Money Crimes with Nicole Lapin - INTERVIEW: Tyler Gray, Expert on Lou Pearlman's Fraud Empire

Episode Date: May 22, 2025

Nicole Lapin sits down with Tyler Gray, investigative journalist and author of "The Hit Charade," who uncovered the explosive truth behind music mogul Lou Pearlman. Pearlman created some of the biggest boy bands in history, including the Backstreet Boys and *NSYNC, and seemed like he could do no wrong. But behind the chart-topping hits and worldwide tours, Lou spun a dangerous web of fraud, betrayal, and financial deceit. Tyler reveals how Pearlman’s dark empire eventually collapsed, devastating the pop stars and investors who trusted him most. For more on Lou Pearlman, check our our episode: CELEBRITY: Lou Pearlman on Apple or Spotify Scams, Money, & Murder is a Crime House Original Podcast, powered by PAVE Studios. Listen wherever you get your podcasts. For ad-free listening and early access to episodes, subscribe to Crime House+ on Apple Podcasts. Don’t miss out on all things Scams, Money, & Murder! Instagram: @Crimehouse TikTok: @Crimehouse Facebook: @crimehousestudios X: @crimehousemedia YouTube: @crimehousestudios To learn more about listener data and our privacy practices visit: https://www.audacyinc.com/privacy-policy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://podcastchoices.com/adchoices

This is Crime House. I think people underestimated Lou Perlman at their own peril. He created a number of fake companies, then got people to invest in those companies. He basically bilked people out of $300 million dollars, collectively. The amount of chaos he was able to manage in his mind rivaled the amount of Oiband acts he was able to manage. As they say, money makes the world go round. What many don't talk about is the time it made people's worlds come to a screeching

halt. Whether it's greed, desperation, or a thirst for power, money can make even the most unassuming people do unthinkable things. And sometimes, those acts can be deadly. This is Scams, Money, and Murder, a CrimeHouse original. I'm your host Nicole Lappin. Every Thursday we alternate between covering infamous money-motivated crimes and gripping interviews with the experts or those who were directly involved themselves.

CrimeHouse exists because of you. Please rate, review, and follow Scams, Money, and Murder wherever you get your podcasts. And for early ad-free access and bonus content, subscribe to CrimeHouse Plus on Apple Podcasts. Hey there, it's Nicole. If you love Scams, Money, and Murder where we look at some of the world's wildest money crimes, then you definitely have to check out Clues with Kaelyn Moore and Morgan Apshur. Every Wednesday Morgan and Kaelyn take you deep into the world of the most notorious crimes ever, Clue by Clue. From serial killers to shocking murders, Clues dives

into all the forensic details and brilliant sleuthing of the world's most infamous cases. So if you're looking for a show that has compelling storytelling, crime scene analysis, and a new perspective through some of the world's most puzzling true crime cases, you definitely have to check out Clues. Clues is a Crime House original powered by PAVE Studios. New episodes drop every Wednesday. Just search Clues wherever you listen to podcasts. Whatever groceries your summer calls for, Instacart has you covered. Download the Instacart app and enjoy $0 delivery fees on your first three orders. Service fees, exclusions, and terms apply.

Instacart, groceries that over-deliver. Hey there and welcome to Scams, Money, and Murder. My guest today is Tyler Gray, journalist and author of the book The Hitch Raid, Lou Pearlman, boy bands, and the biggest punsy scheme in US history. We covered Lou Pearlman on an episode earlier this year and we'll drop a link to it in the show notes for this episode so you can check it out. But basically what you need to know is that it seemed like the mastermind behind the boy bands like Backstreet Boys and N'Sync could do no wrong. But behind the hit albums and sold out worldwide tours, Lou Perlman

spun a web of deceit that eventually made his music empire come crashing down. In 2006, he was accused of running one of the largest Ponzi schemes in US history after his investors lost over 400 million dollars. So Tyler, if someone doesn't know anything about the Lou Perlman story, how would you summarize the whole thing in a few sentences? Lou Perlman was the guy who created the more modern era of boy bands and he did it with money that he kind of stole from a lot of people. Which people?

Retirees in Florida and other places or ranging in wealth from people who had a lot of money saved to people who were just barely kind of scrapping away a little bit and hope to make a living off of it one day, all the way through to banks. He stole a lot of money from banks that gave him loans that he just never paid back. He got very creative with all the sorts of places where he took money from. Mega, mega money crimes, millions and millions of dollars. And we'll get into all of it. So let's start at the beginning, Tyler. You kick off the hit charade by transporting the reader back to 1994,

way back before the Backstreet Boys, before N'Sync became household names. You had a really interesting perspective. So living in your hometown of Orlando, you knew some of the major players in this case, back in the day, including Luke Perlman, right? Do you remember your first impressions of him? I knew them, but it was probably safer to say I knew of them.

