Michael Alig: Glitz, Glamour and Killing for Fame

[00:00:01] Kyle Risi: Michael's outfit was made of junk food boxes. He wore an Oreo hat with earrings made of fruit loops.

[00:00:07] Adam Cox: I'd like to make an outfit outta food. That way you wouldn't have to go to the kebab shop afterwards.

[00:00:10] Kyle Risi: But you might be naked by the end of the night.

[00:00:12] Adam Cox: You might be. 'cause someone's like pinching a chip off your back.

[00:00:15] Kyle Risi: I would not be pinching in a club where everyone's farting and you're sweating and you've probably got like drinks spilled on you. I would not be stealing a chip from their back.

[00:00:23] Adam Cox: I think it'd be great. Or, and then you'd have a mayonnaise as a brass. You're like dipping in the chips everyone's having fun and you're crying because someone's dumped you. Your girlfriends hate you.

[00:00:30] Kyle Risi: Yeah. You could just sit on the floor and sob while you eat your chips. [00:01:00]

[00:01:00] Kyle Risi: Welcome to the Compendium and Assembly of Fascinating Things, a weekly variety podcast that gives you just enough information to stand your grout. At any social gathering

[00:01:10] Kyle Risi: We explore stories from the darker corners of true crime, the hidden gems of history, and the jaw dropping deeds of extraordinary people.

[00:01:17] Kyle Risi: I'm, of course, Kyle Reese, your Ring master for this episode. And I'm Adam Cox, your monkey hairstylist for this week's episode because even the monkeys needs to look good, right?

[00:01:27] Kyle Risi: They have gotta look ha a chimp in his little bikini in his little updo. Yeah, little beehive. Nice little wig. I just assumed he was a man there. I don't know. I'm not gonna. Put names on things. It's appropriate for this week. Okay. Because we're going into the world of drag, potentially.

[00:01:44] Kyle Risi: Drag. Mm Adam. It's an exciting one. Okay. It's a good one. But of course, before we get into today's episode, we have some awesome new Patreon members that we want to welcome to the Compendium family.

[00:01:57] Kyle Risi: we've had quite a few that have joined recently. [00:02:00] So welcome. Oh, do you know what I think is off the back of the Bell Gibson episode and the Gabby Petito. So your episodes, is that what you're saying? Yeah. We just had an influx of new Patreon. So much appreciated. Who are they?

[00:02:11] Kyle Risi: Adam? Well, we wanna welcome Jessica Sue Mackey, Madison Poston. Danielle Jones. Janine Elizabeth Patty and Matthew Carter. That's right. We also have Lois. We have Fan Vanilla Bella, we have Allie, we have Brenda Munson, and Josephine Gothenberg. Thank you all so much for joining.

[00:02:31] Kyle Risi: Your support really means the world to us.

[00:02:35] Kyle Risi: Remember Freaks signing up on Patreon not only supports the show, but also gives you early access to next week's episode a full seven days before anyone else hears it.

[00:02:45] Kyle Risi: If you've already devoured all of our free episodes and you are craving even more, consider becoming a certified freak for exclusive early access to our contents up to six weeks before everyone else.

[00:02:55] Kyle Risi: And lastly, please drop us a review wherever you are listening. It helps more [00:03:00] people discover the Compendium and join this wonderful community of Freaks that is it for the housekeeping for this week because Adam, today we are diving into an assembly of glitter, glamor madness and murder.

[00:03:15] Kyle Risi: Interesting. I have, I mean, you've hinted to drag Queen. Mm-hmm. So what Drag queen has killed someone? Yes, exactly. What Drag queen has killed someone? That's the first question you ask when you see like RuPaul walking down that main runway, like, who should kill this week?

[00:03:27] Kyle Risi: Yeah, it puts a whole new meaning to slay 100% Adam? Yes. In March of 1996, a massive storm has just swept across Staten Island and three kids head out to the beach to see if the storm has washed up. Anything interesting.

[00:03:41] Kyle Risi: As they scan the shoreline, something catches their eye. As they move closer, they discover a large cardboard box bizarrely is completely taped shut.

[00:03:52] Kyle Risi: Clearly this wasn't rubbish, so maybe they think whatever's inside might be valuable.

[00:03:58] Kyle Risi: So driven by [00:04:00] curiosity and armed with a couple sticks, they start poking at the soggy cardboard, and as the cardboard starts to peel away, their intrigue turns to horror as through the gaping holes in the box, the motionless, unmistakable form of five fingers and a palm starts to appear.

[00:04:17] Kyle Risi: This wasn't treasure. They had discovered a human body like a whole one or just a hand At this point? At this point, it's just the hand and the arm. And how, how big's the box? It's like a TV size box.

[00:04:32] Kyle Risi: Okay, so it could contain a whole person? Mm-hmm. Okay.

[00:04:36] Kyle Risi: This week we are traveling back to the mid 1990s New York City to be precise, which was the era where fame, excess and outrageous self-expression were woven into the very fabric of the city's culture.

[00:04:48] Kyle Risi: And at the heart of it was a subculture of young eccentric pogo who had emerged out of the previous party era and called themselves the club Kids of New [00:05:00] York City.

[00:05:00] Kyle Risi: Do you know anything about who they are? So the club kids? I do. I've seen on drag race where they dress up. It's punky, it's kind of art. It's, yeah. Although I think I thought it was earlier than the nineties.

[00:05:11] Kyle Risi: So it is really interesting because, there's a transitional period between the celebrants that came before the club kids and the club kids emerging. Mm-hmm. There is a kind of gray area where there's an overlap between these two genres, but by the 1990s there was very much a very defined kind of new subculture called the Club Kids and New York City.

[00:05:32] Kyle Risi: And we'll explain exactly how kind of they became the club kids and what kind of era they emerged from.

[00:05:38] Kyle Risi: But the Club kids of New York pretty much dominated the nightlife in the late 1980s and the 1990s. And they defined everything from the fashion, the music, even the drugs that were called at the time.

[00:05:49] Kyle Risi: They caused such a stir that the tabloids followed their every move. And in doing so, they became the stuff of suburban parents nightmares, fueling that [00:06:00] fear of not knowing what your kids were getting up to while simultaneously luring millions of teenagers to New York City to get a piece of the action.

[00:06:09] Kyle Risi: I don't think they were. I. Dangerous or anything, they're just like party goers. They're out, they dress a certain way. Mm-hmm. A bit of a following, but you know, they're kind of harmless. They're just regular teenagers.

[00:06:18] Kyle Risi: I'm not saying they're all going around murdering people, stuffing inside boxes out. What you said that that was just one body.

[00:06:23] Kyle Risi: At this point in history, though, New York had already gone through countless party era. It's like shifting in these oscillating waves with each passing decade. And so today's story begins at that transitional point between the rock and disco era that define like the sixties and the seventies into the electronic dance and rave eras of the eighties and the nineties.

[00:06:42] Kyle Risi: Up until this point clubs like Studio 54, have you heard of that? Yeah. Yeah. Studio 54 pretty much was led by the party icons of the eighties, like Andy Warhol and his famous factory of celebrities containing like artists, musicians, and various socialites and were the reason that people had for going out, out on [00:07:00] a Friday night.

[00:07:00] Kyle Risi: People just don't go out, out, they don't, not anymore. Not since lockdown, unfortunately. There were social status in being seen, mingling with these people that were known as the celebrants back in the day.

[00:07:11] Kyle Risi: But in the early eighties, the AIDS epidemic began ravishing the city, turning the nightlife into a bit of a ghost town. But then eventually the scene was handed a final blow when the King of Clubland himself, Andy Warhol, died in 1987, leaving a gaping void in its leadership ready to be filled by someone raw and new.

[00:07:33] Kyle Risi: This is when Michael Alec, an outrageous up and coming little gay boy from small town Indiana brazenly, decided to take the seats at the empty throne, left by Andy Warhol proclaiming himself as the prince of the New York nightclub scene.

[00:07:49] Kyle Risi: and Michael Alec managed to successfully revive the club scene and transition it into this new era of electro dance and techno defining what we now know as a club.

[00:07:59] Kyle Risi: Kids [00:08:00] today, giving us huge celebrities like RuPaul, lady Bunny, and of course Amanda Lepa. Any of those names ring a bell. Oh yeah. RuPaul and Lady Bunny. Mm-hmm. Do you know much about Amanda Lepa? Is she the one with this kind of weird cartoon face painted on her. A bit like, what's that? That cartoon character , all the guys fancied her when they were like growing up.

[00:08:20] Kyle Risi: Ro is it the one from Roger Rabbit? Yeah. Yeah. What's her name again? Oh my God, I can't remember. Yeah. But that's who she reminds me of. Yes. Very much a choice in the look like it's kind of, she kind of makes plastic surgery look pretty damn cool, right?

[00:08:35] Kyle Risi: Yeah a lot, lot of her is pretty new considering she's probably what, 60? Pretty new. I don't think she's alive anymore. I think she's now passed away. Oh right. And like she must be, half of her is like made in China, right? Pretty much shipped in FedEx boxes.

[00:08:50] Kyle Risi: At their peak, they were literally everywhere. So it's really funny to watch these old reruns of the talk shows that they would appear on. And in the early shows you would see like

[00:08:57] Kyle Risi: RuPaul there and she's just super [00:09:00] young. She's super timid. She's just sitting there quietly amongst all the other club kids.

[00:09:03] Kyle Risi: But then in the later episodes she's literally the front and center. It's just amazing to see kind of that transition in her confidence over time to the point that she has become the superstar that we know and love today, supermodel of the world. She is the supermodel of the world.

[00:09:18] Kyle Risi: Yeah. She's just got it in terms of she has,

[00:09:21] Kyle Risi: star power. Mm-hmm. Kinda the way that she presents herself. Although back in the nineties she didn't obviously have a stylist and the same kinda wigs going around. Some of her wigs with, uh, Steve Hack then they were, but Adam, everything that they did was all on a kind of a shoestring budget. Oh yeah, of course. Yeah. And it's pretty incredible considering that they didn't have access to some of the cosmetics that young people have today.

[00:09:41] Kyle Risi: They would just find things in the streets. Oh yeah. Everything was off the rack, but it's weird how, it's completely different to what you look at the drag scene now versus back then. Oh yeah. 100%. But something really, it's so refined now, isn't it? Yeah. So Instagram ready, whereas that is quite raw and just ready.

[00:09:54] Kyle Risi: And even though this Michael all guy was adored across his playground that he helped build, there was a really dark side [00:10:00] to him. His drug addiction would eventually cause him to spiral downward, leading to one of the most notorious murders of this period, marking the ultimate downfall of the subculture, the club kids that he helped create.

[00:10:12] Kyle Risi: So, Adam, today I'm gonna be telling you the wild story of Michael Alec, the Prince of the club kids, the stuff they did, the celebrities that produced, and how the movement ended up turning into something unimaginably sinister with the murder of fellow club Kid Angel Melendez.

[00:10:31] Kyle Risi: Today we are exploring that razor thin line between creativity, chaos, brilliance, and madness.

[00:10:39] Kyle Risi: Really thin line, very, very thin line.

