DISGRACELAND - Gianni Versace: Sly Stallone, Madonna, Elton John, a Serial Killer, and the Death of the Sun King

Episode Date: July 2, 2024

Gianni Versace was a runway iconoclast who outfitted the likes of Madonna, Demi Moore, Prince, Sylvester Stallone, and Don Johnson. He lived like Louis XIV and counted Princess Di and Elton John among his friends. He was plagued by rumors of ties to the Calabrian mafia and a secret health diagnosis. Those rumors continued to persist long after he was gunned down by a serial killer who had been on the lam after murdering four other men in three states.This episode contains themes that may be disturbing to some listeners, including suicide and graphic depictions of violence.To see the full list of contributors, see the show notes at www.disgracelandpod.com.To listen to Disgraceland ad free and get access to a monthly exclusive episode, weekly bonus content and more, become a Disgraceland All Access member at disgracelandpod.com/membership.Sign up for our newsletter and get the inside dirt on events, merch and other awesomeness - GET THE NEWSLETTERFollow Jake and DISGRACELAND:InstagramYouTubeX (formerly Twitter) Facebook Fan GroupTikTok To learn more about listener data and our privacy practices visit: https://www.audacyinc.com/privacy-policy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://podcastchoices.com/adchoicesSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This is exactly right. Double Elvis. Disgraceland is a production of Double Elvis. This is a story about a fashion icon, an icon named Gianni Versace, who outfitted some of the biggest celebrities on the planet, Madonna, Prince, Sylvester Stallone, Demi Moore, and too many to name.

But this is also a story about a serial killer, about the mafia, about Gianni Versace's closest friends, Elton John and Princess Diana, and about living large, living like Louis the 14th large, living like a rock star while outfitting rock stars, rock stars who made great music. Unlike that music I played for you at the top of the show, that wasn't great music. That was a preset loop for my Melotron called Rollin Ricky MK1. I played you that loop because I can't afford the right to I'll be missing you by Puff Daddy and Faith Evans.

And why would I play you that specific slice of illegally sampled cheese? Could I afford it? Because that was the number one song in America on July 15, 1997. And that was the day that one of America's most wanted, assassinated Gianni Versace in broad daylight on his own front steps in Miami's South Beach. On this episode, a serial killer, the mafia, Elton John, Princess Diana, and the strange deaths of fashion icon Gianni Versace. I'm Jake Brennan, and this is disgrace land.

Sylvester Stallone was playing golf when the feds told him his life was in danger. This wasn't one of his many on-screen action hero lives, not the life of mythical vet John Rambo, who barren. through the jungle in a bullet bandolier and headband on the run from Vietnamese soldiers, nor the life of Marion Cobra Cobretti, member of LAPD's elite zombie squad, who took down a cabal of New World terrorists with the aid of his badass raybans. This was Michael Sylvester Gardensio Stallone's real life. The life that saw a young man with partial face paralysis

catapult to a global sex symbol during the hairsprayed heyday of the life. 1980s. The rags to Rocky life that brought a hungry Italian stallion from sleeping at New York City's Port Authority bus terminal to living large on an 11-acre villa with nine bathrooms in an Olympic-sized pool here in Miami. And according to the FBI, the real life of Sylvester Stallone was under threat. It was summer in 1997, and Stallone was at an inflection point in his career. After five Rockies, three rambos, and an arsenal of other than the United States, American gladiator roles. The 51-year-old wanted to be more than a hired muscle knot. Sylvester Stallone wanted to be appreciated as an actor. He hoped his newest movie,

Copland, would do the trick. It was a proper film, not his typical shoot-em-up fair, a novelistic neo-noir thriller. In Copland, Stallone played a subdued small-town sheriff beaten down by fates and justices and dirty cop corruption. He'd gained in a gained 40 pounds for the role and worked for scale. He held his own against Ace Tough Guys Robert De Niro, Harvey Keitel, and Ray Leota. He was brooding. He was great. Early buzz suggested that the critics noticed.