I wasn't hanging out with them. I was on the outside sort of looking into their VIP red ropes. But yeah, you know, growing up in Orlando, you would run across these guys all the time. And certainly people in his universe, I got to know. But you know, Lou and the guys who were either trying out for in his band would always kind of show up. It's a very small downtown Orlando area. So they'd roll into the clubs that would be next

to the clubs that you were going to, or in the VIP section of the club you didn't have VIP access to. And you kind of had this impression, like it was the rest of the world couldn't see through it, but you were like, this doesn't make sense. Yeah, it's always like that when your hometown sort of person does well, you're like, they're just one of us.

Like they're not that big, but you know, we quickly learned that things were a lot bigger than we realized from our small town view. So you were on the outskirts, but you met Lou. Yeah. What was your first take on him? I was a reporter originally in Orlando for the Orlando Sentinel covering nightlife so I saw him and some of the guys in the bands a lot. The first time I actually talked to Lou was in jail. He had been arrested having fled

the country and been caught and brought back to the Orange County jail. A lot of media was trying to get in touch with him. His lawyers were throwing up the blocks and the media there was going through the public information officer, which is kind of like the spokesperson for the jail. Thing is in Florida, there's something called government in the sunshine where many open records and people whose livelihoods are being paid for by tax dollars are accessible by and should be accessible by anybody in the public. So I just went to the jail and didn't sign up as a reporter.

I signed up as a member of the public. Cause I knew that anybody who did that can see anybody they want to see in jail. And that's just how the law works in Florida. So I went down, I signed my name up on the visitor list, sat down in front of a closed circuit TV and he showed up on the other end and I had about 30 seconds to pitch him. And initially he said his lawyers didn't want him talking. And I said, I totally understand that, but I'm gonna write something either way. And I really would love to talk to you about your legacy. And as soon as I said the word legacy, he opened up.

And I think that started a very long conversation that we had directly and indirectly over the years. So do you think also being sort of a hometown boy helped as well? Maybe. I don't know if he knew in that first 30 seconds that I was originally from Orlando. Maybe I said it. I'm not sure either.

The only thing that was motivating Lou was a chance to brag about his accomplishments and balance out what was being said about him in the moment with the positive end of what he believed he was doing and could do again if people would just cut him up a little bit of a break. So he agreed to talk to you and then what happened? Yeah, we did an interview in jail that was just under an hour. I scrambled back to a coffee shop to shore up my notes and write down some other things about it and quickly got a call from the public information officer at the jail wondering

how the hell I did that and why the hell I did that and kind of apologized and said, look, there's no reason I shouldn't have been able to talk to him, blah, blah, blah. We were friends afterwards. What sort of transpired then was I continued to research and dig into things around his businesses. He had 84 businesses at the time of his arrest, many of them completely fake or propped up by fake things. And I continue to communicate with him through his girlfriend, I'm

doing air quotes for the listeners, girlfriend at the time who was visiting him in jail directly. He wasn't really seeing a lot of other people in jail other than her and then he would either talk to me through her or she would tell me what they talked about. And why do you use air quotes? He was a complicated character. There are a lot of accusations against Lou about, you know, having inappropriate relationships with the boys that were in his bands, men, young men who were in his bands at the time, no one ever brought any charges or made any real direct accusations about it. The reason I use air quotes to say, you know, girlfriend is that when you got to know Lou and

you got to know about Lou, you realized that he was kind of just an overgrown kid and a little bit of a case of arrested development. You just got the sense that he didn't have an adult's sense of romance or romantic relationships. And people are always like, oh, is he gay, straight, is it pedophile? What is he? You know, I think it was like, it could be any of those things, but the fact of the matter is he's kind of like a kid inside. He doesn't really have a mature outlook on relationships.

And after all of your conversations with him, what do you believe his psychological profile was? Do you think he was a big kid with Arrested Development, or do you think there was something darker, more nefarious? I mean, he was a sociopathopath and that is my professional medical opinion. I'm kidding. I don't have a medical degree, but I think it's pretty clear. He had a lot of the hallmarks as somebody who at the very least, who's a narcissist,

whatever the right term is for it. I don't know with my few undergraduate classes of psychology, but he definitely believed his own lies deeply, definitely believed his own lies, deeply, deeply believed his own lies until the very end. And so I don't think he was malicious, but he was uncaring at his heart of anyone other than himself. From all of the reporting,

how many conversations did you have with him? Oh God, I don't know. We talked directly or indirectly for the better part of a year and a little bit afterward. Do you think it was the money, the fame, the power that drove him? I think it was the fame in the beginning, but Lou grew up, not a popular kid. He's kind of a math nerd, um, as right or wrong as this might be. He was a bit of an overweight kid who got picked on and things weren't better back then for a kid who looked the way he looked. And he got teased a lot.