[00:10:42] Kyle Risi: Do you know much about New York in the 1980s? That, apart from like the AIDS crisis and things like that, I, it was quite dangerous, wasn't it back then? Yes. Extremely dangerous. Not because of aids, but just because of like crime and everything like that.

[00:10:54] Kyle Risi: I mean, one would argue at a time when AIDS is brand new and ravishing the city. [00:11:00] I would argue that's pretty damn dangerous. Yeah. What I meant was like it wasn't going out mugging people. No. Yeah. There were a lot of, yeah. Crime and criminals and a drug problem, I think. Am I right in thinking that

[00:11:11] Kyle Risi: Exactly.

[00:11:12] Adam Cox: I mean, this point

[00:11:12] Kyle Risi: In the 1980s, New York City was an apocalyptic wild west, marked by urban decay. There was rising crime. Deep social turmoil was plaguing the city neighborhoods, especially like places like the Bronx were crumbling with as many as 70% of white residents moving out to the suburbs. And this was kind of term like kind of white flight at the time.

[00:11:31] Kyle Risi: And across the city. Crime was soaring. By 1990. There were over 2000 homicides being reported per year. Literally, everywhere you went, there were crushed crack vials on the sidewalks.

[00:11:41] Kyle Risi: Times Square was famously called the Sleaziest Block in America, packed with sex shops, peep shows, adult theaters instead of obviously advertising m and ms and Nike on the iconic billboards, it featured porn shows and massage parlors. Really? I had no idea it was that kind of area. It was so run down. Yeah, [00:12:00] completely.

[00:12:00] Kyle Risi: But this was also a time of busting creativity with graffiti artists like Keith Haring turning the city walls and subways into these vibrant canvases, bringing his work into the mainstream.

[00:12:09] Kyle Risi: You've most definitely seen his iconic sort of morph men figures in bright colors on t-shirts. Even today. I think you'll see them everywhere and I think they may have even inspired the morth suit.

[00:12:19] Adam Cox: Uh, Yeah, I know what you mean. It's like the, yeah. Pink, yellow, blue men look like they're dancing. Yeah. And a lot of people try to emulate that in restaurants, cool restaurants and bars and kind of pizza parlors and things like that. You'll see these iconic kind of figurines just splattered all over the wall, and that's pretty much what he was really famous for.

[00:12:37] Kyle Risi: But when it came to the nightclub scene, one of the key epicenters of the city was called Studio 54, which was dominated by the celebrants, which was a mix of wealthy Manhattan socialites and celebrities like Eliza Minnelli, Debbie Harry, and even Salvador Dali, and this was all pretty much led by the original I boy himself, Andy Warhol, who was a huge artist in the 1960s, whose [00:13:00] works included, do you know the famous Campbell soup cans? Yeah. And big old paintings.

[00:13:04] Kyle Risi: He also did the Marilyn Monroe and the Elvis silk screens. Do you know there's like pop art kind of silk screens of Marilyn Monroe's face. Mm-hmm. There'll be like four of them in a grid. Oh, yeah. Or brightly colored, et cetera. That was him. Yeah. He was responsible for those.

[00:13:17] Kyle Risi: And so pretty much the epicenter of this celebrity nightlife was Studio 54, but there were other clubs, they just weren't as well known or anywhere near as exclusive as Studio 54. So the party goers who perhaps weren't in the in crowd or weren't celebrities, were sort of kind of shunned by the elitist celebrants of Studio 54.

[00:13:37] Kyle Risi: But they did have a home. And that was typically at clubs like Danceteria, which at the time was considered one of the epicenters of New wave music in New York City. These are the clubs that kind of birthed Baby Madonna. 'cause that's where she worked in her early career. She was a coat checking girl. There was also run DMC, the Beastie Boys, the Smiths, Cindy Lauper, [00:14:00] this was pretty much the club where all the alternative cool kids went.

[00:14:03] Kyle Risi: This, there's quite an eclectic bunch of people run DMC and then you've got Cyndi Lauper. Mm-hmm. At this point in time as well.

[00:14:11] Kyle Risi: Hip hop was also. Really exploding. Mm-hmm. And it's that era of time when it really began to emerge into the mainstream. And it was clubs like the Tunnel and dance Territ that gave these really big artists from all these different genres that start in their career.

[00:14:26] Kyle Risi: And this whole dynamic between Studio 54 being kind of the elitist club and then you've got TER and Tunnel and places like that was a bit like Norwich before lockdown. We had like Mercy, which was the big commercialized club where all the really preened, fake tan people would go. And it was really difficult to get in, but if you then walk around the corner, you'd find places like Cube or The Loft, they house the alternative crowds.

[00:14:48] Kyle Risi: So this is the dynamic that really existed between Studio 54 and these other clubs like Danceteria. Mm-hmm. And at Danceteria, one of the bus boys working, there was a college kid named [00:15:00] Michael Alec, and he was born in tiny South Bend of Indiana. He was this preppy looking kid, very camp, totally charming, very energetic, but also a raging, attention seeking queen.

[00:15:13] Kyle Risi: You know the type, I mean, yeah. I live with one. Fuck you, where he grew up in South Bend, Indiana, the city was pretty much an industrial town filled with car makers and really small town values. So being gay in this environment was really tough. And as a result, Michael was bullied mercilessly.

[00:15:28] Kyle Risi: But he was a brilliant student. He graduated in the top 8% of his class at school. He wrote a little gossip column for the school newspaper and he learned to hustle by getting his mom to drive into Aldi where he would buy a truckload of suites.

[00:15:41] Kyle Risi: He would mark them all up by 300% and sell them to all the kids at school. And so throughout school he was known as the Candyman. Isn't the Candyman like, isn't that like a horror movie?

[00:15:52] Kyle Risi: Is that the, one of the bees where if you say candy man in the mirror like a bunch of times, then the mirror explodes and you get stung by bees. I dunno, is it? [00:16:00] I think so. It was like Denzel Washington or something like that in that, I don't know, is it rings a bell there. There is one where you shouldn't say the name three times.

[00:16:07] Kyle Risi: Isn't that like bloody Mary? Oh, I don't know. Isn't that what you do when you wanna divorce someone? What? I divorce you. I div Wasn't that scene in East Enders the, that their family Oh yeah. That Muslim family. Yeah. And apparently the way that you could get divorced was by the husband saying, I divorce you, I divorce you, I divorce you.

[00:16:24] Kyle Risi: And while he is saying it, he gets like the second I divorce you and she starts freaking out. Like, don't say it, don't do it. I'm like, what is happening right now? As if, yeah, it's, it's odd that, that that's what does it. Legally, though I don't think it stands up. You still, you're still married. You coughed on that third time.

[00:16:39] Kyle Risi: That wasn't a full three times, but of course as every young, gay, bullied kid does, living in, in a small town of middle America. As soon as Michael turned 18, he decided that he wanted to get the hell out of South Bend. At the time, if you were kind of artistic or different, or even queer, your choices were basically New York City or Los Angeles.

[00:16:59] Kyle Risi: [00:17:00] Michael chooses New York City, and so he enrolls at Fordham University in the Bronx to study architecture. And when he arrives

[00:17:06] Kyle Risi: in the city, he quickly finds his tribe, and they weren't architecture students. The people he connects with the most were the downtown fashion student kind of kids. Mm-hmm. And so he changes his course. He enrolls in the Fashion Institute of Technology in Lower Manhattan. He finds an apartment in St. Mark's place in the East Village, which he describes as intoxicating, decadent, and a dilapidated carnival. Which is that good or bad? I dunno, dunno. Sounds fun, but dilapidated but all at the same time. Like this is New York in the eighties so it's gonna be pretty damn dangerous as well.

[00:17:37] Kyle Risi: Mm. So I don't know. Of course with no chance of him getting into the in crowd at Studio 54, the place kids like him went were Danceteria, which was this 12 story kind of building in the Flat Iron District. And it was owned by this guy called Rudolph Piper, who is the first of our club owners who we will meet, who is straight up a German bond villain. He's like super spelt, he's really skinny, he's sexy like a snake, [00:18:00] always dressed in black. And he's just an absolute machine in the club district and

[00:18:04] Kyle Risi: he would book these insanely wild acts like Hennessy Brown, who was famous for her act, where she would literally squirt breast milk into the crowd. Ew. Why? I dunno. It's 'cause of, for the shock value, I guess. And does she have to like prep for that? What do you mean? Have a have a baby?

[00:18:21] Kyle Risi: Yeah. Like how could you just do that? My breast milks ran out. Oh, I need to have another baby. Probably. But she also had a knack for reaching into her vagina and pulling out magician's, handkerchiefs. And apparently her record was 100, like bits of tissue I don't think that's a good place to store it.

[00:18:35] Kyle Risi: No, no. Especially because the thing is, if you've got a cold and she reaches in there and hands you a tissue, you're like, I'm not blowing my nose with that. Yeah, no, no, thanks. I will just sneeze into my sleeve.

[00:18:44] Kyle Risi: But I think she's missed a trick there with the name Hennessy Brown.

[00:18:46] Kyle Risi: What's that?

[00:18:47] Kyle Risi: But she should have been called tissue box, because that's how I imagine like you fucking a tissue out. And a hundred. I know. And two, who's counting? Is it someone you know when you walk into a like a museum and there's someone with a little stop watchy [00:19:00] thing?

[00:19:00] Kyle Risi: Mm-hmm. Counting. Is someone doing that? They probably made a game of that at some point. Probably. She probably came on and announced that she's got a new world record and they probably counted each 1, 2, 2, 3. We're gonna be here a while.

[00:19:14] Kyle Risi: Rudolph would also book acts like The Missing Foundation, who famously didn't play any instruments. Instead, they would play with various things that they were find lying around on the streets, like old metal oil drums or lead pipes. They would also then throw barb wire onto the stage and just roll around in it naked.

[00:19:33] Kyle Risi: So it's pretty extreme. That was the point of these acts they were meant to shock and be really extreme in nature.

[00:19:41] Kyle Risi: Other acts included a guy who would literally lift kegs of beer using his piercings from his ears and his nipples.

[00:19:47] Kyle Risi: So it is really wild stuff. And this was the alternative scene like, things were way more extreme than the mainstream, more commercialized clubs like Studio 54, which is all about glitz and glamor and kind of get a bottle of volley on the table [00:20:00] and get some MOA champagne.

[00:20:01] Kyle Risi: And This was as gritty as it got essentially.

[00:20:04] Adam Cox: I,

[00:20:04] Kyle Risi: I always used to like a grungy club, so I think I probably would've fitted in there. Do you think? Mm. I dunno if I wanna see that, but it sounds like my place, especially the nipple stuff, I wouldn't wanna see the vagina tissue box lately.

[00:20:13] Kyle Risi: Really? I, I don't know if it goes on. Do you remember when we went to Latitude Festival and we went into that tent and there was that act who just kept showing us their vagina. Was that before or after they were chased round by someone in a Mr. Blobby costume. I think I might miss that. What happened there? Okay. There was a guy dressed as Mr. Blobby and I'm pretty sure he was chasing someone and was stripping them. It was very odd for Latitude Festival, which is a family festival.