But just as Stallone was deliberately moving away from ultraviolence, ultraviolence was moving toward him. On the golf course, Stallone noticed six helicopters hovering about 400 yards away. The distant buzz was, unnerving, and for good reason. All around him, one of the largest man hunts in FBI history was unfolding, a dragnet on the scale of the legendary search for 1930s gangster John Herbert Dillinger. More than two weeks earlier, one of the FBI's ten most wanted was spotted in West Palm Beach. That was more than 70 miles north from where Stallone was, but Miami PD now had very good reason

to believe the armed and very dangerous fugitive. was in their midst. Officials identified the suspect as 27-year-old Andrew Philip Kuhnan sometime alias Andrew De Silva, white, male, dark brown hair, brown eyes, known to pretend he's rich, and sometimes he was,

but always with other people's money. According to the fugitive's own mother, her son got by as, quote, a high-class homosexual prostitute. DOJ posters said Kuhnan was wanted for second-degree murder and questioning in four other deaths. What Flyers didn't reveal

was the sheer sadistic brutality of these killings. The first victim was found in a Minneapolis loft. A 28-year-old ex-Navyman rolled up in a ruck, head bludgeoned with a claw hammer. Autopsy revealed he was struck not once or twice, but 27 times.

The second, a 33-year-old architect, was also in Minnesota, 60 miles north, shot once in the head, left near a lake. The third victim, holy shit, a 72-year-old real estate tycoon, discovered bound, gagged, and dead on the floor of his Chicago garage. His chest stabbed numerous times with either a screwdriver or a pruning pole. It was hard to tell and both were turned up in the investigation. His neck was cut with a sawblade, wound so deep he was nearly decapitated.

The man's ribs were all broken, apparently crushed by the two cement bags left beside his corpse. His head was also wrapped in masking tape like a mummy. Again, holy shit. And the rich man's green Lexus was also missing. Until it wasn't. A few days later, police located the vehicle in a Pennsylvania cemetery, parked near the body of a 45-year-old caretaker who'd been shot execution style in the back of the head. and the executed man's red Chevy pickup was gone.

And now the feds had intel that someone fitting this lunatic's description had been asking around Florida about Stallone. It was no secret. Sly lived in Miami Beach. Locals called his extravagant Bayside villa, Casa Rocky. The actor sometimes had trouble with nosy boaters anchoring behind his estate to see what they could see. Stallone even made local headlines when he tried to block a public path near his property

with an eight-foot security fence, rollerbladers were pissed off. So when a customer at Planet Hollywood's recent opening in Key West started asking where Stallone was, bartenders didn't think much about it. Everybody knew that Stallone was one of the chain's five celebrity investors.

It was part of the attraction. Just seemed like the chit-chat of a star-struck rube aimed for some signed memorabilia in an overpriced drink. But that changed on July 15th when a gunman who looked like, like that customer at Planet Hollywood, who in turn looked like the psycho from America's most wanted, executed someone else in broad daylight in front of witnesses. And this nut job had

assassinated a celebrity. And not just any celebrity, one of Sly Stallone's friends, another Italian signore, Gianni Versace. Versace, the runway genius who lived like a Medici prince. Versace, the household name partly responsible for Miami Vice's pastel suited style. Stallone knew Versace from the early 90s, when the actor was dating supermodel Janice Dickinson. Versace coordinated him with truckloads of expensive gifts, full pantries of fine china, rooms of luxe fabric, trunks of clothes. Versace, as was his way with celebrities, spared no expense. Stallone reciprocated by helping launch a Versace housework. line in 1995 in a provocative ad.

He posed nude with Claudia Schiffer in an Adam and Eve homage. Porcelain Versauchy plates covered their X-rated bits. Stallone was a guest at Versace's lavish lakeside house in Italy. They'd hit the gym together. He even chose Versace to design his costume for his 1995 film Judge Dred. But who cares that critics pan the movie as one of Stallone's worse? He looked badass. And that gilded future cop get-up was unmistakably Versace.

Chunky golden epaulettes, black cat suit, Ero-trash-wet dream. It even had a codpiece. And now, Versace was dead. It could have been Stallone. It could still be Stallone. The murder was so brazen it seemed like a mob-style hit. Before 9 a.m., Versace was outside his Ocean Drive mansion, fumbling with his keys when a gunman walked up, shot him, point blank in the head,

twice, and then coolly walked away. And the shooter was still on the loose. It had to be Andrew Kuhnan. Within the hour, police found the stolen red Chevy from Kuhnan's alleged fourth victim in a parking garage near the Versace mansion. Beside the truck was a heap of freshly sweaty clothes. But what's more, the vehicle had been parked there since June 12. And that was more than a month ago. Stallone still couldn't believe it.

