“The financial is the least of his injustices.” Allegations of Pearlman making inappropriate overtures towards members of his groups, especially to the youngest member of BSB, began in the late ‘90s. “I tried to expose him for what he was years ago,” Jane Carter, Nick Carter’s mother, told Vanity Fair in 2007. Getty Images And so does the inappropriate behavior. And while Pearlman’s blimp business began to fail, the rest of his varied portfolio, which included the Chippendales, several TCBY yogurt outposts, N*SYNC, O-Town, and more, took off. Eventually the lineup that catapulted to superstardom was Backstreet Boys, which joined Brian Littrell, Nick Carter, Kevin Richardson, and Howie Dorough with McLean. McLean was actually one of the first respondents) and several hundred more arrived at the open casting call he held the next year. Several dozen young men auditioned for Pearlman in his home (A.J. He placed an ad in the Orlando Sentinel calling for teenage boys to audition for a new act he was putting together. Pearlman relocated with his business to Florida in 1991 and shortly after, in early 1992, began jockeying for an entry point into music. By 1989, as that same VF report says, Pearlman was flying private and owned a 6,000-square-foot vacation home in Orlando.
His next move, Airship International, also in the business of leasing blimps, raised $3 million in a 1985 public offering and earned a contract with McDonalds. After a years-long battle with his insurer, Pearlman was awarded $2.5 million in damages.
So when Pearlman persuaded the Jordache Jeans ownership to sign a lease with him, he scrambled.Īs Vanity Fair recounted in their 2007 expose, he found the balloon materials in California and a contractor in New Jersey and the vehicle never survived its first flight. Except, and this was a problem, they didn’t have any blimps to deal. In the 1980s, one of his first companies, Airship Enterprises Ltd-not the aviation company(-ies) that would eventually put him in jail-dealt blimps. Instead, it was a settlement from a lawsuit he filed that made Pearlman a millionaire. But while he managed a band in high school, that’s not how the Flushing, New York native found his first cash windfall. It all began with a lawsuit.Īs the first cousin of Art Garfunkel, Pearlman was interested in getting rich via the music industry from a young age. Now, his rise-and notorious downfall-are on display in a YouTube Originals documentary, The Boy Band Con: The Lou Pearlma Story, produced by Lance Bass. He put together acts like Backstreet Boys, N*SYNC, and O-Town and transformed Orlando into the mecca of pop music. Before Lou Pearlman was exposed as a grifter of the finest degree and an orchestrator of one of the biggest Ponzi schemes in U.S.
0 kommentar(er)
