The Story of Ben Stiller's Secret Post-Punk Band

Mike Sniper was working at a record store in Brooklyn, New York, when he got the call. A man had died and left behind a mountainous record collection. It was the mid-2000s; Sniper was a buyer and pricer for used vinyl. Could he appraise the collection?

The task was more harrowing than he had imagined. “It turned out the guy died in the apartment, and no one found him for, like, two weeks,” Sniper says. “It reeked of death.” The man had been a sci-fi critic and, based on his East Village apartment, a hoarder. “There were records in the stove and in the refrigerator. Tons and tons of porn DVDs everywhere.”

But there were treasures scattered amid the mess: “It was the kind of collection you don’t see very often,” Sniper says. “Original Sun Ra records, really rare punk records, original Velvet Underground LPs... [He was] clearly an interesting guy who at some point lost his shit and became a hoarder.”

One LP from 1982 caught Sniper’s eye. The cover was macabre, with, plastered in bleeding red type. The band was called Capital Punishment. There was scant information online. “I’d never heard of it, so I put it on: Ah, this is actually kind of cool,” Sniper remembers. “I wound up buying it for myself.”