This guy had been in town for weeks and weeks, and locals were all. only on high alert now, after he'd murdered a celebrity in broad daylight. And the more Stallone learned, the more infuriated he became. Miami Beach was what? Ten blocks long? Why hadn't cops plastered South Florida with his photo? And the guy was known as a gay hustler, and there were only like ten gay clubs in the city. But why hadn't the police dispatched undercovers in each one? Stallone knew a few things about cops. Shit, he just played one in Copeland, and he knew that it sounded like they hadn't been doing their jobs. And maybe if the Miami PD had been less worried about Stallone's gate,

taking a break from interviewing every stupid rollerblader outside his house, maybe his friend would still be alive. And maybe he wouldn't be having this conversation with black suits on the green. And maybe those helicopters wouldn't still be hovering, standing there, surrounded by the manicured grass in the ocean and the sky. Stallone had to admit, though, you know, if it had to happen, then this wouldn't be such a bad place to go. It was the 4th of July weekend in 1995, and Madonna was having trouble falling asleep.

Maybe it was all the naked men around the house. Naked dead men. Sculpted an alabaster and marble. Artifacts of past centuries. Madonna kept wanting to press her face against their cool, hard bodies. Gianni Versace's lavish villa at Northern Italy's Lake Como, where Madonna was vacationing for the American holiday, was a four-story monument of flamboyant distractions,

opulent bedrooms, three acres of fairy-tailed gardens, a museum-worthy collection of oil paintings and 19th century furniture, a tennis court, a private dock, and an impressive array of naked, dead men. It was all very Versace. Bruce Springsteen honeymooned at the Lake Como retreat in 1985, and Versace's good friend Elton John was a frequent guest over the years, as were staying in his wife Trudy.

Prince had been there too. Versace found Prince strange. It took the little guy three days to notice he'd been staying on a lake. And now the Italian designer had generously invited Madonna to unwind here after wrapping her second Versace campaign, a minimal and sophisticated evening gown shoot that would help class up her image. After last year's late show fiasco, when she said the word fuck 14 times and asked,

David Letterman to smell her panties, Madonna's image needed some serious scrubbing. In six months, she would be shooting her dream role as Eva Peron, the Argentine First Lady in the Oscar Bate movie version of Andrew Lloyd Webber's 1978 musical. Madonna needed to be convincingly elegant. Versace's late Como Villa was the perfect place to practice. Madonna felt like a spoiled princess. She brought an entourage,

and Sri Lankan servants and white gloves tended to every whim of Madonna and her guests. New Versace gowns appeared daily. Fresh bellini's arrived every sunset, which they drank under a giant magnolia tree beside the crystal clear lake. A speedboat captain was on standby if they wanted to swim. Gorgeous Italian bodyguards even took Madonna's dog, Jakita, on long, doting walks. Lucky little bitch. Madonna pinched herself to make sure she wasn't dreaming. Now, this wasn't an impressionable 1980s era Madonna

fresh from watching Basquiat shoot up on a mattress. This was the 80 million record sold Madonna, Madonna who'd done Dick Tracy and co-star Warren Beatty, business mogul Madonna, who'd been on the cover of Forbes in 1990 and secured a whopping $60 million advance for a multimedia joint venture with Time Warner in 1992. This Madonna also had her own Miami Beach Mansion, Right near Stallone's Casa Rocky, this Madonna knew massive, massive wealth.

And to this Madonna, the world's most celebrated material girl, the ruthless extravagance of Versace's lifestyle was daunting. Maybe that's why she couldn't sleep. They called Gianni Versace the sun king of fashion for good reason. At Lake Como, one of his four opulent residences, he cultivated his own personal Versailles. Versace's mansion in Miami South Beach was equally unreal. When he purchased it in the early 1990s, Versace invested $33 million to renovate the former apartment complex and next-door hotel into a palatial estate of 16 bedrooms, two kitchens,

a 54-foot mosaic swimming pool flecked with 24-carat gold, and a shower reportedly big enough for 10 people to share simultaneously. You know, as one does. There was also at least one toilet made of onyx. And ever since he opened his own fashion house in 1978, with his older brother Santos' help, Versace had been spitting in the eye of so-called good taste. He turned the delicate crowd of haute couture into an erotic spectacle.

