30 THE CASE EXPANDS
GAGNE HAD A LASER LIKE focus on Peter Gatien. He couldn't rest until he'd questioned every witness, gathered every shred of evidence, and developed a complete picture of the drug dealing inside the clubs and Gatien's alleged role. The more Gagne learned, the more he wanted Gatien to go down. If the stories he was hearing from former employees and house dealers were to be believed, then the club owner had a Machiavellian grip on nightlife. Sometimes it was just petty accusations of Gatien's dirty dealings—like driving down business in rival clubs by sending people to start fights or making calls to the fire department to have competitors shut down for overcrowding violations. But then there were stories about young men and women, passed out from drug use, who were put out the back door, dumped into a cab with $20, and sent away—all in an effort to avoid unwanted police attention. (Gatien's lawyer has repeatedly deemed these characterizations “totally false.”)
After debriefing dozens of witnesses, Gagne and Germanowski came to see that the drug dealing at Tunnel and Limelight had been at its height in the years prior to their investigation—the Alig and Caruso years. The U.S. attorney's office wanted to expand the case, and the agents got a new directive: conduct an exhaustive historical investigation into the clubs. It would help to enhance their charges against club king Peter Gatien. It also meant that Gagne and his partners would work on the case for almost two years before it went to trial.
31 THE KING OF THE CLUB KIDS
MICHAEL ALIG'S NAME WAS not on the original May 15, 1996, indictment that led to the first wave of arrests. Gagne and Ger-manowski never even saw the legendary Club Kid during their time inside the clubs. Alig was rumored to be in rehab, rumored to have killed his drug dealer. But Alig enjoyed stoking rumors, and nobody took him seriously when he joked that he had murdered and dismembered Andre “Angel” Melendez.
Melendez, the six-foot-tall Club Kid in angel wings, sold cocaine and Ecstasy as a house dealer for Alig, and he also delivered drugs to Gatien's hotel parties. Melendez disappeared on St. Patrick's Day, 1996. The police had no solid leads beyond rumors of Alig's involvement. New York magazine, the Village Voice, and the gay nightlife magazine Next wrote about Melendez's alleged demise that summer as if it mirrored the demise of New York nightlife.
“This is exactly the sort of lurid, nocturnal goings-on that even we don't enjoy discussing … the type of gruesome clubworld unpleasantness that makes us want to turn in our Roxy Gold Card and never again leave the house after dark,” columnist Perry McMahon wrote in Next. “Oh, for those heady, carefree days when nightcrawling was simply seedy and not potentially lethal.”
In November, Gagne and Germanowski finally tracked Michael Alig down at the Chelsea Hotel, where he was crashing with a friend and planning his comeback to the club scene. He opened the door. He was thin, pale, and unshowered.
“Guess who we are?” Gagne said.
“I have no idea,” Alig said. “You just look like a couple of regular beer-swigging, football-watching guys to me.”
“Well, yeah, we are,” Germanowski said, amused. “But more importantly, guess who else?”
When they identified themselves as DEA agents, the light left Alig's eyes. They spent the next hour telling him what they knew about his role bringing drugs into the clubs and about his rumored involvement in Angel Melendez's disappearance. They leaned on him, saying they were ready to arrest him right there on drug conspiracy charges. If he went to trial and lost, he could get up to twenty years in prison, they told him. Of course, the agents knew that there weren't even sentencing guidelines yet for MDMA, and even though the maximum for drug conspiracy was twenty years, it was more likely Alig would get closer to five to seven. But by the time they were done talking to him, Alig believed he was facing twenty to life and a possible needle in the arm for Melendez.
Alig shed a few tears as he considered his choices. If he was willing to cooperate in the case against Gatien, he might get a sentence reduction. He might even get off with probation. But it would mean betraying his friend and mentor.
“Okay, I'll talk.”
Alig surrendered to DEA on November 18 and pleaded guilty to drug charges as part of his cooperation deal. He was given bail and would be sentenced at a later date.
Gagne liked Alig. The kid was artistic and bright. But he had to get clean. Alig had been on methadone, trying to kick heroin, and Gagne chastised him for trading one poison for another. Truth was, Alig was secretly using both with equal fervor. He couldn't get through one day without getting high on something. Anything. “You gotta go cold turkey,” Gagne would say. But Alig couldn't do it.
