Dirty Pop: The Boy Band Scam (2024) s01e03 Episode Script

1
[static humming]
[static humming]
Louis, this is your Uncle Jack
and your Aunt Rose's son, Art Garfunkel,
and I'm talking to you
through my camera in this hotel room
to make a little tape
for your 50th birthday
because our Garfunkel family
has always loved you
and I especially, Louis.
So happy birthday, Lou.
["Saturday Night" playing]
[Aaron] All right, everybody knows
it's Saturday night, right?
All right, it's time to party.
Here we go! Whoo!
Hands up in the air.
I know you're eating,
but come on, it's time to clap.
Every year,
Lou had a lavish birthday party.
His 50th was unbelievable.
[Mandy] There were powerful politicians.
There were music people.
[man] Hold on, everybody.
Hulk Hogan's got him in a headlock.
They wanted the glitz and glamour
that Lou brought.
He created musicians
who became extremely famous,
and everybody wanted a piece.
[Howie] Hello, everybody.
My name is Howie D
from the Backstreet Boys,
and, uh, I just wanted to come out
and say a couple of words to Lou,
who, uh, as I know, is, uh, Big Poppa.
I remember feeling a little weird
because I kept on going
to the Trans Continental parties.
The guys didn't really agree with me.
But I was like, "This is Lou.
This is the guy that gave us our dream."
You've been a great inspiration,
my mentor in life.
And God bless you.
Happy 50th birthday, buddy.
[audience cheering, applauding]
Lou was a very, very smart man.
And he had enough stories,
enough knowledge, enough energy to himself
that you would believe whatever he said.
Betrayal is such a hard word.
For many, many years, I didn't see it.
Enjoy the party.
Thank you for coming. Thank you.
[eerie music playing]
[eerie music ends]
[interviewer 1] What do you think about
the hysteria of boy bands?
That there are so many girls screaming?
People tell me, you know,
that boy bands are over.
And I know boy bands are not over
because boy bands are over
when God stops making little girls.
Until then, it's working.
[interviewer 2]
You ever heard him say that?
Have I ever heard him say that?
[intriguing music playing]
Too many times to count.
But at that time, the world was changing.
The pop world was changing.
Music was changing.
And everyone was pretty much,
like, over boy bands.
Didn't realize Chris Kirkpatrick
rhymed with "get your ass kicked."
Anybody who's talking this and that ♪
Chris Kirkpatrick
You can get your ass kicked ♪
Like, we have Eminem. We have Kid Rock.
Diddy. No more boy bands, please.
[somber music playing]
[fan] Izzy, you're crazy.
[Michael] Even though people had moved on,
in 2005, Lou made a television show
in Europe called Big in America.
Big in America ♪
This is a chance to become a star ♪
I played the role of a tour manager
for a few episodes.
The following two days you'll be
shooting the video at Universal Studios.
Following that, you're going to New York
for press, live radio, PR meetings.
The day after that
you're performing live for 2,000 people.
Two weeks.
The premise of the show was
that this band was big in America.
There is so much a man can tell you
So much he can say ♪
You remain my power,
My pleasure, my pain ♪
Baby ♪
Turns out they'd never even played a show
or sold a record or anything in America.
Baby, I compare you to
A kiss from a rose on the gray ♪
But, hey, it worked for him.
- [photographer] Thank you.
- Thank you.
All right.
[interviewer] He titled himself
as the Big Poppa of Natural.
Mm-hmm.
[interviewer] Is he the Big Poppa of you?
Yeah. I mean,
he's he's definitely a father figure.
He's an inspiration
because no matter what,
he figures out a way
to make everything work.
[Marc] Mike.
[man] I was like
[Marc] How you feel?
[Michael] Once my band broke up,
Lou and I were gonna
start a business together.
I wanted to sign some alternative bands
and start this, like,
TV business with him.
At this point, he was no longer
my manager. We were partners.
But it was also, on the personal level,
very mentor-protégé.
Outside of all the glitz and glamour
and the huge houses
and the Rolls-Royces and everything,
he was an insecure kid
whose nickname was "fat boy"
and would get picked on all the time.
