Patrick Geoffrois, NYC, circa 1988.

At just 20-years-old Patrick Geoffrois was already counted among the “electric poets”, a radical avant-garde French poetry movement inspired in equal parts by dada, surrealism, and the Beats. Along with fellow electric poet Michel Bulteau, he was a founding member of the psychedelic rock band Mahogany Brain, with whom he played guitar, before moving to India to pursue Shaivism. While there, Geoffrois met A.C. Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupada, the founder of the International Society for Krishna Consciousness more commonly known as “The Hare Krishna Movement”, and quickly became one of his most devoted followers distributing the group’s books throughout Europe before heading to New York City. When Prabhupada died in 1977, Geoffrois gave up on the movement and turned to a different way of life. In addition to playing guitar for James Chance and the Contortions, Geoffrois was a street tarot card and palm reader on Saint Marks Place (skills he’d learned from his mother) and eventually a heroin dealer.

During the 1989-1990 New York police investigation into the murder of Swiss dancer Monkia Beerle by her boyfriend Daniel Rakowitz, “The Butcher of Tompkins Square Park”, Geoffrois’ reputation as a “black magician”, “satanist”, and self-described “anarchist necromancer” put him at the center of an elaborate and ultimately false Police conspiracy theory characteristic of other Satanic Panic incidents.

Prior to his death from AIDS in 1994, Geoffrois was famous in New York’s downtown underground scene, (the “Lucifer of the Lower East Side” as Newsday put it) and lives on as a near-legendary figure in books like Jarrett Kobeck’s The Future Won’t Be Long (2017) and in the film Downtown 81, where he had a small role, and which was later dedicated to his memory along with Jean-Michel Basquiat.