AP PHOTO/JOHN RAOUX
Lou Pearlman, the disgraced impresario behind the Backstreet Boys and 'NSYNC who was serving out a 25-year prison term after being convicted of running a half-billion-dollar Ponzi scheme in 2008, died Friday night, multiple sources confirm to Billboard. He was 62.
On the back of those boy bands’ success, Pearlman turned his Trans Continental businesses into a sprawling empire in the 1990s. But it was all built on fraud, and he was ultimately sued by every act he represented except one.
His groups dominated the charts during the 1990s: Backstreet Boys landed six Top 10 singles in the Hot 100 and a whopping nine albums in the Top 10 of the Billboard 200, with both Millennium and Black & White hitting No. 1 (albeit after the group split from Pearlman). NSYNC had six Top 10 singles on the Hot 100 and landed four albums in the Top 10 of the Billboard 200, although the two of them that reached No. 1 -- No Strings Attached and Celebrity -- were both released after the split. His next most popular act, O-Town, had a single and an album in the Top 10.
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But both before and after his fall, rumors were rampant about Pearlman’s relationships with some of the male groups on his roster. "We would hear things, for sure," NSYNC's Lance Bass told The Hollywood Reporter in 2014. "He would always have young boy limo drivers for Trans Continental Records. Those limo drivers would always be put into 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." Pearlman denied any inappropriate relations.
Louis Jay Pearlman was born in Flushing, N.Y., in 1954, the only child of a Jewish dry-cleaner owner named Hy and his homemaker wife.
His first cousin was Art Garfunkel. The curly-haired member of folk singing sensation Simon & Garfunkel attended Pearlman's bar mitzvah in June 1967, giving him an early taste of music stardom.
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.
After a string of blimp accidents in the early '90s, Pearlman soured on the airship business, remembering the time he chartered a plane in the late 1980s for money-minting New Kids on the Block. He placed a classified ad for teen male vocalists in the Orlando Sentinel in 1992 and fondly recalls "the days when we had the auditioning process, when we put it all together, trying to get a record deal,” Pearlman told The Hollywood Reporter.
Backstreet Boys were not an overnight hit, but Pearlman proceeded to sink millions into the group, assigning management duties to Johnny Wright and wife Donna. Success came with the 1997 hit "Quit Playing Games (With My Heart)," which helped fuel album sales of ultimately 14 million copies. They repeated the formula with NSYNC, and Pearlman proceeded to build his Trans Continental entertainment empire based in Orlando, Fla., containing a
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