[00:20:42] Kyle Risi: As middle class as you can get when it comes to festivals. And they had this naked person with their vagina out and being chased by Mr. Blobby. Yes. Which I clearly missed, but it was after 11 o'clock. So the kids are in bed. Yeah, exactly. They and Mr. Blo see wraps up in their little tents.

[00:20:56] Kyle Risi: Mr. Blobby is chilling out. Who would've thought that Mr. Blobby had a [00:21:00] darker side? I know, right?

[00:21:01] Kyle Risi: So when Michael starts coming to Dad's terrier, he is totally in his elements. He would perform in these little talent shows that the club would hold. He would do his little kind of go-go dancing routine. And he was most definitely the club twink.

[00:21:14] Adam Cox: and after a few months

[00:21:15] Kyle Risi: partying, he ends up getting into this routine where he's literally partying all night, sleeping all day. He starts missing a bunch of his classes, and so it wasn't long before we decided to drop outta college and got a job busing tables at the club.

[00:21:27] Kyle Risi: At some point during the 1980s,

[00:21:29] Kyle Risi: michael pitches an idea to Rudolph to let him host a filthy mouth contest, which was basically, if you're familiar with Paris's Burning and RuPaul's Revival of it, it's a contest where contestants would be invited onto stage, they would throw shade at people in the crowd

[00:21:43] Kyle Risi: so it's a bit, not quite like a roast, but you're just throwing like comebacks to each other. Yeah, I think so. So it's a bit like the library is open on Ru Paul's drag race.

[00:21:52] Kyle Risi: Yeah. And Michael says it would very often end up devolving into public masturbation with beer bottles. That it went. Like that. What with beer bottles. I know. How do [00:22:00] you go from throwing shade to having a wink with a beer bottle? Who do I wanna know?

[00:22:07] Kyle Risi: So Michael, he throws these filthy mouth contests, they are a massive success and they become like a regular thing. And each time he hosts one of these events, he gets like paid $500. It's from here that Michael pitches more and more ideas to Rudolph who eventually agrees to let him promote his own party as a club promoter.

[00:22:25] Kyle Risi: His first really big party night was called Consumer hell , where he arranged to steal a bunch of shopping trolleys from a supermarket in New Jersey, which they then wheel to Manhattan on the subway, two at a time, in the club he would have all these TV adverts just looping over and over on the screens in every single room.

[00:22:42] Kyle Risi: And the dress code was pretty much to wear anything that you could essentially buy at a supermarket. So people literally arrived in these really creative outfits like Saran wrap dresses, stuff were kind of Cheerios and fluffer nutters between the layers.

[00:22:54] Kyle Risi: Michael's outfit was made of junk food boxes. He wore an Oreo hat with earrings made of fruit [00:23:00] loops. So really creative stuff that he was coming up with.

[00:23:02] Adam Cox: I'd like to make an outfit outta food. And then that way you wouldn't be hungry that night. You haven't gotta go to the kebab shop afterwards, but you might be naked by the end of the night. You might be. 'cause someone's like pinching a chip off your back. Of course.

[00:23:13] Kyle Risi: I would not be pinching in a club where everyone's farting and you're sweating and you've probably got like drinks spilled on you. I would not be stealing a chip from someone's outfit from their back.

[00:23:22] Adam Cox: I think it'd be great. Or, and then you'd have a mayonnaise as a brass. You're like dipping in the chips and your mayonnaise and you're just there.

[00:23:27] Adam Cox: Everyone's having fun and you're sit crying because I don't know, you've been stitched up or whatever. Someone's dumped you. Your girlfriends hate you. Yeah. You could just sit on the floor and sob while you eat your chips.

[00:23:38] Kyle Risi: Yeah, that sounds like exactly the thing that the club kids would be into. And again, this was a raging success where he was now routinely getting paid $5,000 for every party that he threw.

[00:23:48] Kyle Risi: And he was just getting started. But by 1987, Andy Warhol the king of the subculture at the time. He dies and it is a massive blow to the club scene.

[00:23:58] Kyle Risi: Journalists were describing [00:24:00] this as the literal death of downtown. Like it was already struggling due to all the crime and the white residents that were leaving in droves.

[00:24:07] Kyle Risi: But on top of this, the AIDS epidemic had already done its worst. At the time, remember people didn't really know a lot about AIDS or how you could even catch it. So it was just easier for people to stay away.

[00:24:19] Kyle Risi: But when Andy Warhol died, it was kinda like the final blow. All the celebrities that kind of hovered around him just decided to leave. And that kind of solidified this notion of the

[00:24:29] Adam Cox: death of downtown.

[00:24:30] Kyle Risi: That's how big this guy was. In terms of he's like basically like Monica from friends. If it wasn't for Monica, none of them would be friends. I see. She's the original hostess. She brings everyone together, essentially. Got you.

[00:24:41] Kyle Risi: And so deciding to seize the opportunity, consciously or subconsciously, Michael starts making moves to fill that void that was left by Andy Warhol and people describe him as baby Godzilla just storming around the club in literal roller skates and a tiny kind of secret mini dress.

[00:24:58] Kyle Risi: And honestly, at first, [00:25:00] especially to the old Andy Warhol celebrants that were still around, they just did not like this at all.

[00:25:05] Kyle Risi: Because under Andy Warhol, it was all about glitz and glamor. It was about celebrity and the trust funds. It was sleazy, but it was alluring. Page six was always filled with kind of the celebrants and what they were up to. In fact, the term superstar was made popular under Andy Warhol really bringing that term into the mainstream to the point that it's now commonly used today.

[00:25:27] Kyle Risi: But he also famously coined the phrase 15 minutes of fame. Do you know what they're saying? Yeah. How did that come about? Because people were in the club. They'd have their moment and then they'd go home. Well, the thing is though, like as a celebrity superstar, you could just be famous for essentially being famous, being seen in those circles. And so because of that, all these page six publications and these kind of GOs columns, they would report on you and you would get notice, you would be snapped in these kind of magazines, things like that, and you would essentially become famous.

[00:25:55] Kyle Risi: And that's where that term got coined. Ah, no way.

[00:25:58] Kyle Risi: So when Michael Ali burst into [00:26:00] the scene, he was tacky. He was over the top, and many people just didn't like it. But the truth was Michael and the club kids, they were deliberately parroting and mocking the celebrants for their excess and their attention seeking behavior that had made them so famous.

[00:26:15] Kyle Risi: Mm-hmm.. So when the club kids would dress up, it was at the same level, but instead of kind of jewel dresses, it would be literal bottle caps. And this is where they would just wear really out there, I dunno, art type clothes I guess really, rather than anything. Just anything that you could make.

[00:26:30] Kyle Risi: Yeah. So they wanted to give this illusion of this success and this grandeur and this kind of opulence, but it was all made with literal Saran wrap and fluffer matters and it's that's why it's quite punky in a way. I always think. Yes. I mean there are kind of crossovers between the different genres that are emerging.

[00:26:46] Kyle Risi: At the time, punk was definitely a thing, but it's merging with the old disco crew and the new wave music and you've got the punk and you've got the rock and this kind of all amalgamating kind of creating these little mini kind of sub genres.

[00:26:59] Adam Cox: [00:27:00] and Instead of changing their names to famous celebrant style names like Candy Darling or Ultraviolet, they would literally call themselves Genitalia or Cynthia Social Lies. And these were kind of the start of those iconic drag names starting to kind of surface. Ah, and it all started as a way of parroting these elitist Warhol kind of celebrants that dominated the party scene for so many years.

[00:27:23] Kyle Risi: Oh, like, oh, Jenna Alia. Oh, did you not get that? No. Initially I thought like, oh, he's, that's a weird name, but now I get it.

[00:27:29] Kyle Risi: Yeah. And before long Michael's entourage, they start growing. He has a small group of equally outrageous friends who without fail, would show up to the clubs wearing kind of space hats, feathered kind of leotard, thongs, all in the same outfit. Nice. Yeah, very sexy.

[00:27:45] Kyle Risi: The collapse of the party scene under Warhol doesn't really recover as much as it instead starts to attract a whole new generation with kind of different values, but also a generation that hadn't been ravaged by kind of the AIDS epidemic. So there was kind of less fear. A [00:28:00] bit more freedom out there. Culture.

[00:28:01] Kyle Risi: Yeah. There was a lot more education when it came to

[00:28:03] Adam Cox: a,

[00:28:04] Kyle Risi: by this point, people knew how to catch it. They also knew more importantly, how to protect themselves. How to protect themselves from it. Yeah. So it didn't really have the same effect on this new generation of partygoers that were coming into the scene as it did. The ones that were like surprised by the AIDS epidemic,

[00:28:20] Kyle Risi: but also the really unexpected thing that really helped to attract this new generation of party goers to the scene was that in 1985, the minimum drinking age in New York City was raised from 19 to 21, and the aim was to curb antisocial behavior amongst teenagers. But bizarrely it backfires because even more teens start going out to the clubs in droves.

[00:28:39] Kyle Risi: It sort of becomes super chic to have underage kids in your club. And because the drinking age was set at the federal level at this point, the state police didn't really care much. They kind of sort of turned a blind eye to it.

[00:28:51] Kyle Risi: It's like that thing that kids always do, like you make something forbidden and it just becomes more appealing. Mm-hmm. That'd be really annoying. Say that you've just turned 19 and you're like, great, I can go [00:29:00] out drinking.

[00:29:00] Kyle Risi: And they bring this in and you're like, ah, here we go again. Yeah. But then you'd even be more chic because now you're going out drinking. But it's also forbidden to be drinking. That's what makes it so chic.

[00:29:09] Kyle Risi: Yeah. It'd be really, I imagine that being really weird because you'd be like, last month I could do this legally, but now Yeah. Or you need to go back to having fake ideas. Exactly.

[00:29:17] Kyle Risi: And by this point, Michael is no longer disappearing in the periphery of photographs on page six. Very often kind of spreads are now actually about him specifically and his friends to the dismay of kind of the dwindling celebrants that are like now aging and like going off to retire after like the age of 40, I guess once you get to 40, like it's, you're too old to be partying and stuff, right?

[00:29:38] Kyle Risi: So you just go off and die. 40 more like 30. Um, so one question. What is page six? You made it sound like that was quite significant. Yeah. It's kind of like, it's like the gossipy, kind of salacious section of the newspaper about what's happening in the nightlife and who's doing what, who's wearing what, what, what fashion shows are happening at the time.

[00:29:55] Adam Cox: Right. What the celebrities are doing.

[00:29:56] Kyle Risi: it's through these publications

[00:29:58] Adam Cox: on page six

[00:29:59] Kyle Risi: a journalist [00:30:00] and a scene commentator starts referring to Michael and his friends as the club kids, which they end up loving so much that this is what they end up calling themselves. And that is how the club kids were born. That's how they got their name. 'cause they didn't really have an identity before. They were just these weird young kids who were really

[00:30:14] Adam Cox: kind of,

[00:30:15] Kyle Risi: incensed by being excluded from the celebrity time Studio 54 crew. They started parodying them. They create their own subculture. People start writing about them and bam, they've got a name. They're club kids of New York City. And that's how it was born.

[00:30:28] Kyle Risi: That's a, it's quite a nice name. Really. I feel like it could, they're just young people that go to the club. Mm-hmm. And their kids. The names on the tin, right? Yeah, pretty much. It's not that sophisticated actually.

