Netflix’s new three-part docuseries, Dirty Pop: The Boy Band Scam, examines the rise and fall of the late Lou Pearlman, a music manager who created – and then exploited – some of the biggest boy bands of the ‘90s, including Backstreet Boys, *NSYNC, O-Town and LFO.
By 2006, he was accused of running a industry scam that at one point had $300 million in debts. He fled the country, was captured, and sent to prison in 2008. But what happened next, and what other dark secrets was he hiding?
The backstory
As a child growing up in New York in the ‘60s, Pearlman was obsessed with blimps and the world of aviation. His first blimp-based advertising business, Airships International, had a somewhat rocky start: its only blimp crashed soon after takeoff. But he didn’t give up on his dream, and he eventually founded an air charter company, Trans Continental Airlines, which flew music acts around the world (as well as high net worth clients).
In 1992, sensing an opportunity, he moved into the music world. Pearlman placed an ad in the Orlando Sentinel to compose a vocal group with a “New Kids on the Block look with a Boyz II Men Sound”. The result was the Backstreet Boys, who went on to become the best-selling boy band of all time, selling more than 100 million records worldwide.
On the back of that success, Pearlman soon became a music mogul. He launched other best-selling bands like NSYNC, LFO and O-Town, created on the TV show Making The Band. He also continued to seek substantial investments from banks and wealthy people for his aviation companies, which only ever existed on paper – the planes featured in the brochures of Trans Continental Airlines, for examples, were actually model airplanes. All the while, he was also conducting a large-scale insurance scam.
The music lawsuits
The lawsuits eventually started rolling in for Pearlman. In 1997, Brian Littrell from the Back Street Boys sued him, asking why the band had only received around $12,000 a year while Pearlman had raked in millions of dollars. A year later the rest of the band joined the litigation,at which point they discovered that Pearlman was credited as a sixth member of the band.
The lawsuit was settled, but Pearlman retained a portion of the brand’s future revenues and carried on with the exploitative financial treatment of his other groups. *NSYNC sued and later settled with Pearlman in 1999, and according to Vanity Fair, in a 2006 interview, Justin Timberlake said the band felt it “was being financially raped by a Svengali.”
The lawsuits began to pile up and in 2002, the 14-year-old singer Nick Carter 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.
By 2006, investigators discovered Pearlman had been behind one of the longest-running Ponzi schemes in American history and that he had defrauded investors and banks out of more than $1 billion. The FBI raided his mansion with a warrant for his arrest, but he had fled.
His capture and arrest
There had been sightings of Pearlman in Germany, Russia, Panama and Brazil, but in June 2007, a German tourist on holiday with his wife in Bali recognised Pearlman from a newspaper report about boy bands. The tourist took a picture and sent it to a journalist in Florida, who passed it on to the FBI and Pearlman was arrested the next day in his hotel.
On May 21, 2008, Pearlman was sentenced to 25 years in prison on charges of conspiracy, money laundering, and making false statements during a bankruptcy proceeding.
His death
In 2010, Pearlman had a stroke in 2010 while in prison. In 2016, he had surgery to replace a heart valve, and on 19 August of that same year he died from cardiac arrest in the Federal Correctional Institution in Miami, Florida.