And I think he had interests that some of the other kids consider kind of nerdy. He was really into blimps, really into airships, like, you know, the least cool of aircraft. He had a blimp company too. He did. He did. He was also trying at some point to be in bands with some guys that he knew from Queens a band called flyer that had sort of local success and He initially tried to be in the band as a guitarist and he didn't really fit the part to those guys

So he ended up kind of being their manager and promising him a record deal and all kinds of stuff that he had a tour And stuff that he never really brought to life So early on he wanted to kind of be in the band. Then ever since he sort of fought to be recognized as a guy who was like the sixth member or the unofficial member of the band who wasn't up on stage singing and dancing, but really just as important as anybody in the band and contractually he made himself a member of the band. He paid himself as a manager and as a member of those boy bands.

Pretty wild. Yeah. And I can't think of another example where you know the manager of a band as well as we knew him. Yeah. It struck me as odd before all the fraudulent activities came out that he wanted to be so front and center. And let's clarify, should we double click on what the fraudulent activities were?

Sure. What was he in jail for in the first place? Ultimately, he went to jail for what you would broadly call fraud. He created a number of fake companies, then got people to invest in those companies. And when I say a fake company, I mean- Like a shell company.

Well, worse, he invented an airplane company, I mean, like a shell company. Worse. He invented an airplane company and didn't actually have a single airplane. And then he got people to invest in those planes, which weren't his. He went as far as to take people on tours of hangars where planes were in them that happened to have the same logo of his company on the side, different company, and fooled them into thinking that was his plane, but he never owned it. He just paid off the guys in the hangar to let him walk in there with some investors. And so people were investing in planes that he had only leased. That was sort of an early one.

He went on to just straight up create completely fictitious financial products, like savings accounts that were named to sound like a real savings account. He called it EISA, employee investment savings accounts, E-I-S-A, which sounds a lot like ERISA, which is a real thing, Employee Retirement Investment Savings Accounts. I think that's what that one is. And then he, on his computer, created documents saying that those products were insured by AIG and Lloyds of London, where he literally created those documents on his computer and forged them. So at that point he wasn't even having people invest in anything other than a completely made-up product that was

going straight into his pocket. So there were fraudulent activities happening for him to get the money to get into the boy bands and then there were fraudulent activities after. There was fraud throughout. Yeah, there was fraud throughout. I don't know that in the beginning he was creating fraudulent companies so that he could create boy bands. I think that he had a hit with the boy bands.

It took a lot of money to get them started. It took a lot of money to keep them going and then he made a lot of money from them. He could have stopped. He could have made himself right. It was one of several points in his career where he actually started a real business that did okay. He could have kept on that path, but instead he just kept going bigger and bigger and wanting to be more and more famous, which required more and more investment. He tried to duplicate his boy bands over and over again. He did it twice, but by the time he got to sort of

the third, fourth, fifth, sixth band, they cost more money to develop than you ever made on them. And as you got to know him, do you think he saw himself as con artist or did he genuinely believe in the legitimacy of his ventures? And was he trying to make up for something perhaps that he lacked as a kid with money or clout? The first part of that question, he absolutely thought that he was doing right. And he just needed a little more time

to make everybody happy. I think that was what he believed until the end. When he was in jail dying, he thought that he was gonna somehow get out and use social media, which wasn't around when he was doing his thing, to break the next big band. So on the surface, he was just, again, like an underdog kid who had something to

prove and he had a taste of fame and he just chased it and chased it all the way to the end. Given the scale of these operations and 84 companies and not subtle operations like glimpse and planes and stuff. Yeah. Why do you think all of this went unnoticed for so long? Were there warning signs that were ignored and when did some of it come to light? So the reason that he wasn't caught earlier, a lot of it was dumb luck. Early on he had

a model scouting company, one of these things where people would come up to people on the street, it happened to me actually in New York and say, Hey, have you ever considered modeling? And the people would be flattered and they go, Oh my God, no, but do you think so? And they say, yeah, we just need to come do some headshots, you know, and just pay us, you know, $5,000 for the headshots and we'll go out and get your work. And you gotta pay that money upfront. And so that was like a fraudulent business that he created that was under investigation in Florida, but the investigator dropped the case when a new politician, I believe it was a mayor