[00:30:37] Kyle Risi: And of course the aesthetic was theatrical. It was cartoonish, it was anti-fashion and mocking. Michael literally describes it as part drag, part clown, part infantilism. And here's the funny thing.

[00:30:48] Kyle Risi: In their pursuit of parodying and mocking the celebrity obsessed old God of the Andy Warhol celebrants, they inevitably become exactly that because they start getting really [00:31:00] desperate to be in the limelight even more. Ah, okay. So they essentially become the very thing that they once opposed,

[00:31:05] Kyle Risi: I wonder if they realized that or whether they were like, no, we are not like that. We're different. They did realize that Michael is on record as saying that exact line that we pretty much became the thing that we were opposing. Oh, right, okay. So they definitely had that self realization.

[00:31:21] Kyle Risi: I wonder if they're like, do you know what? This is actually really fun. It is really fun being famous. I like it. I've gonna carry on. Yeah. Essentially,

[00:31:28] Kyle Risi: michael's big Break eventually comes in the late 1980s with a man called Peter Gian, who just a few years back in 1982 purchases the Infamous Limelight Club. Have you heard of that before? No, I never had that one. Well, if you've ever watched any film that's set in New York this is a club that is based on essentially. Oh, okay.

[00:31:48] Kyle Risi: And Peter Gian is actually the second of our club owners that looks exactly like a bond villain in that he wears a fucking eye patch. Yeah, that will do it. He's originally from Canada and growing up he lost an eye playing hockey and eventually gets a [00:32:00] huge injury settlement, which he uses to open up a rock bar in Canada before moving to the USA, where he opens up a disco in Miami and Atlanta before finally coming to New York City.

[00:32:10] Kyle Risi: By this point he was starting to sense that disco had kind of sort of run its course. So he wanted to try something brand new. He finds this old church up for sale.

[00:32:19] Kyle Risi: It's the Episcopal Church of the Holy Communion, which is like, there's 120 year old building in Chelsea. He pays top dollar for it, like 1.7 million, and then he spends another $5 million renovating the inside with loads of multi-tiered balconies under this huge vaulted ceiling.

[00:32:35] Kyle Risi: He builds like a VIP lounge and throughout the club there are loads of light hanging cages that descend down from the ceiling for dancers to dancing.

[00:32:41] Kyle Risi: That's where the original go-go dancers would be dancing. Oh, actually gonna be in cages. Yeah. Yeah. That sounds pretty elaborate.

[00:32:46] Kyle Risi: He's got some money then to, that is it? This is an elaborate club. And so if you've ever seen any New York clubs depicted in the movies, this is what that is based on.

[00:32:54] Kyle Risi: It's just iconic. The club opens in 1982 and by 1988, Peter Gian [00:33:00] is running a fairly successful business operation, but it's different in that it's just not cool.

[00:33:05] Kyle Risi: It's just iconic. Like the Limelight has become this massive tourist trap where people want to come and see this incredible club inside this 120 year old church that's owned by this very shadowy, very alluring kind of persona that appears on like page six and things like that.

[00:33:21] Kyle Risi: Peter is a workhorse. He will regularly work 18 hours a day. He's always at his clubs. He's always lurking in the background, which is very strange for a club owner. Normally you're they're very hands off and there'll be like a way on their yacht or whatever.

[00:33:33] Kyle Risi: He's always working and he doesn't drink and he doesn't take drugs except for twice a year where he'll go on these week long coke fueled orgies. And then when that was all done, he would just be right back to being sober again, back of the clubs, working 18 hours. I like, that's how he unwound. He just, yeah, takes coke for a week and just, just get it all outta your system, you know?

[00:33:52] Kyle Risi: That's it. I guess that allows him to keep focused. He's not tempted at the weekends, you know? He's, he, he's running a business. Exactly.

[00:33:59] Kyle Risi: And at [00:34:00] some point when he was struggling to fill one of the rooms in the club, he tentatively asked Michael if he would be interested in doing something there.

[00:34:07] Kyle Risi: Michael's not sure. His friends are like, are you sure? It's not like really a cool club or anything like that, but he ums and ahs for a bit and then he finally decides that he's going to throw a sexy astronaut party. An astronaut party, and it's a huge hit. So Peter gives him an entire night to himself and is Wednesday nights at the limelight for him to do whatever he wants.

[00:34:28] Kyle Risi: And so Disco 2000 is born. Okay. They rent out a full set of animal mascot costumes under fake names so they don't have to return them. So it's quite smart. They have costumes like Claire, the chicken ice to the bear uric the dog, and amongst others.

[00:34:43] Kyle Risi: So basically these aren't like sexy little chicken outfits. This is a full-blown, fur covered outfit that you would have someone selling hot dogs on the street. One why and two, this isn't where Furring came from, is it wouldn't be surprised. Another subculture born from the club kids in New York [00:35:00] City.

[00:35:00] Kyle Risi: They would basically come in, they would hype up the crowd, they would vogue, they would roam the club dress of these animals, clear the chicken, claire clear the chicken. She sort of had this, uh, trapeze swing over the dance floor where she would pretty much just swing for hours dressed up as this chicken.

[00:35:14] Kyle Risi: Did she cluck? Probably. She's gotta do that for like several hours and like they're all having fun and she's just Ugh. Just keeps on swinging back and forth.

[00:35:23] Kyle Risi: James and James, who's a very good friend of Michael's, he used to be kind of part of the old guard. He was a celebrity time, just when he was kind of, he was kind of young enough to still be able to straddle between the two, like scenes. Mm-hmm. So he was easily welcomed into kind of the club kids of New York City. He was there that night as well. And he was the drug child where he wore this long wig in a slightly little outfit, and he would just sit in a cage surrounded by signs that says, do not feed the drug child. And then he would rattle on the bars begging people to give him a, like a bump of coke.

[00:35:56] Kyle Risi: This is so weird. And again, it was a smash hit. So every Wednesday it [00:36:00] was a different take on disco. 2000, the shopping trolleys made a reappearance. This time he invited his German immigrant mom to visit and you see her getting pushed around,

[00:36:09] Adam Cox: uh,

[00:36:09] Kyle Risi: the club in these trolleys, essentially.

[00:36:12] Kyle Risi: I love how you said that the shopping trolleys made a reappearance. They, they were like this iconic thing that like what, He went through a lot of effort to get those. He's not gonna give them up.

[00:36:21] Kyle Risi: He not calling him up and going, can we have our trolleys back please? I think it was like an a and p in New Jersey or something like that.

[00:36:26] Kyle Risi: Okay. He would bring in bales of hay and live chickens. Literally live chickens. At one point he had built an indoor water slide, which of course couldn't have been very safe with all the electricity. I was gonna say, yeah, that and the chickens, they're gonna pop that thing.

[00:36:39] Kyle Risi: I don't know what's going on. Another time he made a literal Ferris wheel offering club goers, free rides completely smashed out their faces in the club. I'm logging on that thing. But yeah, apparently it was a smash. It everywhere you looked, there were people having sex just in the open.

[00:36:54] Kyle Risi: And very quickly they realized that the parties that did really well typically had this [00:37:00] element of sex to them.

[00:37:01] Kyle Risi: So one of the dress trends for a while was literally cut out the bottom portion of your outfit and wear No. Oh, sexy. I mean, it's sexy. Yeah. You haven't got like, stripped down. You're, you're there ready to go. It's a, it's a new take on chaps. This, this sounds really okay. When I said, I like a grungy club, Uhhuh, not this, and it gets way worse throughout the evening, they would host these little events and the most popular of these would be called the hot body contest, where they would hype up the crowd until people got on stage strips completely naked and the hottest body or the performance would win. $50. $50. Is that all

[00:37:33] Kyle Risi: To be fair, at this point, it's not really about the money. Okay. honestly, it's just about having a good time, I would hate to be the cleaner that comes in at 7:00 AM the next day. And I'd be like, Ugh. Wiping wads of spunk off the walls and wads. Wads of spunk is not phrase that we need to, and of course the music was dance and techno.

[00:37:53] Kyle Risi: So the limelight becomes the sort of ground zero for the rave culture that's bustling into the mainstream at this [00:38:00] point.

[00:38:00] Kyle Risi: What is interesting is at this point, especially for Michael, drugs aren't really a thing. In the clubs it was mostly just weed and cocaine anyway, which of course had been around for generations, but it was all just done on the down low.

[00:38:12] Kyle Risi: But then a new drug hits the scene. It's called Ecstasy. Ecstasy. Ecstasy. She's a slut and she knows it. She wants to rule all the boys. She can help taking the drugs on a Saturday night. What was that for? What was the name of the show?

[00:38:31] Kyle Risi: Summer Height High. Summer Heights High. That's it. Yeah. He's iconic. Chris Lily, was it? Yeah. It's a good show. So ecstasy is now a thing, and believe it or not, it was completely legal at the time.

[00:38:42] Kyle Risi: In fact, it would remain legal until 1996. Really? Mm-hmm. Yeah. Just in the us. So if you got busted with it the worst that the cops would do would just take it off you and throw it in the bin. But I imagine

[00:38:52] Adam Cox: like

[00:38:53] Kyle Risi: if that was me, five minutes later,

[00:38:54] Adam Cox: you'd be in the bin,

[00:38:55] Kyle Risi: I'd be in that bin, rummaging around.

[00:38:57] Kyle Risi: And so because of this ecstasy was kind

[00:38:59] Adam Cox: of sort

[00:38:59] Kyle Risi: [00:39:00] of done very much out in the open. They start making these ecstasy punches, basically involving, crushing up a bunch of ecstasy, mixing it into like a 55 gallon drum of punch and serving it from the DJ booth.

[00:39:11] Kyle Risi: Ugh. At one point they organized this sort of hole in the wall where you'd hand over like 15 bucks and someone would just hand you over like a rocks glass filled with champagne vodka and crushed magic mushrooms. These people are getting fucked up.

[00:39:25] Kyle Risi: It's a bit like in Florence where you would pay like a couple euros, put your hand in the wall in kind of the beside of the building, and then someone would hand you like a glass of wine

[00:39:32] Kyle Risi: it's like that, but in a club and it's magic. Mushrooms and vodka. And champagne. Yeah. I'm, if I'm in a club and someone's handing me a drink through a wall, you're not taking it. I'm not taking that.

[00:39:40] Kyle Risi: that's the thing, because nobody's really cracking down on the ecstasy use. They start getting really brazen with all of the drugs and they

[00:39:47] Adam Cox: would play

[00:39:48] Kyle Risi: this game on stage called, what's My Line? Where they would literally rack up various lines of white drugs on the table, like crystal meth, cocaine, ecstasy, or kemin. And then people were invited up on stage to snort one of them and [00:40:00] guess what it was.

[00:40:00] Kyle Risi: And if you guess correctly, you got to snort another one. And then the winner would be the one who would be able to guess more correctly. That is, I mean, so dangerous. So dangerous that, yeah. Mixing drugs. I thought you were gonna say they're only allowed to, snort one at a time. I thought that's really responsible. I'm glad they kind of said like, just keep to one drug. No. Oh no. It was all about trying as many drugs as you possibly could.

