Lou Pearlman’s career was fascinating. Born in 1954, he was the only child of Hy and Reenie Pearlman, both Jews, who raised Lou in Flushing, N.Y. Hy, his father, was a dry cleaner while his mother, Reenie, was a “school lunchroom aide.” They slept on a fold-out couch so their son could use their only bedroom. They lived at Mitchell Gardens Apartments, which was nice living, but not a Floridian mansion on a lake. More than 50 years later, Lou Pearlman, The Backstreet Boys and *NSYNC Svengali who made millions in the music industry, enjoyed a much bigger home. But in 2009, as he sat in prison after pleading guilty to bilking investors and U.S. banks out of $300 million, his Floridian estate went up for sale:
Pearlman’s first cousin was Art Garfunkel, who attended Pearlman’s bar mitzvah in 1967, according to Billboard. (Pearlman said Art’s son James occasionally visited him in jail.) But Pearlman was not initially involved in music at the beginning of his career; no, at first, he made money off helicopter taxis and blimps.
Pearlman got his entrepreneurial start in the late 1970s, 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 1980, Pearlman aligned himself with a penny-stock operation. An initial public offering in 1985 for Airship International (ticker symbol: BLMP) raised $3 million in a widely suspected “pump and dump” scheme. By 1989, 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.
Before being convicted for fraud in 2008, Pearlman, inspired by the success of boy band New Kids on the Block, founded The Backstreet Boys, the best-selling boy band of all-time, and *NSYNC, along with LFO, O-Town, and others. Pearlman was eventually sued for fraud by every band he founded, except for one. Here are The Backstreet Boys talking about Pearlman, while he was in prison, with The Wall Street Journal.
Pearlman was apparently serving his sentence in Miami. The New York Times reported that he died in federal prison there. He was 62.
I hope he found some peace. God bless and RIP, Lou Pearlman.
— Justin Timberlake (@jtimberlake) August 21, 2016
Jonathan Zalman is a writer and teacher based in Brooklyn.
