[5] He studied architecture there before transferring to the Fashion Institute of Technology. Club Kids the faithful disciples of "party monster" Michael Alig bid their final farewell to the troubled but legendary club promoter, who passed away in . This story has been shared 100,855 times. Outrage! Alig . There, he met the boyfriend of artist Keith Haring, who introduced Alig to New York City nightlife. However, Melendez didn't have the same intense desire to lead that his friend had. [40] Michael Alig had numerous Club Kids and mentors helping him get established to function in the modern real world life such as Ernie Glam and his husband David Maurici, Screamin' Rachael, Steve Lewis, Esther Hayes, Christopher Comp, Sushi, Michael Tronn, nightlife personality Professor Victor P. Corona, and nightlife personality/musician Ingrid LaLa. Theres an advantage to be had in writing about someone that you dont admireyou feel far less beholden to their feelings. 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The crime happened on March 17, 1996, and the perpetrators were Michael Alig and his roommate, Robert "Freeze" Riggs. He moved to New York City to attend Fordham University and quickly met a fellow student called Ludovic who changed the course of his life. Alig told The Post in an exclusive article in 2014 how he grew up as a gay person in South Bend, Ind., wearing Izod and felt as if he had finally come home after arriving in the Big Apple in 1984. Alig himself has noted that because the name of the game was disaffection, the verbal abuse could be rather extreme. His mother, a native of Bremerhaven, Germany, moved to the United States after marrying his father, a computer programmer. On February 2, 2017, Alig was arrested for trespassing and smoking crystal meth in Joyce Kilmer Park in Concourse, outside the Bronx Supreme Court, at approximately 1:30a.m. In reality, he argued, the whole thing was a fairly bloodless affair they simply thought Melendez was unconscious, so they put him on a couch, where he asphyxiated. In fact, the real story might just be even more outlandish than the movie version. [42] An EP, also entitled What's In, was released. While Michael Alig was busy boasting about a crime his club circles didn't quite believe he had done, the authorities were busy trying to figure out the identity of a dismembered body that had washed up on Staten Island in April 1996, perThe Advocate. He along with fellow 'Club Kid' Robert 'Freeze' Riggs were arrested for a brutal murder, with Alig pleading guilty to manslaughter in 1997 for killing Melendez. Growing up as a closeted homosexual in a small town, he felt out of place and had very few friends; his strong interests in fashion and art made him the object . Aligs ex was there and saw him unconscious and called 911, a police source said. Privacy Notice Michael Alig, Keda Albano, Swedish dance band Army of Lovers , Kabuki Starshine and unidentified pose for a photo in Alig's apartment in May 1992 in. There were these giant clubs like Palladium designed for 7,000 people that had like 200 people in them. Michael told me he probably wasnt going to make it through the year. Michael Alig, who spent 17 years in prison for murdering and dismembering his drug dealer, died of an apparent heroin overdose on Christmas. I grabbed the hammer and hit Angel over the head [21], According to Riggs, he hit Melendez a total of three times on the head with the hammer. But with the excess-fueled fame and fortune came dangerous trappings, too, including drugs. Meanwhile, Alig became more and more addicted to drugs over time. Michael Alig, who served 17 years for the murder of Angel Melendez, says prison is the best place to do drugs "because you have no responsibility." Club Kid killer reveals prison's secret sex spots To put it in simple words, Alig's never overcame his problems with drugs. I perched on a couch and Alig told me about his life in sentence fragments and tangentsuntil he asked if we could go to Starbucks because his boyfriend, whom he had met on Scruff a few months prior, was in the bedroom naked. Michael Alig (born April 29, 1966 in South Bend, Indiana) was a party promoter in the Manhattan club scene in the late 1980s and early 1990s. After spending approximately seventeen years behind bars, Alig was paroled on May 5, 2014, but what the notorious murderer did in the six years between his release from prison and his death remains a subject of interest. He was released in 2014. Andre "Angel" Melendez was a regular on the New York City club scene and worked at The Limelight, among other clubs (some not owned by Gatien, e.g., Webster Hall[18]), where he sold drugs on the premises. Some might have found it strange to see Macaulay Culkin, most famous for his early work as Kevin McAllister in the Home Alone movies, playing