or a congressman, took over someone who Luhid coincidentally donated money to on the campaign, a significant amount of money, and the case was dropped. Also there was some sort of bad evidence in that case. So luck came into play in his favor and things that would have blown up his whole fraud kind of went away by accident. But what really kept him, I think, from being caught, he could always point to somebody who had done well off of the investments that they'd made with Lou. And that is the mark of a great Ponzi scheme, great in a horrible way, especially for those invested. But early days in Ponzi schemes, there were people who

put money in and they got more than their share back. And so he would always be able to point to those people and go, well, so-and-so invested, look how happy they are. And I made them rich. And so that helped keep people believing that they could be just like those other people who got rich. And if he made them money, he could make me money too. And then something happened where so many people started coming back to him

looking to pull out the money they had invested in his financial products. They had seen that he hadn't quite had the Midas touch of bands anymore. They'd started to knock on the door of his gigantic office complex in downtown Orlando and they weren't getting answers and he was stonewalling because he was out of cash. So he actually brought in a forensic accountant to take a look at his own finances to see if somewhere in the 84 companies and assets that he owned was there some way to squeeze some more cash out of something that so that he could be

a little more liquid. And so he hires this guy, Paul Glover, to come into his offices and Paul starts looking through all the documents and he starts noticing all these documents that are audited by this company called Cohen and Siegel. They're based in South Florida. And some of these documents, Paul said, were like, they're just bad. Like they didn't make any sense. And whoever this auditor was, was not doing a good job. So he thought, you know, I'm going to give them a call. So he's sitting in Lou's office with these documents in

downtown Orlando. And Paul picks up his mobile phone at the time and he dials the number for Cohen and Siegel in South Florida. Here's it ring and nobody answers. He notices Lou's phone on his desk. Lou wasn't in the office and he'd left him there. Also his ringing, he goes, I'm going to try again. He tries the number again and the phone on Lou's desk rings again. And he realizes that Cohen and Siegel is just Lou. He was his own auditor.

And that is when Paul realized that why he was there was to participate in the gigantic fraud. And he turned his mission in that moment from trying to find Lou some more cash to trying to gather as many documents as he could that proved what was going on and get the hell out of that office and walk down the street to the FBI. And so that's what Paul did that day.

And that was the beginning of the world's wildest crimes, then you definitely have to check out Clues with Morgan Apsher and Kailyn Moore. Every Wednesday, Kailyn and Morgan take you deep into the world of the most notorious crimes ever, clue by clue. And I really love the way that they're breaking down the evidence so you can really see how even the smallest things have helped crack some of the most intricate cases wide open. From serial killers to shocking murders, Clues dives into all the forensic details and brilliant sleuthing of the world's most infamous cases. So if you're looking for a show that has compelling storytelling, crime scene analysis, and a new perspective through some of the world's most puzzling true crime cases,

you definitely have to check out Clues. Clues is a Crime House original powered by Pape Studios. New episodes drop every Wednesday. Just search Clues wherever you listen to podcasts. Didn't he also have really bizarre talent of being able to forge documents? I don't know if it was really good or bizarre. I mean, it wasn't about his skills in Photoshop.

It was about his audacity. No one would think at the time that he would have the nerve or the gall to just completely make up something about his businesses. It wasn't something that was on people's radar a whole lot back then. And certainly from a guy who had done so well creating, he was seemingly successful. Why would he need to do that? So if we step back, what do you think this story teaches us about people's willingness to believe charismatic people? We could agree that he was a charismatic guy,

even when there are red flags there. Like people who claimed to be businessmen, but actually just kind of went bankrupt in every business that they created or you mean, you mean those kinds of people? How did they rise to power? Or continue to do it because for him, it was almost pathological. Yeah. The thing about Lou is that he was very good when he talked to people at very quickly realizing what their dreams were and making those his own. And then what you saw was

somebody trying to make your dreams come true. What he's actually doing is sort of blood sucking your own dreams out of you and taking them on as his own, because the only person who was going to benefit from it was going to be him. I mean, again, this sounds familiar right now, but we don't learn our lessons with this stuff because when we see somebody who dangles out there, that everything you wanted could actually come true, you could be rich like him. Like look at him, he's not anything special. If he did it, you can do it. It's very tempting for people.