Gagne, Germanowski, and Flaherty met with Alig regularly, sometimes at the Chelsea Hotel, sometimes in a park near the financial district—an area they knew no Club Kids inhabited. He led the agents through an oral history of the drug dealing in Tunnel and Limelight: how it started, who was involved, and what he believed Peter Gatien knew. He gave the names of his personal house dealers. He described how they advertised Ecstasy and ketamine on party flyers to get more people to show. He claimed that Gatien personally approved the flyers, and he sent the agents to a print shop near NYU where they found copies of old flyers with the initials “PG” on them.
Alig described Gatien's hotel parties in vivid detail, as if reliving his glory days. He told them about how he and his best friend, a pretty bleached blonde named Cynthia Haataja, aka Gitsie, would rip off the king-sized bedsheets and build a teepee in the living room. He and Gitsie would huddle in tight under the crisp white sheets and smoke crack cocaine together. Alig claimed Gatien once hired hookers and made them wear collars and leashes, walking naked on all fours, while barking like dogs. Another time, Alig claimed, Gatien ordered a girl down on her hands and knees and placed a mirror on her back so they could all take turns snorting lines off her body.
Alig never talked about Angel Melendez, and the agents didn't push. They were prosecuting a drug case. The murder case belonged to NYPD. But one day, as they sat on a bench near Battery Park, Ger-manowski turned to Alig and asked him point-blank: “Mike, why'd you kill Angel?”
“It didn't happen,” Alig said. “It's not what anybody thinks. I didn't plan any of it.”
To Germanowski, Alig seemed on the verge of breaking, maybe even confessing—if he trusted them enough. Not long after, during a routine debriefing, Gagne and Germanowski told Alig they wanted to show him a photo of an unidentified body that had washed up along the East River.
Alig fidgeted nervously.
“We just want you to study the photo,” Germanowski said, “tell us if you think it's Angel.”
Gagne laid the picture on the table. It was a crude, underexposed snapshot depicting the upper half of a corpse, lying on an orange police stretcher on the dirt, presumably just fished out of the river. The victim's wet, gray flesh had mostly slipped off—or been nibbled off—down to cartilage and bone. The arms had been severed at the elbow and stuck out like stiff drumsticks. The skull and hollow eye sockets were exposed. Kernels of loose teeth were still holding tight onto an angular jawbone. There was a steel collar around the victim's neck and chains around his trunk.
Alig laughed.
“That's not Angel,” he said defiantly.
Gagne and Germanowski realized in that moment that Alig knew exactly what had happened to Melendez, and when he saw the photo of the only lead police had, he knew they weren't even close. He had won that round, and the agents had lost a little credibility. He didn't say any more about Melendez and they didn't ask.
Late one night in December, Gagne got a panicked call from Alig's new boyfriend, Brian. They had been staying at a Howard Johnson's in New Jersey, snorting heroin and watching TV, when NYPD pounded on the door at 3:00 a.m.
“Everything is going to be okay,” Alig told Brian as he was taken away in handcuffs.
The thirty-year-old promoter was being charged with first-degree murder. Turned out there was a second corpse—a legless torso that
had washed up on the shores of Staten Island back in April. It had recently been identified through dental records as Angel Melendez. (The other corpse was likely a mob hit, as evidenced by the chains.)
Alig denied any involvement in Melendez's murder. But the police had already arrested Club Kid Robert Riggs, aka “Freeze,” earlier that week, and Riggs gave a signed confession to the killing, naming Alig as his co-defendant. Riggs had been in a holding cell for six or seven hours and in the clutches of painful heroin withdrawal symptoms when he signed the confession. He had been begging for drugs, methadone, medical attention—anything to make the pain stop. Which is why Gagne and Germanowski knew that Riggs's confession wouldn't stand up in a court of law. In a cold sweat and foaming at the mouth, Riggs would have told them he was Santa Claus just to get some methadone. It angered Gagne. He and his partners took their time with defendants because they knew they had one shot at getting a confession that would stick—one shot to do it right. And if they got a guy to confess under physical duress, then they were the same as the bad guys.
Riggs's confession should have been an embarrassment to the police. It wasn't going to stick. But Alig didn't know that.
