"(silence)" "(electrical buzzing, then a chime)" " When Michael woke up that day, he had no intention of killing anybody." " [Voiceover] You know, it was real biblical, it was Shakespearian in scope of what happened." " [Voiceover] In the heaven of nightlife, and at the pinnacle of power in New York City during a certain era, and then sinking to the greatest depths of hell." "Where is Michael now?" " [Voiceover] There was the club kid story." "This is the story of something good turning into something bad." "There's the innocence lost story." "This horrific crime, the gore element, the drug element, the decadence." "It's like when you put them all together into one story, it makes it almost like overload." " When people speak about New York City or anywhere in the world, they say" ""the city that never sleeps."" "At that time, that was true." "It never slept." "(somber piano music)" " Westside of Manhattan was a cesspool." "Anybody who's in real estate will tell you that waterfront property can be hugely valuable, and the fact that it was lying fallow shows how poorly the city was run." " New York was really run down." "It was 1984." "The subways were an absolute mess, there was graffiti everywhere, the city was dirty, and it was kind of lawless and scary." " It was more like Sodom and Gomorrah back then." " But it was creative and this was New York when" "New York was still scary and you had very rich and you had very poor." " Lot more crime, lot more drugs." " It was still a gritty, gritty place to be." "And it was fabulous." "In the East Village, there was the art scene that was happening with Jean-Michel Basquiat," "Keith Haring, and there were still long stretches of alphabet city that were bombed out." " Most of the buildings on Rivington and Staten, they were all abandoned." "They were stripped of all the plumbing and all the wiring by the junkies to sell the copper, whatever they could get for money for drugs." " [Voiceover] It was a time of rising violence, rising street gangs." " It was a city that a lot of people thought was unfixable." " Drive-by shootings that we never saw in the history of New York." " [Voiceover] I mean, you'd walk down the street and you'd have crack vials crushing beneath your feet." " If you went beyond 8th Avenue, forget it." "It was like a war zone." "There were no lights." "It was insane!" " It still had that seedy element." "Times Square hadn't been Disney-fied." " Times Square was still kind of raunchy back then." "You didn't really go to Times Square." " Prostitutes everywhere, wearing outrageous outfits, or walking around half-naked." " Tramps or drug dealers and people getting robbed and stabbed, peepshows everywhere, strip clubs." " Just neighborhoods today where you can't even imagine that that would go on." " So it was a dangerous city, but it was also an amazingly creative city." "It was a city of subcultures." "It was a city where street culture and fashion and music were literally bursting through the sidewalks." " We were not enslaved by rent." "We had time to be creative, and do other things much more important than work." " It was real." "It was the feeling that anything could happen." "It was the feeling that you were living on the edge." " it was a dangerous time in New York." "It was the height of the AIDS epidemic." " Painters, poets, and performance artists, all these people who basically couldn't get arrested in the legitimate mainstream." " You would see someone and they'd be fabulous, and the next month they'd be dead." "It gave an energy and a focus, I think, to New York that isn't there now." " Gallery openings and events and fashion shows." "It was just sort of ferment of creativity." "It really was very exciting." " New York was still New York." " You basically had an open city, but then again there really weren't many night clubs." "There were underground places where people used to go to." "Nothing large, always hidden." " You could not find five place in the entire city that were serving a decent cappuccino." "It didn't happen." "It was only American coffee." "But, on the other hand, they had maybe 20 or 30 SM clubs of the weirdest kind." " Weird warehouses in the East Village, or I don't know what they were, but there were a lot of them." " I had read Andy Warhol's POPism." "I'd read Edie." " He in a way had created the first, this idea of a court of superstars." "That weren't Hollywood movie stars, that weren't necessarily rock stars, they were these alternative people." " That let me know that there were people like me out there, people who thought differently, who dressed differently, who acted differently." " With his factory and his superstars, he had created this whole kind of alternative celebrity culture." " I certainly remember seeing Andy Warhol in clubs, because he used to go out a lot." " At midnight, everyone in the world who was anyone and wanted to get out, get photographed, get high or get laid, was at the back bar of Studio 54." "It was the apex." "It was the center of the world at that time." " Parties with so many of not just New York celebrities, but the wealthy of New York, the socialites." " Halston and Liza Minelli and Baryshnikov, and Elizabeth Taylor and Truman Capote." " Salvadore Dali used to come there with his five drag queens and two madams." " But you couldn't compete with something like that." "And it had a very short life." "People think it went on forever." "It only lasted 11 months or so." "By the time Rubell and Schrager went to jail, it was already on the downturn." "Michael came from Indiana, just a naive, nice kid, charming, nice kid." " He came from South Bend, Indiana, which is not a gay-friendly or creatively-friendly place." " Midwestern, um..." " South Bend is the smallest of the small cities that you can ever imagine." "And it's all Notre Dame and nothing else." " Boring." "It's horrible." "It's everything that people who live in" "New York don't want to be part of." " And for somebody like Alig, gay, to grow up in South Bend was, you couldn't be more out of place than he was in South Bend, Indiana." " I spent a year there one night." " I heard that he was being picked on by kids in school." "Where was I?" "I was gone, I should have been there for my brother, but I wasn't." " I knew why he ran out of that town as quickly as he could." "And he loved the lights and came to New York and off he went." " It just seemed to be common knowledge for people outside of New York." " If you were gay or different or artistically inclined, came to New York because that was just the thing to do." "I mean it was either New York or L.A." " When I got to the city and my first trip down," "I guess it was to St. Mark's place," "I just stumbled upon Patricia Field's store." " I mean, it's possible I met him when he first came into my store" " Something was just unreal, unbelievable to me that actually met Patricia Field that day, she was my salesperson (laughs)." "Down by Cooper all the people selling all the stuff in the street, it was very carnivalesque and kind of a little bit dilapidated and decadent." "At that moment I thought whatever college is closest to this neighborhood is the one that I'm going to decide to go to." "I got a scholarship to Fordham, so I went to Fordham." " It was a good thing." "He was going to get an education, and Michael was a straight-A student all through school." " Well, the first time I met Michael was at Club Aria, second time I'd been there, and it was 157 Hudson." " The most fabulous club ever in the history of the world." " And they had themes." "So it might be sadomasochism, it might be art." " And then it'd be fashion, then it would be the Stone Age, and then it would be futurism." " At first michael was a very well-behaved, nicely dressed," "kind of just sort of almost preppy." "He was this sweet little kid." "And he worked as a busboy at Danceteria." " 'Cause I remember seeing him and Keoki, his boyfriend, holding those big bins that you would use to collect glasses in the club, which was so unfabulous." " But I nearly got fired, 'cause the manager, Jorge, was like you're not doing a very good job being a busboy." "You better think of something else to do or you're gonna have to go." "I remember telling him, "Oh, I want to be the DJ."" "And he was like "Yeah, right, sure." ""You're going to be the DJ." ""Go pick up some cups."" " And I met Michael through someone named Steven Lewis." "Steven Lewis was really very, very much into the scene." "Moreso than I was." "He lived the scene." " I first noticed him, I was in a meeting with Rudolph, who was an impresario at a place called Danceteria, fabulous place." " In my office at Danceteria, I basically received all kinds of people that were there to show me some acts, bands, weird acts." "Lady Hennessy Brown that squirted milk out of her tits as a show." "The people from Missing Foundation, which were a band of weirdos into SM that rolled naked over barbed wire on stage, things like that." " My first impression of Michael Alig wasn't an impression," "I couldn't figure him." "I didn't know if he was smart or crazy." " I think it was in 1985 that Michael Alig was go-go dancing in a talent contest at a club called Danceteria, and I was one of the judges and he played right up to me, and he said, "Oh I'll give you sex, drugs," ""and rock and roll if you let me win."" "He was terrible, he had no talent." "People were doing elaborate lip sync and musicianship, and he just got up there and kind of, danced in his undies." "I was like "there's no way he could win," ""even if he bribed me."" " Twinky little twit." "Very gay, very full of ideas, very imaginative, lively." " When I first started noticing Michael, he was on the periphery of the club scene, and he was watching everybody, and sort of taking everything in and learning." " If somebody insists for long enough that he has a great, new idea, well, maybe he has a great, new idea, so let's give him a chance." "By giving him a chance I got rid of the problem, because if it was a success, great, we had a success." "If the idea sucked, well, then I got rid of the guy, and we moved on to the next one." "And michael Alig was one of them." " And as I was coming in," "Rudolph was praising some idea that he had." " The filthy mouth contest, if I'm not mistaken." " And I asked Rudolph if he was throwing a party, he goes" ""yeah, I have some idea," and I can't remember what the party was, but it was kind of cute." " And rich people would go on stage and insult people in the audience." "And I thought that was a good idea." " After that he threw a lot more parties." "Eventually, we became best friends." " After his shooting in 1968, he developed a great fear of hospitals." "It's said that he would cross the street if he was near a hospital." "And he went in for what was supposed to be a relatively routine gallbladder operation, and because of some mistake, he died." "It was very much unexpected." " When Andy died, there was this incredible loss among the creative forces." " There was a sense of a sort of, that that generation or that era had finally come to a close." " That was the end for them, and they stopped going out." "And there became a vacuum in nightlife." " It was kind of a low period, very dry culturally, (laughs) artistically." " And I even wrote a cover story in the Village Voice called "The Death of Downtown."" " It'd be a kind of signal of this end to the Warhol era." " It seemed like the whole big, gigantic dance club craziness of the '80s had come to an end." "And the scene that I was at the center of was giving way to this whole new club kid scene that was bubbling up." " It wasn't a lull because Andy Warhol died and people were mourning." "It was just one of those cyclical changes." " I even made a party for it, downtown is death, long live downtown!" " We were all talking and just sort of wondering who is going to be the patron saint of the freaks now that Warhol had passed." " As Schumpeter said, "Innovation is recombination."" "Taking different bits and pieces of what has come before and reworking them in different ways." " And I just picture in my own mind, here's a guy trying to go to Fordham University, he's a busboy and he's looking at these party promoters and he probably said to himself, "I could do that." ""And I can probably do it better than they can."" " Michael started out as kind of a fun, rebellious person who wanted to shake up the bourgeois and just not bring on the boredom, and kind of spin the face of mass culture because it was so tedious and bourgeois." " He tries to fill the vacuum gradually, starting with various small parties and then eventually kind of building this domain of nightlife." " Suddenly he was everywhere." "Everywhere I turned there was Michael Alig." "And the next thing I knew he was handing out invitations, and I was like "Oh, he's a promoter now."" " So he went crazy." "He went all over town and distributed 10,000 invitations, those days you had flyers or invitations, there was no internet, and he went bananas." " Michael never listened to music." "He just listened to the messages on his answering machine." " There was a lot of change in the air ripe that everyone could still get a sense of that included technology, you know, lighting and sound and lasers." " Meanwhile percolating underground was Michael Alig who was organizing all these crazy club kids like a kind of pied piper character in charge of all these fractured fairy tale characters who were going to be the next wave in nightlife." " And I think at first Michael wanted to part of the celebutante scene, he wanted to be part of these die-hard New York club people who'd been around for years, but they wanted nothing to do with Michael." " We clicked when we talked, but he made me uncomfortable because I knew that my time was coming to an end, this was my celebutante era, and I was over, I was out, I was done." "21, I was a has-been." "And this little kid was coming up, and it bothered me to no end." " And so Michael, rather than being put off, just decided to go and create his own scene." " It was just something about him, people were just drawn to him, he just had this certain gift." " He was extremely intelligent." " You could clearly see he was a very charismatic fellow, he was very charming, so I could see why people would follow him and did." " He had a crew of people that would literally follow him like ducks." " His children, you know, that would follow him and he was always the one to say," ""Now we're going here" or "Now we're going there."" " Oh, he has a charisma, he had the leadership, yes, this one could see, sure." " I really was not impressed." "I didn't see it." "To me he was just irritating." " Everywhere I turned, people were yelling "Michael, Michael."" "And I would turn my head and it's like, they weren't calling for me, they were calling for him." " Michael had this magic wand that, almost literally, he was a fairy prince." "And, like Andy, he created his own superstars." " When I think back on it, it kind of reminds me of an old