Did you ever feel that way? No, I was a skeptical journalist like you know I was cynical. I don't know there could have been a moment where I was like oh you know what I'm gonna actually you know get on board with him but there's been some really good journalists like the guy who co-wrote Lou's Own Biography was a journalist at the same newspaper where I was. He was a good journalist he just got sort of swept up in the thing you know the guy who wrote the Donald Trump book got swept up in a kind of thing too. Like, you know, there's even writers, even journalists, you know, who are trained to be skeptical of stuff like this can get swept up in

the cash-in allure of it all. Was there a surreal or particularly disturbing interaction you had with him during your reporting? The most disturbing thing wasn't a real personal interaction that was necessarily about me. He was already in jail by the time we were having real conversations. But when I guess I realized just how far off the deep end he had kind of gone and how pathological he had gotten was when his girlfriend Tammy came back in one of our conversations and said she was saying he's way off the deep end he's making things up that he can't possibly expect me to believe so for example he told her that this is all going to be over soon look the cops know they made a big mistake they're just trying to figure

out a way to cover their own asses so they don't look stupid when they let me out of here. He told her that they knew they were wrong and they were sort of being apologetic about it. They would do things like sneak him out at night so that he could go to like McDonald's and get his favorite meal. And he came up with this psychotic sounding story about there being a computer in Tampa that was logging his keystrokes from when he was in business and he had all that and was just trying to get it to the just like really delusional stuff that started happening, which actually made me start to go, oh, this is not a well person. Was there any detail that didn't make it into your book that still haunts you or you put it all out there? put it all out there? I mean, mostly. There's some things where you couldn't empty the notebook on.

Let me just like go to the thing that lots of people speculated on and no one's ever found a smoking gun on, which is that he molested some of the guys in the band. Did he touch them inappropriately, especially by today's standards? Yeah, of course, like creepy massages and things like that. But no person in any band ever came forward and said, he did X to me. You know, it was always somebody else hearing that he did it to somebody else.

And why would they like their victims if they were, what benefit does it do to them? He was already in jail. He's not going to do it to anybody else. So I didn't make the book about that stuff and appropriate stuff. Yeah. I didn't make the book about that stuff. Inappropriate stuff, yeah, but like sinister predator like stuff, it seemed out of range for who he was mentally as a character. Like he just wasn't that curvy.

I don't know how to put it, but he was creepy, but I think he wanted to be loved more than anything. So I stayed away from that stuff and had people saying things secondhand that I didn't think was fair to report on Lou having done something to somebody who they themselves wouldn't say had done anything to you know, you don't want to drag a victim into something and be a victim when they're not even saying they're a victim.

So I kept that stuff out of there. So you visited him in jail, but he ultimately went to prison. Right. When I saw him he was being held in jail before his trial, the book ends with him going to trial and getting convicted. So for anyone who doesn't know jail in prison sometimes used interchangeably not the same When I saw him, he was being held in jail before his trial. The book ends with him going to trial and getting convicted. So for anyone who doesn't know, jail and prison sometimes used interchangeably,

not the same thing. Jail is where you go awaiting sentencing. So you went to see him as he was still going to trial, the evidence was still coming out. Right. And he was waiting to go to official prison, which is a less nice place oftentimes. And you continued to interact with him for that year. In roughly the year that I was talking to him before he got sentenced to 25 years

in prison, we talked through the intermediary of Tammy pretty regularly. And he never cut off anything. I was just done with the book. He went to trial and he got sentenced and that was literally a bookend. The thing about when he was sentenced to, he didn't have any money to give back. You know, he'd basically bilk people out of $300 million collectively. At least that's what could be accounted for. And so the judge sentenced him to 300 months in prison and said, for every

million dollars you can recover for your victims, I'll take a month off your sentence. And so the judge sentenced him to 300 months in prison and said, for every million dollars you can recover for your victims, I'll take a month off your sentence. And it was a genius move, I think, by the judge, because what he was doing was he was proving to people that even given the incentive to have his own get out of jail card, he wouldn't find another penny because he'd spent it all. It was gone. It's been it on businesses on, yeah, some crazy goofy luxuries.

He had a life size, Anakin Skywalker and R2D2 in his house. He had a Uzi sub machine gun. He had a cornflower blue Rolls Royce. He had a bunch of Rolexes, like all kinds of different stuff. But what he really spent it on was 84 businesses and the upkeep involved in all those businesses and everybody on payroll. So there wasn't some gigantic pot of money buried in a backyard somewhere 84 businesses and the upkeep involved in all those businesses and everybody on payroll. So there wasn't some gigantic pot of money buried in a backyard somewhere sitting offshore

in some account. And that's what the judge wanted to make sure all his victims knew. Yeah. I mean, it breaks my heart, especially that there was no restitution for the people who wanted to invest in a retirement savings account that sounded legit, but wasn't. Those people never got any money back? Pennies on the dollar, if anything, nobody got paid back much. Anybody who got paid back anything from selling his assets probably was banks

first, just because of the weird ways that the law works there. And by the way, the promise of those retirement accounts, these weren't greedy people. Lou was only promising if you would have gotten 15% return on your regular 401k, he was promising 17%. So 20 years later, what do you think audiences should take away from Karlman's story in terms of understanding and recognizing Ponzi schemes?