He made men's silk shirts with ornately tacky prints into luxury goods. He put socialites in bondage gear. He put Princess Diana in gold studs. He posed supermodel into Evangelista in a se-thrued top. grabbing her crotch and touching her breast in the New Yorker's erudite pages. He took high fashion from its precious, self-contained atelier and yanked it out onto the street. And Versace created cultural moments, Hollywood moments, huge red carpet moments. There was the 1991 Oscars when Cindy Crawford turned up with Richard Gear,

still smoldering from pretty woman's success, and a spectacular red Versace gown with a plunging neck and elegant, backslit. That couple, those red carpet photos, that red hot dress, that was a moment. It was a moment in 1994 when actress Elizabeth Hurley went from Hugh Grant Arm Candy to household name when she wore an astounding black Versace gown, held seductively together with giant gold safety pins to the premiere of four weddings and a funeral. In 27 years later, the dress has its own Wikipedia entry. In J-Lo's Emerald Green Naval Cleavage Wowser from the two thousand. thousand Grammys. That was a moment's moment. And they weren't creating fabulous cultural moments

back in Versace's hometown. Born Giovanni Maria Versace and Reggio Calabria, a southern city riddled with earthquakes, bandits, and malaria. The Versace's mother was a successful dressmaker. His family was firmly Boucho. But when a 20-something Versace moved to Milan to pursue contracts with the country's established fashion houses, he found that Northern, Northern, Italians generally regarded as southern ilk as peasants and wasterels, yellow-toothed brutes from a cursed region. To Northerners, Versace's native Calabria was the stinky foot in their fine leather Italian boot. But Versace assimilated. He was ambitious. He lost his southern accent, cut ties with friends from home, did the cosmopolitan things a young upwardly mobile man does

to air kiss asses in a European city and build a network. But the more Versace hascended Milan's upper echelons, the more he found them uptight, stodgy, and intentionally drab. And the narrower he found the guardrails of this polite society, the more liberally he experimented in his work. Versace experimented by mixing elements of fashion that would supposedly clash, leather and silk, suave, and linen, denim, and satin. He experimented by sending women down the runway in bikini bras and tailored pantsuits

way back in 1980. He experimented with the metal used in butcher's gloves and invented an entirely new material for evening wear, a metal mesh fabric called oratone. He experimented with fetish wear tropes and scandalized the fashion world when his fall 1992 collection Miss S&M showcased a bevy of legy models and variously edgy displays of leather, studs, dog collars, and harnesses.

And the more successful Versace became with these experiments, the more the old money boars turned up their noses, resorted to their tribalist conditioning and complained about another southern interloper trampling their sacred tenet of good taste. So Versace called bullshit on quote-unquote good taste, because what was good taste anyway? A highly subjective code dictated by sexless bitties in heavy fur coats. A charade to keep blue-blooded bloodlines intact.

A way to keep out new ideas from new people. Good taste was polite oppression. Good taste was arbitrary restraint. And to Versace, the point of wealth or luxury was freedom. Freedom to Versace meant treating his much younger sister Donatella like an adult from a young age, coming out to her early on, bringing her into nightclubs when she was still a child. Freedom meant nurturing Donatella's Utre instincts and molding her into a platinum blonde camp queen who people would like into a chain-smoking Janice from the Muppets. Freedom meant being in a long-term relationship with his partner, Antonio, but also procuring well-vetted male escorts to join them periodically. Freedom meant knowing money was made to be spent, and there would always be more to make. Freedom was knowing that good taste was a ruse. When the weapon of good taste failed to stop Versace,

Northern Italy's polite society tried to discredit him in another way. They said the secret to Versace's success must be the so-called Calabrian mafia. a.k.a. Trinagita, a.k.a. One of the most feared organized crime groups in the world, dating back to the 19th century. It was the Calabrian mafia who kidnapped John Paul Getty the third, the teenage grandson of oil-veillian heir J. Paul Getty in 1973, and what a feat of fuck-upnery that was.

