Diva: How so?
FO: With the internet and fall of Berlin Wall. A wave of criminal creativity came out of Eastern Europe. Smart criminals are creative. Selling drugs these days is a mugs game. Criminals these days are all on the internet. You can makes billions on the internet stealing credit cards and identities. It's much more trans-global now. The old model is based on locality, neighborhoods and turf to defend. Crime today doesn't have that same grounding in location. You can go on the internet and some guy in St. Petersburg can hook up with a guy in Australia using a a server in Iran to steal from a guy in US. The policing is a nightmare. The law is playing catch up at the moment. Where does one jurisdiction end and another begin? The smart criminals are all online.
Take Craigslist for example. Most Craigslist scams are small time - $50 here and there. But you can get a lot of people scammed in a short time and you'll probably get away with it because you don't get people so riled up over losing $50 as you would over $10,000. You used to have to get to know someone, one on one, now you just go online.
Crime often pays in the short term, but usually not in the long term.
Diva: It's quite fascinating. Switching to a totally different topic, in the case of Michael Alig, do you think there was mental illness or do you think his judgment was so impaired by the drugs that he lost all sense of normal human behavior?
FO: Ah! Have you heard the latest?
Diva: No! Please tell me.
FO: He was up for parole again and was convinced that he was getting out. He's been in there over 10 years and the sentence was 10-20 years. He thought he was going to get out for sure. You know if you get 10 to 20, you can get out in 7. They did a piss test. He came up positive for I don't know if it was Percocet or what. Now his on suicide watch. He's probably never going to get out. Michael would rather be famous than free.
Diva: Surely people have forgotten about him by now....
FO: Oh, you'd be surprised. There's a cult of Alig out there. You get young kids who don't really know what went down. He's like this generations' Charles Manson. The parole board wants genuine remorse. Michael is just....not equipped. I'm no psychiatrist. There are many people who do many drugs who don't end up dismembering their roommates. Michael had so many issues. And with the life that that was given to him.... His job was to push the envelope. It wasn't completely unforeseen. I remember standing the balcony at the Limelight and seeing kids overdosing on the floor. I'm not a prude, but there was no adult supervision. And the fame was part of it.
And there was some racism about the whole thing. Michael didn't regard someone like Angel as an equal. He also had a racist streak. He'll deny it, and say that he pretended to get a shock out of people. But it was there. The murder was bad enough but what he did afterwards is what was really bad. He went around saying that he had murdered Angel, then saying that he was kidding. But as time passed and Angel didn't' come back, it became increasingly clear that he wasn't kidding. Don't get me wrong, Angel was definitely not a nice person. But to do that to the family...
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Diva Interviews