I think we've actually become okay with a lot of Ponzi schemes because our tolerance for them has grown so that we'll give them more time to turn the corner. I think it all comes down to emotional investing. If you're investing because you're passionate about or you have a dream and you think it's about to get answered, it's probably not a legitimate thing. Like he came up with bogus companies taking new money to pay off old debts, but there was never actually a legitimate product or service.

Yeah. It's one thing to come up with new products. They're going to make the company successful. It's another thing to come up with new companies to make a different company solvent. And that's what he kept doing. And that's why he had 84 companies at the end of the road. Some of them were profitable along the way. He got started on fraud though. He was a guy who was into blimps.

Like he loved to watch him. He lived in Queens near the airport where blimps, the good year blimp would take off and land and he kind of got himself into working on the ground crew for it. And he ended up ordering kind of a DIY blimp kit through the mail and built his own blimp and sold ad space on it to Jordache jeans at the time. You know, made all these promises that he was going to do this flight with the Jordache label is going to be models. We're going to get on the blimp and it was going to land in lower Manhattan. It was going to be this big press event. He painted the thing like gold,

the Jordache colors at the time, and the paint was so heavy that when the blimp took off and it was a crappy blimp that it went into a death spiral and crashed into a dump. It doesn't get more poetic than that. And that story was written in all the local papers. For anyone else, that would have been the end. He took that and made a fraudulent insurance claim, claiming

the blimp that crashed was way nicer than the one that he actually crashed. Used that insurance money to buy a real blimp and then turn that blimp business into a successful business, advertising business. Eventually taking his company public as a penny stock, you know, really low priced public stock. That could have been a great life for Lou. You know, he would have been a millionaire many times over from that and invested smart and taking his time. But he turned the blimp business into the airplane business, but never owned any airplanes.

The airplane business is where he met, uh, the manager of new kids on the block. If anyone remembers them from the 80s, and just wanted to do that. He thought that he could be in that business too. So that's when he turned his attention to boy bands and needed more and more and more and more money to support them. Dateline True Crime Weekly. Andrea Canning and the Dateline team cover breaking crime news around the country. And now a special series with daily updates from the trial of Sean Combs. I'll be talking to NBC News correspondent Chloe Malas

every day after court about what she's seeing inside, the witnesses, the evidence and what it all means. Dateline True Crime Weekly. Listen now wherever you get your podcasts. and now wherever you get your podcasts. Do you think we've learned anything as a culture from his downfall? Or are we more susceptible now than ever? We're more susceptible than ever. The tank is full of more sharks than have ever been in it before. I think that social media poured gasoline, mixing metaphors, but it poured gasoline on the fire that Lou started.

I think that it's so easy now to drop a piece of fake information into the world, catch the right person's attention. And suddenly, the stock market jumps up 1,000 points, and people make or lose billions of dollars in an hour. If you were writing this story now, or if you were writing this book in 2025, what advice would you give someone who thinks they might have spotted a modern day Lou Pearlman?

That is a thing people want to know. They're like, how would people have known? And I think if I was writing the book today, there might have been a pull aside here and there in the book to educate people on how Ponzi scheme works. And maybe throughout the story of Lou's life, really calling out those moments where he turned the corner into the land of fraud. And this was a fork in the road.

He could have gone legit at this point. Instead he took the other way. And then of course you can get into why and what happened, but a little bit of that service to let people know that there are key moments that you're kind of Spidey sense should go off a little bit about why isn't he returning my call? Why am I not getting statements? I'll say this, for all the ways that people couldn't check up easily on all that sort of stuff, there are many more ways they can do that now. So for all the social media or whatever kind of things that allow fraudsters to do what they do much easier, there's also easier ways that people can check

up on that stuff. Yeah, that's a really good point. And I think, you know, from the years I've been covering financial crimes, somehow magical blinders come on when people hear promises of getting rich and famous. In hindsight, you can see these red flags, but in the moment, I think people get really caught up with this dream that they're being sold. Yeah. I mean, have you ever worked a job that you left and thought, why the hell did I stay

there for a year? And you were probably there because you thought you're going to get rich. Plenty of people do things for money that they wouldn't have naturally done. And that's just talking about money. Like if fame comes into the play, that's a 10x more powerful drug. I found this quote from your book to be particularly insightful. You write, that was a theme among most of Lou's victims, investigators, family, friends. I interviewed for this book.

