Case of Lou Pearlman

Music Manager / Mentor to the Stars

Queens, NY

Hollywood, CA 

Orlando, FL

If you or someone you know were sexually violated by Lou Pearlman contact the Florida Council Against Sexual Assault at: 888-956-7273.

Allegations were made that Lou Pearlman molested young members of boy bands back in the 1990's.

Table of Contents:

2006

1. Orlando Businessman, Partner With Lou Pearlman Commits Suicide  (11/14/2006)

2007

1. Former Backstreet Boys/N' Sync Boss Busted in Bali  (06/15/2007)

2. Sleazeball Behind Boy Bands  (10/02/2007)

3. Article Alleges Lou Pearlman Molested Boy Band Members  (10/02/2007)

4. Sexual Abuse Accusations Swirl Around Pearlman  (10/03/2007)

5. Timberlake's mentor accused of pedophile behaviour  (10/03/2007)

6. Former Pearlman Assistant Claims Accused Con-Man Touched Him Inappropriately (10/04/2007)

7. Lou Pearlman's PervGate: The Most Disturbing Things We Learned About the Boy Band Impresario (10/04/2007)

8. Pearlman Denies Preying On Boys In Bands  (10/10/2007)

9. Music Manager More Interested in Boys Than Bands  (10/10/2007)

10. Judge: Pearlman attorney must cooperate (10/15/2007)

11. Mystery Pearlman Documents Could Reveal Hidden Assets  (10/15/2007)

12. In humble Queens, Lou Pearlman was king  (10/21/2007)

13. In jail and on the phone, Lou Pearlman reverses the charges (10/21/2007)

14. Mad About the Boys  (November/2007)

Also see:  

• Related Information

  1. The Awareness Center's Brochure  
  2. When A Family Member Molests: Reality, Conflict, and The Need For Support
  3. Recidivism of Sex Offenders  (U.S. Department of Justice: Center for Sex Offender Management)
  4. National Sex Offender Registry

  5. Rabbis, Cantors and Other Trusted Officials

  6. Offenders: Problems Our Parents Wouldn't Speak Of

  7. Policies Addressing Victimization and Offenders

  8. MaleSurvivors.org

WFTV (Orlando - November 14, 2006

http://www.wftv.com/news/10314709/detail.html

ORLANDO, Fla. -- Channel 9 has learned a prominent Orlando businessman, who worked closely with music executive Lou Pearlman, took his own life.

Frank Vazquez was the vice president of operations for Trans-Continental Companies, owned by Pearlman.

Vazquez also was a managing partner in several Church Street Station enterprises, including the Pearl Steakhouse, The Exchange Lounge and News Cafe and The Cigar & Wine Club.

Trans-Continental has been under investigation before and, just last week, a state spokesman told Channel 9 they were investigating a savings program offered by the company.

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Rolling Stone Magazine - June 15, 2007

http://www.rollingstone.com/rockdaily/index.php/2007/06/15/former-backstreet-boysn-sync-boss-busted-in-bali/

Pearlman's life on the lam has come to its sad, predictable close: he was picked up by Indonesian cops yesterday at a tourist resort in Bali. For viewers at home who are just tuning in, Pearlman had fled the country after the FBI alleged that he bilked investors – many of them Florida retirees – in an elaborate Ponzi scheme.

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New York Post - October 2, 2007

http://www.nypost.com/seven/10022007/gossip/pagesix/pagesix.htm

October 2, 2007 -- LOU Pearlman - the hog-fat, boy-band honcho who created *NSYNC and the Backstreet Boys and launched the careers of Justin Timberlake and Nick Carter - was a pervy pedophile who preyed on the young men he mentored, Vanity Fair reports.