He found his alternate reality
in this world, in the pop music world.
[Lou] My business associates often give me
a hard time for being too nice
in negotiations and deal-making.
But at the end of the day,
I'd rather have
the people I do business with
feel like they've been treated fairly.
Remember that what
you are really trying to build
is a life that you can look back on
and feel good about.
[interviewer]
What'd you think of Lou's book?
Br [laughs]
Brands, Bands
[interviewer] And Billions.
Brands [laughing]
The first time
that I ever heard about Lou Pearlman
was when I got a call from a reader.
"What do you know about this Lou Pearlman
and Trans Continental Airlines,
this investment?"
They said that it was
some kind of FDIC-insured investment,
and it was going to have this nice yield
which was higher than the highest yields
people could get anywhere.
And then some of them are like,
"Oh, look."
"It's got extra insurance
from Lloyd's of London."
It also was being called
an Employee Investment Savings Account,
but Lou said that everyone in the world
could buy into it.
So, something was not right.
Soon after I started writing about it,
that caused this whole flood of people
asking for their money back.
[whimsical music playing]
[Cheney] After the litigation and stuff
with the Backstreet Boys,
Pearlman just went on with his life.
But you know,
the son of a bitch owes me money.
And by the way, even today,
16 million dollars will get my attention.
He'd paid us a million and a half,
but then it stopped and there was no more.
Then he tried to have a check sent to me
from a bank in Munich.
I called my friend in Munich,
and he checked it out.
The address was a vacant lot.
You can reasonably assume here
that I was pissed,
and I would devote my time
and my energies to square that.
[tense music playing]
By 2006, it was starting to get
a little bit rough,
and people were calling for their money.
[Scott] All Ponzi schemes grow
to a certain point,
and if you don't bring in new investors
to cover the old investors,
you'll have trouble.
That's when
the first signs of trouble come.
[Danielle] They'd tell friends and family,
"Hey, this investment I told you about
is being looked into."
And once those people started to request
their money, it just snowballed.
[Mandy] Nobody wanted to talk
to the shareholders,
and I was the only one that was
continuing to answer the phones.
They'd call up furious and fuming,
and some even came
actually up to the office.
[Melissa] Investors started coming into
all of the different entities
looking to get money,
to where there would be,
like, scenes being made.
"Where's my money?"
"How can I get my money?"
People were stealing things
from the studio and the mansion,
trying to get whatever they could.
[Melissa] At that time, there were
different investors coming around,
and I'm not gonna say "shady,"
but I might say "shady."
Just didn't seem like these people were
people that you'd wanna be involved with
unless you needed
something really desperate.
[tense music continues]
[Patrick] I started seeing a lot of cars
parked out front of the house.
Cars I had never seen.
I lived there for seven years.
Gated, people are waiting,
following people in.
You know, and I grew up with guns,
like, something just was like,
you need to have the gun in in your room.
Before that, I knew that he had
an investment savings account.
It got high yields,
and he would never let me do it.
"No, no, no.
You don't want to do that. No, no, no."
And I don't know, like,
what eventually made him change his mind
and say, "Okay."
But I had a lot of my own money,
over 100,000 dollars, invested in this.
[interviewer] I am curious to know
if you invested.
I'd rather not talk about it. [chuckles]
Yeah, so
- [interviewer] Understood.
- Yeah.
[Marc] A lot of people lost money,
Um, Frankie's mom being one of them.
Frankie would still be alive today.
We'd all be much better off today if
if Lou didn't do any of this.
[Jerry] It was sad, the whole situation.
Um, I think Frankie took, uh,
the bad way out if he did commit suicide.
[interviewer] Do you believe
that Frankie's death was a suicide?
[inhales deeply]
I believe that it was.
Lou did not believe that it was.
What he told me,
probably two months after the fact,
was that Frankie was murdered.
And I go, "Who did this?"
"Well, I don't know,
but I'm gonna find out."
And I told him,
"One minute, you don't care,
and the next minute,
'He was murdered, ' and now you care?"
