Lou Pearlman

The documentary The Boy Band Con: The Lou Pearlman Story premiered at SXSW on March 13, 2019. It was released on YouTube Premium in April 2019.

On December 13, 2019, Pearlman was the subject of an episode of ABC's 20/20 titled "The Hitman: From Pop to Prison".

The members of Backstreet Boys were the first to file a lawsuit against Pearlman, feeling that their contract—under which Pearlman collected as both manager and producer—was unfair, because Pearlman was also paid as a sixth member of the Backstreet Boys (i.e., one-sixth of the band's own income). The band's dissatisfaction began when member Brian Littrell hired a lawyer to determine why the group had received only $300,000 for all of their work while Pearlman and his record label had made millions. Fellow boy band *NSYNC was having similar issues with Pearlman, and its members soon followed suit.

With these two major successes under his belt, Pearlman had become a music mogul. Other boy bands managed by Pearlman were O-Town (created during the ABC–MTV reality television series Making the Band), LFO, Take 5, Natural and US5, as well as the girl group Innosense (with Britney Spears in the very beginning as a short-term member), co-managed with Lynn Harless (the mother of *NSYNC band member Justin Timberlake). Other artists on the Trans Continental label included Aaron Carter, Jordan Knight, Smilez & Southstar and C-Note. Pearlman also owned a large entertainment complex in Orlando, including a recording studio he called Trans Continental Studios, and a dance studio near Disney World named O-Town. In 2002, Pearlman and Wes Smith co-wrote Bands, Brands and Billions: My Top 10 Rules for Making Any Business Go Platinum.

In a 2009 interview with Howard Stern, Rich Cronin, the former lead singer of band LFO, said that he only had received a fraction of the money owed to him from record sales, and claimed that Pearlman had "wanted to bang everyone", and had attempted to seduce him multiple times. Cronin also alleged that those who did oblige Pearlman were looked after.

Pearlman was featured in the third season of American Greed in the episode called "Boy Band Mogul" in 2009.

Five days before his sentencing, Pearlman requested a telephone and an Internet connection two days a week to continue to promote bands. U. S. District Judge G. Kendall Sharp rejected the request. On May 21, 2008, Sharp sentenced Pearlman to 25 years in prison on charges of conspiracy, money laundering, and making false statements during a bankruptcy proceeding. Pearlman could reduce his prison time by one month for every million dollars he helped a bankruptcy trustee recover. He also ordered individual investors to be paid before institutions in distributing any eventual assets.

Fashion Rock, LLC lived on until February 2, 2007, when its assets were sold in Pearlman's bankruptcy proceeding. Difrawi continued filing lawsuits that were all dismissed and was most recently running Expand, Inc. dba Softrock.org aka Employer Network, from the same address as former TCT.

In February 2007, Florida regulators announced that Pearlman's Trans Continental Savings Program was indeed a massive fraud, and the state took possession of the company. Most of the at least $95 million which was collected from investors was gone. Orange County Circuit Judge Renee Roche ordered Pearlman and two of his associates, Robert Fischetti and Michael Crudelle, to bring back to the United States "any assets taken abroad which were derived from illegal transactions."

Following a flight from officials, over the course of which he reportedly had been seen in Israel and Germany, Pearlman was arrested in Indonesia on June 14, 2007 after being spotted by a tourist couple from Germany. He was living in a tourist hotel in Nusa Dua in Bali. Pearlman had been seen in Orlando in late January 2007, in early February in Germany, including an appearance on German television on February 1. Reportedly he was seen in Russia, Belarus, Israel, Spain, Panama, and Brazil. In early February, an attorney in Florida received a letter from Pearlman sent from Bali. Pearlman was then indicted by a federal grand jury on June 27, 2007. Specifically, Pearlman was charged with three counts of bank fraud, one count of mail fraud and one count of wire fraud.