Hollywood studio boss or something." "You felt like he was kind of grooming you." " He basically would gather people who dressed up into his circle and make sure they got into places, that was really what Michael did." "You could never really get to know him very closely." "I felt very sort of, you know..." " Michael as a leader of people, it was just, you would think he would be satanic, slick, smooth operator." "That wasn't Michael at all." "You would speak to him and you'd think" ""what a weird guy."" " And combined with my talent and my ability to sell concepts to owners, people with money, we were a pretty formidable team." " And it was right around that time when Michael was throwing good parties at good clubs that the Tunnel opened." " Rudolph was an incredibly creative person." "And he just made a very interesting club." " Rudolph made this fabulous bathroom with 50 stalls long with a DJ at each end." " So it was this cavernous place, with these chandeliers, it was this fabulous decor." "Some joker even mentioned that it was like Auschwitz in Las Vegas." "This was the decor of this club" " It became a much more expensive deal to open a club." "You couldn't open it for $150,000 anymore, now it was millions." " So of all of this sort of interplayed into setting up for a really good decade in New York." " The true "club kid" phenomenon started just as the '80s were coming to an end and coming into the '90s." " Rudolph was having trouble filling the basement, which was the VIP room." " And that's when Michael approached them and said," ""Look, I can fill the basement." ""I know I can do that," ""and it's going to be really fabulous."" "The death of downtown was when Michael swooped in and started throwing parties in the basement." " The drinking age had just risen to 21, and everybody thought this was the end of young people going out, but in fact, it was the beginning of young people going out." "i don't know how that happened." " People really liked kids at clubs back then." " At one point, the Tunnel basement was just filled with teenagers." " They're underage, let's face it, they were there!" "Amazingly, nothing ever happened." " He was really sought after to get 15-16-year-old kids to the club." " I started to get concerned about this, although New York was a different kind of town in those days, there was no war on drugs." " I said, "Oh, well can I play the music at your parties."" "And sure enough, that worked." "He was going to do the music himself." "He was going to DJ and do party, and I was like "Let me do the music."" " Originally, they weren't called the club kids." "It was just Michael and his little merry band of misfits." " For about a week or two, they were known as the "funtouchables,"" "like the untouchables." " And I said "somebody's going to come and inspect, think there's anything happened, no." "And this went for years, it went on for years." " And Rudolph actually called this those club kids, because that's a kind of German." "And it just stuck." " To indoctrinate the youth of America towards a more liberal way of life, towards debauchery and sex and drugs, why not?" " Out of nowhere, the club kid movement kind of exploded." "it was all these underage kids in crazy costumes that you couldn't even imagine." " Most people tried to go with the flow, or change it just a little bit." "but Michael tried to change everything." " They did not play what I was playing upstairs." "He wanted to separate himself." " By promoting a particularly theatrical mode of expression." " These kids started to show up, all dressed up as ballerinas or clowns or pygmies or a chicken or whatever." " Michael went off on this sort of tangent and created this look that was" " Such a cartoon in its delivery." " It wasn't fashionable, it was actually anti-fashion." " And it was anti-posing, it was in your face, it was loud." " Clowny." " Juvenile." " Character." " Almost cyber-like." " Bold." " Slash retarded." "Sort of deliberately foolish, deliberately uncool." " If it didn't work, that's fabulous." "Just go with it and run with it." " Be creative, paint yourself." "It was no longer, it was a new glamor." " It was glamorous in a very dysfunctional way." " And he would have, you know, like women's underwear on, and makeup that was sort of like a gender-fuck kind of a thing." " We were all sort of the outcasts and the losers and the people who never would have made in the previous scene." " Some of the most crazy people you can even imagine." "Like, really over the top." " They didn't go to Fiorucci, they weren't dong any of that brand label stuff." "They were just putting a stupid thing on their head, and walking out with it." " Why can't you just wear this with that with that with this." " Kind of putting a club kid spin on it, as you said." "With particular reference, obviously, to Warhol and his superstars, but also to Leigh Bowery." " All those looks, the polka dots on the face, the light bulbs attached to the side of the head, all that stuff was ripped off directly from Leigh Bowery." " But it was definitely the whole idea of turning things on its end." " This kind of outrÃ© way of dressing, making it kind of a joke." " With all these made-up names for themselves, like Jenny Talia or Walt Paper." " These are people like Michael Alig, James St. James," "Julie Jewel, Ernie Glam, Larry Tee" " And Reuben Sandwich, and the It Twins and" " Lahoma Van Zant, of course there was RuPaul." " Sebastien Jr., Reuben Sandwich, Oliver Twisted, wow, why do I remember this?" " They were the club kids to me, Kenny Kenny." " So anything that the press would say," ""those pesky club kids" or "those annoying club kids"" "any attention's better than nothing." " Michael himself did not adopt a stage name, aside perhaps from the moniker "king of the club kids."" " But we were the alternative in the gay community." " Personally, I just thought they were irritating." "To me, they were just like flies buzzing around, and I just wanted to swat 'em." " They acted in infantile ways that older nightclubbers would have found extremely objectionable or obnoxious." " We were just like "ugh, God."" " They had class, and as to where we came in, we were kind of like the clowns." " But they were in your face, they were very forward." "They were going after their dream, which was to become a kind of Warhol-esque famous for being famous person." " And by Jackie 60, we didn't even let them in." "There was a no-lunch pail policy." " And also to have the best time of their lives night after night, whether it involved drugs, alcohol, flesh and body parts, whatever it took." " They made all their own outfits and they constructed their own personas, it was very Warholian." " I began to embrace media and kids and all those things and use the clubs to make money." " Even if the name "club kids" hadn't really caught on" " Amy Virshup wrote a cover story for New York Magazine that put Michael on the cover, and it said "CLUB KIDS."" " Those kids got press, then eventually some of those kids were on television." " And I was watching MTV, they were interviewing michael!" "He's on there talking about how he's running these clubs, and college kids going to clubs at night, and sleeping all day, so it was great!" " It also fueled the fantasy for kids that were growing up at that time, that they could break out of their shells." "And Michael was very aware of that." "That was very much the objective." "It was like, let's recruit everyone." " Mom would tell me, you know," ""Hey, michael's going to be on this show"" "or he's on Donahue or Joan Rivers." " And that's what the goal of Michael Alig was with the club kids, to perpetrate a national hoax." " This started to create a phenomenon that took over the country." " As fabulous and extreme as everyone was, you felt that they were suburban kids." " We first began to dress up back in the early," "I want to say '90s." " No, it was like the mid-'80s." " You will probably see this throughout the filming, we kind of disagree a lot." " A lot, we're always fighting." "Anyways, go on." " Michael embraced fat people, ugly people, weird people." " You know, the kind of outcasts and being harassed like they were gay or just didn't fit in." " And they'd been picked on at school or bullied or treated as fags, or whatever it was." " There were outcasts in every little town." " Leaving home, escaping from their parents, from middle America and just come by hook or by crook to New York to be part of this scene." " That was the sort of sales pitch, this is what your kids are doing at night." "You know, your kids sneak out of their house and they become these night creatures." " On national TV, including some talk shows," " When you walk down 34th Street in Manhattan, everybody has this miserable look on their face, like I hate my life and I hate what I'm doing," "I hate being here, and it's because they're not doing what they want to do" " They're doing what somebody else wants." " And, plus, we've been doing this when we were growing up, I mean most of us when we were growing up, we found ourselves in different scenes, but we were still the weird ones," "we were still the freaks, we were still the ones that stood out." "It's just now we're being paid to do what people were originally joking us for." " But, yeah, if you were living in Enid, Iowa, and you just were unhappy, you would watch michael on TV, or read about him in a magazine, and you would run away from home," "and join us in New York." " Are you Michael Alig?" " Yes, I am." " The man with the drink tickets." " When we were growing up, it was a whole different ball game." " Most of us went through pretty tough times." " They would come to New York for acceptance." " That, initially, was what was so magical about coming to New York and meeting these people." " It made its mark, because it screamed loud and clear, and everybody heard it." " And it was young, and it was sexy, and it was crazy." " We got to New York and all of a sudden" " We are the ring leaders." " We're like the big insiders." " Because they were free to express themselves any way they want want, and nobody's going to ridicule them, nobody's going to say anything about it, because in New York, at that time, who cared what you were doing?" " The further you pushed your expression, the more you were included." "And that was kind of a new experience for me." " You were inspired." " The allure is the same." "The flashing lights, the community, the sense of" " Family, and we all really came to care for each other." " It was an act of defiance." " I remember him arguing with me, telling me that it was important to do this because he was fighting the establishment." " They should just be very, very silly." "It was like they were walking around with their mum's underwear on their head." " And that act of defiance was saying," ""you may judge us, you may hate us because we're gay" ""or because we're effeminate or because we're interested" ""in fame, but we're not going to apologize for that." ""That's who we are."" " You promote and then maybe you'd get a gig go-go dancing." " And then I ended up doing the door, you know they realized that I was good at it," "I could be really bossy." "(laughs)" " There was a lot of people that really fawned over Michael." "He obviously had a lot of power at that time." " If you wanted to send us tickets to (mumbles) New York, we went to New York." " He had access to money, he had access to drinks, he had access to jobs." " Maybe 50 kids turned into hundreds of kids, and then it turned into thousands of kids." " The club kids hadn't the slightest grasp of reality." "They were the most narcissistic, amoral group of people that you could ever conceive of." " Surprise!" "Michael was given the club Mars." "Rudolph had given it to him before it opened, and said, "This is going to be your baby." ""Whatever you want."" "And then the week before it opened," "Rudolph fired Michael." " He was very upset about this, but it was a not only a business decision, not only a decision to stick with the new." "But also, I was afraid really of this entire scene going wrong one day, as it did later with Peter Gatien." " When Rudolph closed, then Michael gravitated to me." "And from there, Michael gravitated to Peter Gatien, and the rest is history." " You know he built his world, and he built it quickly in the Limelight, it was his platform." " And that's when Peter Gatien said," ""Why don't you come to Limelight, and do a party?"" " It was different." "No one ever thought about putting a club in a church." " I never liked the Limelight." "It always creeped me out." " When Michael first took over Limelight, nobody believed that it could be done, because the Limelight had been around for 10 years, and it had never been cool." " When we met Peter Gatien, the Limelight was called "the Slimelight."" "I remember Michael and I walking in there, and I'm telling Micael," ""Are you sure you want to go to a party here?"" " We all just rolled our eyes and said," ""This is the end of Michael."" " Gatien was around before, he was just very quiet about it." " I think Peter made it a real "business."" " The lighting rig moved up and down and it had 360 degree lasers." " The new music, and it just all kind of worked with what was happening in Europe with raves and all that, you know, Day-Glo poppy stuff." " Keoki became a very good DJ legitimately." " Michael was an explosion of creativity." "Michael was a gem, you know." "Mr. Gatien was just a man who had a room." " Oh, I heard of this new promoter, totally outrageous, spontaneous, great ideas, but he could be his own worst enemy." " He was playing out his fantasy of himself." " Michael was pretty obnoxious from the get-go." " The most narcissistic person I've ever met." " Visual, energetic." " Michael never used to drink or take drugs when I met him." " There's no way you could predict that" "Michael Alig would do what he eventually did." "I mean, they didn't even do drugs, these kids at that point." " If anybody was doing drugs, it was not in the open." " He would find where we were, and he would grab it and he would flush it down the toilet." " He was squeaky clean, he was irritating and humorous, and he would pretend to be fucked up." " The second we would enter Limelight, he would pretend he was drunk and fall." " It was just all a game." " Michael hated drugs." " The club kid era, I mean it was like an energy that was sweeping, a fun energy that was sweeping." " It really did seem to be a global village." "It really did seem like there was almost a tribal culture that existed on the street." " I mean going to raves starting on a Friday night at the Tunnel and ending on Monday." "And they would do 18-hour sets." " It was big dance halls all over New York." " We had the Vault, we had Save the Robots, we had all these other places that, Mars, Quick." " Probably 15 different rooms, one was house music, techno, goth, rock, the gays, but we all came together as one." " Everybody got along." "I never saw any fighting or anything like