"That doesn't make any sense."
But knowing what I know now,
I believe that Lou was, at that point,
probably starting to panic, in a way,
because his stories
are spiraling out of control.
[pensive music playing]
[Marc] We had
this beautiful space downtown.
I'm standing in front of the elevator,
and as it comes down, he comes into frame.
Doors open up. He's like,
"Hey, I gotta run.
I just want to say I love you."
"I'm going out.
I'm gonna be on vacation a while."
"Thank you for everything."
"Okay?" Okay.
A few weeks later,
the FBI raided that space.
- [tense music playing]
- [sirens wailing]
[indistinct police radio chatter]
[woman speaking over radio]
We had a warrant
for the Church Street office.
We seized a ton of documents.
I was able to go in with the FBI that day
and bring out boxes of evidence.
[Mandy] I was sitting typing
and they said,
"Would you please
lift your hands off your keyboard."
"Do not touch one thing,
and please would you come with me."
And I thought, "That's it. I'm done."
[Danielle] There was also a search warrant
for his home,
and I went with the team that day as well.
Lou Pearlman wasn't there,
but there was a young man there
that was taking care of the house.
[Patrick] I could see local news trucks,
unmarked cars,
people in the FBI jackets
that you see on TV.
Every drawer, every cabinet,
everything is open.
And then I saw Scott Skinner,
and he's like,
"Patrick King,
we've been waiting for you."
There was a safe at the house
that you could tell
had been cleaned out in a hurry.
By the time we did the search
on his office and his house,
he had been gone, from what I understand,
approximately six weeks.
[Andy] Lou left the country,
and his story to everybody
that was asking questions about it was
he was gonna get the money
out of the lock boxes.
He was going to make this all right.
He'll be back, and he'll figure it out.
[music ends]
Meager cash flow
is the primary cause of migraine headaches
and upset stomachs among
entrepreneurs and new business owners.
Cash flow is the fuel
to get your business started
and keeps it running.
Without the dough, it won't go.
[Tammie] It was a few weeks after
the raid on Church Street
when I started hearing
about the investment scheme.
I didn't know anything about it.
[Mandy] Somebody from the inside
must have been giving
the feds information.
There was somebody at Trans Con
that was probably a snitch.
[interviewer] Did you have anybody
from within the company
that you guys were working with?
No.
Uh, Lou kept everybody at a distance.
He didn't want anybody
to be able to say what was going on.
Lou and I were starting our company
together, so we went on the road.
Our first stop was Dublin.
He was gonna accept a Lifetime Achievement
Award at this big award show.
We went from Dublin to Berlin.
We had some investor meetings there.
From there, we would go to Spain,
down to Panama,
and we ultimately wound up in Bali.
When I was traveling with Lou,
I wasn't on the lam.
I wasn't on the run.
I was starting a business.
I had no freaking idea what was going on.
[eerie music playing]
A close friend of Lou's called me
and told me
what was going on with the investments.
I didn't think my son would have
been involved in taking money
and wasting somebody else's money.
My son was not that kind of a guy.
Frankie was so loyal to Lou Pearlman.
He defended him.
And I think it broke his heart
when he learned about this.
[Scott] There's a reason
people want their money out
because they heard
their cousin tried to get their money out,
and they couldn't.
And their friend tried to get
their money out, and they couldn't.
You start seeing things in the news,
and that's when the collapse begins.
[reporter] Connie and Pat Caesar say
they've been badly burned
by Trans Continental Airlines
and the man who runs it,
boy band mogul Lou Pearlman.
According to the Caesars,
they invested 300,000 dollars
in the company's savings program
that offered the public
big returns and no risk.
[Connie] He's just taken our lives away.
[reporter] Two months ago, the Caesars
tried to get their investment back,
but the money,
their life savings, never arrived.
[dramatic music playing]
What these people were promised was
that their account was held in their name
with their own account number in a bank.
If the bank were to collapse
for some reason,
then the funds would be FDIC-insured.
But their statement
didn't come from a bank.