See, this kidnapping was so poorly executed, the demand for ransom seemed like a hoax. So when notorious tightwad Grandpa Getty balked at their nearly $17 million dollar demand, These Southern Italian savages sliced off young Getty's ear, stuffed it into a plastic envelope and mailed it to a Rome newspaper to do some quick convincing. But there was one problem. They'd forgotten about Italy's National Postal Strike. And the severed ear sat in transit for three weeks,

while their cash cow almost died from infection. Those were the geniuses they said were responsible for Versace's independent success. What Versace came to understand was that, that the old money elites weren't upset because he designed loud clothes that looked like overpriced pawnshot fantasies. They were upset because they felt threatened because Versace represented something they couldn't control. New wealth. And new wealth's only master was freedom. We'll be right back after this word, word, word. Ronnie knew a hustler when he saw one, and the dark-haired guy in the baseball hat and sunglasses was definitely on the take.

Ronnie saw the guy around the hotel at odd hours, late nights, early mornings, always alone, always with a backpack, and never saying a word. Always shooting Ronnie furtive, searching glances, but darting his eyes before they made contact. Finally, one day Ronnie dispensed with the subtlety and made a show of cruising him hard. The guy finally spoke. You see something you like? Ronnie told him he had a cute ass and he could make some money off of it. Then Ronnie asked how big he was.

The guy came up to Ronnie's room to show him. The guy said to call him Andy. Ronnie made some calls for Andy to help make him some cash, set him up with some old rich guys. And they used Ronnie's room and Ronnie took his cut that way, a small fee for a neutral location. Ronnie was a gay, HIV-positive, often barefoot 43-year-old who'd been living at Miami's Normandy Plaza Hotel

for months when one of America's most wanted rolled up and introduced himself as Andy in May 1997. With its constant churn of transients and tourists, Miami was a good town to hide in plain sight, especially someone like Andy, aka Andrew Conanan, a 27-year-old whose half-filipino, half-Italian features could scan Cuban. The Normandy Plaza was especially ideal, a single occupancy hotel located, in Miami's lackluster North Beach neighborhood. The place was cash only, right on the water. Room started at $29 bucks a night.

Phone service was extra. Staff didn't look too closely at your ID. Maids weren't concerned when he wouldn't let them in, and there was even a spot out front to park your stolen truck. At 9 p.m., the Normandy Plaza opened its back gate onto the beach, so you could come and go discreetly without passing other guests or the front deck. And as long as your room bill was paid up, nobody asked questions. Kuhnan kept the lowest possible profile, borrowed in like a night crawler by day, reading in his room, recovering or getting high with Ronnie, who introduced him to a crack dealer who sold $10, $40, and $100 rocks.

The price variation depending on weight. After dark, Kuhna would pull his baseball hat down low and head out into the salty air. He'd grab fast food or cheap takeout, cheap vodka from the liquor store. We'd visit a nearby adult superstore to buy porn bags with names like Inches and Jock. Drive to Planet Hollywood to do some reconnaissance. He'd go to gay clubs and loiter looking for rough trade. He'd get water from the bar, bum a cigarette, and wait. K'nan found this existence tolerable for a while.

But after two months, Q9an was sick of it all. sick of anonymity, sick of pretending he was no one special, because Andrew Kuhnanin was special. He was smart, genius level smart. He read the whole Bible by age seven, in the third grade his IQ tested at 147. Kuhnan was superior, made the gifted program in junior high, went to a prestigious private high school in the Hall of California with diplomats' children, voted most likely to be remembered in the senior yearbook. He'd be remembered all right. He read Vogue, GQ, and Vanity Fair religiously.

Those were his people. Q9 was spoiled. The last of four kids, he was his parents' favorite. His siblings called him the prince. One time, the prince got sick and missed a high school field trip, and his father bought him a brand new Nissan 300 ZX, Turbo, to make him feel better. Sure, his father had since fled the Philippines to evade prosecution for selling fake stocks, but Qunan had took his dad's point to heart.

He deserved the finest things, and for a while he had them. He'd been a kept man, lived with a retired millionaire, had a $33,000 infinity in an allowance of $2,500 a month, flew around the country on the Sugar Daddy's dime. But that arrangement fell apart after QAnan and met David. the waspy-looking architect he'd fallen for and then left dead by the Minnesota Lake. Sure, QNan had fibbed a long way to get what he deserved. Said he went to Yale or Cho.