Michael Alig, a glamor-obsessed clubber-turned-killer. Michael Alig had several roles in four Eric Spade Rivas films: Vamp Bikers, This page was last edited on 15 February 2023, at 01:31. According to The Guardian, there are many versions of the exact circumstances surrounding Andre"Angel" Melendez's death, thanks to the inaccurate depictions in various pop culture works and exaggerations by both the media and the Club Kids. Things took a wild turn changing Alig's life forever with the March 1996 disappearance of Andre "Angel" Melendez, a nightlife staple who DJ'd, wore angel wings and dealt drugs. Alig in the visitor's room at the Emira Correctional Facility. He told me hed been on Xanax and drank during the Outrage party I attended. Party Monstershows Melendez physically attacking Alig during an argument, and after Riggs hits Melendez's head with a hammer a few times, Alig suffocates him and injects him with a syringe. [8] During this time, Alig and other regular clubgoers began creating flamboyant personas, and later became known as "Club Kids". The story didnt interest me initially. Fabulous was the word of the day. Alig was released from prison in 2014, but continued to chase hisClub Kid heyday and do drugs. I got turned into Cruella Deville [during the episode], but no one could please Elke, so Jason and I needed a final release, Cain said. The Club Kids were out and about, and their open celebration of difference wasn't just a fringe thing, either. Alig has insisted that the Club Kids weren't using narcotics to have fun but rather to stave off the horrors of everyday life. I couldnt quite muster sympathy for him, given his role in his apparent downfall, but I felt bad for him on a human level. Thanks for contacting us. Cain and the Club Kids were caught in a messy battle with Aligs mother, Elke Blair, over who would keep his ashes. Sitemap, Your California Privacy Rights [29] Alig was arrested as was Riggs. Michael Alig was a very real person, as are many of the other scenesters depicted in the movie up to and including Angel Melendez, who really was killed by Alig and his acquaintance. As a culture, we tend to care more about killers than their victims, just as we have historically tended to center white voices (Alig was white; Melendez moved to New York from Colombia as a child with his family). . Alig's ex "was there and saw him . Per Variety, the pair killed Melendez with a hammer and later dismembered his body and threw it in the Hudson river in a cardboard box. As The Guardian tells us, the 17-year-old Alig moved to New York from Indiana in the early 1980s in order to get a reprieve from his difficult family conditions and the constant bullying because of his homosexuality. 82,056, This story has been shared 73,275 times. [16] Alig later claimed that after he completed his stint and was released, Gatien fired him. According to The Advocate, this wasn't the case with Angel Melendez. In 2014, Alig . He became part of the scenes exclusive, trend-setting group known as the Club Kids who were paid merely to show up and bring a bit of fabulousness to the mix, Alig recalled. The city was in such a state of disrepair that it looked like Mad Max, with the subways and streetlights out and fires. Alig also says that he didn't smother Angel Melendez and definitely didn't pour Drano down his throat. They also appeared on Donahue, Geraldo, and The Joan Rivers Show. Doesn't Recall Speaking With Mayor. Alig told me a few years ago that he never thought hed live to see 50, so anything that came after that milestone was gravy. I wasnt particularly surprised when, about a month after its publication, Alig was arrested for smoking meth in public (outside the Bronx Supreme Court building, no less). This, combined with peer pressure to constantly outdo himself, caused him to become erratic and sometimes outright nasty. But oh, was the gravy lumpy. Over the coming weeks, the Village Voice continued to report and make accusations about Melendez's murder. In May 2014, reports emerged that Alig was attempting to sell his memoirs and was pursuing a career as a magazine writer. Whether he deserved a renaissance, a second chance at cultural relevance, it never happened. Even if hed previously recited this dozens of times, it still impressed me when he said it to me: The club kids were a reaction initially to the AIDS crisis and to the death of Warhol. Shortly after his arrest, Riggs confessed to police: On a Sunday in March of 1996 I was at home and Michael Alig and Angel Melendez were loudly arguing and getting louder. Alig was sad, objectively, like a half-dead bug on its back. It was liberating, he wrote of the wild scene, which included androgyny icon Grace Jones partying among about 300 other people. Then, he filled the victim's mouth with detergent and closed it with duct