[00:40:21] Kyle Risi: So they start handing out ecstasy as party favors as well. That was Michael's thing. He would walk around the club. If you saw someone not having a good time, he would approach him and say, open up. And he would slip a pill in your mouth. But remember Michael at this point is completely anti-drugs, but he would pretend like he was really fucked up. He would stage falling over, or he would cut himself on purpose and say that he fell over, or he would see like a busboy coming and then deliberately fall into them. So everything was just built on extremes and chaos

[00:40:47] Adam Cox: and

[00:40:47] Kyle Risi: he was always thinking about what the next extreme thing that he could do.

[00:40:51] Kyle Risi: This is when he starts throwing what he called the outlaw parties. They would orchestrate these flash mobs and would basically cram themselves like [00:41:00] two, 300 party goers in one, go into

[00:41:02] Adam Cox: like

[00:41:02] Kyle Risi: a grocery store or a bank vestibule with a boombox and they would just rave it up.

[00:41:08] Kyle Risi: The most famous of these was in a McDonald's in Times Square where they literally would all jam into these kind of restaurants,

[00:41:15] Kyle Risi: all the other punters that are currently in the McDonald's at the time are freaking out. The owners' calling the police and at the same time he's ordering a hundred cheeseburgers and he is just throwing them out into the crowd.

[00:41:26] Adam Cox: So he is just taking over the restaurant? Yeah, or whatever store, that is it. He would also break into like old abandoned warehouses. One time they stole a bus and they held a party in a bus. How was he not arrested? More? the point of these parties was to obviously attract attention and of course the police very often would be called and within 15 minutes they would be there to shut down the party.

[00:41:45] Adam Cox: And that was the whole point, it was mission accomplished. He wanted to attract attention because what this ended up doing was fueling his image in the papers and then again attracting more attention.

[00:41:56] Adam Cox: They would also hold these kind of outlaw fashion shows between train station [00:42:00] platforms, perfectly timed. Just at the point, their two trains or a kind of either side for maximum kind of exposure. And people are just looking out the window going, what's going on here?

[00:42:07] Adam Cox: What's this all about? And then they'll read about it in page six and they'd be like, oh yeah, we saw them. And that's just one way that their profile would elevate.

[00:42:14] Adam Cox: And by this point, the club kids are just national spectacles. They're invited to attend MTV, they're in all the magazines and the talk shows like Grano and Joan Rivers.

[00:42:24] Adam Cox: Of course, the talk show's objectives were to fuel the fears of parents that their kids were kinda running off to New York City and starting to od on all these kind of weird, fantastical drugs that were breaking out into the scene at the time, like ecstasy. But at the same time, watching at home alongside those terrified parents, were their kids going, yeah, I want that life in me.

[00:42:45] Adam Cox: Yeah, that looks fun. I wanna go do that. So these talk shows think that they're doing something noble, but really what they're doing is they're just encouraging more kids to just run away to New York. It's like promo for the club kids. 100%. Michael is essentially the Pi Piper and his flute is the [00:43:00] drugs and all the parties that he's throwing.

[00:43:01] Adam Cox: By the early 1990s, Peter Gian has a monopoly on all the big New York clubs, like Palladium Tunnel Club, USA,

[00:43:07] Adam Cox: the tunnel, for instance, is this old railroad freight terminal from the days when trains would go straight up to the warehouse, where you'd offload all your cargo onto, my favorite detail about the Tunnel Club is that the bathrooms would span like 50 stores long and there would be a DJ booth at either side that was dubbed The Poop dj. The Poop dj. I, I reckon that's where you probably start out, isn't it? If you're a DJ in New York at the time, your first gig.

[00:43:32] Adam Cox: Oh, I'm the poop dj. Yeah. Why not? Blasting out some tunes while people are taking a shit Yeah.

[00:43:37] Adam Cox: At Peter's height, his clubs were ranking in $600,000 a week from all of his clubs, and it was all because of Michael. Wow. That is a lot.

[00:43:46] Adam Cox: It's roundabout this time that Michael finally falls victim to drugs, and it's just because it's impossible for him to escape from them.

[00:43:53] Adam Cox: He starts, of course, with ecstasy, and then for a while his favorite then becomes ketamine, then crystal meth, then acid, then mushrooms. He [00:44:00] pretty much kind of goes through them all. At one point, he would blow up these balloons filled with like 50 ecstasy pills and then just release 'em over the dance floor, and then people would literally just fight over these balloons, like fucking animals, just to get what's inside of them.

[00:44:12] Adam Cox: I'm surprised they would, I'm guessing the cost of ecstasy back then would've been pretty cheap because they just seemed to be giving it away would nearly, yeah, and it, I think it's a synthetic drug anyway, so you can just make it in the lab and mass produce it, and if and when you are out partying, the purpose was to take as many drugs as you possibly could. Like to try them all. Not just like, I'm gonna stick with ecstasy tonight. It was like, I want xxi, I want Xanax, I want Rohypnol, I want them all, all at the same time.

[00:44:37] Adam Cox: And a popular at the time was these pre-mix combos called Zack, which basically contained Xanax, ecstasy, crystal, and ketamine, which you would take all at once and you would just completely lose your mind.

[00:44:47] Adam Cox: And it's so funny to me because ketamine and Xanax are sedatives. So the opposite of what you'd want to take at a rave. Yeah, I just don't understand how people survived with that kind of amount of drugs. I would be dead. Yeah.

[00:44:59] Adam Cox: [00:45:00] And like I said, Michael at this point was really hot on ketamine and I guess he would run out from time to time. So to get a supply of Ketamine, he would buy cat medication in liquid form.

[00:45:10] Adam Cox: And he and James had pour it onto a baking tray until it kind of like crystallized. So there's these really funny video montages of them constantly just checking the oven to see if it was ready. And then when it was, they would then crush it up and then just snort it.

[00:45:22] Adam Cox: The fact that they resorted to that, that just shows, I don't know. There are the spiral. Yeah. That is not a good state to be in.

[00:45:28] Adam Cox: Of course, when ketamine stops being exciting, they then switched to harder drugs and eventually they arrive at heroin. And so all of a sudden it went from all these kids jumping around frantically in the clubs to just staring at the ground in a daze.

[00:45:42] Adam Cox: It's really sad. That doesn't sound fun. It doesn't.

[00:45:45] Adam Cox: Michael starts falling into a drug cycle and he starts missing very, very important business meetings and when he does show up, he's literally just in a bedsheet.

[00:45:52] Adam Cox: He just has no shame. He doesn't care. He says that once he was out shopping in the supermarket and he was in a major K hole, he accidentally bumps into someone's [00:46:00] shopping cart. Turns out the guy was someone from the club. He sees that Michael is in a major K hole and he just gives him a bump of cocaine right there in the a and p supermarket. This all, yeah, this will get you this all sort you out. Yeah. Just helps him snap out of it.

[00:46:12] Adam Cox: from there he'll make his way to the eggs. He'll see another guy from the club and then bam, he gets another hit of whatever else he's got on him. It feels like a seesaw. Very much a yo-yo, you take this and then you go too much. Then you take this other thing to an upper and a downer.

[00:46:23] Kyle Risi: He has this really weird obsession with piss and poop that he starts to literally pay people to drink their own piss on stage. He would also sometimes pee on people from the balcony above. One time he pees down on a new bartender who's just started and she is fucking furious. She immediately reports him to Peter Gian and Peter fires her because of course Michael is his golden boy, right?

[00:46:48] Kyle Risi: Yeah. He also starts tricking people into drinking pee as well. And also sometimes their own vomits there's this one drag queen called Ernie, and he would just hand her a Gatorade bottle and she'll drink it and [00:47:00] everyone would laugh and he'd be like, oh no, what's in here?

[00:47:02] Kyle Risi: That is, this is disgusting. It's not this, this is just not nice. To be fair.

[00:47:06] Adam Cox: I mean,

[00:47:07] Kyle Risi: That happens time and time again. So if you're repeat getting trick to drinking piss. Okay. Yeah. Like do you really have sympathy for that person?

[00:47:14] Adam Cox: I mean,

[00:47:14] Kyle Risi: That's like the 10th time today. I'm sort think he secretly likes it.

[00:47:19] Kyle Risi: So, michael also starts to employ his own acts as well. One of the most popular acts that he employs is a woman called Ida Slapper. She's wildly popular because she would get on stage dresses like Frank and Ferter from Rocky Horror. Oh, the drag queen, right?

[00:47:35] Adam Cox: I thought like you friend, like a frank feta.

[00:47:37] Kyle Risi: Do you wanna guess what her act was? She slapped people. No, she would basically give herself a champagne enema on stage. Oh my God. Then she would point her ass at the crowd and then spray everyone with it. Ugh. Ah. Why are people going to this place? I know it's so rank. I would need to be like dipped in bleach after this [00:48:00] 100%.

[00:48:00] Kyle Risi: One of Michael's gnarliest parties was called Blood Feast, basically inspired by his obsession with horror movies and basically he would buy bags and bags of brains and liver from a butcher. He would retrofit these coffins taken off the lid and replace them with a clear Perspex panel so that everyone could see inside them.

[00:48:17] Kyle Risi: And then he would get his club kits to lay in them covered in mashed up brains, liver and blood, and they would just all be dotted around the actual club itself so people could just come along and marvel at it and everything would just be really dark and moody. Loads of red lighting and stuff. Bit horror movie esque.

[00:48:34] Kyle Risi: This. This is surreal. Surreal James. And James talks about how at the end of the night he couldn't stop gagging from the putrid smell that has started to develop in his little coffin. But he says it was all about the experience. What experience? I'm sorry.

[00:48:50] Kyle Risi: At this point, Michael is a fucking dirty bastard. He's so riddled with hepatitis, so it's no surprise there that he makes a game outta spreading it around the [00:49:00] club by deliberately French kissing people. No. So lots of people end up getting or thinking that they had it.

[00:49:06] Kyle Risi: So at Hepatitis as a peak, Michael creates this game called The Wheel of Hepatitis, and it's basically a bit

[00:49:13] Kyle Risi: like Wheel of Fortune people who thought they had it but didn't know how they got it, they come up on stage, they would spin the wheel and wherever it landed would be the person who gave it to you along with a funny description of how you caught it.

[00:49:25] Kyle Risi: So like it would be like you caught hepatitis from Michelle Visage by drinking her boob sweat or something ridiculous like that. And it became really popular was hauling the magazines and stuff. Yeah. But hepatitis can be quite serious, right? It's hugely serious.

[00:49:37] Kyle Risi: I think it's like a brain thing, isn't it? Yeah. And people going oh yeah, I've got it. Oh, it's really funny. Yeah, I got it. Became really cool to kind of say, yeah, I've got, I've got Hep B, I've got Hep B. Oh yeah, I've got it from a donkey. Yeah. Yeah. Or Michelle Visa. Right. So I've rambled on a bit about what these club nights are.

[00:49:55] Kyle Risi: We've explored New York in the eighties, the city, in this transition from the kind of the [00:50:00] fading rock disco era towards the electronic dancer techno, all unfolding in the shadow of the AIDS epidemic.