No one could believe one man was capable of masterminding such a long running convoluted scam. How did he run all of those scams simultaneously and also have time to go to the club and run boy bands? I don't know. He had a real talent for it. The amount of chaos he was able to manage in his mind rivaled the amount of boy band acts he was able to manage. His brain was probably split between keeping the metaphorical plates spinning and actually discovering talent. He had talent for discovering talent. He could spot it. And he had a talent for, I think, managing a web of lies in his brain. You know, the way some people can manage a difficult calendar or keep facts at arm's length to be able to use them. He was able to manage the chaos of lies that

he created. And even with the boy bands, he did have a talent there, but many of them felt like they were scammed. It was different than a Ponzi scam, but they felt like they got screwed in these contracts too. They did. And I'll say something about that in a second. I think you make a good point though in the last question is that, you know, people wanted to, they want to believe there was a conspiracy because they want to believe they were ganged

up on and that they couldn't be outfoxed by a single person, especially not this guy. But I think he used that kind of outer appearance as a bit of a shield or a cloak to hide behind he's smarter than he looked kind of thing. There wasn't a conspiracy between him and a whole bunch of people that defraud these people out of money at the end of the day. It was him. He did collect a lot of people who conspired to make boy bands. It's not an evil conspiracy.

It was just like he brought in a lot of talent who recognized talent. He recognized talent, but he brought in a lot of people who recognize talent. He recognized talent but he brought in a lot of people who could recognize talent in these guys and help develop them in ways that you know went beyond even the way he was able to. He had an instinct for it in as much as anybody has instinct. He surrounded himself on one hand with people who knew how to develop talent and come out of like Disney and places like that. On the other hand he surrounded himself with hucksters who were willing to like do whatever he told them to do as long as he kept making them rich and they would turn a blind eye to whatever he was lying about.

And when he discovered these young men, they would essentially work for free. Yeah, which I don't think is totally unusual for someone to try to develop themselves as a talent. It's an investment you make in yourself. And for them, he wasn't saying like, pay me upfront. He was taking the money out of their earnings and take it a lot. If you ask what did the guys in the bands feel like he was ripping them off? They did.

And they sued him, you know, and there was very public lawsuits about that. He was paying his bands really poorly for what they earned. I mean, these guys were working like crazy overseas, playing every night, traveling, doing all this kinds of stuff. And they would do it for months and months and months before. They ever really got paid. And there was one story where the N sync singers were going to a dinner with Lou and it was supposed to be this big moment where he finally gave him a check.

And they were like, this is it. We're rich. We've been working like for a year touring, we're on the road. We have these number one records and everything. And he ceremoniously handed them all envelopes with checks in them. And one by one, they opened up and found out the checks were for $10,000. And they thought they were going to be like a million dollars. Yeah, because millions were made. And at the same time, Lou was paying himself as if he were a member of the band too. So that for them was, I think, when it kind of all came crashing down. Yeah, because it's one thing when you are discovered and you're cultivating your talent to be part of a legit band.

But then it's a whole other thing when you're touring and going around the world and making real money and selling real tickets to not get anything at that point. And I think that was the beginning of the lawsuits that happened between the boy bands and him. Right, and they started trying to divorce themselves from him legally and business-wise. The thing that I would say that Lou did for the investors in his fake retirement

schemes was he would dangle things out there like his company was going to go public and that he was going to make them all rich as part of that IPO. He'd say, don't do it. Don't pull your money out now. We're about to do this thing. You know, we're about to go public. It's the really wrong time. So he would actually keep people invested for 1800 investors he had, you know,

kind of at the end. And he would keep them in it through things like that. So can that serve as a cautionary tale to people who might find themselves caught up with a potential con artist if they're asking you to not take out your money and you feel red flags or they're not showing you documents. These could be beige flags. I don't know if they could be fine. What would be something that somebody should look out for as a definite red flag in a financial scheme? Real financial opportunities and the people behind those don't hide information. They share it. If you're asking for information

about how the money you invested is performing and someone won't show you, that's a really bad red flag. Even when people lose your money, they still show you. Any legitimate investment will show you and be transparent about how your money is performing. If you can't get that information, you might be in a scam.

