The tip was forwarded to the FBI, which sent agents to the island to question him. Pearlman eventually agreed to accompany the FBI to Guam, where he was arrested and taken back in Orlando in July I mean, he had told some of the biggest lies that you can tell.
He had made things up. He had made up an accounting firm. He'd made up a bank. And no one had ever caught him. Can't I just talk my way out of it? It just wasn't meant to be. Pearlman pleaded guilty to conspiracy to commit bank fraud, money laundering, bankruptcy and fraud in I'm a legitimate guy, and things just kind of got out of my control, and so I'm not a real criminal. A judge offered Pearlman an unusual proposal in an effort to uncover any funds that Pearlman might have hidden: For every million returned to victims, Pearlman would get a month shaved off his prison sentence.
Pearlman turned to what he knew best and started a Christmas choir inside prison — he even held auditions. Emily Dorsett, a talent developer, wanted to help his venture behind bars and flew from California to Florida to meet him.
It is part disaster movie, part warning from recent history. It is the age of the analytics-powered documentary. Pearlman joined a long line of svengalis who had infected the popular music industry since the s. Pearlman used his ostentatious lifestyle to seduce people and to distract from his lies. Renting a plane to the then ascendant New Kids on the Block in the mids showed him just how much money was sloshing about in the pop world, and whetted his substantial appetite for a share.
Louis Jay Pearlman was born in Flushing, N. His first cousin was Art Garfunkel. Pearlman got his entrepreneurial start in the late s, after graduating from Queens College with a degree in accounting, by founding a helicopter taxi service in New York City. He later moved into blimp leasing. After the maiden voyage of the newly minted Airship International crashed in New Jersey in , Pearlman aligned himself with a penny-stock operation.
By , he was traveling in a private jet and had relocated to temperate Orlando. All the while, Pearlman quietly was convincing would-be investors to get in on the ground floor of a flourishing -- and fallacious -- fleet of planes. Trans Continental would become the cornerstone of Pearlman's Ponzi scheme of 84 businesses of varying degrees of legitimacy, in which investors contributed to the company's Employee Investment Savings Accounts EISA program. After a string of blimp accidents in the early '90s, Pearlman soured on the airship business, remembering the time he chartered a plane in the late s for money-minting New Kids on the Block.
After touring and working nonstop for two years, including landing two No. The Backstreet Boys ultimately paid Pearlman to get out of their deal. Learning as much of the story as I could learn, it made me feel better about myself and I didn't feel so alone [because] when you see so many people have the same or similar stories and a lot of heartbreak that they went through, you now feel more of a part of a family.
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