"I would absolutely say the guy was a sexual predator. All the talent knew what Lou's game was," Steve Mooney, an aspiring singer who was Pearlman's assistant, told VF's Bryan Burrough. "Some guys joked about it. I remember [one singer] asking me, 'Have you let Lou [fellate] you yet?' "

Mooney said he once asked Pearlman, who was known as "Big Poppa," what it would take for him to get into a band. "I'll never forget this as long as I live. He leaned back in his chair, in his white terry cloth robe and white underwear, and spread his legs," Mooney told Burrough. "And then he said, and these were his exact words, 'You're a smart boy. Figure it out.' " Mooney added that a singer groped by Pearlman told him, "Look, if a guy wants to massage me, and I'm getting a million dollars for it, you just go along with it. It's the price you got to pay."

Phoenix Stone, an early member of the Backstreet Boys, tells Vanity Fair Pearlman was "definitely inappropriate" with Nick Carter. Nick's mom, Jane Carter, wouldn't get into specifics, but said, "Certain things happened and it almost destroyed our family. I tried to warn everyone. I tried to warn all the mothers . . . I tried to expose him for what he was years ago."

Tim Christofore, a member of Take 5, recalls that during a sleepover at Pearlman's house, the music czar swan-dived onto his and another boy's bed and wrestled with them wearing only in a towel, which came off. "We were like, 'Ooh, Lou, that's gross.' What did I know? I was 13," Christofore told Vanity Fair.

Rich Cronin, lead singer of LFO, recalled Pearlman told him of an "ancient massage technique that if I massage you and we bond in a certain way, it will strengthen your aura."

Pearlman, 53, is in a Florida jail awaiting trial on bank fraud charges. Prosecutors say he scammed more than 1,000 investors out of $315 million. He'd been a fugitive until June when he was busted in Indonesia, living under a fake name. His lawyer did not return calls from Page Six.

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WFTV (Orlando) - October 2, 2007

http://www.wftv.com/news/14256868/detail.html

ORLANDO, Fla. -- Eyewitness News obtained a copy of a tell-all article in Vanity Fair that will go on sale nationwide next week. The article contains allegations that former music mogul Lou Pearlman molested young members of boy bands.

In the article, titled "Mad About the Boys," the strongest allegations come from Pearlman's assistant and aspiring singer, Steve Mooney, who said during the late 1990s he witnessed teenaged singers walking out of Pearlman's bedroom at his Windermere home late at night.

Mooney also described what happened when he once asked the boy band creator what it would take to get into a music group. He said Pearlman "leaned back in his chair, in his white terry cloth robe and white underwear, and spread his legs. And then he said 'You're a smart boy. Figure it out.'"

"Certain things happened and it almost destroyed our family. I tried to warn everyone. I tried to warn all the mothers. I tried to expose him for what he was years ago," the mother of Backstreet Boy member Nick Carter is quoted saying.

An original member of the Backstreet Boys, Phoenix Stone, said in the article that Pearlman was definitely inappropriate with Nick Carter. Eyewitness News spoke with Phoenix Stone's attorney, Clay Townsend, who works in Orlando.

"The suggestions are pretty darn serious and I'm sure Pearlman is going to be livid," said Townsend.

Townsend also said his client believes while Pearlman was inappropriate with young boys, it never turned sexual, but the allegations are still serious.

"There's some things that will concern some folks and aggravate others. It's tragic all the way around, the personal and business side," said Townsend.

Townsend said, at this point, it's all hearsay and charges are only possible if a victim goes to the authorities. The Orange County Sheriff's Office said it was not aware of the allegations.

Lou Pearlman is set to stand trial in March. He has been held in the Orange County Jail without bond since July on federal charges of bank and mail fraud. Pearlman is accused of stealing $317 million from investors and another $130 million from banks.

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Central Florida News - October 03, 2007

http://www.cfnews13.com/News/Local/2007/10/3/sexual_abuse_accusations_swirl_around_pearlman.html

Former boy band manager Lou Pearlman is still awaiting his trial on tax evasion charges, but now accusations of sexual abuse are coming to light against him.

A new story by Vanity Fair magazine alleges Pearlman behaved inappropriately with some of the young men in his boy bands.