Said he was in the Israeli army even though he wasn't Jewish. Said he had a daughter from a failed marriage. Said his parents were rich but cut him off from his inheritance when they learned he was gay. Neglected to mention his father's exile or that his mother had gone completely batshit. Sometimes, Qunanan had had had a lot of. hard time keeping his story straight. But he only embellished, so he didn't waste time proving he was worthy. Why should he have to prove he was special when he clearly was? He just skipped a step. Gianni Versacei knew Andrew Kuhnana was special. In 1990, at a San Francisco gay club,

the Italian fashion king mistook Kuhnan for someone he knew and briefly chatted him up. Kuhna went along with it, of course, and then told everyone for years that he knew Versace. because Andrew Kuhnan would know Versacei. In a way, no one else ever would. Kuhnan slipped up one night at the South Beach Club Twist. He was grinding on the dance floor with a hairdresser from West Palm Beach who asked what he did for a living. I'm a serial killer, he admitted. Kuhnani couldn't help himself.

For once, the truth was more impressive than the lie. But then he laughed, said he was an investment baking and took off, which was a shame because Twist was where he was. needed to be. His old friend Gianni Versacei lived down the street. What Kuhnan didn't know was that Gianni Versace had been quietly preparing for his own death. In August 1994, Versace noticed hearing loss and extreme swelling on his head's right side. His doctor's diagnosis, a rare form of inner ear cancer. Surgery came with the high risk of disfiguring Versace's face, a businessman of aesthetics, Versace instead opted for chemotherapy, but administered at a low enough dose that the

treatment wouldn't leave him bald or listless. Versace worked throughout the chemotherapy, running the fashion house from his Milan apartment above the company's headquarters, with nurses visiting him periodically to administer his treatment. He kept his diagnosis secret, but people could see something was wrong. Senior Versace must have AIDS, they said, And there were other problems. Donatella, who'd long been her brother's thickest these muse and sidekick, had assumed more prominence during Versace's illness. As his cancer went into remission, the shift drove a deep rift between the two. And by late 1996, Donatella was hoovering up cocaine like a human dirt devil, and their relationship had become acrimonious.

Meanwhile, his brother Santo tried to tamp down on Versace's spending after his recovery. So, in September 1996, Versace mostly erased both siblings from his will, leaving the majority of his fortune to his 10-year-old niece, Allegra. Then, in early 1997, Versace had an embarrassing public flap with Crown Jewel's celebrity conquest, Princess Diana. She had agreed to write the foreword for Versace's newest coffee table book, Rock and Royalty, since proceeds would benefit the AIDS Foundation of their mutual friend, Elton John. But when Versace sent a finished copy, the Princess of Wales was horrified to discover

a family portrait with her two young sons, William and Harry, pages away from nearly nude men. She publicly demanded the four would be excise and bowed out of the highly publicized launch event. But by the morning of July 15, 1997, things were again looking up for the 50-year-old. Versace's cancer was officially in the clear. development he'd toasted six months ago with glasses of champagne. He had reconciled with Princess Die and was already designing the world's most famous new D'Vorce some new threads. And earlier in the month, he had signed with Wall Street firm Morgan Stanley to take his $800 million fashion dynasty public. Gianni Versace would soon be the first Italian designer with his name

on both the Borsa Italiana and the New York Stock Exchange. It was around 848.8.4.000. It was around 848, when Versace returned to his South Beach mansion after buying five magazines from a cafe. He worked for a second to decipher which key opened up his front door, and as he did so, Versaceae smiled at a passing neighbor, and then, within seconds, Gianni Versace was brain-dead. Kuhnan's first bullet hit the base of Versace's brain, tore the top of his spinal cord, and exited from his neck. A second bullet tore through the right side of his brain. Versace's face, cracked the top of his skull and then stuck in his head. Versace slumped on the steps. Kuhnan walked off, leaving behind a shocked eyewitness and a gory

tableau. And there was so much blood, the front steps looked vandalized with thick crimson pain. So much blood, in fact, that the blood still remains. Right where Versace's body lay on that day, his sunglasses, sandals, and a dead bird. In a freakish coincidence, a piece of the first bullet had exited Versace's neck, hit the front gate, and then killed a bird. It wasn't just any bird that died by Versace's side. It was a dove, specifically a mourning dove, mourning with a you after its mournful coup. The sun king was dead, and nature wept. Kurt de Marz in room 32, said he'd be down to pay his bill in 10 minutes. 30 minutes went by. The Normandy Plaza hotel clerk went up stairs to find room 322 empty. On Saturday, July 12, 1997, Kurt DeMars, aka Andrew Kuhngan,