that." "It was very, like, a peaceful kind of a scene." " And that's also when the rave scene kind of integrated with nightlife." " It could be like a midget, a tranny, a Hasidic Jew, a Chelsea gay, a club kid, a raver, a gothic, and we all got along." " it just took off." " Positive chaos." " It was fab-u-lous." "(throbbing techno music)" " So the Limelight became the hot place to go." "That's where the energy was." "That's where the excitement was." "That's where the sex was." "That's where the drugs were." "It didn't matter if you were underage or not." "But if you were cute, all doors open." " It had a lot of energy, and it was just exciting." "It was something I'd never seen before." "I couldn't believe it." " [Astro Earl] Gaultier did a room, Mugler did a room." "So it was all about ambience and decor and visuals." " I wasn't really impressed till he started doing Disco 2000." " Disco 2000 was supposed to be the apex of the club kid scene" "It was what everything had been building for." " And the show every night, every Wednesday night, was called "Unnatural Acts."" " It was depraved, I thought." "The idea of having somebody drink their pee on stage for entertainment I thought was" " A little questionable, but the amazing thing is his night was on a Wednesday, and it was probably the most successful night out of the whole week." " He was very much in tune with something that was happening." " Disco 2000 proper was amazing." "I mean, you'd have a club in the middle of the week on a Wednesday filled, the entire club, it wasn't like just one room, every week until 5:00 in the morning." "And the crowd was classic New York." " It was like Disneyland on crack, it was awesome." " Club kids were dancing on their shoes, and the people that were normal customers there were just like "What the hell is going on down here?" ""The music is so weird."" "So that's what Michael lived for." " it was just an over-the-top, exaggerated performance." "I thought they were like living art pieces." " You met in the club a lot of people." " But it was an era of promiscuity, it was an era of bisexuality, homosexuality, any sexuality you could dream of." " People were having sex in the open, people snorting coke in the open, you would have really things that we'd just never see now." " You'd get school teachers coming in with wedding dresses, see-through wedding dresses." "It was just, anything went, it was just crazy." " And that was when everybody was just in the bloom of their youth, and everybody was just fabulous, and the outfits got a little crazier, and the makeup got a little wilder." " And of course Gatien had go-go boys and girls on the altar and coming down from the ceiling in cages." " The drugs started escalating and everything sort of just coalesced at Disco 2000 and it became Michael's signature." " People came to, he was like a attraction, like people come to see the Empire State Building, the Statue of Liberty, they would come to see the club kids at the Limelight." " He stole these costumes from a costume store and decided that I would wear this chicken suit." " When they went out and got Clara the Carefree Chicken and there was a bear." " I see the bear, and what was the dog?" "There was a dog." " I would spend hours at Disco 2000 wearing the costume on the stage, vogueing, flapping my wings, and at one point they built this giant" " Swing in the middle of the dance floor." "And this big chicken was just in the swing." " The chicken had its own drink ticket, you know?" " I saw it quite often when I went to look at these clubs in the '90s where you'd see people coming in in wild costumes, it was a thing in these clubs," "and drug use was prevalent." " You'd stick $15 through a hole, and they'd give you a rocks glass of vodka, champagne, and crushed mushrooms." " To get in the club, you had to have something, something special." " You had to be cool or you had to wait for hours and never get in, whether it was any of those clubs." " You wouldn't let anyone into the room unless they were doing something for the room." "I worked there, and I still got the butterflies, because I wanted to make sure that I looked good." " There was sort of tiers." " There was like an A crowd, a B crowd, a C crowd, and a D crowd." " You just can't have a scene with 50 fabulous people." "You got to have some paying customers." " First of all, there was the old school that were the VIP." " There was a lot of racism in those clubs too." " Ravers came next, maybe." " You know, even when you get to your bridge and tunnel people, those were the boys that everybody wanted to sleep with." " And then you had the Jersey Shore." " People from New Jersey which were always barred from coming in anywhere." "They were discriminated against, except the chicks." "New Jersey chicks are hot!" " The thing about Peter Gatien, genius man, very just business oriented, very smart." "Never really hung out, he was always in his office." " Next week it'll look completely different." " He had three clubs going with basically the same crowds." " It was fresh week-in and week-out." "Nobody was doing that at the time." " The scene was very organized." "They used to have style summits and tours where the club kids would go and tour different cities." " And it was "King of New York" and "Queen of New York"" "and the "Best Promoter at Night," and the "Best Dressed."" " It was amazing, it really was incredible and the Outlaw parties" " The Outlaw parties in New York were crazy." "Sometimes we ended up at the wrong location." " Sometimes, nothing happened, nothing clicked, we weren't going to fill the room." "So what we would do was throw an outlaw party." " You create all these invites, usually with a xerox, and then you pass them out, this was the day" " Pre-cell phone, pre-internet-- so you would actually have to photocopy something." " And you would give it out." " This is a tradition in nightlife, where you organize everyone on the sly to show up at some public event, whether its a subway station or a sanitation dump." " And then he would have them in a supermarket, he would have them in a Dairy Queen, or he'd have them at McDonalds." " We could do it anywhere." " They'd go to a deserted bank, and he'd draw thousands of people." " We all pile in." " And you'd have a really concentrated party for like 10 or 15 minutes till the cops find out about it, show up, and break it up." " The '80s version of a flashmob." "It's just alcohol and a boombox with a pre-mixed Keoki tape, and we'd break in, bolt cutters." " And all of a sudden, there would be hundreds and hundreds of these crazy club kids." " And they would converge on this place, annihilate it, if you will." " They'd party at McDonalds." " Which was famous, fast food will never be the same." " He took a party again the following week at a train station." "By the time police came, they all ran." " By getting on the train and leaving." "It was hysterical." " Instead of 10-20 people in the club, it's just all of a sudden there's this energy." " It would just get crazy and the police would come." "It would be a whole scene." " And Richie Wood says," ""Handcuffs do not go with my outfit."" " It was a remarkable scene in the clubs," "Limelight, whatever." "And then he would do his tours of Times Square, march 30 or 40 club kids into a Burger King, just totally freak out everybody in the place." " Ah, the memories." " People lived to talk about what awful thing Michael Alig had done." " Never seen anybody with that kind of influence and power." " There's so many outrageous stunts that," "I mean it just runs the gamut." " I remember Michael stealing a city bus one time." " I would be like, "You can't go out like that." ""You're going to be naked at the end of the night." ""You can't just wear feathers." ""You'll be naked by the end of the night." ""Please don't wear that outfit out."" "He'd say, "Ok, fine."" " Completely amoral." " Sure enough, I'd see him out Times Square, just feathers." " Michael Alig is an absolute genius." " Infantile." " Going to another party and stealing their attention." " The day he put his mother in a shopping cart and rolled her around the dance floor, my, my... (laughs)" " He was really sloppy, and he was really intrusive of space." " I remember he did a party at Red Zone, he had a ferris wheel outside." "And people would go on the ferris wheel right outside the club." " Bales of hay, and live chickens and goats running around." " These are the things that he did." " So I don't think he's a genius, but he's brilliant." "People say he's a genius." " I want to say genius." " I still don't know how he got there, because I never saw him read books, I never saw him, there was not internet then, so I don't know how he got these ideas, osmosis or what." " Let's bring a club kid from East Berlin." " Let's do a water slide inside." "They'll come and slide into a pool." "And economically Michael never cared." "He didn't care how much money he spent he was only interested in doing a party." " You never knew when you were going to end up in jail, whatever when you were with him." "So there was all that sense of danger." " Combined with a worldly amount of charisma." " We used to do these Outlaw fashion shows." " At a given up location." " The post office on the night of tax time, when the whole post office is lit up." " He had a fashion show on the subway." " The number one train on the 7th Avenue line, where there was a fashion show involved," "I remember bottles that we dressed up were walking up and down." "And as you come down the stairs, they would announce your name, so that was pretty fabulous." " Just at that time to catch the both crowds, it was fun." " It was insane." " And the police got there, so we had to, like, flee." " This kid who couldn't find a way to get in found his way in." " Are you Michael Alig?" " Uh-huh." " That's good." "All right, we're off to a good start." " [Voiceover] Alig represented the zenith of a city out of control." " We were joking about Clara the chicken, and I said," ""Oh, I wonder whatever happened to that costume."" "And then Michael said to me, "Oh, I cut it into pieces" ""and threw it in the river." (creepy bursts of laughter)" " I'm going to be very honest with you:" "you cannot have a club with the club kids without drugs." "It can't exist." " Drugs are everywhere." "And if you're a star in the scene, everybody wants to give it to you." " Creative movements take to mood and mental elevators" "like lettuce takes to olive oil." "It tastes good with the olive oil better." " I mean, let's face it, people don't do drugs because they're not enjoyable, you know, drugs are fun." " God." "Forgive me, mom, for knowing all this." " Occasionally, he did a little ecstasy," "Little bit of ecstasy, he liked that." "And then it was a little more ecstasy, and then he started throwing ecstasy parties." " There were corridors filled with drug dealers, selling everything from ecstasy, cocaine, weed, special K." " Dust, GHB." " Ketamine, and then came in crystal meth, and LSD." " A six-inch line off an eight-inch dick." " Rohypnols, heroin." " Everything crystal, ecstasy, cocaine." " There was always like a punch with acid, mushrooms, and ecstasy in it." " There'd be like a hundred balloons and 20 of them would have ecstasy in it, so we'd throw the balloons over." " You can take one or two, or they would double dip them, whatever that meant." " Mitsubishi was a good pill." " Ecstasy, heroin, crystal meth, and I'm talking about all at once." " These drug concoctions, they were all mixed up." " XECK, which was Xanax, ecstasy, crystal, and K." "They were all my favorite." "My drug of choice was more of everything." " We were all aware that we were sort of in this petri dish, testing things about." " Granted, to some degree, the city was out of control." " What changed the city, Giuilani started it, a mini fascist, tyrant, bully." " Went on a mission to "clean up New York"" "and one of his targets was nightlife, and within the nightlife, I think the Limelight Club was his top priority." " He had that mentality." "He was very good at what he did." "He was very tough, he was very honest." "You couldn't get to him, you couldn't bribe him." " All of a sudden in New York, you started hearing "quality of life."" ""Quality of life campaign" became this catchphrase." " And I always thought that the city that would elect a major asshole like Giuliani was not a city worth living in and so it was time to move." " It was an adversarial relationship between the nightclubs and the administration." "Nightlife was always a big piece of New York, and it was growing." "The Giuliani administration and the police department were trying to figure out how to basically go into these clubs and either close them down, or certainly try to restrict the drug use that was taking place." " You'd be in the middle of having your experience and there's like six or seven cops in the middle of the room and they weren't leaving." " If you look suspicious, take him in, and we'll ask questions later." "That's how he did it." "He totally swept the streets." " Everything from squeegee people, the mafia people large and small, politicians." "It was not longer that it's not that we can't eliminate it." "That changed, the whole thing changed." " Peter was like the king of New York at that time." "He had four major clubs." " He was the big fish that if you could go after him you'd be sending a message to all the other club owners that we're going after you." " He became a target, he became a target, and that was the end of him." "Once that happens, it's over." "You cannot fight these people." " It was more of like a witch hunt." " For all of the ills of New York nightlife, because what went on at the Limelight was not just confined to the Limelight." " Even though there were drugs in the club and there were drug dealers, there wasn't like a major system." " There were these gangs from Brooklyn and the Bronx, and one of them was called TF," "I think they were called Together Forever." " I mean, you basically had access to everything as long as you had the money." " Reality of the situation is there's no way to stop a pill from getting into a nightclub." " Once the gangs saw that there's money there, they started moving in." " Well, what happened then was, the club owners would have to go in court, they'd have to hire their lawyers, they'd have to pay hefty fines." " That was kind of what brought people to New York at that time was nightlife, it was an industry." "The government decided that they didn't want it anymore." " Sent a message to everyone." "Either you straighten out your ship or we're just going to lock you up." " Started getting tickets people for jaywalking," "I mean to an extreme." " I think that really he chose the nightclubs not necessarily because they were such quality of life infractors, but because it was a good way of getting publicity for himself, and he, like all mayors, is a media whore," "so I believe that's why he did it." " It was the mayor's task force that would go visit