Shortly after Alig's arrest, Gagne and Germanowski received a string of urgent phone calls from Alig's mother, Elke, his boyfriend, Brian, and his best friend, Gitsie. They begged the agents to go see Alig at Rikers. He wanted to tell them something. He trusted them. He refused to speak to anyone else.
Gagne knew Alig wanted to confess, and it was going to jeopardize their entire case. Alig could connect Peter Gatien to the drugs, the cash payouts to house dealers, the drug budgets, and the hotel parties. But the details that Riggs had revealed to police were gruesome and gory. If Alig had really murdered Melendez the way Riggs had claimed, then there was no way their play-it-safe prosecutor, AUSA Eric Friedberg, was going to let them put Alig on the stand to testify against Peter Gatien.
32 THE CONFESSION
OF MICHAEL ALIG
ON DECEMBER 9, 1996, four days after Michael Alig's arrest on suspicion of murder, Gagne, Germanowski, and Flaherty slowly drove out to Rikers Island. Slowly, because they weren't certain they'd make it there before they got cold feet and turned the car around. Gagne seemed to be struggling most with the decision. His cell phone rang. It was one of the attorneys assigned to their case. Germanowski could hear screaming through Gagne's cell phone.
“You guys are going to fuck this whole case up! He's our best witness!”
The attorney urged them to go back. Wait until after the trial to get your murder confession, the attorney pleaded. We can get him, on the murder, but one thing at a time.
Gagne had heard enough.
“What's that? I can't hear you … I think I'm losing you.” He closed his phone.
The agents sat in the parked car outside Rikers for a few minutes, staring at the gates.
“What do you think?” Germanowski said.
“You know what Alig's gonna say when we go in,” Gagne said. “You know what the fucking guy's gonna say.”
“If Angel was my brother, I wouldn't want anyone to wait,” Flaherty said.
“Right. Okay. Let's do this,” Gagne said. Whatever fallout resulted, they would just deal with it. Gagne knew it was only bad news waiting for them inside.
“This is huge for Peter,” Gagne said. “This is gonna be great for him.”
Alig was hungry to confess when he saw the agents.
“Michael, everything you say,” Flaherty told him, “nothing good is going to happen for you.”
“You know that whatever you tell us,” Germanowski said, “as much as we like you as a person, this information is going to be used against you. You understand this, right, Mike?”
It was important to them that Alig declare beforehand, with the prison guard as a witness, that his confession was at will and that he was not being coerced. It had to be clean.
Alig understood. He refused the presence of counsel. He said he needed to talk and he knew the consequences.
Vivid details spilled from his mouth. He had been carrying the dark images in his mind for nearly nine months and they had been eating away at him. He couldn't get the words out fast enough.
“Slow down, Michael,” Germanowski said. “Slow down.”
33 THE MURDER OF
ANGEL MELENDEZ
ON ST. PATRICK'S DAY in New York, green beer flows by the gallon at pubs and bars from the Bronx to the Bowery. Crumpled plastic cups and green vomit are washed off the sidewalks and subway platforms the next morning. In 1996, Alig and Riggs got a day's head start on the holiday partying at Tunnel, snorting coke, heroin, and ketamine, and getting as wasted as possible. The next morning, Sunday, March 17, they stumbled into Alig's apartment at 560 West 43rd Street around 7:00 a.m. Angel Melendez arrived two hours later.
Melendez had fallen in love with the Club Kid scene in the early 1990s and garnered minor celebrity as Alig's personal drug dealer. The twenty-six-year-old lived in New Jersey, but most weekends he crashed at Alig's Manhattan apartment.
Alig treated Melendez shabbily. He stole from his stash of drugs and cash. He derided him as a hanger-on who never really got the Club Kid aesthetic—mocking Melendez's giant wings, which were always knocking things over.
Melendez was fed up with Alig's abuse. The club scene had lost its shine and he wanted to get out and move on. But he was still owed money, and when he arrived that Sunday morning at Alig's apartment he was in a dark mood. According to Alig, Gatien paid cash fees—so-called appearance fees—to some house dealers, and Gatien allegedly owed Melendez money for selling drugs exclusively at Tunnel and Limelight.
