“Club Kid” Killer Michael Alig, the Inspiration Behind ‘Party Monster’, Freed From Prison

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Alasdair Duncan

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The notorious “Club Kid” killer Michael Alig is free from prison, after serving 17 years for the death of drug dealer Angel Melendez. Alig’s surreal rise and fall as a ’90s New York club promoter was documented by James St. James in the deeply-deranged-yet-somehow-true biography Disco Bloodbath. The book was later adapted into a film, the 2003 glitter-and-gore-fest Party Monster, starring none other than Macaulay Culkin.

Alig and friends were big on the daytime talk show circuit back in the day, as evidenced in this vintage Donahue clip. 

Disco Bloodbath is one of the most incredible true crime books ever written, and you should do whatever it takes to get your hands on a copy. The short version is that in the early 90s, Michael Alig was the king of New York’s colourfully-dressed, ketamine-chomping club kid set, but his empire came crashing down in 1996, when he plead guilty to manslaughter in the death of Andre ‘Angel’ Melendez. 

According to testimony, Alig’s friend Robert “Freeze” Riggs beat Melendez with a hammer after an argument about an unpaid drug debt. Subsequent to this, Alig helped him to hide, dismember and ultimately dispose of the body, dumping various parts of it in the Hudson River. You can read a fuller account of what happened here, but be warned, it’s pretty gross. 

In-between working on a memoir he’s calling Aligula, Alig has remained active on Twitter while in prison. Following his May 6 release, he Tweeted that he was “grateful for this second chance”, and followed it up with a picture of his first post-prison burrito. He seems to be taking to selfies in a pretty big way, and a picture of him chugging coffee came captioned “Who needs coke when u can get a caffeine jolt from a Starbucks double espresso?” 
A lot has changed in 17 years, from the way we take and distribute pictures of our penises to cultural dominance of the viral video. To help his old frenemy adjust, Disco Bloodbath author James St. James penned an open letter to Alig on his blog, explaining how to adjust to life on the outside in the new millennium. 

“Boys are cuter in the 21st century,” said St James at the start of his letter. “And dicks are bigger. These are facts. If you don’t believe me, spend an hour on Tumblr. Another odd thing: EVERYBODY has killer style now. Kids in Peoria are as fabulous as the kids in Williamsburg. It’s all rather dizzying, and kind of depressing. When everybody is fabulous, nobody is.”

You can read the rest of this rather amusing diatribe here. 

via CBS News
Image via YouTube

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