Lou Pearlman was a big name in the music business in the 90s with boy groups like NSYNC and Backstreet Boys. On the side, he cheated investors out of millions with a pyramid scheme. A new Netflix documentary shows the life of the flamboyant fraudster.
This is original content from the Capital brand. This article will be available for ten days on stern.de. After that, you will find it exclusively on capital.de. Capital, like the star to RTL Germany.
The man with the powerful double chin and the figure of a whale caused sleepless nights for millions of girls. Lou Pearlman produced boy bands like an assembly line and made teen idols dance like dolls. This business made the manager famous – another would land him in prison.
Impressed by the musical success of his cousin Art Garfunkel, Pearlman, born in New York in 1954, played in a rock band in his youth – with little success. He had more success as a businessman. He bought zeppelins, started a helicopter taxi service, founded a travel agency and the charter airline Trans Continental Airlines. Pearlman was not yet 30 when he was already a millionaire. Even then, however, he was not very truthful. When one of his zeppelins crashed, he tried to defraud the insurance company – like almost every musician he later worked with.
Fascinated by the meteoric rise of the New Kids on the Block, Pearlman entered the pop business in the 1990s. He had his protégés call him “Big Poppa”, including legendary groups such as the Backstreet Boys, US5 and *NSYNC with Justin Timberlake. The bands sold millions of records – and “Big Poppa” earned a lot of money.
25 years in prison for Pearlman
But that wasn’t enough for him. Instead of living a quiet life under palm trees in Florida, where he had lived since 1991, like those that often adorned his loose Hawaiian shirts, Pearlman built one of the largest fast ball systems in the USA. In ten years, he collected over 300 million dollars from small investors who thought they were investing in the “Trans Continental Savings Program,” a kind of pension fund for the employees of Pearlman’s airline. However, the airline had hardly any employees. The boss pocketed the money.
When the authorities took a closer look at “Big Poppa’s” business practices in 2006, he was at an awards ceremony in Germany with his band US5. Pearlman fled and went into hiding. Months later, he was arrested in Bali and extradited to the USA. He was put on trial in 2008. The heavyweight was sentenced to 25 years in prison. The judge proposed a deal: for every million he paid back to his creditors, he would be given a month off his sentence. Pearlman did not accept it. He died in prison in August 2016.
main character
Lou Pearlman has enriched the pop world with the phenomenon of boy bands. No other producer has catapulted so many artificial groups into the charts. When asked how long the boy band hype would last, he once replied: “It won’t be over until God stops creating little girls.” In order to finance his extravagant lifestyle and his monstrous property in Florida, he set up one of the largest pyramid schemes in the USA – and defrauded investors of millions.
The documentary about Pearlman “Dirty Pop Business – The Boy Band Fraud” is running on Netflix.
Source: Stern