It came from Trans Continental Airlines.
Lou had Trans Continental Airlines,
which ironically, I never, not once,
saw a Trans Continental airplane.
[Chris] When you're a naive kid
and see airplanes on somebody's desk
and they say they own an airline,
you believe them.
[Danielle] Trans Continental Airlines
was supposedly an airline company
that he ran that owned,
I think it was, like, maybe 50 planes,
and supposedly celebrities or corporations
would lease and rent jets from him.
[Lou] We started leasing airplanes,
and we started leasing them
to not only airlines
but also to people
in the rock and roll industry
like New Kids on the Block.
Ultimately, we discovered
that none of that was true.
He didn't have any planes.
There were no operations at all
other than this investment scam.
[Helen] They had this little brochure
about Trans Continental Airlines,
where he had this picture
that was actually someone holding up
a model plane
with the airport in the background.
The hand of the person is just cut off
so that it doesn't appear in the picture.
[Cheney] Pearlman was a master forger.
He would forge signatures
and create false seals.
[Danielle] He provided us with a statement
from German Savings Bank
showing he had 30 million dollars
in this bank in Germany.
And it turned out, of course,
that the German Savings Bank
was never a legitimate bank.
Lou Pearlman had totally false
bank statements, tax returns.
State documents also accuse Pearlman
of using a mysterious accounting firm
to hide the scheme
from investors and Wall Street.
[Helen] He did create
this fake accounting firm
called Cohen & Siegel,
which was named after two gangsters,
Mickey Cohen and Bugsy Siegel.
[Danielle] And then a couple of investors
got a letter signed by Harry Milner,
CFO of Trans Continental Airlines,
assuring them that
this was all just a big misunderstanding
and that everything was gonna be fine
and they'd be able to get their money out.
And we were all saying,
"Who's Harry Milner?"
We've been working on this for a year
and never heard of this person.
[Scott] We kept trying
to contact Harry Milner
to ask him, "Hey, what's going on here?
Where are you getting these numbers?"
Sadly, we'd come to find out
that Harry Milner had passed away
long before any of these returns
had been signed.
[Danielle] There was an association
between Lou Pearlman and Harry Milner,
but it was many, many years ago.
And when we actually
went into the offices,
they found where Lou Pearlman
had actually written the letter
and given it to his assistant to type up.
There were a couple of files
that I took of Lou's
that I was just kind of iffy about.
Letters that maybe
could be perceived differently
that I'd written to some people.
I just was
I thought, I don't want anybody
I didn't want anyone else reading them.
[Danielle] Ultimately, we found
over 1,000 people had invested
in this plan.
It had gotten up to
probably 300 million dollars.
[Scott] He also ran a bank Ponzi scheme,
if you will,
because he went to one bank
and he'd borrow 100,000 dollars.
When that became mature,
he'd go to the next bank
and borrow 200,000 dollars,
so he could pay this money back
and then still have some money
to take out.
And he kept building on that
until the loans were in the millions.
Lou's investor Ponzi scheme
was like 300 million,
and the bank fraud was like 200 million.
That we know about.
[reporter] This Polk County man
who wants to be anonymous
had invested
nearly a quarter of a million dollars.
Pearlman himself picked him up
in a limo, took him to dinner,
and showed him documents to prove
that the savings program was FDIC-insured.
[man] When he picked that paper up
with the seal, I believed him.
[helicopter blades whirring]
[Patrick] As the things with the news
started picking up more and more,
then I started knowing
something serious was going on.
It has affected my grandchildren
because that money was there
for their college education.
It it's gone.
[Erik-Michael] When all of the news
started coming out about that stuff,
I recall feeling a sense of being used,
but also, like, and these people
must think that we were in on it with him.
- [Lou laughing]
- [indistinct chatter]
He should be put in jail
and kept in jail until he dies.
[Marc] I was floored.
Wait, hold on,
ripped off people from their retirement?
You know, I was a cop.
To hear that, it it was devastating.
[man] He's a crook.
He's a crook. Put him in jail.
