The killer club kid has spent a decade in prison ... and he's having the time of his life

Outside the Elmira Correctional Facility, 350 miles northwest of Manhattan, stands a 15-foot copper statue of two naked men in an amiable embrace, their genitals covered with fig leaves. It's the only decoration that marks the visitor's entrance of the maximum-security facility that is otherwise shrouded in a dozen rows of barbed wire and institutional brick. Inside, the former prince of New York nightlife lives in an unadorned concrete box. Gone are the assless clown pants and nurses uniforms he'd don at his legendary parties. Now 40, he wears prison-issue green pants, a maroon T-shirt that fits snugly over his slight paunch, and a pair of glasses with no left lens. It's been ten years since Alig and Robert "Freeze" Riggs murdered drug dealer Angel Melendez, carved up the body in Alig's bathtub, and disposed of it in the Hudson River. Alig's conviction marked the end of an era in New York nightlife, but for him the party had just begun. He spent the next decade shuttling between different prisons, battling a host of addictions, dating convicted rapists, and writing a memoir, Aligula. The oft fanciful felon talked to Radar last week about first love, she-male self mutilation, party planning behind bars, sex igloos, and the night he murdered his friend.

RADAR: So when do you expect to be out of jail, Michael?
MICHAEL ALIG: By 2010, I think. But it could be by my next parole hearing in 2008.

James doesn't come up to visit. He says he doesn't have any money. I guess he spent all the money he made raking over my life storyDo you have high hopes for that?
The last time, I went in expecting them to berate me and really lay into me, but they didn't. They could have—I mean, I killed somebody. What more reason do you need? My behavior hasn't been perfect, but all of my evaluations have been exemplary. My only trouble is I've relapsed three times since I've been in. But I've been clean for 28 months. You would be surprised about how common violence is in here. I mean, I don't want to say, "Compared to the inmates who cut people, I'm great!" but that's the way you have to look at it. This thing that happened with Angel was, well, I don't want to call it a fluke....

What exactly drove you to kill him?
The argument we were in with Angel that morning was a really stupid, minor one. We were arguing over an outfit, nothing major. But Angel was a drug dealer and we were drug addicts, and though we were friendly on the surface—and we did like him—we were resentful because he was profiting from our addiction. He was taking all of our money, and it created animosity. All the other drug dealers were friends first and dealers second. So, on this day, the animosity came out, and we let it go too far. We didn't restrain ourselves the way we should have. That, and we were high.

It's been a decade now since Angel's body washed up on shore. Do you still think about him?

I had dreams about Angel for a long time. In the beginning the dreams were horrific. I'd be lying in my bed, and Angel's hands would grab me and pull me down to Hell. Lately I've been dreaming of just hanging out with him and talking. My psychiatrist says it's a sign that I'm starting to forgive myself for what happened.

Do you keep in touch with Freeze, your partner in the murder?
There's a rule against inmate-to-inmate communication, but I write to my mom and he writes to his mom, and they tell each of us what the other writes.

In Party Monster, your friend James St. James characterized you as a spoiled sociopath. Are the two of you still friends?
James doesn't come up to visit. He says he doesn't have any money. I guess he spent all the money he made raking over my life story. He claims he didn't make any money from that though ... he claims they took advantage of him. Poor James was taken advantage of selling my story.

What did you think of the way Macaulay Culkin portrayed you in the film version?
Honestly, um, I don't think he did a very good job. Seth [Green] did a really good job of playing James. Macaulay's portrayal of me is more Richie Rich than me. I saw some clips that made me cringe.

In the past ten years you've been incarcerated in two New York State correctional facilities: first Clinton, and now Elmira. What's the difference between the two?

There was a really incestuous feeling at Clinton. Imagine you're in a club like Tunnel with 1400 people, or a club like Pyramid with 200 people. You see the same faces over and over again. Here there's a big turnover rate, but at Clinton people are there for life. So, it's like going to Pyramid every night for ten years.

I think you'd probably rather be at Pyramid, though. Even the women in the waiting room have H-A-T-E tattooed on their knuckles.
All the White Supremacists have that. You would think they'd be frowned upon by the Crips and Bloods, but they really just see each other as another gang. They're just trying to preserve their own kind.

Have you had problems with gangs?
Jail is the kind of place where you have to fit into one group, but I never have. I'm telling you, I'm the only person I've seen in here who is able to flit from one group to another and be treated fairly and nicely by all of them. When I was first taken out of protective custody, the Bloods leader came up to me and said that I wouldn't have any trouble. So they're really nice to me, those gang members. I've never met nicer gang members in my life.

Did you see the guy who was cut this morning? I heard he needed 33 stitches.

Yes, I did. He was right across from my block. I woke up to the screams, but I didn't see anything. My porter said they were cleaning up the blood downstairs.

How regularly does violence break out here?
This is the first facility I've been in that I'm out in the general population, and when I first got here, we were just waiting on line to go back to the cells and this crazy inmate was running down the line cutting people in the face with a razor blade. I kept thinking, How much is this going to cost me in plastic surgery if he cuts me? Because I couldn't move away and look scared. One of the people he cut, it was like a horror movie—the blood was just flowing from his hands. It was like Dawn of the Dead or something. There's really a lot of blood that comes out when something like that happens.