TAGGED FOR MURDER

[Draggingtree]

TAGGED FOR MURDER

By RICHARD LACAYO Sunday, June 24, 2001

 

When Gianni Versace walked down the street in Miami Beach, he had every reason to think he had created the world. If fashion has joined Hollywood and sports among the great public spectacles of our time, Versace was one big reason why. And if Miami Beach is now a laboratory of instant gratification, full of clubs and in-line skaters and muscle guys with deltoids like the gas tanks on a Harley--in some measure that was Versace's doing too. Six years ago, when the city was threadbare, he fell in love with it, and soon began converting a hotel and a crumbling apartment building into his comically scrumptious mansion, one of his four homes around the world. And where Versace went, the models and movie stars soon followed.

 

Andrew Cunanan created his own worlds too. They just didn't work out. For years he had insinuated himself into the lives of well-off, older gay men. An adroit and tireless liar, he told friends in San Diego he was Andrew DeSilva, a man with a factory in Mexico, or wealthy parents in the Philippines, or a wife and daughter--the ones in the photo he would pass around that he got from who knows where. http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,138062,00.html