[eerie music playing]
Traditionally, in the FBI, you don't have
any formal relationships with the media.
But Helen was writing a lot of things
about the Pearlman investigation,
and I just called her up one day and said,
"Hey, can we help each other out here?"
You know, that sort of thing.
[Helen] I had this blog
that was part of the St. Petersburg Times.
It's called Money Talk,
and a lot of people followed that
because they were interested in Lou.
And so people would be posting rumors
about, you know,
he's here, he's there, and of course,
the investors really wanted him
to be brought to justice.
[Scott] You got to realize
that once you become a fugitive,
that next knock at the door, what is that?
Where am I gonna go today?
[Michael] During the time we were in Bali,
he was relying on me solely
for his freedom.
I didn't know at the time.
His assets had been frozen,
which forced all of the travel
to be on my credit card.
So it was chaos, but I was like,
there's been 12-15 lawsuits
every other time,
and he's gotten out of them
and just cruised on.
I start to go down to
the business center of the Westin in Bali,
and I'm, like, seeing
all of these news reports about Lou.
And this woman, Helen Huntley,
had a message board,
and people that I recognize
are trying to find Lou.
So I'm sitting next to him
in this business center,
and he's sketching away over there,
and then he picks up the the paper,
and he shows it to me,
and he says, "Does this look real to you?"
And it says "German Savings Bank" on it,
and he had hand-drawn this bank seal
for, like, a loan document,
and he faxed it off from
the business center to Bank of America
I think it was for a million dollars.
And he got the damn loan.
And I was like, "Dude, you got to tell me
what's going on. This is not right."
"Oh no, buddy. This is how you have to
do business on a global scale."
The next day, I called my family.
And I left.
[tense music playing]
[Helen] I did get a call from a reader
who was also staying
at this resort in Bali.
He was walking on the beach with his wife
and saw Lou out there.
[camera shutter clicks]
[Scott] Helen's contacted me saying,
"Hey, I got this reader
who thinks he's seen Lou Pearlman
in the hotel he was at."
Okay. I said, "Well, where's the hotel?"
"Indonesia."
"Okay, let's go."
[camera shutter clicks]
So, the reader had his camera,
and he and his wife,
they were eating breakfast in the hotel,
and they saw Lou.
And they took a picture.
[camera shutter clicks]
[Scott] And when he took the picture,
not only did he get Lou,
he got my two agents
at the table next to Lou,
watching him at the time.
I'm getting contacted by
the guys in Jakarta. "Yeah, that's Lou."
I said, "Well, we got
an arrest warrant for him."
"Get him out of there."
Good morning. Good morning, everyone.
Boy band mogul, Lou Pearlman,
has been arrested.
Pearlman appeared in court in Guam today
after spending months
hiding from authorities.
The creator of NSYNC
and the Backstreet Boys
is accused of bank fraud
and faces several lawsuits.
Pearlman was picked up in Indonesia
Thursday and turned over to the FBI.
[Michael] Three days after I came back
from Bali,
woke up 6:45 in the morning
to a call saying,
"Michael Johnson,
this is Agent Scott Skinner from the FBI."
"We've arrested Lou Pearlman in Bali,
and he was under the name
Incognito Johnson."
I'm Michael Johnson.
He registered as Incognito Johnson
because we were on my credit card.
Through that,
the investigation was tied back to me.
I had depositions of ten hours.
I mean, it was just horrible. I
And the person that interviewed me,
Agent Skinner,
he was just very harsh,
and I felt like I'd done something,
and I and I hadn't.
Lou never involved me
in any of that stuff.
[Lou] Yes, I'm guilty
of making a profit
after taking a huge risk,
and I'm guilty
of making multi-millionaires
out of a whole bunch of young singers too.
I don't think that makes me a bad person.
[pensive music playing]
[Julia] When Lou Pearlman was caught,
I felt relieved and glad
that they found him.
Happy.
When Lou was caught,
the cop in me cheered.
You know, like, "I can't believe
you did this to people."
"I can't believe that
I'm somehow associated with that."
He betrayed the family.
