Blind Item #8 - The Roommate - A Dancing Boy Blind

Back before the one candidate for yesterday's #14 blind started going by his actual name, he was a regular at one of the franchises of a certain major city club mogul. He hosted frequent drug and booze fueled parties attended by the group which included the one person, along with his boyfriend, who would commit a notorious murder. (Said person is now out of jail, and because FSF was apparently quite wrong about that second acts quote, he has a bigger and madder fan base than ever.) Who did he like to invite? Barely legals of both sexes. I know because my first year college roommate attended one and maybe more than one of these (can't remember). Said roommate, sadly now deceased, also dealt on campus, and while the source was very likely another person at a higher level mentioned in this blind (and long suspected by the feds), the intermediary was someone who got famous in a way no one wants to: he was the victim of the notorious murder. (They were both also seeing that VJ known for drug guzzling and boi chasing, which caused business conflicts.)

My roommate had actually started visiting the city (from his small upstate hometown) the year before, largely because his childhood best friend was going to school nearby. (She was actually a child cello prodigy, and would years later go on to internet fame at the big video site. The summer before he and I started college - he chose to go where she went so they could be close again - she was living with a certain older orange-haired 80s synth diva in the city. She has a story too about probably the most famous cellist at the time, who was also her teen times teacher, but I'll leave that for her, if she wants to. He's foreign born, and his name is in three parts.)

Sadly, my roommate was recruited in the aforementioned scene (you can imagine why some rich, famous, and powerful men visited these spaces, even if it was officially to keep their profile up, and hang with the kids), and more sadly, his experiences led to him to move beyond party drugs. By our second or third year, his addiction was well advanced, and he spent most of his time with other addicts. I became a kind of replacement for him to the old friend. For a good while there, we spent hours of every day together (she's the nicest person), listening to music, playing music, and talking about everything but him. He and his troubles were always the elephant in the room.

Who else had been trafficked as a minor, according to him? The victim of that famous murder. You can imagine what they both knew, and the names they could name. By the early years of the next decade, the roommate had finally gotten clean, and was working with other addicts, and writing a popular blog among survivors and people in recovery. It came as a shock to many when he was found dead, of an apparent accidental overdose, in 2004. As you can imagine, there are unresolved questions about both the murder and the overdose. There's a third death too, which I'll get to in a follow up.