Let it rain! Let it rain! ’” according to a police report of the alleged incident at the Turnberry Resort & Club. “He finally finished his inappropriate behavior by emptying bottled water in her face.”
A perfect player
Incognito is no aberration, he’s exactly what NFL team’s covet in an offensive lineman — the angry and impenetrable muscle that stands between the defense and the quarterback.
“You are taught to be an aggressive person, and you typically do not make it to the NFL if you are a passive person,” ex-Dolphin offensive lineman Lydon Murtha wrote in Sports Illustrated. “There are a few, but it’s very hard. Playing football is a man’s job, and if there’s any weak link, it gets weeded out. It’s the leaders’ job on the team to take care of it.”
So it was natural that the Dolphin’s allegedly turned to Incognito — a 2012 Pro Bowler who was voted to the team’s leadership council this year — to toughen up Martin, the soft-spoken Stanford graduate.
In April, he allegedly left a voicemail spewing racist insults and threats at Martin, reportedly calling his teammate a “half n—r piece of s—t.”
The NFL is now investigating Incognito, who was suspended last Sunday after Martin walked off the team and went public with the voicemails and text messages.
A former Nebraska student said Incognito is no racist.
“In the family, there are those issues . . . with his dad, to be honest with you. I think he can very easily gone down that road,” said the former student.
Instead, friends say he’s just misunderstood.
“Calling him a maniac — that’s not him,” insisted Rubek, 30, Incognito’s bro at Nebraska. “The thing about Richie was, he’d pick on you — but we’d all pick on each other — but he was the first one in the group to jump to your defense if someone else did.
He’s proud of his friend.
“He got kicked out of two universities. Guys like that don’t make it in the NFL. They usually float off to oblivion.”
Now he might.
Additional reporting by Brad Hamilton, Michael Gartland, Kris Conesa in Miami and David Schwartz in Glendale, AZ.