[man announcing indistinctly]
[Chris] Lou was a snake.
He was so busy seeing the shiny objects
that he didn't see who he hurt.
[reporter] Several investors say
Pearlman would remind them
he ran a major entertainment empire.
[Lou] I'm going to be doing this contract
with Michael Jackson.
[reporter] These broken promises
left the Caesars devastated.
We don't know where the next dollar
is going to come from.
We don't have any other money.
If I went to sleep tonight
and didn't wake up,
I'm fine with that
because at least I can find some peace.
[helicopter blades whirring]
[reporter] But three years before
federal agents stormed into
Lou Pearlman's entertainment empire,
then Assistant State Attorney General
Jackie Dowd had been hot on the trail
of another Pearlman company.
- [interviewer] You felt you had a case.
- I very strongly felt I had a case.
[reporter] According to Dowd,
the state had 2,000 complaints
from consumers who felt misled
by Pearlman's model scouting company,
Trans Continental Talent,
but Dowd says just when she was ready
to file a massive consumer fraud case,
she was forced to resign,
and several months later,
the Attorney General's office
shut down the investigation
and cleared the company.
[Scott] A lot of people thought
that investigation was dismissed
because of Lou's relationship
with certain people, okay?
That's as far as I'm gonna go with that.
You know, there were rumors
that he had relationships
with the Attorney General
of the state of Florida at the time.
[reporter 1] A federal lawsuit filed
this week
accused Crist of not doing his job then
and claims that investigation
could have uncovered
the Pearlman savings program in 2004.
[reporter 2] But ultimately,
the suit against Crist was thrown out.
[audience cheering]
[Lou] It's such a great honor
to have right here in our hometown
probably the number one sheriff
in the United States.
[Michael] People will do anything
for fame.
But people will do almost anything
for the proximity to somebody famous.
Whatever we have to do
to get him re-elected
over and over again, brother,
we'll do it!
[audience cheers]
[Michael] And Lou used that to bring in
more and more investment.
Everything he'd always been doing,
it was always a front for investment.
Graphic depictions
[Michael] It snowballed
over 40-something years,
and it had different heads,
but the heart of it was always the same.
[inaudible]
[tense music playing]
[Helen] On the federal level,
the case against Lou was brought by
the District Attorney's office in Orlando.
[Cheney] Seems to me that
it was pretty quick from indictment
to him negotiating
and entering a plea of guilty.
[Danielle] I was very happy
that he pled guilty
because the way he was
and the way his personality was,
you know, you kind of thought
he would go down fighting.
You know, there were investors
who came to the sentencing
and talked about
how he had ruined their lives.
There was no remorse, nothing.
I I don't understand people like that.
[reporter 1]
You don't expect to see a penny back?
No, not at all.
[reporter 2] Lawyers who packed
today's Lou Pearlman hearing
circled like sharks afterward.
Each wants his client
at the top of the payback list.
I do feel confident
that he has, uh, money.
Uh, but, uh, if I had the ability to prove
that he had money I'd have already got it.
I was on the front row,
and Pearlman turned around.
He's kind of ashen-looking.
I said, "You should've paid me,
you asshole."
I wanted to be there
when the hammer came down.
Lou Pearlman sentenced today
for defrauding banks and investors.
The judge handed down
a 25-year prison sentence,
but Pearlman can have a month reduced
for each million he pays back.
[Cheney] The Federal District Judge
told Mr. Pearlman,
"For every million dollars
you can turn over to the government,
I'll reduce your sentence by a month."
In essence,
you can buy your way out of prison.
[Jerry] His sentence was 25 years,
which is unheard of.
Murderers don't get 25 years,
and this was a financial crime.
They would've hung him if they could.
[audience cheering]
[Erik-Michael] I never thought
Lou was going to meet
any sort of consequence.
I thought when he went to prison,
he was going to be out fast.
[Melissa] I was so confused
when Lou went to prison.
The emotion of it, it's still cloudy,
you know, it's still cloudy for me.
[Marc] I never went to go see him.
I never saw him in jail.