tape. Guys waiting eight hours outside his door, asking for him, asking for, Michael.. Blair told us in January, she felt they were trying to bully her over where he would eventually be laid to rest. In an interview with his former fellow prisoner, Daniel Genis, Alig said that his time spent reading while in solitary inspired him to write his memoirs, which he titled Aligula, and he particularly identified with the character Raskolnikov from Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment. Terms of Use It seemed to me that Alig was still serving a sort of sentence, that the prison bars he spent 17 years behind were ultimately immaterial. The $500 Prada glasses that his friends, two former club kids named Jenny and Karliin, bought for him last year are precariously perched on his nose, held together with fishing line, one lens . The wilder, more eccentric the makeup, hair and costumes, the better and no one was held in more esteem in the hierarchy of alien-looking club-hoppers than a gender-bending man with an entourage. . Michael Alig died of an overdose on Christmas Day, 2020. Once inside the joint, Alig said, he was hooked. Chad Rachman; Retna. Then Alig grabbed a pillow and tried to smother him. Have you ever done Special K? [41], On October 15, 2014, Alig released the pop song, "What's In" (featuring DJ Keoki), written and produced by Greg Tanoose, through Austound Music, an Austin, Texas-based record label. parties. The visionary party promoter and style icon was one of the best-known members of a loose . Alig, nonetheless, repeatedly assured me he was a good person. The blog contained transcripts of phone conversations between Alig and St. James about Alig's experiences in prison. [24] The following day, the New York Post's "Page Six" column ran a lead item about the murder mystery, citing Musto's reporting as well as a New York magazine piece quoting an evasive Alig. ", "My interview with Keoki and Michael Alig for, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Michael_Alig&oldid=1139419541, American people convicted of manslaughter, People with histrionic personality disorder, Prisoners and detainees of New York (state), Deaths by heroin overdose in New York (state), Short description is different from Wikidata, Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License 3.0, The events of Alig's years as a club promoter up to his arrest are covered in, The events of Alig's years as a club promoter up to his arrest were portrayed in the documentary, produced and directed by, A prison interview with Alig is featured in the documentary, Alig is cast as "Michael" in Spanish NY based independent director Manuel Toledano's first and only movie (finished in 1998 with the participation of producer. "Get him off of me" [Angel] started shaking him violently and banging him against the wall. 45,190, 2023 NYP Holdings, Inc. All Rights Reserved He was known in his heyday as the self-proclaimed King of the Club Kids, a group of outrageously dressed, drug-fueled hedonists staging the most sought-after nightclub parties in the 1980s and early 1990s. Superstar Andy Warhol once said, "In the future, everyone will be famous for fifteen minutes." Infamous "Club Kid Killer" Michael Alig had much more than his fifteen minutes when he was the undisputed king of nightlife in the '90's, but his time as a creative force in New York ended abruptly after the murder of Angel Melendez in 1997, a drug dealer and periphery member of Alig's . Alig waffled between claiming to be off drugs and admitting to doing a bump here and there. While the fact that the scene kept silent about a man who freely talked about killing someone might seem unbelievable, it's worth noting that Alig's tendency to shock and provoke knew very few bounds. After working the Outrage! Michigan Student Killed by 14-Year-Old and 13-Year-Old Boys in Attempted Carjacking After Offering Them Ride to Home, Kansas teacher farts during online class; bursts into laughter along with students, International Business Times, Singapore Edition. Culkin also stated that he aimed for more artistic endeavors and tried to avoid doing the kind of movies that had made him famous. The battle between Michael Alig's mom and his Club Kid followers over his ashes has gone nuclear, with his mom claiming they're trying to "bully" her not only about where her son's . The overlap made me wary and a little queasy. Melendez and definitely did n't pour Drano down his throat [ 16 ] Alig was arrested as was.. Day, 2020 he did n't pour Drano down his throat 29 ] later! Roommate, Robert `` Freeze '' Riggs the Advocate michael alig last photo this story has been shared times! ] he studied architecture there before transferring to the Fashion Institute of Technology that Alig released! 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