these clubs, and they would go in and they would shut them down." "And again, this was something that occurred more and more as the '90s rolled on." " The mentor of us all, the Marquis de Sade, established, he said that even in a limitless way, one has to set limit." " Michael pushed boundaries," "Michael was outrageous to begin with." "And as he did more and more drugs, he got more and more outrageous." " It's not just the drugs, it's the fact that there were no boundaries, there were no limits." "There was no sense of right and wrong anymore." "Michael wanted anything to get a reaction." "The club kid movement, which had started off as something wonderful and beautiful and fun, had turned evil." " It was a gradual progression into darkness." " Everybody was sort of falling apart at that point." " Too much power, too much excess, too many drugs." " I just think that it snowballed into bad things," "I could say it's dark." " It got druggier and druggier and darker and darker, and the center wasn't holding." " And it went from these crazy rave parties where everybody is on E and hands are in the air to a lot more people lying on the floors and the corners in K-holes." " Gitsy died in my apartment, for God's sake." " It seemed like every week somebody was dying for a while." " [James] The scene went from day to night." "It never went back." " At one point, it just didn't feel like it's a party anymore." " Maybe at first you smoke something or you took a pill, and then you started snorting things, and then eventually you started injecting things." " Ketamine wasn't enough, ecstasy wasn't enough, and so you just found, discovered heroin, and of course, once you do heroin, you're done." " His behavior started becoming really erratic." " But there was quite sinister drug-related stuff going on." " It seemed like there were no consequences." " Dressing up, the power trips, the thinking you're something you're not, and respect, and morality, all those things, you kind of throw them up in the air." "You're saying there's no such thing as being civil, there's no such thing as respect, there's no such thing as love and hate." "You're playing with all those things." " I did get a call from him one day, and he says," ""Hi David, this is your junkie brother Michael."" "I hadn't talked to him in a long time, and I was just so happy to hear from him." " He overdid it, and then, well, he got fucked, what can I say?" "Shit happens." " It became less about kind of good natured, crazy, rebellious fun, and more about just sickness." " Michael had always been obsessed with death." "He was always obsessed with gore." " I think he always had a dark side." "There was definitely some dark theme parties at Limelight." " This was a turning point in the club scene." " He had a blood feast party at Limelight, which dabbled almost as a foreshadowing in severed body parts and blood and body fluids, and it seemed like he was almost fantasizing about wanting to dismember a body," "which he ended up doing." " [Voiceover] We did this whole theme about a club kid serial killer." "It was just amazing to think that probably a year later or something, it actually happened." " Michael started putting drug dealers onto the budget." "And people were being hired not because they were fabulous, but because Michael wanted X amount of drugs to be available for the party." " And what their job was was to distribute, give everybody a bump here and there, and da-da-da." " And that was symptomatic of the fact that the scene had gone over-the-top in a way that was going to end tragically." " When you throw drugs into the mix, people die, people get killed, people get arrested, people go to jail." "It's just part of the turf." " Angel was what they call a "pier queen."" "Angel was part of that rough gay crowd that hung around the West Village piers." "He was a street guy." " Angel had this really dark side to him, like a really dark, violent side." " He was very nice," "I never got an evil vibe from him." " Michael basically had three drug dealers living with him." "Angel was one of them." " And when Angel asked for the money," "Michael didn't have it, one thing led to the other, and Angel ended up dead in a bathtub." " Angel." "Didn't like Angel very much." " That's one of the tragedies of this whole case, is that the victim is always forgotten, it's all about Michael Alig and sometimes about Freeze." "It's never about Angel." " No, I didn't really care for Angel too much." "I avoided him, as much as possible, especially if I owed him money." " You couldn't miss him with those wings." " He wore those often, but he seemed like a pretty cool guy." "We would seem him every Wednesday or Saturday." " He was a nice guy." " Angel was one of our kids at Jackie's 60." "He was there every Tuesday night with his angel wings, and everybody loved him." " He was a kid that used to go to CBGB's." "He was sort of like a punk, hardcore kid." "But he was not really A list." " Drug dealer nonetheless." " If Angel didn't have drugs, they would not have allowed him to hang around." " I have this great picture I was able to take of him." " I didn't like Angel." "I thought he was a piece of shit first, personally." "If you could just line up the people that should die in this world, he would be near the front." " But that all being said, I loved the guy, he was awesome." "Very sweet, very nice." " I always felt like he came in from the side, but then tried to be a part of them." " These people who maybe couldn't penetrate this upper level with their creativity or with their looks or with their expression, a lot of times they would do it by becoming drug dealers." " He was accurately portrayed in Hollywood where he wasn't quite accepted on the level of Michael's complete inner circle." " He was a poser." "He was basically a poser." " Michael's follower." "As much as he tried to pretend, again, it was the illusion of the drugs." " As far I understand it, that was the core of the conflict." " Angel always had this paranoia that people were making fun of him or that people secretly didn't like him or that we were all laughing about him behind his back." " Michael came up to me, and he was like," ""God, Astro, I just wish he was dead."" " But I didn't think in any way, shape, or form that he deserved to die." " [Michael] I guess it was around 10:00 in the morning, and I think it was a Sunday morning, and we had been up probably since Thursday night." "The concierge called up and said that somebody, that Angel was downstairs and should he come up." " He demanded getting paid for the drugs that he was dealing at Limelight." " He was a little bit belligerent." "It's not the time to be showing up at Peter's house with a drug dealer, or hire drugs looking for money," "10:00 on a Sunday morning." "I said, "Come in, take a nap, and we'll go" ""to the club that afternoon and get your money."" "Some argument broke out between them about about the argument between us, about the argument over the money, and Freeze said something to him like," " "This is why nobody ever likes you." ""If you weren't a drug pusher," ""you wouldn't have any friends."" " Ooh, that was, you know, Freeze was probably a little bit right, which is why it hit so hard." "It was a low blow, hit below the belt, and I think that's why it probably affected Angel so much, because I think he subconsciously knew this." "Angel was asking me something like," ""Are you going to let him talk to me like that?"" "or "Is that true?" or something to that effect." " And he grabbed Michael by the throat." " We went flying through my china cabinet, which had a big glass front on it, and this big piece of glass went into my back, and blood was spurting all over the place." "Now Feeze says this was a pillow," "I remember it being a sweatshirt." "I remember taking a sweatshirt and wrapping it around my hand, because I had it was smashing his face, and trying to push him off, and he was biting my hand, biting my chest, and Freeze was trying to pull him back," "and I was trying to push him off, and he just reached around for whatever he could grab." " Grabbed a hammer, clubbed Angel." " Two or three times, and he finally did stop biting me, and he fell back, and at this point me and Daniel were all on top of him on his stomach." " They both finished him off with a pillow and shooting him up with Drano." " We had no way of thinking, there's nothing in our frame of mind that he was dead." "I mean, it wasn't even something we were thinking could have been, it's just unconscious." "And it was kind of a normal situation to have unconscious people around the house." " Terrible thing." "He did try and kill him, but the guy was dead." " We had done everything we could think of to revive him, short of putting him underwater, which is what we did." "He didn't gasp for air." "It took us a moment to realize what exactly that meant." "And I know that right now, probably anybody watching this would think "well, why didn't you call a lawyer?"" "But, first of all, Angel had probably 50 half-gram vials of Special K, and almost two ounces of cocaine, and rohypnol, and all kinds of drugs on him that we just started using." " And killing this guy was just a goof, a total goof." "You know, they wanted his drugs and money, but it was an afterthought." "I guarantee you that Alig thought, "Hmm, I wonder" ""what it's like to actually kill somebody."" " We were afraid of police coming over and questioning our drug use, and are you drug addicts and, you know, everything being kind of exposed to the real world, and, perhaps, everything coming to a halt." "How were we going to survive without heroin?" "You know, we need another bag in three hours." "So, we never called anybody." "And in fact, we went to Olympia's house instead." "Took Angel into the bathtub." "We put him on ice and we poured baking soda and Drano over." " And then after he does it, hmm-hm-hmm, so let's leave him in the bathtub for a while and get high for a week." "Then the body starts to stink and you put Drano on it, whatever, whatever." " What are we going to do, are you going to go back to the apartment?" "And he said he didn't want to go back, and I said, "Well, I don't want to go back either," ""but what are we going to do?" ""You have to come back."" "I said, "Maybe he won't even be there."" "We walked in the apartment, everything seemed completely normal, didn't look like any fight had gone on or anything." "The china cabinet was broken, and there was glass and a little bit of blood on the couch." " When we went in the bathroom," "I mean, I knew that he was going to be there, but I was really hoping that he wouldn't be, and he was, you know, so..." "We are going to be caught with a dead body in our house, and not only a dead body, but a dead body that had been in our house for what, eight, nine, 10 days?" "We'll never be able to explain that." " People are coming to the party at his house, but they can't go in to this bathroom." " When we finally moved him, we started smelling, the body was decomposing underneath only." "The top was not." " I remember Michael said, "Oh, that smell," ""that's plumbing," or something like that." "And I just, whoop, never even thought about it." "Ok, lets do another line." " So they decide, well, we're going to have to get rid of this body." " We couldn't move the arms or legs or anything." "And there was no way of fitting the body into this box." "Freeze did go out and went to Macy's and bought some large kitchen knives." "At that point we said we'll either do so much heroin that we die, we were fine with that too, because we were feeling so guilty." " Michael started doing heroin and drugs to put him another planet, and then started hacking up his body." " He cut the body to make it fit." " I'm remembering this whole thing lasting less than a minute." "We both just went like this kind of thing and just cut very quickly," "I cut so fast just to get it over with, and Freeze was spraying Calvin Klein Eternity, which was very, we didn't see the symbolism in that until much later." " i remember being at Michael's at setting a cocktail down on this box and Michael was wearing Angel's boots like I am with my legs crossed and sitting in front of me and wearing Angels' boots saying, "Astro, who's missing?" "Who's missing, Astro?"" "And I was like, "I don't know, Michael," ""but what is that stench in this house?"" "And the box that my cocktail was sitting on was Angel's body." " I asked Michael when I who did it, I said," ""How could you chop his legs off?" ""How could you cut his legs off?"" "And he told me, "Well, I just did 17 bags of heroin," ""and it was like I was in a Foghorn Leghorn cartoon."" " It was right about here that Michael Alig told me that he killed Angel." "He asked me if he could borrow my car." "I said, "What do you want to borrow my car for?"" "He said, "I just murdered Angel"" "and needed my car to get rid of the body." "i told him to get the fuck away from me, and he scampered off." " They came up and they took the box down on the luggage trolley." "They took it to the service elevator, we went through the regular elevator, but we were thinking the whole time," "I could smell it, Freeze could smell it, and I cannot imagine that the concierge could not smell it." " Put it in a big TV box and put it in a cab." " We went to Tunnel for some strange reason, and just stopped right in front of Tunnel, and asked the cab driver to help us take the box out of the trunk, which he did, and then we asked him to help us lift it." "We walked across the Westside Highway to the river, and to throw it in the river." "And he asked us why we were doing that and what was in the box, and we told him that it was dishes and things that we didn't want, and he didn't say anything about it." "The box did not sink, like we had imagined it would from seeing movies." "It floated up down the river." " Because they forgot the crucial thing:" "you're supposed to puncture a hole in the box so it'll sink." " Freeze wanted to jump in the river after it." "We gave him a $20 tip and he drove us back to our building, which again was just outrageously idiotic, because the cab driver would have known exactly where we lived." " He was smart, but he let his brains go out on a coffee break at that point." " Just a bunch of bad decisions, one bad decision after another." "And we went back to the apartment." "(ominous music)" " That particular time, we were in a tropical storm." "So for all intents and purposes, this body should have went out to sea, but because of the storm blowing everything in, it washed up on Staten Island." " He was on this escalator, in that he had to keep on being more and more outrageous, and so you could say, sooner or later, he was going to go too far." "I don't think anybody thought sooner or later he was going to murder anyone." " I still struggle with it, it's still hard for me to think about when i heard, 'cause I heard it from Michael, really." " I remember the first sign that I got that something was really weird was I actually called