Now, with more resources comes more proliferation of potential scams, but also more resources for consumers. Are there any places to go or where would you recommend somebody look? Oh God, you're asking the wrong guy. I read the copy on the back of the white cloth can. I don't know if you know that. I'm not the guy to ask about this. Okay, deal. Is there something that people still get wrong about the Lou Pearlman story? There is some things that people still get wrong about Lou. Like he wasn't all monster. He did have a fatherly quality about him for some people. He did have an eye for talent. He would listen to people's dreams earnestly and yeah, he would steal those dreams from them and eventually as he was

promising to make them real. But yeah, there was a reason people called him Big Papa or the reason people called him Papa Lou. He had a patina of generousness and he could make you feel good. And that was the thing that people got an emotional benefit out of for him. In his greed, there was a byproduct of making people happy temporarily. That was at least something. It didn't make him a totally one dimensional character. So after everything that you've covered about this guy,

his charm, his ambition, and his deceit. What do you think this story ultimately says about our willingness to trust and how we fall for people who promise us the world? I think what the Lou Pearlman story says is that there's a lot of power in listening to people's dreams and telling them you can make them come true. The more concrete you can make that vision to somebody, the more likely they are to turn over trust and money and time and attention and parts of their lives to you even faster. The more people have access to successful people, the more they believe that they too will be a success.

And that's the thing I think that that translates to the modern day is that we see a successful person. If we can get ourselves close enough to them, we believe we could get a piece of that too. That there's some sort of fairy dust. Yeah, like it's a tangible thing that rubs off on you. Not that it comes from hard work, privilege sometimes. Things that you can't put your hands on.

Did you get caught up in this story emotionally at all? There were people in the course of it that I felt really bad for. Not really Lou. I mean, I felt bad for like young Lou, child Lou. His girlfriend was originally a girl who really cared for him. She was literally his nurse when they met, you know, it was a Florence Night in Yellow Fact thing happening there. And she was a good person, is a good person still decided part way through this process of writing this book that he needed to be exposed and was sharing

information with me. I mean, she knows that I say this, so it's not outing her. We'll lose also no longer with us. So there's that. But Tammy saw what was going on and turned the corner. And yes, she was kind of trapped and she sort of felt compelled to not abandon him totally. So I feel sorry for her, but just, you know, sympathized with these folks who saw the good in him and didn't want to give up on him. So he was arrested in 2007. He was sentenced in 2008. He died in 2016.

Were you surprised to get that news? No, he was extremely unhealthy. He wasn't doing well for himself in jail. Prison doesn't tend to make people healthier. No, it doesn't. Do you think he changed at all when he was in prison? Do you think he felt remorse? Did he ever reach out to any of the victims?

To my knowledge, he didn't reach out to any of the victims. No, but he did keep talking to Tammy about how he had new ideas for new businesses. He was going to get them going as soon as he got out. So that's the thing. No remorse for sure. Like he always believed his talent would lead him to greatness when he got out. He didn't have social media or any of that stuff going on when he did his thing. He was like, you imagine Lou Perlman in the social media era, he would be a maniac. He would probably be way up there. He would be making tons of money in a superstar probably.

Yeah. I mean, even without social media, I feel like he was still everywhere. Yeah. On MTV, making the band. Do you think this persona is affectionately or unaffected, only as a schlub helped her hurt him? Well, it helped him with his financial frauds. Like I said, it was a costume. He was hiding behind it.

He was a lot smarter than people gave him credit for when they looked at him. And you know what? If you're going to judge somebody based on their appearance, look down. Okay, to some degree, it's on you. It certainly shouldn't have cost retirees in Florida their life savings and made it so they had to work until they were dying. Yeah I think people underestimated Lou Pearlman at their own peril. Cool. Tyler thank you so much for joining us and shedding light on this crazy unsettling legacy story of Lou Pearlman. It's been a fascinating

conversation. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you so much for listening. I'm your host, Nicole Weppen. Scams, Money and Murder is a Crime House original. Join me every Thursday for a brand new episode. Here at Crime House, we want to thank each and every one of you for your support. If you like what you heard here today, reach out on social media at Crime House.

Don't forget to rate, review and follow Sc Scams, Money, and Murder wherever you get your podcasts. Your feedback truly makes a difference. And for ad-free listening, plus early access and bonus content, subscribe to CrimeHouse Plus on Apple Podcasts. Scams, Money, and Murder is hosted by me, Nicole Lapin, and is a CrimeHouse original powered by PAVE Studios. This episode was brought to life by the Scams, Money and Murder team. Max Cutler, Ron Shapiro,

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