skipped out on his last bill and then reemerged three days later to carry out his favorite murder. Six days later, there'd still be no trace of the serial killer, even though 12 arms of the law were devoted to Kuhnan's capture. The killer was still out there somewhere when Versace's memorial service took place on Tuesday, July 22nd. Exactly one week after his death, a crowd of more than 2,000 gathered at Milan's Duomo, the city's exquisite Gothic cathedral, along with a bevy of supermodel sting and a sobbing Elton John who was comforted by Princess Diana. The following day at about 3.45 in the afternoon, Fernando Carriria, a 71-year-old property caretaker and 20-year-old resident of Florida, was making a routine check-in on a houseboat 41 blocks north of Versace's mansion.

Carreria's wife was with him when he noticed the front door's busted top lock. The bottom lock was already unlatched. Somebody's been in here, he told his wife. Carreria pushed the door open. Inside, all the lights were on and the curtains were closed. Carreria headed to the living room. Sofa cushions were on the floor with a blanket. An overturned chair was positioned like a makeshift barricade.

Then Cariria saw a pair of sandals. Somebody is in here now, he told his wife. Miami had crimes, so Carreria kept a handgun in his waistband for moments just like this. As he went to grab it, a loud, startling bang rang out from upstairs. Carreria and his wife both ran outside, terrified. Carreria thought the intruder had shot him and missed. He didn't want to be a sitting duck, so he and his wife hid in the bushes. Cops came quickly with the ongoing manhunt.

They'd been on high alert for suspicious local activity and immediately approached the seen as if the intruder could be Versace's killer. Over the next five hours, a fusillade of special forces, helicopters, boats, dogs, and grenades laid siege to the houseboat. They've been waiting for this opportunity for days. After the tear gas cleared, two sergeants ventured inside. They found Qunanin in an upstairs bedroom. His eyes were open.

Blood covered his ears, eyes and lips. He was dead. Kuhnan had shot him. in the mouth with the same gun he'd used to kill Versace. The sergeants who'd ID'd ID his body high-fived. For eight frantic days, Andrew Philip Cunan loomed large in the national consciousness. But here, in a stained bed, propped up by bloody pillows, he looked like any other South Beach club's scum.

Small, pathetic. Nothing unique at all, scoffed one of the high-fivers. The Miami Herald dubbed the crime scene a houseboat of horrors. but inside scanned more yuppie tweaker den. A set of binoculars sat on the kitchen counter. The broken front door lock was in the fridge butter tray, pill bottles, rubbing alcohol, and a bloody bandage littered a coffee table. And there were fast food wrappers and used cotton balls in the bathtub.

And in a pile of magazines was a freshly thumbed copy of Vogue. It was a very Andrew touch. Eerly, the houseboat was about 400 yards away from the golf course where Sylvester Stallone learned about Q'nananin. The whole ordeal shook Stallone to the core. He put his Miami Beach Villa on the market in August 1997, right after Copland was released. Six weeks after Versace's murder,

Princess Diana died in the limousine ride that cleaned her life. She wore black Versace sat in shoes. In 2000, Donatella sold Gianni's South Beach Mansion for $19 million to a telecom big wig, who remodeled in a remodeled. into a luxury hotel and event space. In 2013, the former Versace mansion was resold at auction for $41.5 million. The winning bidder was a scion of Jordash denim.

The second highest bid came from another famous conman prone to hyperbolic flourishes in vulgar wealth. But Donald Trump came up a half million short. The property remains a luxury hotel that's primary selling point is a very selling point is its Versace mansion passed. The hotel's gold-flect pool is a popular backdrop for Instagram influencers who can also take selfies in front of the gate where Versace once lay dead. Two out-of-town men were recently found dead in one of the mansion's suites, an apparent murder suicide, and they were found on the afternoon of July 14, 2021, the day before the 24th

anniversary of Versace's murder. And in the annals of American true crime, the assassination of Gianni Versace has become a turn-of-the-millian classic, up there with the O.J. Simpson trial. It has everything, glamour, sex, celebrity, allured crime scene, a serial killer, and so much disgrace. I'm Jake Brennan. This disgrace land. Disgraceland was created by yours truly is produced in partnership with double Elvis. Credits for this episode can be found on the show notes page at disgracelandpod.com. If you're listening as a Disgraceland All Access member,

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