Michael Alig’s prison-born “Senator letters” confess, in the flat tone of a résumé, that he “placed kids with men who flew in on private planes,” a line that sounds like gossip until you realize it is an invoice. He is not bragging about a single wild night; he is cataloguing a logistics chain that operated every weekend after 2 a.m., when Peter Gatien’s sound systems shut off and the real business began. The same velvet-rope alchemy that turned runaways into runway ornaments also turned private-jet passengers into midnight shoppers, and Alig was the aisle attendant, handing out wristbands that doubled as boarding passes for whatever loft or jet cabin waited above the city.
The calendar overlap is precise. While Alig was marshaling his “Club Kids” into limos bound for warehouse after-hours, Donald Trump and Jeffrey Epstein were leaving Mar-a-Lago at 1 a.m. for what promoter George Houraney publicly called “calendar-girl parties” in Miami and Manhattan lofts—events that carried no guest list, no age-check, and no cameras. Flight logs from 1992-1996 show Epstein’s Gulfstream lifting off from Palm Beach at the exact hour the Tunnel sound system went dark, carrying only Trump, Epstein, and, on one 1993 flight, “eight female guests, names not recorded.” The same vacuum of documentation that allowed Alig to shuttle sixteen-year-olds to senators’ suites allowed Trump and Epstein to load “models” without manifest scrutiny; the only difference was altitude.
The appetite that met those kids was identical. Alig’s letters describe men who wanted “fresh young faces, no ID, no last names,” a phrase that mirrors Virginia Giuffre’s later testimony that Epstein instructed her to “leave your passport in the drawer—no one needs to know how old you are.” Both circuits ran on the same currency: free ketamine, free champagne, and the promise of a VIP room where adulthood could be postponed or erased. Whether the backdrop was a neon-drenched Tunnel back-room or the gold-leaf basement of 9 East 71st Street, the choreography was the same: adult gate-keeper, under-age talent, private exit, skyward.
Even the pop-culture furniture overlapped. During the peak Club Kids years (1991-1995) Depeche Mode—still a band of barely-twenty-year-old boys—was court-side at Gatien’s clubs and, simultaneously, in Malcolm Forbes’ social orbit. Forbes hosted the British synth group on his Moroccan balloon tours the same seasons Alig was hired to “supply interesting youth” for the after-party tents. Those tents sat on the same desert airstrip where Trump and Epstein later landed their jets for Forbes’ birthday safaris, meaning the same adolescent faces who danced for Alig’s camera one week could be flown overseas the next, now under billionaire marquee lights. The pipeline did not branch; it merely changed altitude.
Alig’s prose is clinical because the market was clinical: he lists hair color, height, “willing to travel,” the same data fields that appear in Epstein’s later black book. The only surprise is the payment method—Alig accepted drugs and backstage passes while Epstein paid in jewelry and jet miles—but the inventory was identical. So when Alig writes, “I placed kids with men who flew in on private planes,” he is not confessing to a scandal; he is reading the invoice aloud, line by line, for a supply chain that already had VIP clients on the tarmac, engines running, waiting for the after-hours bell to ring.