Angel to buy drugs from him, and Michael called back on his phone." " Around that time, he was 86ed from the clubs." " He was fired and then I didn't see him anymore." "'cause I guess he knew I wouldn't lent him any money 'cause he wasn't working there anymore and wouldn't be able to pay me back." " We knew that we weren't seeing" "Angel around, and we knew that Michael was no longer allowed into the clubs." " When I first heard about Angel's disappearance, was through gossip." " And there were rumors" " That he had gone missing, there were rumors that he had been killed, there were rumors that he had been chopped up." " And they were saying things like," ""Oh, have you heard about Angel?"" " Where's Angel, where's Angel?" " It was kind of like a family thing, like everybody saw everybody, and then after awhile, he just wan't there anymore." " When I asked Michael what happened, he gave me some really flip answer suggesting that something terrible had happened to Angel." " I couldn't face my friends without telling them what had happened, because I felt like every minute I'm spending with them, I'm lying to them." " We knew he couldn't have possibly have killed Angel, because anyone who's going to murder someone isn't going to go around admitting to it." " When people asked them at Limelight," ""Have you seen Angel?" he made a joke, he says," ""Yeah, I killed him, I chopped him up" ""put his body in a trunk, and threw him in the East River."" " His relationship with Peter had deteriorated." " Peter wanted to understandably cut his relationship off with me before I brought down his entire empire." " And also Michael at the time, he was really bruised up." "He had bruises on the back of his neck, like wounds." " His life as a creative person and as a power in New York ended very abruptly." " We went to work that day, normal day, case comes in over the radio." " And I got a call that there was a body on the beach, and this is by Miller Fields in Staten Island, and my partner and I responded, who was Ralph Gengo." " And it was discovered by some mutes that were along the beach." " And they had gotten a stick and they started probing and poking, opening it up, thinking they'd find some kind of treasure or something spectacular." " And they poked holes in it and seen enough." " I knew that people were looking for him, and I knew that there was kind of something going on, but it really wasn't till his brother came one night looking for him." " I thought it was weird that he had Angel's phone and that he had had all of Angel's drugs." " And he would say it all with the same crazy look on his face, so he might've said something bad happened to Angel, but I didn't know if it was true or not." " Multiple people had OD'ed, had died, had committed suicide." "That kind of language and that kind of event was not that shocking." " I thought that it was a publicity stunt, and that angel would appear." " Just seemed like another prank, he was just trying to get press by staging this kind of fake murder." " So as a detective investigator," "I'm looking for some clues and where am I gonna go with this?" "I have a body in a box." " We were at his house, and he chopped up the lines and got me real high, and then told me the whole story from beginning to end." " And he created the image that he got rid of Angel and thrived on that, little did we all know, that yes, he did in fact get rid of Angel." " You know when I started to believe it was true, was when I met Angel's family." " We started to think "all right, this is serious." ""His brother is really concerned," ""and really does not think that this is good."" " They were crying, and I was thinking" ""you know what?" ""There's no way Angel is going to take" ""part in this scam, this prank," ""and put his family through this."" " And then we opened up the box, and we stripped down the torso, 'cause we didn't have any legs, the body was cut in half." " There were plots being hatched about how to get Michael out of the country, and he was quite convinced, no body, no crime, and he was going to get away with it." " We weren't getting away with it, and Freeze was having a difficult time as well, up on the roof of the building, imagining every helicopter that's coming by and every ambulance they're coming to arrest us," "and just doing drugs and drugs and drugs to not have to think about it, not have to face what we had done." " Three hits in the back of the head." "If you ever hit a piece of wood with a hammer or like a 2x4, and you don't quite hit it flush, you hit it on an angle, you get that half-moon." " I said to Musto, "You should investigate it, right."" "Because if it is true, this is a huge story." " Where it came from, at that time we didn't know." "But it did land on Oakland Beach, and that is what they call an "unidentified floater."" " Most of us felt that this was an unsolvable case, that this was going to be a cold case." "'Cause if you think of the possibilities of where this body could have come from, my first thought was this is maybe something that happened on a freighter." " Articles in the Village Voice started happening." " I went with a blind item as the lead item, because by this point the chatter had grown really loud, and someone told me, "It's really true."" " I had known from the very beginning." "I felt that this was someone from South America," "Mexico, Guatemala, something like that." "They went with the premise that it was an Asian." "So we spent nearly three or four months within the Asian community trying to identify a body." " Looking for Angel in the Village Voice, that was the story that really broke the case wide open." " And then Michael Musto started to write things about it." " So I ran, here's exactly what people think happened," "And I put the details of the Drano, the pillow, the chopping the body, the throwing it into the Hudson." " Very bone-chilling, and scary, you know..." " That was then picked up by Page 6, which is the big column in the New York Post, and that's when it blew up as a story." " Months later on, I'm reading a newspaper." " In the Post was a body that came up on the Hudson River." " That torso, it fit it to a T, legs cut off, hit in the head with a hammer three times." "I'm saying, "This is it."" " It was at a club whose name I forgot where Michael came up to me and asked me if I would represent him, and I said, "Michael, you know," ""It's a little late right now."" "And we had an honest conversation." "I asked him point blank, did he kill Angel, and he said, "No."" " "No, no, no, I didn't." ""I don't know what that is all about." ""I didn't do it."" " He could barely walk." "His hands were swollen like baseball mitts." "He was completely covered in marks." "He was like a homeless person, walking around with a blanket, that's how he would show up to the club, like a blanket on." " Everyone knew something." "This story got spread out so far that we could not make a connection that Michael Alig told one person." "They had always heard it from someone else or heard it from someone else." " One of the club kids told me, "Oh, yeah," ""but there's also the thing that he killed somebody."" "And then he added, "Don't tell Michael I told you,"" "which to me showed the really sad hold that Michael had over these kids, even after killing someone, the kids wanted to stay in his good favor." " And that's what took a lot of time, was we had to find that evidence, who Michael actually told this to." " And that detective says, "It's not the body" ""that you are looking for, we're associating" ""with our body, but there is a detective in the DA squad" ""in Manhattan that is looking for a body."" " I told everybody in my office that I've got it, this is it." " Once those dental records matched Angel Melendez, we knew we had the right body." "So it was, "Tommy, read the paper."" " Peter sent me some money to leave town if I wanted." " I think it was just like this slowly building case against him." " We no longer had suspicion." "We had probable cause that he did it." " We had rumors that he was in Jersey somewhere with intentions to go to Colorado." " And we thought we had enough at that point to make the arrest." " We got information from that hotel that he was staying at, we called in Jersey police." "Somewhere around the middle of the night, we knocked on the door, said it was maintenance" " And when we entered the hotel room," "Michael was stoned." " We had an arrest warrant already secured, and Michael was arrested." " He barely knew what was going on." "I practically had to stand him up." " I'll never forget that ride back." "I was with the Brooklyn DA's office supervisor, and Michael was lying down in the back, getting sicker, and sicker, and sicker." "I actually felt pity, because the horrors of addiction are well-known, and I did about 90 miles an hour in the unmarked car." "Thank God a state trooper didn't pull me over." " So I also went to Manhattan in another car, and went to pick up Robert Riggs." "He was on, I think, 43rd Street, he was going to work." "He was just about to walk into his building, and I put my hand on his shoulder, and he told me everything." "He says, "I'm glad it's over, I'm glad you guys got me," ""I can't live with this anymore."" " We would have never been able to live with ourselves at all, and it was a relief in fact when we were arrested." " And that confession letter is very accurate." "And you can also see my signatures on the bottom of it." "And that's what happened." "What anyone else tells you, this is a true story." "Robert Riggs was there, I think he was more sober than Alig at the time." " If it wasn't Angel, it would've been something else." "It would have been his suicide, it would have been, something was going to happen along the way." " Keoki asked me to represent him." "Michael was in federal custody when I started representing him." " When Michael woke up that morning, he had no intention of killing anybody." " And if you think about it, it seems that he was the victim and Melendez was the aggressor." " The circumstances of the violence that occurred that led up to Angel's death could have been washed away with a phone call to the police." ""I have a man on the floor, he's been hurt," ""Freeze hit him with a hammer."" " [Det." "Tom] Had he left it alone at that point and called the police" " It was a legitimate self defense argument." " I guess Riggs would have went to jail for assault." "Michael was still a victim at that point." " That went out the drain when they walked out the room." "When they smothered him with a pillow." " I never even went to the arraignment, that's how fast Michael Alig and Riggs were put in jail." " She started telling me something about Michael, and she kept saying "Murder."" "But she was saying it in German, and I did not understand her, so finally she came out and she told me what had happened." " I had a phone call from somebody within that gave me a heads-up that they were doing a press conference on the arrest of Michael Alig." "So the NYPD was excluded." " I was just wondering how this person really so uniquely unprepared for life in prison was gonna handle that, or even survive it." " After we were put on methadone and kind of leveled out, I mean it's very bleak." "It was comforting having Freeze next to me because we were both thrust into this wild environment, we just stuck out like sore thumbs, we didn't walk like the rest of them, we didn't talk like the rest of them," "we didn't have the same background." " When Michael first got arrested, it was, it was painful." "He was raped, he was beat up, you know this is someone I had been with for like 11 years." " And I was in disbelief." "I was like, "Mom, are you sure that this really happened?"" "This is a shock." " I said, "Michael, you're really sick." ""You really, really got to get help." ""I don't know how you're going to get out of this."" " As more and more evidence comes out," "Michael left fewer and fewer defenses available." " Can you plea bargain, can you do something to get out of these things, I don't know." "They want me to turn in people and this and that." " It was not uncommon for prosecutors to turn people and say, "You cooperate and testify," ""you're going to get a better deal."" "Now one of the issues and problems with that is the credibility of these people." " Once they knew that he had committed a murder, plus his drug dealing, he just wasn't that attractive to them as a witness." " The DA's behavior in this whole, they knew damn well what Michael had done, and they protected him, you know, they protected him." "And as long as there was no body, they would have protected, 'cause he was scheduled to be the chief witness against Gatien." " They didn't care about the drug case on Michael." "All they cared about was that they got Michael to testify against Gatien." " The problem with that was that they wanted me to lie." "And I mean just like blatant lies, and I couldn't do it, and I wouldn't do it." "And they became frustrated." " At a certain point in time, a very dramatic development occurred, which sort of forced our hand on a plea and that's what ultimately led to a plea in the case, which is that there was another" "person in the apartment that weekend." " A witness that'd seen what happened in the apartment." "There was somebody else in there that, they hid from us." " And the other person told the District Attorney that Freeze and Alig robbed Angel," "which made it a murder during the commission of a robbery, which all of a sudden under New York state law made Alig eligible for the death penalty." " After that, I was sort of disgusted." "I just did my job and went on to the next case." " And I said, "You know, you don't want to roll" ""the dice and talk yourself into being on death row."" "Even though New York wasn't very receptive to the death penalty, it was on the books." " One of those parties depicted a horror show with a poster of a hammer, which was how he was hit over the head, with the legs cut off, right on the poster." "So premeditation may have came into factor." "Michael could have got 25 to life, if not no parole." " At that point in time, I was frankly happy to get the plea offer that we did get, which I thought was 10 to 20 concurrent with any federal sentence, was in my view when you're talking about possible death penalty eligibility" "was a damn good deal." " And that's why his lawyer advised him to plead guilty to manslaughter." " He agreed that that was clearly what he wanted to do." "He jumped at it, and Rigg, Freeze jumped at it as well." " I'm impartial." "If that's what the courts decide, that's what I live with." "My job is done." " Literally, it was a steal." " And half the people just didn't care." "And the other half were truly horrified." "And some of the ones that were horrified were people that loved Michael Alig when he started out, and just felt he had tumbled into such an abyss that they couldn't imagine how it had happened." " I couldn't believe it." "These two guys, these two harmless kids that just laughed