bamboo

In 1996, the most famous party promoter in New York told people that he had killed a man. Most of them laughed. He told it at parties and at dinners, and he even said it to a camera crew filming him. Almost nobody believed him until a box washed up on a beach in Staten Island: His name was Michael Alig. He was the "King of the Club Kids", a crowd of young people in wild makeup, wigs and costumes who made the Limelight the craziest club in the city. They went on Donahue, Geraldo and Joan Rivers. He was paid to throw parties, and drugs were everywhere. In the video below, filmed about 3 months before his arrest, he says it at 0:06 without any hesitation: "I killed Angel, and that's the kind of thing that gets me in trouble." Watch his face at 0:12, right after he says it. Angel was Andre Melendez, a dealer who sold drugs at the Limelight and lived in Alig's apartment building. On March 17, 1996, after a fight over money Alig owed him, Alig and his roommate Robert "Freeze" Riggs killed him in the apartment. They left his body in the bathtub, covered in ice, for days. Then Alig got rid of it in exchange for 10 bags of heroin and threw it in the Hudson River. Children playing in the water on Staten Island pulled out the box. Meanwhile Alig kept telling the story, and a Village Voice columnist printed the rumor in April. Police were busy investigating the club's owner. The body was identified in November, and Alig was found hiding in a New Jersey motel. He pleaded guilty to manslaughter and got 10 to 20 years. He walked out in 2014 after 17 years and went back to the spotlight. On Christmas Eve 2020 he died of an overdose at 54. He told everyone for months. Did nobody believe him, or did nobody want to?