“Peter knows he owes the money. But the more you bother him the longer you'll have to wait to be paid,” Alig told Melendez. (Gatien, on the contrary, would deny that he ever owed Melendez drug money, or that he ever paid fees to secure the services of house dealers.)
Frustrated but exhausted, Melendez napped on the couch while Alig and Riggs cooked up more “Special K” (ketamine) in the oven, heating the liquid anesthetic into a powdery form that they could snort to achieve an out-of-body numbness. As they waited for the drugs to cook, they rifled through Melendez's pants pockets and stole small amounts of cocaine.
“We should just kill him and take his dope,” Freeze joked before heading to the bedroom to relax.
Melendez arose by noon, still angry about the debt owed him. Alig agreed to call Gatien to ask for the money in an attempt to placate Melendez. But when Gatien's wife, Alessandra, answered the phone she refused to put Gatien on.
“Peter wouldn't want to talk on the phone, especially about anything concerning that,” Alessandra allegedly said before hanging up on Alig.
“I want my money. What are you going to do about it?” Melendez screamed. According to Alig, Melendez's anger quickly escalated to physical violence. He slammed Alig through a large glass cabinet and pinned the 155-pound junkie on his back. Alig bit Melendez's chest and grabbed a shirt off the floor, stuffing it into Melendez's face to try to break free.
Riggs was rustled from his nap by the sound of breaking glass and Alig's screams. He ran out from the bedroom to find Melendez shaking Alig like a twig and yelling: “You better get my money!”
Riggs grabbed a hammer from the kitchen table and slammed the back of Melendez's head—one, two, three times. Alig put his hands around Melendez's neck and squeezed until Melendez's eyes rolled over. Alig couldn't be sure whether it was the choking or the third hammer strike that had made Melendez finally go limp.
Alig and Riggs stared at Melendez's still body. One of them thought to check for a pulse, but neither knew how, so they put a spoon under Melendez's nose, waiting for it to fog up.
Nothing.
In a junkie haze, Alig took Drano—or maybe it was air freshener, he couldn't be sure—and poured it down Melendez's throat, believing it would abate the smell of internal decay. Riggs helped Alig undress Melendez down to his white underwear and drag his heav
y, lifeless body into a bathroom in the spare bedroom. They dropped him into the tub, poured ice over him, and left the apartment to find heroin and get high as quickly as possible.
Alig eventually called Gatien again.
“Why do you want to talk to Peter?” Alessandra asked. She always kept a wall between her husband and trouble.
The problem with Melendez had become much worse, Alig said. Alessandra hung up. Fifteen minutes later, she called back to inform Alig that neither she nor Gatien had any idea what he was talking about but that he had better take care of it.
Alig went to see Gatien at Tunnel. The Club Kid hemmed and hawed about “a problem” with Melendez but he wouldn't say what it was. Alig would later claim that Gatien acted paranoid and pretended not to know anyone named Angel. Gatien allegedly handed Alig $160 in cash and told him that whatever the problem was, “take care of it and I'll call you later.” Alig used the money to buy heroin and get high with Riggs.
Alig had a decision to make. He had been planning to throw a small party for several weeks, but now he had a dead body in his bathtub. Alig had grown up on slasher flicks—it wasn't beyond his imagination to simply pour a little more ice on Melendez, lock the door, and send his guests to the spare bathroom. The party continued as planned. Gitsie noticed a faint smell of decay coming from the back of the apartment, but she was too kind to say anything.
Melendez had been dead for eight days. According to Alig, that's when he finally returned to see Gatien, broke down in tears, and admitted his crime. Alig said he begged for help and guidance and that Gatien berated him for causing a “huge problem” for everybody. Alig claimed that when he told Gatien he was considering going to the police, because it was an accident, and they would have to see that, Gatien said that would be the worst thing he could do—after the NYPD raids of September 1995, they didn't need any more police interest. According to Alig, Gatien counseled him to get rid of the body and then get out of town as soon as possible. Alig would later tell DEA that he received about $4,000 in cash from Gatien over the next week, never hand to hand but from assistants who passed the money down surreptitiously. (Gatien's attorney has countered that Gatien never spoke of Melendez's murder with Alig, and no money was ever given to Alig specifically for the purpose of leaving town. Gatien was never charged with anything related to the murder.)
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