and danced and put makeup on their face and costumes killing someone?" " It was a great party until drugs." " If he killed Angel, and that's against the law, and the law caught him, well..." " This was all drug-related." "I don't think Michael has the capability of going out and attacking someone." "But on the drugs..." " I knew that all the things that had gone down were about the drugs." "It wasn't about Michael as a person." " So I think that's what killed Angel, was not Michael himself." "He would never have done that in his right frame of mind." " I never liked that excuse at all." ""I was so fucked up, I'm so sorry,"" "it seems like a cop-out to me." " Michael was very into horror movies and very into blood." " We'd still watch horror movies together, he'd think it was funny." " I know a lot of people who were on drugs." "I knew a lot of people, you know, when do you, this sounds like a judgment, but when do you hit somebody that's strangling you and then decide to pour Drano down their mouth and then cut off their legs?" "I mean, there's something a little bit more going on." " You have to have that in you beforehand regardless of the drugs." " The drugs might have made it easier to bring it out, but I don't think it was the drugs that made Michael do that." "And that's, I've never said that before really, but I really feel that's what I've come to conclusion." " I don't think it's just an accident that you end up cutting somebody up, I don't." " Somewhere deep inside his head, he was thinking what would it be like to be a murderer." " Most of the people that I investigated and interviewed always stated that Michael was over-the-top." "There's nothing halfway about him." "He's either all-in or he's not in at all." "So when this went down with Angel," "I had a feeling that he went all the way." " Without Michael being a focal point, without the scape goat, without the Party Monster, there was nothing to hold it together." "The murder abhorred everyone." "There was no way to justify the lifestyle anymore." "The straights ran from it." " It was numbing in the beginning when it first went down." "I didn't know how to act." "People would ask me how I feel about Michael." " He validated all the misgivings that anybody had about the club kids." "They were freaks, they were assholes, they were losers." "All the bad parts became obviously true." " Now of course I know how to answer." "Michael was the most incredible person I had ever met." "And is the most incredible person I ever met." "He just did the most fucked up things that I could ever even imagine." " The scene was self-imploding from its own lack of boundaries, restrictions, morality, and behavioral modifications." " It seemed like the fall of Rome." " It was, there was a lot of people employed, a lot of creative people lost their jobs when the crackdown took place." " (sighs deeply) Ok, so this is how it ends." "I knew immediately that it was over, that everything was over, that the scene was dead and gone, that it was time to move on, that my life would never be the same." " And sometimes they'd go in at 12, 1:00 in the morning, 2:00, empty out the clubs, padlock the clubs, and under the nuisance abatement law, shut down the clubs." " They would keep attacking until they found something, until they found a reason to revoke your liquor license and that's how they started closing the clubs down." "They did one by one." " I think one of the issues that the city should have done was try to work hand-in-hand with these clubs rather than coming in with hammers, when I say hammer, coming down with a steel hammer and basically saying, "We're not going to work with you." ""If you don't obey the law," ""if there's drug use in these clubs," ""we're going to come in and we're gonna shut you down."" " He's just an entrepreneur." "He had nothing to do with the sale of drugs." "Did he do drugs?" "There was rumors that he did cocaine, who didn't in the '90s?" " We know that there could be drug use in Madison Square Garden or Yankee Stadium, they're not going to come down and shut those places down." " He never ended up getting Peter Gatien on anything more than tax evasion." "Peter is deported in Canada right now as a result of that." " My feeling is that Peter was a marked man." " They flagged the case." "Peter Gatien was a big number." " And one way or another, he was going down." " In fact, Peter Gatien was taken down by the DA's own, financially and other ways through legal fees and everything." "Peter Gatien should be given the money back." " And Steve Lewis went to jail," "I think almost as a fall guy or something." " I was found guilty of something I didn't do." "But to say that anybody running a club is innocent would be ludicrous." " Peter Gatien got deported and now you lost everything." "You lost Palladium, Limelight, Tunnel, Club USA, all gone." "Gatien was brought down, everybody was getting turned against each other, all fucking bullshit." "I'm going down the street to Twilo." " What was going on around me was collapsing so hard." " It was the fall of a world that I believed I would belong to forever." " It was the end of an era by that point." " The culture of criminality, small and large, which was viewed as "there's nothing we can do about it,"" "gone." " A lot of people moved away." "They wanted nothing to do with Michael." "They didn't want to believe it." "None of us could find work, because we were affiliated with a murderer." " I was pretty much tarred with the same brush as he was." "I was persona non grata at all the clubs that he was running." " So the scene was kind of collapsing in on itself and only the very few at the top were surviving." " I remember Kenny Kenny turning me away from Save the Robots, where I worked!" " There's no more food coming in, so they started eating each other." "People saw the destruction of their own lives and wanted to get out." " Most of the club kids who had any sense, the second it happened, just pulled out and said," ""I'm going to really rethink what I'm doing," ""because any association with this is awful."" " I left New York." "I got rid of all my nightlife, all my club kid attire." "I was just done." " Those are the years you don't want to remember." " If I didn't leave I would be 40-50 years old, lying in a K-hole, lying in a puddle of my own vomit in the corner of a club or I could get out and go on with my life" "and have a second act." " Big nightclubs, balls-out decadence, that whole thing that Michael personified, that was the end of it!" " The whole end of the Limelight era affected me was that that Sushi and Amanda Lepore" "came on my doorstep and wanted a job." "I said, "Come on in."" " What happened after that, of course, is that club owners got wise." "They saw what happened to Gatien, and that's when the whole lounge thing happened." "And then it became about small venues," "$500 bottles of champagne, models, 'cause that was all legal." " It was the difference between skinny junkies then and skinny models now." " They'd rather we weren't there." "They didn't see the point." "Clubs started being run by different types of people as well." "Clubs started being run by people who were in hedge funds." " Why pay club kids to come to your club, who never pay for a thing, right?" "Who did all these drugs and attracted all this law enforcement and such." " The economics of New York improved dramatically." "Crime decreased dramatically." "And now I think the scale has gone too much the other way, which is why we have Occupy Wall Street and Zuccotti." " Quite disgusting, even though I love it dearly, and it's where I was born." "It's gotten so one-sided." " I think at one time it was lopsided on the club side." "I think now its lopsided on the quality-of-life side." " There's nothing wrong with that side, but I think the most important thing is a balance," "Mr. Mayor." " I never imagined that there would be a time when there was not like five major clubs in New York, let alone any major clubs in New York." "It was just unimaginable." "It was so much a part of the New York experience, and it was such a big industry that supported so many different people." "It seemed blasphemous that anybody would try to destroy it or shut it down." "It was completely unbelievable." " And, really, New York kind of never recovered from that." " People with money started to get more aggressive." "You used to see a lot of Puerto Ricans on the streets of New York." "You know, people were bought out, they were pushed out." " In this decade, compared to where it was in the '80s or '90s, basically we're in a different world." " Now everybody's a fucking promoter or host, and they get a bottle and they invite their 20 friends." " The club scene today is adult, it's clean, at least no one's getting murdered, but you know what?" "It's boring." " Now days, you don't have to make a decision." "All you gotta do is pay." "You buy a bottle." " So, it's changed." "In a weird way, New York has become like all those other cities." "It used to be that New York was New York, and nobody could stand up to New York." " After that, we became pen pals in a way, but then he tried to manipulate me to write a letter of recommendation to shorten his sentence, and I felt a little bit used, just like he used to" "manipulate me before the murder." " I heard of Michael Alig when" "I saw the movie Party Monster." "I would send him pictures of the kitties, things like that, figure anything to brighten up that grey place there would help." " In the first few years Michael was in jail, sending postcards out with bloody axes on it." "I didn't want anything to know about." "But as time went on, and Michael wrote me letters saying that he felt bad, he showed true remorse," "I started to write him back." " Just getting letters helps him." " As Michael accepted what he had done, and understood the path that he had to go down to be my friend, we became friends again." " I see him as a genius, a creative genius." "I see him as an insane drug addict." "It all depends on how I want to look at him, he had two sides." "And let's hope that when he gets out that the good side prevails and not the bad side." " At the root of all the stuff that happened with Michael, he's a drug addict." " That means Alig didn't behave himself, and he wound up doing 17." "Riggs has been out a long time." " How much longer is he going to be in there pulling stunts?" "I'm sure he made the most of it." " He was completely out of touch with what's going on." " I don't really know what's out there." "I know that there's a war going on (laughs) and I know that there's something called the internet," "I actually know what it is, but I mean I haven't been on it." " He doesn't know how evil people can be." " Some people will never ever change their mind no matter how many good things he does." "Some people will forgive him without question, that's just as bad." " People who just see the glamor of the club kids and see the fun and the kookiness and the craziness and they haven't learned the lessons of Party Monster." " The few that either never used drugs or stopped using drugs, and I'll say Richie Rich," "RuPaul, Moby, Chloe Sevigny, all the ones who stopped or never used drugs are the ones who became super millionaire movie stars and designers and whatever." "So that in it of itself should, you know, it speaks volumes." "But, that said, I think even a lot of their inspiration came from our drug use, you know, came from the rest of the drug use from the scene." "So I think it kind of goes hand in hand, and one could not really have survived without the other." " You have celebrities that, you know, get chased down the street just for a photo, let alone they didn't kill anybody." " The dreams I have now are of hanging out with Angel at times before we killed him and before the drugs and everything, the good times." "In the beginning, the dreams were repeating the crime over and over, and I think as I've learned to forgive myself, I haven't completely forgiven myself yet, but the closer I get to forgiving myself," "the better the dreams get." " I remain very loyal to him." "I'll support him in whatever he does, but I fear for him." "You know, I fear that he is not gonna have the skills to be able to navigate everyday life." " I think Michael still would want to make his mark." "I have a feeling that that's so strong in him." " Go to Siberia, be a watch repair-maker, and live in obscurity." " It's really hard to reintegrate into society if you're just a normal criminal." "But Michael Alig is no normal criminal." "I'd just say he had an accident." " I actually always maintained that Michael Alig was innocent." "He imagined this whole thing." "He didn't do nothing, he was innocent," "I spearheaded the movement," "Michael Alig is innocent, free Michael Alig." " He wrote to me from jail a couple times, and I just never answered him back." " The few friends that have disappeared, am I disappointed?" "Of course I am, but I also understand why they would disappear." " I think a lot of people are going to think twice about welcome Michael Alig back with open arms." "I still think there's something dangerous about Michael." " I didn't want to accept it." "It's really hard to explain, but I just kind of blocked that time, the whole time, the whole 17 years from when it all started." " When I see footage of myself on talk shows and just at parties," "I can't even believe that was me." "It's a wonder I had any friends, really, when I see stuff like that." "I was just, like, a nightmare." " The man who went inside needed to be there." "He needed to be locked up and taken away from society because he didn't care about anybody but himself." " It really does take a long time for the enormity to really, you know..." " Use your experience to help the others." "There's a lot of them out there, just ready to fall off the cliff." "Help 'em out." " By doing things like that slowly," "I can work in the direction of repaying my debt, but I may, I probably will never reach the point where I've repaid my debt." " I hope he has a little spunk left in him, but I'm expecting a very humble person, but then again even 16 years in jail probably won't change Michael." " I'll give him a hug." "That's the first thing I'm going to do." "And then sit down and talk to him." "I'm sure we'll have a laugh, because Michael always makes me laugh, and in the first couple minutes I see him, he'll say something funny." " My Spanish is limited, "loca, give me a drink ticket."" "(laughs)" " He has a tough act to follow." "There's a lot of expectations around him." " The positive in him is going to be he's had his 15 minutes of fame, as Andy Warhol said." "Everyone's going to want to talk to him." " And then he has to watch out for those bitchy queens that are going to be complaining all the time about what he does." " I just wonder how strong Michael is." "When you're locked up and you're controlled for so long, when you get out, do you just want to get drunk?" "Do you want to get high?" "Do you want to get