He got his boy band members to call him “Big Poppa”, began his business career in cooperation with an ex-Nazi and seemed to have never-ending amounts of money.
There were many red flags with Lou Pearlman, but early success bought him time and it was almost a decade before he was sentenced to 25 years in prison for running a Ponzi scheme.
Dirty Pop, streaming on Netflix, is the story of Pearlman’s charade, pop domination with the Backsteet Boys and NSYNC, and destruction by the FBI.
Some of the fakery is spectacular.
Pearlman claimed he owned an airline leasing company – Trans Continental Airlines – and many of his suite of companies from fashion to finance used the title.
The impresario was so convincing that nobody checked. Trans Continental didn’t own any planes and essentially didn’t exist.
A photograph he used of a Trans Continental plane taking off at an airport was actually a small model plane held up by a friend (with his hand cropped out), in the same way that tourists use a camera to make it look like they are the same size as the leaning tower of Pisa.
He did, however, have some history in aviation. He hired out airships in the 1980s and early ′90s manufactured by a German company run by a former Nazi.
Two of the ships crashed and the business fell down around him. That’s when he went into the pop game.
And there’s no denying that he was very good at it.
Backstreet and NSYNC were phenomenally successful.
With both he made the novel move of treating them like superstars when they were playing free gigs at schools and hadn’t sold a record.
The teenage boys would be flown around in private jets and stay in five-star hotels.
Pearlman was paying for this from what people thought was the super-successful Trans Continental airways.
It seems the money was instead coming from Pearlman’s extraordinary ability to sell a dream. The dream of a non-existent airline, the dream of pop superstardom and the dream of making great profits from an investment.
‘Investors’ were lining up to give money to the Pearlman juggernaut, but like any Ponzi scheme the new investors had to keep coming in to pay off the old and keep the charade going.
His contacts book was legendary. One of the boy band members tells of being on tour when the Twin Towers were hit in 2001 and wondering how they were going to get home to Orlando when all flights have been grounded.
Who knows if it’s true, but we heard that Pearlman called George W Bush in the White House and got clearance for his private plane to take to the skies.
The music stopped playing when he launched a savings bond which his literature claimed was backed by the US regulator and double insured, including with Lloyds of London.
The FBI estimated the savings scheme stole $300 million, with another $200 million taken as part of a bank fraud.
What is amazing is how easy much of this seemed to be.
He made up an airline company.
He hand-drew the logo of a fictional bank – the ‘German Savings Company’ – on a letter which a US bank loaned him $1 million on the back of.
Dirty Pop has got lots of criticism for putting the words of Pearlman’s memoir on top of a different interview, using AI to lip sink.
“This footage has been digitally altered to generate his voice and synchronise his lips. The words were written by Lou in his book Bands, Brands & Billions,” a note on screen read.
It was a curious choice for a programme about fraud, but nonetheless Dirty Pop is a captivating story worth your time.
