Michael Alig – the infamous nightlife legend, “King of the Club Kids” and convicted murderer – died of an apparent overdose at his Upper Manhattan home on Christmas Day, the New York Daily News reports from official sources. He was 54 years old.
According to reports, Alig was using heroin just before he lost consciousness at about 3 am, her boyfriend told the police, and doctors found him dead at the scene.
In the nineties, Alig was a notorious businessman from the Peter Gatien nightclub empire (which included Limelight, the Palladium and Tunnel) and a “Pied Piper for young clubs”, as Michael Musto reported on the pages of Village Voice. In 1996, Alig pleaded guilty to collaborating in the murder of his drug dealer, Andre “Angel” Melendez and served 17 years in prison. A dispute over drug money turned violent, leading to a terrible case: Robert “Freeze” Riggs hit Melendez with a hammer to the head, then Alig smothered him with a sweatshirt until his death.
Gallery: Limelight, Tunnel, Roxy photos
The pair hid the mutilated corpse in the bathtub (covering it with ice and a few sprays of cologne Calvin Klein Eternity), then continued the party for more than a week – fried in a mind-blowing mixture of heroin, ketamine, cocaine and rofinol – and even he invited friends to the apartment while Melendez’s body rotted in the other room. When the stench became unbearable, they dismembered the body and threw it into the Hudson River.
The “party monster” and killer was the subject of James St. James’ memoirs, entitled Disco blood bath, who rejected a documentary by Fenton Bailey and Randy Barbato, Party Monster. Alig’s story later inspired his 2003 feature film with the same title, starring Macaulay Culkin as Alig and Seth Green as St. James. Another documentary, Glory Daze: The Life and Times of Michael Alig, is now also broadcasting.
Alig was released from prison in 2014 and returned to New York City, claiming to have been rehabilitated (although nightlife no longer existed as he remembered it). “The biggest thing I learned in prison was patience,” he said Rolling Stone at the time. “I was demanding and self-centered, but in prison you learn very quickly that the time is right. When Freeze and I went to the methadone clinic for the first time, we stayed there for almost 36 hours. You sleep in the waiting room.
“I went to prison addicted to heroin and it is a very difficult drug to give up – especially in prison,” he added. “I would like to shut down, go through withdrawal and hope to feel better a week or a month later. And when it didn’t, I decided, ‘Fuck it. I committed this horrible crime, no one will ever forgive me, I may as well get high and not have to deal with it. ‘”
Alig also talked about the price that solitary confinement caused by drug use caused him. “I went through this eight, nine, ten years. At one point, there was even a two-year sobriety period, but it was never long enough for my brain to reconnect to what it was before I started using drugs, ”he said. “It was only after four years off that my brain really started to get connected again. But you asked about the loner. Whenever the urine test is positive, you are left with another year of solitary confinement. If you’re on a drug program, they kick you out. And then, when you’re in solitary confinement, all the more reason to use drugs! “
In 2017, after finishing his probation, Alig tried to resurrect himself as an inhabitant of the nightlife and threw a party to celebrate. Page Six reported that Alig received death threats for organizing the party and many detractors criticized the idea that people were “celebrating” a convicted murderer. “The bad ones are really bad,” said Alig Rolling Stone. “They say, ‘We are going to kill you and we think you should buy the electric chair and, as the state did not do that, we are going to do it!’ “
Despite other problems with drugs, addictions and arrests, Alig remained sorry while trying to reintegrate into society. “Eighteen years later, looking at the person I was at that time, I feel nothing but shame and disgust,” wrote Alig in an article published by New York Post in 2014. “I was a selfish addict who killed another human being.”