WHO IS LOU PERLMAN?
With the news of Aaron Carter’s death, I thought I’d do a little digging. Immediately a name pops up: Lou Perlman. According to Wikipedia, Lou was born in 1954 to Jewish parents Hy Pearlman and Renee Pearlman. He was Art Garfunkel’s cousin and grew up in NYC.
While attending Queens College (1970’s) he wrote a business plan to create a helicopter taxi service. He worked with German businessman Theodor Wullenkemper to train him how to fly blimps. We moved, temporally, to Germany to train at Wellenkemper’s blimp company.
He returns to the US and created Airship Enterprises Ltd. which was a blimp leasing company. He leased a blimp to Jordache and used the revenue to build a blimp. It quickly crashed and Pearlman sued the manufacture and they counter sued him. He was awarded $2.5M settlement after seven years (early 1980’s).
Next, he started a new company Airship International which he took public needing to raise $3M to buy another blimp. He lied to investors saying his partner in the endeavor was Wullenkemper. He leased the new blimp to McDonald’s. In 1991, Pearlman moved Airship International to Orlando FL. He brought on MetLife and SeaWorld as new clients for his blimps. Within a short time he lost a major client and had three blimps crash.
Jerome Rosen, who worked at Norway Securities, a small cap trading company traded the stock frequently. It gave the appearance the stock was highly sought after. Allegedly Pearlman paid Rosen tens of thousands of dollars per trade to drive up the price of the stock. Meanwhile, Pearlman sold hundreds of thousands of shares and warrants generating hundreds of thousands of dollars for Pearlman. After the blimps crashed, the stocks price fell to $.03. and the company was closed.
Pearlman moved on leaving all the investors in Airship holding the bag. His next stop was the music industry. He became fascinated with the New Kids on the Block band. Actually, he fell in love with the millions the band generated. Pearlman created Trans Continental Records. The new record label’s first band was Backstreet Boys. Pearlman used $3M of his ill gotten gains to create a talent contest/search for a boys band. He specifically wanted five boys in the band. Backstreet Boys would become the best selling boy band of all times. The boys were not paid for over 3 years and then it was a check for $25,000. Pearlman had made tens of millions off the band.
Pearlman funded and managed NSYNC, Aaron Carter (his older brother Nick was in Backstreet Boys). Among other bands Pearlman managed: O-Town, LFO, Take 5, Natural, Marshall Dyllon, US5, Solid Harmonic and Innocence (with Britney Spears). Pearlman owned a large entertainment complex with a 200,000 sq ft recording studio and dance studio (named O-Town) near Disney World. With the exception of US5 and Marshall Dyllon, all of the bands sued Pearlman for fraud. All the bands either won their cases or settled.
In the case of the Backstreet Boys, who were the first to sue, began to question why Pearlman was being paid as both the manager and producer as well as the 6th member of the band. Aaron Carter filed his lawsuit at age 14 and accused Pearlman of racketeering which was later settled out of court. The music business wasn’t Pearlman’s last scam.
Pearlman used some of his ill gotten gains to purchase an icon in downtown Orlando: Church Street Station. It is a historic train station downtown and in the center of the developed tourist area of downtown. This property would later be auctioned off for $34M in 2007. His mansion sat among Tiger Woods’ and Shaq O’Neil’s homes in Windemere and was 16,000 sq ft valued at $12M. It was decorated in a late teen boy motif. It had life size Star War Stormtroopers in the foyer and an over the top game room as the home’s focal points.
In 2002, Pearlman bought a internet based talent company Options Talent Group. The name was changed to Trans Continental Talent. It subsequently went through other name changes as the complaints began to roll in. There were a pattern of complaints which led New York State Consumer Protection Board to issue an alert calling it a photo mill scam. Several states began investigations into the company; meanwhile in Florida, Attorney General Charlie Crist opened an investigation. But despite all the complaints and evidence provided by those scammed, no charges were ever filed.
Pearlman still wasn’t finished with his scams. In 2006, it was discovered he had created the longest running Ponzi scheme in US history. He defrauded investors out of over $1B. It had ran for the past 20 years. Pearlman had created 3 fictional companies and falsified FDIC documents and Lloyd’s of London documents to convince investors of the worthiness of the investments. By 2007, Florida officials found the $95M collected from investors was gone. Pearlman fled the US first to Israel and then to Germany and eventually was arrested in Indonesia. He was sentenced in 2008 to 25 years in prison.
During an interview in 2009 with Howard Stern a singer from LFO (Rich Cronin) said Pearlman “wanted to bang everyone” and had tried to seduce him repeatedly. According to an article in The Hollywood Reporter in 2014 there were rampant rumors about Pearlman’s relationships with some of the male groups on his record label. NSYNC member, Lance Bass, “we would hear things, for sure”. “He would always have young boy limo drives for Trans Continental Records. Those limo drives would always be put into the different boy bands. Then I’d hear rumors that he would molest the boys before they would even get into the groups. I don’t know how much of that is true, but to me, where there’s smoke, there’s fire.”
According to Billboard Magazine, visitors to the Pearlman’s home noticed young buff blond boys in an entourage. This was similar to the dance studio as well. Pearlman was reportedly ‘dating’ a nurse turned girlfriend Tammie Hilton for 10 years. Accordingly to Tammie they never had sex because of his religion. Bass said while Pearlman never crossed the inappropriate line with him, “Even as a young guy, I assumed that Lou probably was gay.” “It didn’t really bother me. I knew then that I was gay, so I kind of related to him in a way.”
Vanity Fair wrote a salicous article “Mad About the Boys” with rumors but no first person facts or allegations. One of Pearlman’s staffers recalls Lou moving a band member into his mansion telling the boy he was ‘the chosen one’. The staffer said Lou told the boy “we have a secret… I will take care of you”. The boy freaked out and the his brother flew in from Hawaii and refused to leave him alone in the house with Pearlman. The boy would quit the band shortly afterward.
Keep in mind that Pearlman was operating out of Orlando while Epstein was operating out of Miami. There are several similarities to the stories including the corruption within the state of Florida by turning a blind eye to the information when presented with facts. The most disturbing, is the long term damage done to the young people who come into contact with these predators.
exactly. evil evil ppl
Damn! What an evil web of deceit!