I didn't go visit him.
There was no contact from me.
I knew I needed to separate myself
from the situation, so I didn't call him.
That was it.
[Michael] I still had
that feeling of friendship,
but at the same time,
I was kind of glad he was where he was.
[interviewer] Did you visit him?
Uh, well, they wouldn't let me
because I had some, uh,
legal problems myself at the time.
So they, actually
I tried to, and they kept denying me.
But when he was in prison,
a guy named Peter contacted me.
He was telling me they loved Lou.
They loved him in jail.
[laughing]
Ex-wife would always say,
"You have an evil laugh."
I'd go [laughing]
I was like,
"You don't know what's going on."
[whimsical music playing]
I knew the Lou Pearlman
that was in the real world,
and I knew the Lou Pearlman in prison.
Right around 2000,
I met Lou in his office.
He was very down-to-earth,
great guy, and we hit it off right away.
We were gonna do the deal
with the Church Street Station.
I met the owners.
And then, unfortunately, I got arrested.
I was arrested for RICO, mail fraud,
bank fraud, and conspiracy to all those.
I was in county jail awaiting sentencing,
and I opened up the newspaper,
and I see, right on the front page,
him getting on a plane with shackles.
I'm like, "Oh my God,
if he actually goes to prison,
we can hang out together. It'd be great."
So I'm sitting at lunch,
and I look outside,
and I said, "My God, that's Lou!"
I ran out of the chow hall.
I walked over to him,
and he was like, "Oh my God, Peter.
What are you doing here?"
[operator] This call is from
[Lou] Lou Pearlman.
[operator] an inmate at a federal prison.
I have hundreds of missed calls
and voicemails
from when Lou would call me from prison.
- So, how are you?
- [Lou] I'm doing great, buddy.
I'm walking up by the track,
doing my thing, and
A number of times he got beat up
trying to, like, rat people out
and, like, trying to get deals
for ratting people out,
and he'd get beat up for it.
Hello?
- [Lou] Mikey Mike. What's happening?
- [Michael] How's it going?
[Lou] It's going good. Chilling out,
doing my thing, you know.
[Michael] I got your email, it says
you have some meetings
coming up with your lawyers?
[Lou] Yep.
He didn't have any lawyers.
[Lou] So it looks really, really good.
[Michael] Right.
I would always know
that most of what he's saying is not true.
So he's, like, just making up
all this stuff
in this, like, fantasy world
that he built for himself in prison.
And I never got a sense,
in talking with him or visiting with him,
that he felt
that he deserved to be in prison.
It was frustrating.
He just never copped to it.
[somber music playing]
[Melissa] I personally believe
that Lou wanted to handle the situation
by paying his investors back
because I feel, in his mind,
he wasn't doing anything wrong.
[Danielle] I don't think he ever had
any intention to pay anyone back,
and I don't think
he would have ever been able to.
I mean, he spent the money.
At the end of the day, I believe
everybody would have been made whole.
You know, time.
He needed a little bit more time.
Everybody believed he really had
all this money buried somewhere,
of which nobody found.
I don't believe it was true.
He never did account for
about 125 million dollars.
But keep in mind,
we all had tried to estimate what it was
based on his financial bank statements
and tax returns
that we know were all false.
I mean, so, you know,
it could have been a billion dollars.
He told me that he had two and a half to
three billion in the Cook Islands hidden,
that no one will ever get to.
[Tammie] Criminals don't understand
that criminals lie to each other.
They backstab each other
because this one wants what that one has.
That one wants what this one has,
and they just play this song and dance
until somebody goes to jail,
somebody gets caught, somebody dies.
"This document originated from
a correctional facility."
That's always nice on a piece of mail.
He wrote me several letters
while he was in jail.
"Hi, babe. I'm still doing my thing."
"It's crazy being in a medium prison
with life-sentenced inmates
and drug dealers."
"I've also been getting
tons of rappers auditioning."
And he's got a helicopter
flying over the Orange County Jail
to break him out.
[helicopter blades whirring]
[Peter] One day, I'm in the chow hall,
and I said, "Where's Lou?"
