Michael Alig won’t be enjoying New York nightlife anytime soon. When the most infamous club kid of the 1990s was released from prison on Monday, after serving 17 years for first-degree manslaughter, speculation began immediately that Alig, who pleaded guilty in 1997 to killing and dismembering his dealer Andre “Angel” Melendez over a drug debt, would surely return to the New York club scene, where he was once a flamboyant figure at Limelight and other Manhattan dens of hedonism.
The reality is a little different, however.
Happy to be free and so grateful for this second chance. Can’t wait 2C @JSJdarling at dinner. #frenemy pic.twitter.com/AJwvtPcyFf
— Michael Alig (@Alig_Aligula) May 5, 2014
On his first night of freedom, Cinco de Mayo — or Cinco de Michael, as the self-promoting ex-con referred to it on Twitter – Alig, 48, wore his prison-blue colored shirt to dinner at Almond restaurant in Manhattan’s Flatiron district with approximately a dozen friends from his club days. Among those in attendance were former club kid Ernie Glam, now a journalist; Scotto, the former NASA party promoter and DJ; Astro, a longtime New York nightlife fixture, and ’90s club fixture James St. James, who chronicled Melendez’s death in the 1999 book ‘Disco Bloodbath.’
The book was adapted into the 2003 movie, ‘Party Monster,’ which starred Macaulay Culkin as Alig, and that film was preceded by a 1998 documentary called ‘Party Animal: The Shockumentary.’ World of Wonder, which produced both films (and currently produces ‘Rupaul’s Drag Race’), was on hand to shoot the reunion of Alig and St. James, who hadn’t seen each other since the former went to prison. (World of Wonder co-founder Fenton Bailey said the footage would be used to augment the ‘Shockumentary’ footage and not for a new film.)
The dozen or so dinner guests then hurriedly finished dinner, because, Glam explained, an 8 P.M. curfew is among the conditions of Alig’s parole. “He also has to go to job readiness training, drug counseling, anger management counseling –and I believe there may be drug testing,” said Glam, who added: “He wasn’t drinking last night.”