laid?" " He has to watch out for the politically correct people." " The man who went inside didn't give a damn what anybody thought of him." "The guy who's walking out cares what everyone thinks about him." " I took a life and he is not around, and I am going home, and I will have a chance to restart my life, and Angel won't." " It could be total car crash (laughs) and he could end up back in jail again, or maybe, who knows" " Michael just might have a third act." " Who is coming out?" "Is it the Party Monster?" "Or the nice gay kid that they all fell in love with." " Who knows what he'll invent, he invented the club kid, so who knows will be next." " The club kids is not all that stuff that we've gone through and everything we talk about, blah-blah-blah-blah." "It's the fact that Michael has been in prison for 17 years." "He's never been on a cell phone, he's never gotten an e-mail, he's never Googled himself, he's never been on the internet, there's so much that Michael hasn't experienced, and that to me is where his story picks up." "(ominous music)" " An open letter to me from James St. James on the World of Wonder Blog, I guess." ""Technology develops at light speed now," ""you don't want to get left behind." ""You need a smartphone, a computer, a GPR," ""and a tablet, there are no two ways around it." ""Things we don't need anymore: phone books," ""dictionaries, maps, and encyclopedias." ""They're all in your phone, it's crazy!" ""It's very sad, the scene has changed." ""Clubs aren't the subversive pleasure palaces of yore." ""Now it's just the thousand shrieking girls taking selfies" ""and dancing to Wake Me Up by Avicii?"" "I was really intimidated by New York back then, and I'm imitated by it again because it's different now." "It's more intimidating." "Oh, the new World Trade Center - [Woman] Yeah." " There's only one of them." "(pensive piano music)" " A little nervous, a little apprehensive, it's been 17 years since the last time I saw him, it's a little strange." " It was surprisingly not good." "It wasn't like "oh great, I'm free."" "It was more like, it was more like..." "You know, who am I to have all these people here to be recording this, and it felt kind of obscene, it felt kind of wrong." "It felt, it felt very much like I'm afraid people are going to think that we're celebrating." "The first night I come home, I can really be myself for the first time with a bunch of people who aren't going to judge me, aren't going to take advantage of me, aren't going to do whatever," "yeah, I was giddy." " It was the initial like, "oh my God, you're old, I'm fat."" "We were different people the last time we saw each other." "So, it was very, it was like once you get past his hair cut," "Hah!" " And it just wasn't the serious tone that I felt and that people who had been visiting Michael for years and remember James St. James never visited Michael in jail." "We did, we drove six hours there and six hours back, and talked to him and really tried to get his life in order, and spent a lot of energy and time teaching him about the world that he was going to enter" "and what he had to be." "And immediately he gets out, and they make it a circus." " No." "You shower in your clothes?" " in your clothes." " Everywhere, every prison in New York?" " Every prison in New York." "(laughs) Oh, James." " I know I told you boys are cuter now, aren't they?" " Yeah." " Over here is where RuPaul and Larry and Lahoma and Lady Bunny live." "I think it's that building there!" " I'll show you where it is." "Oh, and look it's the same door and everything." " It is!" "That's where RuPaul used to sleep." "James, there's something wrong with this." " It's called yogurt, now." " Oh, is that what it is." "I thought it was whipped cream!" "I thought it was whipped cream." "I went "Well, if it's supposed to" ""taste that way, then I like it."" " We're waiting for Michael to have his first parole meeting with his parole office I guess." "He seems to think it'll be about 10 minutes," "I have a feeling it's going to be about three hours." " I have to be in at 8:00, and from 8 p.m. till seven in the morning" " Besides the backlash, living with Michael has been great because it kind of takes me back to the old days before we were all using a lot of drugs." " I want him to experience people freaking out over him." " I watch all of your makeover stuff." " Well, wait a minute, don't you watch all of my makeover stuff?" " I should be, shouldn't I?" " Oh, you should be, yes." "If it wasn't for me, he wouldn't be anybody." " Welcome back, kiddo, - [Michael] Yep, thank you." " Stay on the straight" " Finally home!" " Yup, 17 long years." " He was lost in time and now he's back." "He's back, Michael is back." " I cannot believe you just ate my fucking sandwich!" " That used to be an after-hours club called the Cooler." " Tomorrow, I believe, we're going to try and watch Party Monster, the shockumentary and the movie." "I don't know if Michael has the attention span to watch two movies." "I have a feeling that he's going to be more caught up in," ""I never would have said that," or you know," ""I never wore that outfit to that party."" " That never happened." "I was expecting not to like it, and everybody told me that I wouldn't like it." "They all said that Macauley didn't do a very good job, and that the acting was really terrible." "And in the beginning when the movie first started," "I was like, "This looks like a Lifetime movie," ""the acting is really terrible."" "This is what everyone's perception of you is." "95% of people who have heard of Michael Alig know Michael Alig from this." "Why do you think I'm feeling vaguely suicidal?" "Now I know why Keoki walked out of this movie." "And Macauley's like this accent, this weird British accent, and he's like, "I'm going to watch the movie now!"" "I was thinking am I going to have to start imitating Macauley imitating me in order for people to believe that it's really me, because that's not how I am at all." "But, James said that his character would grow on me by the end of the movie, and you know what, it did." " [Voice from tv] "Very Pirates of the Caribbean"" " Argh!" " [Michael] Rargh!" " Oh!" "(laughs)" "James and I never did the two of hearts dance," "I'll tell you that right now." "(laughs)" "I'd give it a B." "On that billboard, when it was the Calvin Klein billboard, and who had the after-hour club where we all went climbing up on the sign from behind?" " I don't remember." " Richard Vasquez, the California Club." " In spite of what a lot, not a lot, a few people talk bad about him, but me and my friends have always liked him, always thought he was a warm, sincere person." " Well, I used to DJ with Keoki." "And Michael hooked me up as first time as a DJ at a major clubs." "Put it this way, what happened with him is inexcusable." "But you know what, the guy to me is still a friend, still a friend to me." " What did you tell the cab driver?" "Why did you tell him you were doing it?" " We didn't tell him anything." " You said, "Will you help us throw this box into the water?" - [Michael] Mmhmm." " And he said, "Ok."" " Mmhmm." "He said he wanted $20." "Did you think you were going to get caught?" " Hmm." "We felt guilty just lying to everybody, just you and Jenny and everybody that knew Angel." "We could not go out with you every night and say, "Oh, we don't know where he is."" " It's funny, I remember the night that you told Jenny at Limelight, and she ran out crying, remember that?" " It was too much for me, so I'm going to tell everybody else and now it's everybody's problem." " [James] Our problem too." " Right, and none of you had anything to do with this, so it was extremely selfish, but that's kind of like that junkie mentality of drag everyone, "if I'm going down," ""you're all coming down with me."" "But I mean, I'm not blaming the drugs." "It was my decision to use the drugs initially, but I mean, yeah, the symptoms of drug addiction almost mirror exactly the symptoms of being a sociopath." "I mean it's like the selfishness, the narcissism, lying, manipulative, self-centered, self-indulgent, they're all very similar." "The only difference is that a sociopath will be that way whether they're a drug addict or not." " First time I ever saw Andy Warhol, he was coming down those stairs." "Wait!" "Was this the bathroom?" " Yes, this was the bathrooms right here." " How weird, how many nights did we spend in this bathroom?" " That's where James used to hold court, right over there." " It's true!" " That bathroom stall." " This was my office." "My office was Christopher and Walt and Richie and everybody." "After I left, I think everything fell apart. (laughs)" "James and I actually had this conversation today on the way to the parole office, when the cameras were off, of course, and he said, "You know, I'm going to" ""have to be the devil's advocate." ""I have to bring the devil out of you," ""and it's your job to fight that."" " I do like her style though, look how fabulous she is." " Anita Sarko?" "(laughs)" " No, that's like deconstructed like Margiela, that's fabulous." " And what happened was World of Wonder came in, with James St. James, their representative, and they started to make Michael look like a fool." "In my opinion, they were manipulating him." " What a nice place to dump, dispose a body. (laughs)" " Oh, a great spot!" "We should come back every year, scenic" " We should throw another body, we can throw a body over here, right (both laugh)." "Lovely spot for body throwing, little body tossing." " When Michael and I are laughing and joking and stuff like that, people don't realize that it has been 20 years, and that any emotion we've had over everything that's happened has long since been dealt with." " I was feeling like I need to take stock in my life, like what am I doing, are we really glamorizing this?" "We had to have that conversation, you know?" "And just know also that it's kind of in poor taste." " Wait a minute, you're telling me that I'm in poor taste when you're" " I'm saying that I've said things that are in poor taste." "Think that's Angel?" " [James] Hmm, yeah." " It's an arms race." "When you say something to be shocking, then I feel like I have to top it, and then you have to top that, and it comes to a point where, World War III." " He's a funny guy." "He can't be funny right now, because he has to be remorseful." " I don't know about that, like I said," "I don't think he's wired for that." "It's not that he doesn't feel bad about it, it's just that he seems to be a happy guy all the time." "He doesn't seem to be like a down side to him." " it was another lifetime ago, so we aren't being callous or anything like that, but life does go on and life does move on." " I told Michael what was happening, 'cause Michael didn't know, he was just out, he was elated, prancing, having a great time, he was out." " I'm not allowed to use the words" ""whirlwind" or "head is spinning" anymore, Astro says." "Those words I have to retire from my vocabulary." "So I don't know another way to describe it." " How have you changed?" "How are you going to change?" "How are you going to be better?" " i think it's sort of like a work in progress." "I don't think I could ever say that "Oh, I'm changed," ""I'm different, I'm better now."" "I don't think I will ever be better now." "I don't think anybody that was involved in this will ever be better now." "I think there is a getting better, there's a going in the direction of getting better, hopefully." "But I don't think there's ever" ""Well, it's over now, I'm done."" "I don't think it'll ever be that way." " I think he'll always have to prove himself at this point." "I don't think there's ever going to be a point where someone will be like," ""Ok, you know, you're good."" " He didn't understand how it was being played in the media." " There's a lot of intense interest that I sort of, for some reason, wasn't prepared for." " People at Vanity Fair, the New York Post, and the New York Times, Inside Edition, of course the Daily Beast, Huffington Post is Monday, and Rolling Stone is Monday." "I didn't want to give the wrong impression that you can commit a horrible crime and because of that you'll be on the cover of the New York Post, and you'll be in People Magazine and Vanity Fair and documentaries and whatever." "I don't think I'll feel completely free until all of this is over, and I can just wake up one morning and not have to go do like an interview or have a film crew follow me around." "Then I think I'll feel free." "It's still the city that I left, only in hyperdrive." "It's like a hundred times more." " [Voiceover] He described something like walking into Blade Runner." " I remember those times when we could walk through" "Times Square and we might be the only people there." "And now you go and there's 100,000 there and 50,000 signs and there's these new kind of lights, these LED lights that look bright, these Day-Glo colors even in the daytime." "And it's like this hyperkinetic version of Times Square, and it feels like they've stolen it from me, it's theirs now." "But again, we must be doing something right." "Times Square, the whole city is filled with beautiful, rich tourists from all over the world, spending all of their money here, so we must be doing something right." " To be taught everything." "He doesn't know how to, he was sort of asking about cursors on computer screens and things like that." " I need an address book." "Actually, people don't have address books anymore, do they?" " You got a cell phone, you need to buy service, and he's like "what am I," ""I don't know where to get laundry detergent,"" "you know, things like that." " Somebody has to turn on Skype for me." " He made a comment on Twitter or something that" ""I can see people on this little black box machine."" "He called it a machine, like computers are machines." "He couldn't open up a door the other day with a key so easily." "He had never done it for 17 years." "There are basic things that he has to learn, stuff that you take for granted, like wearing a watch." " I'm just used to not having sex now, you just grow used to it, you know." " Every time he used a cell phone recently, he would literally turn it off rather than just end the call." " Hello?" "Well, um, yeah, we just figured," "I'm with Ramon and Lisa right now, and we figured out that the ringer on my phone has been turned off for two days, and I didn't know how to turn it on, so they turned it on for me and I had all these missed," "and then, and then whenever I tried to call you over the past two days, your mailbox is full and it wouldn't accept any new messages." "Text?" "Ramon, he says you have to teach me how to text." "I'm being bombarded by Facebook and Twitter and all this kind of really scary, depressing internet stuff." " There's all these comments." "There's the extreme negative comments, which I knew was going to happen, you know, that people saying they think Michael should be dead or that he should overdose and die, that he shouldn't be out