Pearlman and his companies were forced into involuntary bankruptcy in March 2007. Trustees and lenders auctioned off Pearlman's assets and personal belongings through eBay and a traditional bankruptcy auction. Church Street Station, a historic train station in downtown Orlando which Pearlman had purchased in 2002, was sold at a bankruptcy auction in April 2007 for $34 million. Several of Pearlman's belongings, including his college degrees, were purchased by The A.V. Club journalist and film critic Nathan Rabin during the eBay auction.

In 2006, investigators discovered Pearlman had perpetrated a long-running Ponzi scheme that defrauded investors out of more than $300 million. For more than 20 years, Pearlman had enticed individuals and banks to invest in Trans Continental Airlines Travel Services Inc. and Trans Continental Airlines Inc., both of which existed only on paper. Pearlman used falsified Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, AIG and Lloyd's of London documents to win investors' confidence in his program titled Employee Investment Savings Account, and he used fake financial statements created by the fictitious accounting firm Cohen and Siegel to secure bank loans.

By June 2004, Fashion Rock, LLC had filed a civil suit for defamation against some who had criticized Pearlman's talent businesses. The case was dismissed and closed in 2006. One of the accused, a Canadian consumer-fraud expert Les Henderson, successfully pursued a libel lawsuit against Pearlman, Tolner, El-Difrawi and several others.

At the age of 14, Aaron Carter filed a lawsuit in 2002 that accused Pearlman and Trans Continental of cheating him out of hundreds of thousands of dollars and of racketeering in a deliberate pattern of criminal activity. This suit was later settled out of court.

In September 2002, Pearlman purchased Mark Tolner's internet-based talent company, Options Talent Group – formerly Emodel and Studio 58, – which would subsequently go through several names including Trans Continental Talent (TCT), Wilhelmina Talent Scouting (WSN), Web Style Network, Fashion Rock, and Talent Rock. Regardless of the name, all incarnations were based on the business model used by Emodel founder Ayman "Alec" Difrawi, himself a convicted con artist, who played a principal role in running Options/TCT/WSN and setting up Fashion Rock. The companies received unfavorable press attention, ranging from questions about their business practices to outright declarations that they were scams. After Hotjobs and Monster.com pulled over a thousand of the company's job ads from their boards, they were further advertised on the Difrawi-founded "Industry Magazine" website.

Pearlman then relocated Airship International to Orlando, Florida in July 1991, where he signed MetLife and SeaWorld as clients for his blimps. Airship International suffered when one of its clients left and three of the aircraft crashed. The company's stock, which had once been pumped up to $6 a share, dropped to a price of three cents a share, and the company was shut down.

After he took his air charter company, Airship International, public in 1985, Pearlman became personally and professionally close to Jerome Rosen, a partner at small-cap trading outfit Norbay Securities. Based in Bayside, Queens, and frequently in trouble with regulators, Norbay actively traded Airship stock. This sent Airship's stock price consistently higher, enabling Pearlman to sell hundreds of thousands of shares and warrants at ever-higher prices. However, Airship was reporting little revenue, cash flow or net income. In return for keeping his penny stock liquid, Pearlman allegedly paid Rosen handsome commissions, according to a mutual friend, that reached into 'the tens of thousands of dollars' per trade.

Garfunkel's fame and wealth helped inspire Pearlman's own interest in the music business. As a teenager he managed a band, but when success in music proved elusive, he turned his attention to aviation. During his first year as a student at Queens College, Pearlman wrote a business plan for a class project based on the idea of a helicopter taxi service in New York City. By the late 1970s, he had launched the business based on his business plan, starting with one helicopter. He persuaded German businessman Theodor Wüllenkemper to train him on blimps and subsequently spent some time at Wüllenkemper's facilities in West Germany learning about the airships.

Louis Jay Pearlman (June 19, 1954 – August 19, 2016) was an American record producer. He was the creator of successful 1990s boy bands such as Backstreet Boys and NSYNC. In 2006, he was accused of running one of the largest and longest-running Ponzi schemes in history, leaving more than $300 million in debts. After being apprehended, he pleaded guilty to conspiracy, money laundering, and making false statements during a bankruptcy proceeding. In 2008, Pearlman was convicted and sentenced to up to 25 years in prison. He died in federal custody in 2016.