The hat-making enterprise had successes — a point out in Girls’s Put on Each day and wares offered in Barneys, Saks Fifth Avenue, Lord & Taylor, and at a Bergdorf Goodman trunk present. “We have been in each a kind of crusty outdated girl outlets,” Mr. Tyler-Leonard stated. In “Occasion Monster,” Mr. St. James described the house as “a daily sweatshop” with Mr. Riggs “pressured into indentured servitude — operating up saucy little frocks for Bella — dawn, sundown — all day, every single day, in change for room and board.”
Mr. Tyler-Leonard described himself because the artistic pressure behind the enterprise, as Mr. Riggs sewed. That they had a dispute over income and lease, Mr. Tyler-Leonard recalled. “Freeze and I have been dwelling polar reverse lives,” he stated. (Mr. Riggs didn’t reply to requests for remark.)
Ultimately, Mr. Riggs moved into Mr. Alig’s Hell’s Kitchen house. There, in 1996, the 2 killed Mr. Melendez, 25, who glided by Angel, a nod to feathered wings he wore. As Mr. Alig and Mr. Melendez entangled in a struggle over cash, Mr. Riggs bludgeoned him with a hammer. Mr. Alig then suffocated him, poured detergent down his throat, and duct taped his mouth shut. They stashed the physique within the bathtub earlier than dismembering it and dumping it within the Hudson River. Mr. Alig and Mr. Riggs have been sentenced to twenty years in jail.
Mr. Tyler-Leonard maintained contact with Mr. Alig,who later died of a drug overdose. Mr. Riggs, now 56, was launched in 2010, and studied city anthropology at CUNY and sociology at NYU.
He and Mr. Tyler-Leonard haven’t spoken since their Membership Child days.
The Occasion’s Over
After Mr. Alig went to jail, Mr. Tyler-Leonard scrambled for revenue. “I needed to get a job to complement my job being fabulous,” he stated. He leased an area to begin a bar, Lulu’s, on Norfolk Road, in Might 2002. Every week later, he discovered that he had H.I.V.