of prison." " The only thing you can own is what you yourself feel." "You don't really have anything to do with what other people think, and it's kind of on them, so you just have to let it go." " He's a fame-hungry sociopath, and all this bullshit about him, sorry for what he did, he's not sorry." "He's not sorry in the slightest." "He's only sorry he got caught." " And I wish the haters would please let it go." "Michael has done his time." "Michael is free, and everybody should understand that, and leave him be." " I mean not one negative thing in there." "And the Inside Edition thing is 100% positive too." " It's like a train wreck or a car crash on a highway." "We all have to see what happens next." " I feel sort of like I'm connected with a hundred times as many people, but the connections are probably one-hundredth of the depth that they would have been had there not been the internet, so it's a give and take." " But then there's also the extreme positive comments of people writing on his Twitter and on blogs, that he's their idol, and they want to go partying with him, and stuff like that, and I think" "that's equally as screwed up." " I believe him to a point, I'm not an idiot." "I'm not naive." "If he fucks up, I am going to be there the second it happens, and I'm going to be the first one to scream from the highest mountain that this mother fucker is a fuck-up, and I'll fucking bury the mother fucker." " I think if you're going to be an interesting person, you're going to be one or the other," "I don't think you're going to be sort of" ""well yeah, he's all right," you know?" "I really don't have any opinion about him whatsoever." "If you're going to have an opinion about somebody," "I guess, have a strong one." " When I wrote Disco Bloodbath, it was meant as a cautionary tale." " My name is Andrew Barret Cox, and I'm 22 years old, and I am the writer of Club Land, a pop musical about the life and times of Michael Alig and the club scene of the '80s and '90s." " It was not meant for people to look to" "Michael or me and make us into heroes." " It's finally going to happen, I'm finally going to meet the person I wrote this entire show about, so, see how it goes." " I'm optimistic about the future of clubs, and I think that there will always be fresh new looks out there and fabulous new people, and new people who will take up the mantle and lead us forward." " I think today it's even a little bit more extreme than it was back in the day, 'cause everybody's trying to outdo everybody and every look like it's been done, and they're just doing more and more and more." " Today, we are fortunate that we have so many rights for different people, different walks of life, for gays, bisexuals, or transgendered, and I think with the internet that it's definitely created more tolerance." " It's interesting because a lot of the people who I knew about in the scene prior to moving to New York City are people" "I now hang out with on a regular basis." "I can text Amanda and go over and hang out with her, and talk about nails and whatever." "It's interesting, it's a little surreal." " The legacy of the club kids, is widespread and worldwide." " They were very prescient in terms of fashion," "Lady Gaga has taken their visual wardrobe, lock, stock, and barrel." " I think it's exactly the same thing." "She's done it a little bit better than we did." " And this kind of whole Lower East Side, Rivington Street subculture that Gaga came out of, and that left a real imprint on her career and on her love of theatricality." " It was about spectacle and grabbing headlines, getting coverage, and, let's face it, that is exactly the way celebrity culture operates today." " Because we don't live in our own skins very well anymore." "We live vicariously through idiots, and we have to feel superior to them or inferior to them." " This narcissism that we were kind of making fun of, but I never thought it would get this bad." "This is exactly what were kind of warning against." "I love the decadence." "It's just so extremely decadent." "Championing and warning against at the same time, and lo and behold here it has come to pass, and I'm disgusted by it." "The reality now is a parody of what we were parodying, so I mean, you can't even make fun of it anymore." " You know, I think he's going to exist as this kind of celebrity of the demimonde, always famous for this one thing, which is a shame in a way, 'cause there was a time when Michael actually represented something positive." " You know, in the very beginning, what we were doing with this whole club kid thing, there was a lot of positivity to it, the message that we were getting out, that's love yourself" "and be yourself, and who cares what other people think." " it wasn't until I saw it starting to crumble around me that I knew it was something that was really special, and that it was a moment in time." " America has always been founded upon this notion of uniqueness and selling yourself, creative powers," "and all that kind of thing, so I mean it really is kind of an American concept." " There's a message of self-expression in, that is about fearlessness, about not caring what other people think, about not editing yourself to please others." " I get all this mail from these kids in Kansas and Iowa and Nevada and whatever, even to this day." "They're like 16, 17 years old and they feel like outcasts, they're bullied at school." " I found one of the invites from a Disco 2000 sticker." " And it's really a powerful message." "In a lot of ways, it's life changing for these kids." " It's like a treasure to me, but it's not a treasure to anyone else, so, and then this is one of the original cards that they used to hand out for the promotions of each of the club kids." "They're a treasure form a time that's not going to happen ever again, that was amazing." " EDM has really exploded, like huge." "And it all traces back to these roots." " There's no more chaos in Manhattan." "There's just no more chaos here." "Michael was chaos." " It's a quieter time in New York." " Back then, it was like an event." "You'd go out, you didn't even think there'd be an ending to the night, you would just go, it'd be like going to a concert or something, or going to a one-time event." " Know what you get when you're leaving your house." "And then you didn't, he had no fucking idea what was going to happen, so." " If someone would've told me in 1990 that I'd be paying $350 to get into a nightclub and buying a bottle of vodka, I would've laughed!" " I know fully well in a half-hour," "I'm going to be pissing it out." " Back in the '90s, you could pick up a piece of trash, a piece of plastic, put if on your head, and look fabulous." "Today if you do that, somebody will be like," ""Girl, you have a piece of trash up on your head!"" " Art openings for Jean-Michele Basquiat, Andy Warhol," "Roy Lichtenstein, Cindy Sherman, Peter Max, Keith Haring." " People used to dance at night clubs, now you're basically going to a venue and just looking at the DJ like it's a concert venue, and that's more boring." "It was more lively, it was more colorful back then." " Nina Hagen, New Order, Duran Duran." " Everybody remembers the murder and the demise, the end of the club kids, the Disco Bloodbath, and all that sensational stuff, but man you had the Ramones play here, you had Guns 'N Roses play here." "You had a lot of great things, fashion and art." " Imagine a club that presents this kind of event and entertainment in the space of a few months, in the space of a year." "Madonna had her first show there, first two or three shows there and paid $250." "It doesn't exist anymore." "You cannot get this talent to perform in a club." "There's no money that can pay for it." "Amazingly, this is not remembered by almost anybody." " And then, it all fell apart." "It's the weight of its own excess." " There were a lot of negatives to it." "From the people, maybe the mothers and the fathers whose sons were devastated by drugs during that era, they died, maybe in car crashes, maybe they overdosed, they'll have a different perspective." " Long after the last record was dropped, they're still talking about the shit we did." "They're legendary things." "It didn't happen by accident, it happened because we sat in meetings every day." "People think Michael's job was running around like a clown in a great outfit." "Michael was there during the day contributing to every meeting about money, DJs, staffing, he was involved in every aspect of this club and the other clubs that we ran." " There weren't enough hours in the night to visit all these clubs, so the clubs had to start expanding their hours." "Tunnel was open till 2:00 in the afternoon at that point because nobody was getting there until 5:00 in the morning." " This is Tunnel." " How insane." "It's the same!" "The same bricks." "I feel vaguely like these people are invading upon my nightclub." " What that era was, was the era of the big clubs." "And you need a lot of people to find one or two you might want to talk to, let alone sleep with." " These days any nerd can go up and have a Facebook account and make it." "When I started, I didn't have any of that shit," "I had a fucking Rolodex." " Basically all anyone does is just take each other's pictures, you know "this is me having a good time,"" ""this is me having a good time,"" "and nobody's having a good time." " A momentary kismet that happened a million times, thousands, thousands, thousand times of a punk chick fucking some old business guy." "And that doesn't happen anymore." "There's nothing like that happening." "The yuppy goes into a bar in Williamsburg or East Village thinking he's a pariah now, what are you doing here, and he feels it." "Back then, he was accepted." "He had a role, he was the guy with money that I could fuck and do coke with." "I need a couple of those." " I feel it's time for dancing again." "It's healthy, you don't have to go the gym on a treadmill." "You could be in the clubs dancing and having a good time." "I don't like treadmills." "Of any kind." " The media age, the internet is made for a person like Michael Alig." "Michael could get 2,000 people to show up at a subway platform in one hour's notice, without internet, without cell phones." "Do you understand what a mind like this can be?" "What's in, what's out" "What it's all about" "I know what the kids all like" "What's good, what's bad" " I want to paint, I want to write," "I have a couple of business ideas." " He has a hundred of these ideas, literally things that are just unbelievable, that you have not thought of, nobody's thought of." "And if you want to keep defining him as the axe-murderer club kid with dots on his face, go ahead, but I don't think he's ever going to wear dots on his face again, and I don't think" "he's going to kill anybody anymore." " He's obviously a very creative person, and I think we can do an incredible event here at the gallery." "I like what he's doing, I like the artwork, and I think it would be more than just an art show," "I think it'll be an event, I think it'll be incredible." "So I asked them to come and meet me and see if we could do a show together." " I have a couple of movie ideas and TV show ideas that I'd like to try and sell to somebody, so, those are the kinds of things that give me the kind of rush now that I used to get" "from promoting a party or directing a nightclub or whatever." " Prior to 9/11, the country was embracing all different types of ideas and people." "But post-9/11 we became really attached to what we understood, safe." " I happen to be a fan of Giuliani, and I'm unusual in nightlife to say that." "I think he was a very good mayor in a lot of ways." "I think he cleaned up the city in many, many ways." "And as a New Yorker, I'm grateful for that." " The city is such, a much better place." "Whatever he did, man, he made me feel a lot safer down on the street." " Frankly, I think it's a time gone by." "I don't think we'll see it again, and in reality it's probably for the best." " i do like the change." "I just want to be a part of it," "I don't want to be left in the lurches." " It may be something different, but it's never all gone, absolutely." " People like to go out and be seen, get dressed up." "It's sort of a universal thing that's all around the world." " Only in New York." " It's not just, it's Miami, it's anywhere youth has an opportunity to have pleasure." "Just keep it clean ladies and gentlemen, that's it." " The city has its own, own energy." "I live here in Florida." "I have to go to New York two, three times a year just to get that energy back." "There is nothing like it." "The air is static, it just makes you feel alive." "And that's New York City no matter what." " I was very codependent before I came to prison." "I needed to be in a relationship," "I needed people to pay attention to me, and watch movies with me and not leave me alone and whatever, and spending five years in solitary confinement will definitely teach a person how to be comfortable being with themselves alone in a room." "And teach you patience, I've definitely learned patience." " Someone is dead because of Michael, and I think it is hard to know what an appropriate amount of time is in prison." " There was a point, the first five, six, seven years of my sentence, where I sort of thought" ""Well you know what, I've done something that's so terrible," ""nothing I can ever do is ever going to make up for it," ""so fuck it, I might as well just continue using drugs" ""and go off the rails, because there's no point" ""in even trying to make up for it."" "And yet, there is a point, and I think that's a really powerful message that no matter what you've done, you can do the most horrendous crime in the world, and it is never too late to say, "You know what," ""I'm going to leave all that behind." ""i'm going to turn over a new leaf." ""I'm going to do something else, and I'm going" ""to do something positive with the rest of my life."" "Angel was like the rest of us, he was a misfit from New Jersey who came to the Big City to be celebrated, to be accepted." "The bottom line is that Angel was loved, he was loved as one of us, he was accepted as one of us, and in spite of the way it ended, if that would make his family feel any kind of comfort," "then that's what I'd like them to know." "I'm going to carry it with me for the rest of my life." "Now, to what degree I don't know." "Maybe it will lessen in severity." "(crying noises)" " I do have faith in Michael." "I do believe that he is remorseful, and that he paid his dues and that he's going to try to do something good with his life, and try to do something to help people now he's out." " He cannot afford to be a little bit short anymore." "He must excel." "He must be better than what is expected of him." " I'm not sure how I'm going to reinvent myself, but I've done it before, and I mean, if they can reinvent Times Square the way they've done, I certainly should be able to reinvent myself." "(pensive piano music)" "(techno music)"