[00:50:07] Kyle Risi: We've also gotten an intriguing glimpse into kind of the world of the club kids and the outrageous nightlife that Michael helped build.

[00:50:14] Kyle Risi: Now feels like a perfect time to take a quick break, and when we get back, I'm going to introduce you to Angel Melendez, the fellow club kid whose tragic murder at Michael's hands would ultimately mark the end of this era.

[00:50:27] Kyle Risi: Ooh. Sounds good.

[00:50:30] Kyle Risi: So Adam, we're back. What have you learned so far? Well, Kyle, I've learned that whilst I always thought club kids were cool. Mm-hmm. I do not wanna go partying with them. No. Not at this age. This is, this is horrendous. Some of the things they did in that club, I feel like I need to shower right now.

[00:50:47] Kyle Risi: Especially the Hepatitis B kind of game that he would play. And the champagne anima. Mm-hmm. The and anima anima. Have you had your anima anima by this point? Michael starts employing, kind of [00:51:00] club sponsored drug deeds for the sole purpose of keeping everyone well supplied with whatever drugs that they wanted.

[00:51:05] Kyle Risi: And this is really controversial because Peter Gian says that he has no idea that this was happening, which is impossible because he was always at the fucking club. So he must have known, but he says apparently that he didn't, one of the deida that he hires is a man named Andre Melendez, AKA angel.

[00:51:24] Kyle Risi: He was super well known

[00:51:25] Kyle Risi: for his six foot angel wings that he would wear. He's originally from Columbia and when he was eight, his family moved to New Jersey and at some point during his early twenties, he came to kind of the city to try and find his tribe.

[00:51:36] Kyle Risi: But people really don't like him. They call him like a posr. And they treat him as a a little bit of an outcast, which is really ironic considering like the reason the club kids existed in the first place is because they were all want outcasts themselves, right? Mm-hmm. So they have the sort of hierarchy cliqueiness going on again, they've become the exact same thing that they were parroting. Mm-hmm. From the Celebr.

[00:51:59] Kyle Risi: [00:52:00] Angel learns very quickly that he can actually get into the circle if he's a drug dealer. This isn't what he wanted, but at least he has like his foot in the door and he's got a chance of eventually being accepted in some way.

[00:52:11] Kyle Risi: It's also around about this time in 1993 that Rudy Giuliani was elected as mayor and his entire campaign was built around cleaning up the city, being tough on crime and cracking down on drugs.

[00:52:21] Kyle Risi: So all of Peter Nation's clubs became primary targets So in September, 1995, during a fed raid at the Limelight, they find a lot of evidence that drugs were being sold, which gives them license to shut the place down Temporarily. They start trying to build a case against Peter for drug charges and racketeering.

[00:52:39] Kyle Risi: And so with that pressure, Peter makes moves to fire Anyone known to be selling drugs in his clubs, which of course included Angel, angel,

[00:52:48] Kyle Risi: So Angel's now out on the streets, he's got no job. He's also actually homeless. So Michael lets Angel live with him for a while, which is wildly unpopular with the other club kids.

[00:52:58] Kyle Risi: But remember, [00:53:00] Michael is in a drug spiral. So by having kind of angel near him means that he can have some good access to regular drugs. Yeah. By letting him stay with him, he's gotta a live in dealer that's exactly it. He has a living dela and

[00:53:11] Adam Cox: of course

[00:53:12] Kyle Risi: at the time, Michael was living in this luxury apartment on Peter's dime, and while they live together, there's loads of tension that starts brewing up between them because Michael doesn't actually like him. He's just keeping around. He's using drugs. Exactly.

[00:53:24] Kyle Risi: One night in the winter of 1996, James and Michael, they get trapped in his apartment. After a snowstorm. Apparently angels trapped somewhere else, and so with nothing to do. Michael and James, raid Angels drugs and they end up using a couple thousand dollars of his drugs.

[00:53:41] Kyle Risi: How much did they take? An absolute shit ton. When Angel comes back, of course he's furious for Michael. He has no pretense about replacing the drugs or being apologetic or anything. He just does not care. They have a massive fight. Angel beats Michael up with a platform shoe and essentially their friendship is now over, [00:54:00] but he still wants to be made whole for the drugs that he's obviously stolen. Mm-hmm.

[00:54:04] Kyle Risi: By this point, the Limelight has now reopened. There were DEA agents dotted all throughout the club. They send agents dressed up as club kits in sort of like a honey trap move to try and lure people in and get them busted.

[00:54:17] Kyle Risi: Mm-hmm. Is glaringly obvious who they all are, but regardless, everyone is on the best behavior.

[00:54:22] Kyle Risi: Angel shows up at the club at night and he obviously is looking for his money. Michael then instructs the bouncers to throw him out because of course he's not supposed to be there. It's completely humiliating for poor angel and now everyone is just laughing at him.

[00:54:35] Kyle Risi: So that just feeds into his anxiety that he's just not accepted amongst the club kids.

[00:54:40] Kyle Risi: Eventually Angel has enough and the next day on Sunday, the 17th of March, 1996, around 10:00 AM Angel turns up in Michael's apartment demanding that he gives him the money that he owes. Michael's new kind of live-in dealer. A guy called Robert Riggs, who is also known as Freeze. I'm gonna call him Freeze from now on.

[00:54:58] Kyle Risi: He comes out of his room [00:55:00] and he jumps to Michael's defense saying, this is why no one likes you, angel. Like if you weren't a drug dealer, you wouldn't have any friends. So that's a really cool thing to say.

[00:55:08] Kyle Risi: Really harsh, poor angel. All he is doing is just wanting to, live his life. Supply a few drugs. He must to find his tribe. Exactly. Of course. Sensitive Angel, he completely loses it. He pushes Michael into a glass cabinet, which smashes and gashes the back of Michael's neck and there's just blood everywhere.

[00:55:23] Kyle Risi: Angel then jumps on Michael. He's biting him, he's trying to strangle him. Michael is screaming for freeze to kind of help freeze. Can't get Angel to stop biting him. So he grabs a hammer and he hits Angel over the head. Angel barely flinches, so freeze has to hit him two more times before Angel finally just slumps to the ground, according to freeze. Michael begins to smother angel with a sweatshirt

[00:55:47] Kyle Risi: When he knows that he's out, he grabs a bottle of drain cleaner and he pours it into angel's mouth before taping it. Shut shit with duct tape. That's awful. That's horrendous. And fair enough. Angel attacked [00:56:00] him, but if he's knocked out cold, just Yeah. Thing is though.

[00:56:02] Kyle Risi: That's exactly my point. At this point, you could have had a way out. You could have just called the police. Yeah. And said, I got attacked and was self-defense. Right. Yeah. There's no way going back now. Right. You've just poured bloody, drank cleaner in someone's mouth and taped a shut. Yeah.

[00:56:17] Kyle Risi: At this point, they have no idea whether or not he's alive or dead. So they strip all of his clothes off and together they drag his body to the bathtub. They submerge him in water to see if they can see any air bubbles. I'm likes, I know, just check for a pulse's. Yeah, like get a mirror. Feel his pulse. Bloody submerge him in water. Oh, now we've drowned him. Idiots. So they realized that of course he's not gonna wake up.

[00:56:39] Kyle Risi: And like I said, maybe at this point with the exception of the drain cleaner, they could have just called the cops and claimed like self-defense. But no, Michael explains that they didn't call the cops because the apartment was just filled with angel's drugs.

[00:56:49] Kyle Risi: Yeah, but they're angel's drugs. Yeah, but it could be implicated in it. But that's his explanation. Whether or not it's, it's rationalized or not, I don't know. Yeah. Okay.

[00:56:57] Kyle Risi: So instead they decide that they're going [00:57:00] to cover angel's body in ice. They also cover him baking soda and even more drain cleaner to stop him from decomposing. While they try and work out what they're gonna do next, does that do that? I have no idea.

[00:57:12] Kyle Risi: It doesn't because you're gonna find out what happens in a second. Next what they do is they gather up all angel's drugs and they just leave and they're gone for a week. What they are doing is just using all of angel's drugs and so they get really fucked up.

[00:57:25] Kyle Risi: Eventually the week is over and they decide that they need to go back to the apartment and deal with the situation because this entire time freeze's just been having the worst trip cause he is petrified of what's gonna happen to them, right?

[00:57:37] Kyle Risi: Oh yeah. So Michael keeps trying to convince freeze that Angel might have just woken up and just left. Oh my God. That's how fucked up they are. Yeah, he, he's gone and No, no grudges. He's just gone off. Yeah, he's just, he won't be there. Of course, they get back.

[00:57:52] Kyle Risi: Angel is still dead in the bathtub. The baking soda and the drain cleaner didn't help. It's only accelerated the decomposition [00:58:00] process. So this time they need to now try and deal with the smell, right? So what they do is they put more baking soda and more drain cleaner on him. How is that going to like cover up the smell? No idea. If anything that's gonna make him perhaps decompose quicker, which might not necessarily be a bad thing if you're trying to hide a body.

[00:58:15] Kyle Risi: Mm-hmm. But that's not gonna hide the smell. I don't think it's gonna reduce him down to a mush. But the my point is, the reason why they're trying to deal with the smell is because they're having a party that night. Oh my god, what's wrong with these people? So a ton of people show up. Of course, they tell everyone not to go into the bathroom.

[00:58:32] Kyle Risi: They're saying that they're having plumbing issues. People are like, oh, that's what that smell is. Smells like a, a rotting corpse. Exactly.

[00:58:38] Kyle Risi: I'm surprised no one actually went in the bathroom. And I just think like people are high probably. Mm-hmm. They're gonna go in that bathroom. They probably, if they're winning there high, they probably wouldn't know what they're looking at. Oh God. So, like I said, 10 days into this, they realize that they need to take action.

[00:58:51] Kyle Risi: So Freeze takes a trip to Macy's, he buys a meat cleaver and a few knives freeze just does not have the stomach to deal with what's coming next. So Michael Cesare, if you [00:59:00] give me 10 bags of heroin, I will deal with the Angel's body.

[00:59:03] Kyle Risi: Wow. So they both get really fucked up. Then Michael goes into the bathroom, he cuts off Angel's limbs while free stands. The doorway sprain. Calvin Klein eternity in the bathroom. Oh, Michael, what is wrong with these gay Poor Angel. This feels like it's out of some kind of weird comedy movie.

[00:59:20] Kyle Risi: Yes, it does. Totally. There is a film about this called Party Dancers oh, and that's about this particular story. It's about this particular story. Do you know who it starts? Do you know this film? Um, McCulley Kin. Right? McCulley Culkin and Seth Green. Do they play freeze and this? No. So, uh, Macaulay Hol plays Michael.

[00:59:37] Kyle Risi: Michael, yeah. And James. And James is Seth Green. Okay. And the radio over the top. If you don't know anything about the club kids in New York, or James and James or Michael Alec, you would think this is the worst acting you've ever seen in your life. But it is so accurate and so precise. It's just a work of genius.

[00:59:55] Kyle Risi: I do have, however, a slight issue with their use of gay [01:00:00] voice. Because they're straight actors and that's kind of our thing. It's like cultural appropriation. You know, I, you know, I think about other things to worry about here. This person, angel died. Yes, angel.