So I talked to one of the officers.
"We took him to the hospital."
I said, "Oh my God."
He got an infection around his heart
because he had had a valve replacement.
He agreed to go into a voluntary coma
so he could have the operation
to replace the heart valve,
and he didn't make it.
[somber music playing]
[reporter] Lou Pearlman,
the disgraced star-maker
behind NSYNC and the Backstreet Boys
has died in prison.
Some of Pearlman's former boy band members
took to social media
to pay their respects.
Justin Timberlake tweeted
that he hoped Pearlman had
"found some peace."
Everybody really trusted him,
and loved him and believed in him.
But it was all a facade.
He hurt a lot of us, you know.
Happy anniversary Donna and Johnny ♪
[Donna] I wanted to tell him
how I felt, but
I didn't get that chance.
[Michael] I was in the studio
producing a band.
And I remember
just being at the mixing board
and everything just going white.
And I was like, "It's over."
[somber music playing]
I remember calling the coroner
a couple days later
and he was like, "Man."
"I was starting to wonder
what to do with his body
'cause nobody has contacted me."
And the next week or so
was a roller coaster
of trying to get ahold of Art Garfunkel,
and he wouldn't claim the body either,
and it was just this whole circus.
There was only a couple of us
that was trying to get his body
back up to New York.
[Jerry] Eventually, Lou ended up
in the family plot in New York,
and only five people went to the funeral.
And there's no stone marking
where he's buried in the cemetery.
Like a a forgotten person.
[Julia] When somebody dies,
I'm not the person to say
he deserved to die or something.
I'm not that person.
Because everybody deserves to live.
[radio static]
["Larger Than Life"
by Backstreet Boys playing]
Ha-ha-ha-ha ♪
I may run and hide ♪
When you're screaming my name ♪
All right ♪
[audience cheering]
But let me tell you now ♪
We truly owe, not everything,
but we do owe a lot to Lou.
[Howie] Thirty years is a long time.
And that's why I wanna start by saying
thank you, all you guys,
for helping us create our legacy.
But we've been the ones to continue this
by having loyalty to each other
and a commitment
to see this thing through until it's over.
[song ends]
[audience cheering]
You guys are pop personified,
so to receive this
from your golden pop hands is
It's it's too much.
[contemplative music playing]
[Chris] I think
we should remember Lou as a crook
who got what he deserved in the end,
and there are people
that are still in pain and hurting
because of his actions.
But at the same time,
there was a crazy explosion of culture
that started in Orlando, Florida,
with an idea.
[Erik-Michael] My feelings on Lou Pearlman
create quite a duality.
How do I feel this way about
this one individual
that really took a lot
from a lot of people,
but also gave so much
to millions all over the world
still to this day.
In general, I think that no one has
anything bad to say about Lou.
[interviewer] Nobody?
Nobody. Except maybe people
that lost money
have to say
he's the worst guy in the world,
but, uh, you couldn't have
a better friend.
[Tammie] Lou was amazing.
And he was as dishonest
as everybody else on this planet.
It's not worth hating him.
[Scott] In my estimation,
I think he's nothing more
than a fraudster, a scam artist.
He was a full-time fraud
from the time he got up
until the time he went to bed at night.
And so, I guess in some regard,
he was a genius
to be able to keep doing it.
In all of this,
there is the success on a level
that has never been seen
in pop music history.
[audience cheering]
But the fact that all of this
was financed by people's life savings
is disgusting.
And it's only now
that I can look back at that,
and that's the fucking monster
That's the monster
that was my best friend.
[Lou] When you help people
as a way of life,
they tend to pass it on.
That is the greatest thing
about doing what I do.
Suppose I came to you
when you were an aspiring singer
trying to make ends meet,
and I told you I was willing to invest
three million dollars to make you a star.
If it all works out,
you'll make 10 to 20 million,
and I'll make 20 to 50 million.
Does that sound like a good deal to you?
[contemplative music continues]
[music ends]
[somber music playing]
[somber music ends]