CLOSING TIME

New York’s Lethal ‘Party Monster’ Found Dead at 54

Michael Alig helped define the city’s club scene—until he went to jail for killing his roommate and dealer.

One of the most infamous figures in the history of New York nightlife is dead of an apparent heroin overdose, his boyfriend told the media on Christmas morning. Michael Alig’s bacchanals were signature moments in the city’s club scene in the 1980s and early 1990s, particularly at the renovated Chelsea church that became the legendary Limelight. Macaulay Culkin portrayed him in the 2003 film Party Monster, but nothing defined Alig like his 1996 slaying of his roommate and dealer, Angel Melendez, over a drug-money dispute. After killing Melendez with a hammer and stashing the corpse in his bathtub, Alig and friend Robert “Freeze” Riggs “continued to party for the next eight or nine days,” as a Rolling Stone profile once recounted, before mutilating Melendez’s body and dumping it in the Hudson River. Alig infamously confessed to the killing on television—”He was a copycat, so we killed him”—though he maintained he was a victim of an unfair edit. Alig pleaded guilty to manslaughter and emerged from prison in 2014.