[01:00:09] Kyle Risi: They place angel's legs into a duffle bag, and they dump that into the Hudson River freeze. Then finds a big corrugator kind of box in the basement where they place angel's torso in his arms and they seal it up a duct tape. They don't realize that the box is actually lined with cork, which is gonna be a big problem for them later on.

[01:00:25] Kyle Risi: Next they drag the box into the elevator. Now there are some rumors that the box hung around for another seven days. In fact, people came over and they used it as a footrest, not knowing what was inside the box. But I couldn't verify that. Yeah, exactly. Like, what about the smell? But. It gets to the point where they load the box into the elevator, they drag it through the lobby by a stroke of luck.

[01:00:45] Kyle Risi: There is a cab driver that's parked right outside and he agrees to take them to the west side highway on 25th Street and they pay the cab driver an extra $20 to help them lift the box in and out of the boot. And then he helps them carry it across the street and [01:01:00] together they throw the box into the Hudson River and the cab driver's

[01:01:04] Adam Cox: like,

[01:01:04] Kyle Risi: dude, what's in the box? I was gonna say, is he not like this? This box stinks. And why are we throwing it in the river? Exactly. Do you know what they say? What they say? Oh, it's just some old dinner plates that we didn't want to dump in the garbage. So the river is okay. I'm sorry. And the cab driver's just oh, I've got 20 quid or bugs. Yeah. And he's just yeah, okay.

[01:01:21] Kyle Risi: Sounds plausible to me. And because the box is lined with cork, it just, bobs on the surface of the water freeze, freaks the fuck out.

[01:01:30] Kyle Risi: He tries to jump in the water to get it back. Michael has to talk him out of it. And the cab driver's just there like, dude, it's just some old plates, like, yeah, yeah. The plates on Second thoughts, we will wash them. And so they just get back into the cab and the cab driver takes him back to Michael's apartment.

[01:01:46] Kyle Risi: But that cab driver must have known something was upright and there's no record of any cab driver coming forward. Really? Hmm. Because they probably would've been questioned, like, really? You bought this story? Of course they're not gonna come forward, I guess. So that's [01:02:00] plausible.

[01:02:00] Kyle Risi: So now Angel is of course dead. His torso is floating in the Hudson. Kids all over the city obviously still need their drugs from Angel. And when they beep Angels beeper to buy drugs, Michael is the one who gets back to them. Right? Of course. They're like, what's going on? Where's Angel? Why do you have all these drugs?

[01:02:18] Kyle Risi: Why do you have a massive gashing in the back of your neck? Why are you wearing angels and boots? We all thought that you hated him.

[01:02:24] Kyle Risi: Yeah, this is not gonna be good for his, alibi, or I dunno, defense. No. Michael tells him, oh yeah, I killed the angel and I stole all his drugs and yeah, I also stole his boots.

[01:02:32] Kyle Risi: Oh, okay. So no, he is being honest. Yeah. 100% honest. It's crazy. Here's the thing, nobody knows whether or not to believe Michael because he's built his entire persona on saying outrageous stuff for attention or for shock value. So they literally just laugh it off.

[01:02:48] Kyle Risi: Also in the 1990s, like kids went missing all the time, especially in New York. Mostly they left the city without warning. Sometimes they committed to suicide or they ended up OD-ing. And so there's a sort of desensitization when it [01:03:00] came to their mates disappearing or dying. Right. They reckon that angel probably just left the city. And Michael was spinning this to his own advantage.

[01:03:07] Kyle Risi: Sure. Because he's built his entire persona on saying outrageous things. So these rumors just start to spread, which at first just seem like they're tongue in cheek. There are rumors, like I heard that angel's body is like stuck in someone's freezer in Brooklyn. I heard that Michael hit angel over the head with a hammer.

[01:03:22] Kyle Risi: I heard that freeze had sex with angel's naked body. I heard that he threw angel's legs in the Hudson, for example. That bit is true.

[01:03:29] Adam Cox: that's the thing, what is

[01:03:31] Kyle Risi: wild that every single one of these rumors is rooted in truth because they started with Michael. Right? So it's really interesting that Michael is hiding in plain sight.

[01:03:40] Kyle Risi: Like he can shock all his friends and he can distance himself from what he's done. Mm-hmm. And because of what he is like, nobody really takes it seriously.

[01:03:48] Kyle Risi: Mm-hmm.

[01:03:48] Kyle Risi: So as we know, eventually a storm washes angel's body up onto Staten Island. Three kids discover the body, and at first Angel is misidentified as he's Asian. They visit like Chinatown to see if anyone [01:04:00] was missing someone. Nobody comes forward. And even when Angel's family finally report him

[01:04:04] Adam Cox: missing,

[01:04:05] Kyle Risi: they never connect the dots because Angel was Colombian

[01:04:07] Kyle Risi: so that's real sad. So around this time that Angel's Body is found, Michael decides that he needs to go on a road trip. We're not sure why. He says that he wanted to check himself into a rehab clinic in Colorado. Others think it was kind of to distance himself from the crime and his inability to shut the fuck up and stop telling people that he killed Angel.

[01:04:26] Kyle Risi: Yeah, I guess this, in the newspaper, they found this body. They're looking, they must be getting a little bit scared about what's gonna happen. But I think what's probably more close to the truth is that he now has got all of Angel's drugs.

[01:04:38] Kyle Risi: He's got $18,000 of Angel's money, and he just wants to go off and blow it all off. This guy sounds like a right. He's a nightmare. A nightmare. He is worse than that. He's like bloody murderer, number one. It's true. We probably need to be a little more sensitive to the fact that a young man has died.

[01:04:54] Adam Cox: So Michael and his friend Gizi, they hit the road, they travel towards Chicago where they meet up with their friend, a [01:05:00] woman called screaming Rachel. And what, why'd she get that name? I don't know. On the club kid scene somewhere. So if the trip was to prevent him from telling people what he did, then he completely fails miserably because he tells screaming Rachel everything.

[01:05:13] Kyle Risi: Michael instantly regrets this because. She actually really likes Angel and Michael

[01:05:18] Adam Cox: kind of

[01:05:19] Kyle Risi: knows this as well, but he just has no self-control. So when they leave Chicago, Rachel needs an outlet for how she's feeding. And she writes a dance song called Murdering Clubland.

[01:05:28] Kyle Risi: And in it she embeds the backwards lyrics on repeat saying Michael, where is Angel? Interesting. Mm-hmm. How does she do that? Backwards. She records it and then puts it into the track. Into reverse? Yeah. 'cause they did that loads in the sixties and they, during the Satanic panic of people like, oh, there's satanic verses hidden in records and things like that.

[01:05:46] Kyle Risi: Really? This is kind of along those lines. Hmm. So Michael and Gizi, they get back on the road, they meander towards Denver. They are so severely addicted to heroin, which they need to take every few hours just to stave off the withdrawals at this point.[01:06:00]

[01:06:00] Kyle Risi: So their window of productivity is very short, which is why this trip ends up taking five weeks. Oh my God, that's so high. That is so much heroin. I'm surprised the body can withstand that much heroin. Mm-hmm. That's the thing though, like heroin's a serious drug and that's that puts people to sleep permanently, doesn't it? Yeah. Eventually they arrive in Colorado and they're like, so I guess it's time to check ourselves into rehab.

[01:06:23] Kyle Risi: They're like, L no. Should we just break into that veterinarian and see if we can get some care in? Oh my God. These people are the worst. They're the worst. They break in it's pitch black, and while rummaging around the medicines,

[01:06:35] Adam Cox: they open up a freezer, which Michael

[01:06:36] Kyle Risi: pulls out a dead cat and freaks them the fuck out and they just run off. At that point they're just like, should we just go back to New York City after all of this?

[01:06:44] Adam Cox: One of that, that didn't even get to the rehab club,

[01:06:46] Kyle Risi: So when they get back to New York, the rumor mill is still in full force and at this time it's all over page six. And also in The Village Voice and other publications, it all kicked off when a fellow club kid and journalist for the Village Voice writes like a blind item, [01:07:00] which is basically like a piece that says, I'm not naming any names, but this is the word in the street.

[01:07:06] Kyle Risi: Right. Okay. And basically it talks about the alleged rumors that have been going around following that, Angel's brother actually comes looking for him and he puts out a bunch of posters. He's asking around even offering like a $4,000 reward. And so at this point people are starting to question whether or not this is all true.

[01:07:24] Kyle Risi: Because normally these club kids, they just skip down. Yeah. But no family members then come looking for them. Yeah. So this now looks suspect and actually people are questioning, Michael, did know something? Did he actually do it? Exactly. But then screaming Rachel, she comes forward, she releases her single murdering Clubland.

[01:07:42] Kyle Risi: Mm-hmm. With that creepy backwards lyrics saying, Michael, where is Angel? By now the village voice is now running with another Right This time. They are naming names, and of course Michael is directly implicated here. And from there it just gets into all the gossip columns around the city who start running their own [01:08:00] pieces.

[01:08:00] Kyle Risi: He was stupid to, I'm not condoning it, but to tell everyone and blab everywhere I know, he just does not have any self-control. So when Michael returns to the city, this is literally what he's stepping into.

[01:08:10] Kyle Risi: But even though the story is everywhere, Michael is not arrested or even questioned by the cops. And that's because the cops were grooming him to testify against Peter Gian in his drug and racketeering trial. Right. Okay.

[01:08:24] Kyle Risi: Basically, they didn't care that someone was murdered. They were out to get what they saw as a bigger fish as part of kind of Mayor Rudy Goode's effort to clean up the city. Mm-hmm.

[01:08:34] Kyle Risi: And so Michael starts feeling like he's untouchable.

[01:08:36] Kyle Risi: At one point he's doing some promo work on camera and the interviewer asks him about the rumors and he says directly to the camera in a sort of laughing way. Angel was one of those copycats that we hated, so we killed him. He then pauses. He looks down for a moment, realizes once again, oh God, that he cannot control what he says.

[01:08:54] Kyle Risi: He looks off camera and says, regretfully, this is the kind of thing that gets me into trouble. I can't believe he's just [01:09:00] confessing left, right and center. But he's not. He's mad and people aren't really paying attention to this yet. Nope.

[01:09:05] Kyle Risi: Eventually, the police finally feel pressured to look into the allegations. There's a lot of back and forth between Michael and the police. They say that if he testifies against Peter Gian, they'll consolidate all his charges against him for a total of three years. But even at this point, Michael is like, I'm not sure I need to think about it.

[01:09:21] Kyle Risi: Right. So he goes off while all this is going on, Michael tries to make a comeback he gets like thousands of these little mini kind of jars of honey, which he creates a custom label for called Honey Trap, Michael Alli, where to meet, et cetera. Which club it was any hands 'em all out the city. It does not do well at all.

[01:09:39] Kyle Risi: And this is kind of the sort of eye-opening moment for him that people actually are suspicious that he did actually kill Angel. ' cause before they just thought, oh, Michael's just saying crazy shit again. Right? Mm-hmm. But now people were starting to actively distance themselves from him and his nightclubs.