The accusations include solicitation of sex and exposing himself to the teens, and some of the alleged incidents happened in Orlando.

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By ninemsn staff

NineMSN (Australia) - October 3, 2007

http://news.ninemsn.com.au/article.aspx?id=302079

The music executive who launched Justin Timberlake and Nick Carter has been accused of sexually preying on his famous boy band clients.

Vanity Fair reports that Lou Pearlman, who was the creative force behind mega groups *NSYNC and the Backstreet Boys, had a disturbing history of inappropriate behaviour with the young men he guided.

"I would absolutely say the guy was a sexual predator," said Pearlman's old assistant and aspiring singer, Steve Mooney.

"I remember (one singer) asking me, 'Have you let Lou [fellate] you yet?'."

Mooney also tells a shocking story that he claims took place after he asked his boss what he would have to do to get into his own band.

Pearlman, who was known as 'Big Poppa', allegedly then leaned back in his chair and spread his legs.

"And then he said, and these were his exact words, 'You're a smart boy. Figure it out'," Mooney says.

Phoenix Stone, who was an early member of the Backstreet Boys, claims that Pearlman was inappropriate with a young Carter.

Carter's mother Jane also claims that she tried to warn other boy's mothers about Pearlman's behaviour.

Pearlman, 53, is currently held in a Florida jail awaiting bank fraud charges after being arrested living under a false name in Indonesia.

He is accused of scamming more than 1000 investors out of $315 million.

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WFTV (Orlando) - October 4, 2007

http://www.wftv.com/news/14267747/detail.html

ORLANDO, Fla. -- The assistant of accused con-man Lou Pearlman is talking about reports of Pearlman's sexual behavior with boy bands.

"He has touched me in awkward ways," said Steve Moody.

Moody, 29, said Pearlman promised him fame and fortune ten years ago. He claims that in exchange, he and other young male singers were touched inappropriately.

A friend of Pearlman's said the former music mogul is aware of a Vanity Fair magazine article exposing the sexual allegations.

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By Elizabeth Goodman

Rolling Stone Magazine - October 4, 2007

http://www.rollingstone.com/rockdaily/index.php/2007/10/04/lou-pearlmans-pervgate-the-most-disturbing-things-we-learned-about-the-boy-band-impresario/

Lou Pearlman's fall from grace has been well documented, but now Vanity Fair has unveiled their scandalous feature about the boy band impresario who now sits in a jail cell on charges of embezzling $300 million. A short summary: After founding the Backstreet Boys and *NSYNC and guiding their careers, both bands turned around and sued Pearlman for fraud (as Justin Timberlake told Rolling Stone, "I was being monetarily raped by a Svengali" — one of the baddest of all time). Pearlman was later investigated for defrauding his investors and fled the country; he was captured in Indonesia in December 2006 and upon his return to the States, his belongings were auctioned off and he was indicted for fraud. While there were mutterings about Pearlman's alleged perviness for years, this new story really drives the point home. We've taken time to comb through the piece and pull out the most distressing details:

• "I would absolutely say the guy was a sexual predator," Steve Mooney, an aspiring singer and former assistant to Pearlman insists: "More than once, he says, he encountered young male singers slipping out of those doors late at night, tucking in their shirts, a sheepish look on their faces. `There was one guy in every band — one sacrifice — one guy in every band who takes it for Lou,' says Mooney, echoing a sentiment I heard from several people. `That's just the way it was.'"

• Around 1997-1998, allegations of sexual abuse emerged, one of which involved former Backstreet Boy Nick Carter. "My son did say something about the fact that Nick had been uncomfortable staying [at Pearlman's house]," Denise McLean, mother to fellow Backstreet Boy A.J. recalled. "For a while Nick loved going over to Lou's house. All of a sudden it appeared there was a flip at some point." "Certain things happened," Carter's mother told Vanity Fair, "and it almost destroyed our family. I tried to warn everyone. I tried to warn all the mothers."