[01:09:55] Kyle Risi: At some point with all the swirling media attention, a cop in Staten [01:10:00] Island stumbles upon an article about all the alleged rumors and allegations that were swirling around the scene. He notices that the body that they found, which they misidentified as east Asian, seemed to fit all the rumors that he was seeing in these papers.

[01:10:14] Kyle Risi: The fact that the body was cut up and everything like that. Exactly, yes. So like Angel was hit over the head three times with a hammer. So the body they found clearly had three wounds on the back of head. They heard that Angel had his legs cut off, the body that they had didn't have any legs.

[01:10:29] Kyle Risi: They heard that Angel was stuffed in a box and thrown into the Hudson, and the cop was like, hang on a minute. This sounds like the body that we have. I feel like the police should just take notice of this. Page six a lot more often. It's a different jurisdiction, right? Mm-hmm. Staten Island is in New Jersey.

[01:10:43] Kyle Risi: Yeah. They're probably not thinking outside of the jurisdiction essentially. They probably investigated it all in Staten Island. Mm-hmm. At one point they did go to Chinatown, but that's because the body was misidentified.

[01:10:53] Kyle Risi: And so it's at this point that they connect all the dots, Angel's body is finally identified, and by this point, Michael is now [01:11:00] hiding out in a hotel in New Jersey with his boyfriend. And so in early December, they arrest Michael and Freeze. And Free says that when the cops approached him and touched him on the back of his shoulder, this kind of wave of relief just washed over him that this is all now over.

[01:11:16] Kyle Risi: So they are sent to Rikers Island and because the DA still want him to testify against Peter Gian, they visit him in prison to get the ball moving before this wall that Michael is facing, closes in on himself.

[01:11:28] Kyle Risi: But because he is so sick from heroin withdrawals, he can't answer any of their questions. This guy must be in such a state. What they do is they check him out of Rikers Island, they drive him to his heroin dealer and they let him shoot up in the back of their car just so that he will cooperate. Really, this is the DEAA federal agency.

[01:11:49] Kyle Risi: When this comes out, it's a huge scandal. So the DEA are forced to completely rescind their deal, and they completely drop Michael as a witness altogether. Oh. So now he, so he's fucked [01:12:00] himself. Yeah. And so now he can't use this to get himself a lenient sentence. Exactly.

[01:12:06] Kyle Risi: They both end up getting between 10 to 20 years in exchange for pleading guilty to manslaughter.

[01:12:11] Kyle Risi: Peter Gian is fully acquitted based on a lack of evidence, but he is deported back to Canada for tax evasion and he loses all of his clubs.

[01:12:18] Adam Cox: and In fairness, he is a, a corrupt or slightly crooked businessman. Mm-hmm. He hasn't killed anyone. No, he hasn't. So I feel like, do you know what, that's okay. But hasn't he, like you think, by facilitating or allowing drugs to be sold openly, even though he denies that, how many lives have been lost at your hands? By people overdosing? Yeah. And getting into this state fair point. Yeah.

[01:12:40] Kyle Risi: Michael does not do well in prison. He is repeatedly raped. He has to spend a lot of time in the psychiatric unit. And because he keeps getting busted for using drugs, he ends up being locked up for five years in solitary confinement. how did he get busted for drugs? I guess drugs make their way in the prison. Right. Wow. And I guess he's so he's never gone through a [01:13:00] proper, rehab or anything? No. So I guess this is the best kind of rehab, right? Complete cold Turkey. You're inside solitary confinement 23 hours a day. Oof. Certainly gonna be one way to help you get clean.

[01:13:10] Kyle Risi: Freeze is eventually paroled in 2010 for good behavior. And Michael is eventually released after 17 years in prison in 2014. And the thing is though, he's just not prepared for release at all. James and James calls him up to kind of prep him and

[01:13:26] Kyle Risi: he's like, let me tell you what's in the world now. Anybody from anywhere can be what we were because of the internet. Let me tell you about Instagram. Yeah. I guess if he went away in the nineties, yeah. He missed out on a lot that coming, the internet becoming what it is today.

[01:13:41] Kyle Risi: Sure. And all that fame that he gained during the nineties was all driven through page six and these publications. Right. And these talk shows that he would go on and now anyone can get themself famous on Instagram and all that sort of stuff. Influences Exactly. But also what's wild is that Michael's never used a cell phone before.

[01:13:58] Kyle Risi: Of course, he's never been on [01:14:00] the internet when he's released a group of the surviving club kids or meet him at the prison gates where they have a massive van loaded with booze and they take him on a tour of the city and he's just shocked by how it's transformed

[01:14:13] Kyle Risi: Times Square. Of course now a huge tourist attraction, far removed from the porn theaters and the massage clubs that used to be there.

[01:14:19] Kyle Risi: Everything is now, of course, clean and glamorous and there's lots of wealth everywhere. People on the street, they still recognize him. They're shouting at him. Welcome back Michael. Don't kill any more of your drug dealers. Yeah. I dunno why people, he's got this support. This guy is a murderer at the end of the day.

[01:14:35] Kyle Risi: Yeah, yeah. Okay. It's manslaughter if you want, but he hid the body. He did all this deliberate stuff afterwards. Mm-hmm. And joked about it and was so blase, so brazenly. Yeah. Joking about it as well, that I don't think he deserves this. I just No, he doesn't. He absolutely does not.

[01:14:49] Kyle Risi: And it's about to get a lot worse because 17 years in prison, you would think, does he have any remorse? Yeah. Has he become a better person? Has he rehabilitated? But I'm getting the sense that he probably hasn't, [01:15:00] well, James and James, takes him to the spot in Chelsea where they dumped Angel's body in Hudson and they're kind of reflecting on everything that's happened.

[01:15:07] Kyle Risi: And I'm paraphrasing here, but he, James and James says,

[01:15:10] Adam Cox: you know,

[01:15:10] Kyle Risi: it's funny, I remember the night that you told Jenny at the limelight and she just ran out crying. You remember that? And Michael is like.

[01:15:17] Kyle Risi: It was just too much for me. I told everyone that way it would become everyone else's problem. that's the junkie mentality. If I'm going down, then you're all coming down with me and I'm not blaming the drugs. It was my decision to use the drugs.

[01:15:29] Kyle Risi: But the symptoms of drug addiction almost mirrors the exact symptoms of being a sociopath, like the selfishness and their narcissism. James then says, how are you gonna change? How are you gonna be better? And Michael says, I think it's a work in progress. I think I could never say that I've changed, but I am different.

[01:15:49] Kyle Risi: I'm better now. I don't think anyone that was involved in this will ever be better, but we're heading in the direction of getting better. Hopefully. Then the conversation comes [01:16:00] to an end. Michael looks around and notes how different everything is and he says, what a nice place to dispose of a body. We should come back every year.

[01:16:09] Kyle Risi: He's just outrageous. Yeah, just stop. You almost said something somewhat sentimental or nice or do you know what I mean in terms of like you, you have acknowledged that there is some change in you. Sure. And then you go and do that. And it's a big question I did ponder over whether or not he did feel remorse and a part of me.

[01:16:26] Kyle Risi: Wants to say that he does, but when he says these things, it's just like he's just had a tender moment and that's awkward and uncomfortable for him. Mm-hmm. And so you end that moment with saying something outrageous where brings it back to the level that you're used to being with those barriers up, so it's really interesting. You could argue that he shows no remorse. I think that he does have remorse, but he's just got this really strange attention seeking personality maybe. But then I think if you really had remorse, I dunno, I, I dunno if you'd make that joke. That's, that's my [01:17:00] theory anyway.

[01:17:00] Kyle Risi: Six years later though, at the age of 54, Michael is found dead from an overdose on Christmas Eve 2020. And he had mixed heroin and fentanyl. And

[01:17:09] Adam Cox: that's just another

[01:17:10] Kyle Risi: reflection on how times have changed. 'cause we know how like dangerous fentanyl can be nowadays, right? It's a huge epidemic across America. So think back when they would play that game. What's my line? Yeah. Like how dangerous would it have been if Fentanyl was spiked in those drugs? Exactly. Like how many more eyes would've been lost.

[01:17:29] Kyle Risi: You definitely couldn't do that today. No, I mean it, it sounds like he's never really been properly treated for his drug addiction. I dunno. I, that doesn't feel like there's probably a way back for him considering everything he did and got up to. Mm-hmm. I'm not surprised. Yeah, it's crazy.

[01:17:46] Kyle Risi: And Adam, that is the story of Michael Alec, the club kid who murdered Angel Melendez wow. I had no idea that was how the club kids came to be. Mm-hmm. And that's how all the club kids ended because when he went to prison pretty much that died out?

[01:17:59] Kyle Risi: [01:18:00] Yeah. New York got cleaned up, yeah. The late nineties, that's very, what's it like Dawson's Creek, Buffy, that kind of era. Mm-hmm. More like rock, uh, indie bands and things kind of Yeah. Making their way through.

[01:18:10] Kyle Risi: Mm-hmm. Yeah. Interesting. It's just crazy. I, I dunno, would I want to have gone back to the nineties and experienced the club kid movements? I think I would say yes to that. I'd like to, yes. In the sense that I think there, hopefully there are some like, offshoots of that culture which didn't involve brains and liver and, I don't know, stuff being shut outta someone's butt.

[01:18:33] Kyle Risi: But it seems like it could have been fun, I don't know. They took it to the extreme. They did. Yeah. And that's what's wild.

[01:18:39] Kyle Risi: If you guys wanna find out more, there are loads of documentaries out there. The documentary that I watched was the documentary that

[01:18:47] Kyle Risi: the Party Monsters film with Macaulay Culkin and Seth Green

[01:18:50] Adam Cox: was

[01:18:50] Kyle Risi: based on

[01:18:51] Adam Cox: by

[01:18:51] Kyle Risi: the same name Party Monsters, which is essentially a documentary that is all talking heads of the original club kids of New York City that was around [01:19:00] Michael at the time.

[01:19:00] Kyle Risi: Mm-hmm. If you're gonna watch Party Monsters with Macaulay Culkin or the documentary, I would opt for the documentary just because there's actual real footage of the shit that they would do, which is just wild. Yeah. I guess there's no dramatization that's, you're hearing it from the horse's mouth.

[01:19:18] Kyle Risi: But yeah, so should we run the Out, off this week? Let's do it.

[01:19:21] Kyle Risi: And that brings us to the end of another fascinating foray into the compendium and assembly of fascinating things. We hope you enjoyed the ride as much as we did, and if today's episode sparks your curiosity, do us a favor and follow us on your favorite podcast app.

[01:19:35] Kyle Risi: It truly makes a world of difference and helps more people discover the show. And for our dedicated freaks out there. Don't forget, next week's episode is already waiting for you on our Patreon, and it's completely free to access.

[01:19:46] Kyle Risi: And if you want even more, join our certified freaks tier to unlock the entire archive, delve into exclusive content and get a sneak peek at what's coming next. We'd love for you to be part of our growing community.

[01:19:57] Kyle Risi: We drop new episodes every Tuesday and until then, remember [01:20:00] the brightest stars sometimes burn out fast, especially when fueled by glitter glamor, and way too many drugs.

[01:20:07] Kyle Risi: See you next time.

[01:20:08] Kyle Risi: See you next time.