• Pearlman used the notion of realigning the boys' auras as an excuse to touch them. Rich Cronin, lead singer of the Pearlman band LFO (and current member of Sureshot) remembers, "I definitely heard that aura bullshit. It took everything in me not to laugh. He was like, `I know some mystical fricking ancient massage technique that if I massage you and we bond in a certain way, through these special massages, it will strengthen your aura to the point you are irresistible to people.'"

• Pearlman used multiple companies to make it seem like his investors were making money, like Trans Continental Airlines — which didn't even exist. In fact, according to a childhood friend of Pearlman's, the photos Pearlman used to market the airline featured models, not real planes: "You notice you can't see the entire airplane. You can't see the tail numbers. You know why? Because that's where Lou was holding his fingers! It's a model. It's one I built for him."

(Top)

Show Buzz - Oct. 10, 2007

http://www.showbuzz.cbsnews.com/stories/2007/10/10/people_hot_water/main3352164.shtml

(CBS) Lou Pearlman has kept a low profile in a Florida penitentiary for the past four months on accusations of bilking investors out of $500 million. He has refused to speak to media outlets.

However, the boy-band impresario -- of 'N Sync and Backstreet Boys fame

-- has come out swinging against Bryan Burrough's November Vanity Fair article alleging Pearlman, 53, engaged in a slew inappropriate relations with many of the young bandmates.

Pearlman broke his media silence in an exclusive interview with Radar magazine in response to the article.

"A great deal of that story needs to be corrected," Pearlman told Radar. "This article is clearly biased and one-sided without substantial evidence."

Pearlman denied charges that he showed band members porn and took them to strip clubs. "I never had secrets kept from parents. Especially since at least one parent was always around to chaperone and drive the boys. I never showed any of our artists any porn," Pearlman said. "What strip club do you know that would let minors in? Therefore, NO, I never took any minors to strip clubs."

Pearlman also fired back at accusations he gave massages to band members. "I paid for professional masseuses to give massages to our artists. I have no idea where this question is going. It is also true that I do not own a Neverland Ranch."

Former Take 5 member Tim Christofore alleges Pearlman, clad in only a towel, took a swan dive on a bed full of young boys and wrestled with them. "T.J. (Christofore) is making up this story. ... The fact that he never mentioned this in court should tell you where he's coming from," Pearlman said. "He's just trying to join the lynch party. Besides, I've never owned a towel that could wrap all the way around me anyway."

Despite the bevy of accusations, few expect the band members to come forward. "None of these kids will ever admit anything happened," an attorney who has sued Pearlman for a contract dispute told Bryan Burrough. "They're all too ashamed, and if the truth came out it would ruin their careers."

More than a dozen insiders told Burrough they had heard tales of Pearlman's behavior while insisting they experienced nothing untoward themselves. Backstreet Boy Nick Carter was tepid on the subject. "This is something that's been going on for years, talks and allegations," the Backstreet Boys' youngest member said. "It's kinda old news, you know what I mean? So, really, there's no comment on the issue."

Burrough was unavailable for immediate comment, but a Vanity Fair spokesperson told Page Six, "Mr. Pearlman's comments are ludicrous. We stand by our story." The article hit news stands in New York and Los Angeles on Oct. 3 and nationally on Oct. 9.

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Former Boy Band Members Accuse Manager Lou Pearlman of Sexual Misconduct

By RUSSELL GOLDMAN

ABC News - Oct. 10, 2007

http://www.abcnews.go.com/US/story?id=3709785&page=1

Awaiting trial on bank fraud charges and accused of scamming thousands of senior citizens out of millions of dollars, Lou Pearlman, the pop-music impresario who founded the Backstreet Boys, now faces the prospect of life in a big house very different from the 15,000-square-foot mansion he once occupied outside Orlando, Fla.

Just what took place in that house -- complete with movie theater, video games, pool table, swimming pool and a planned bowling alley -- has become the focus of a series of very different allegations by young men who claim Pearlman acted inappropriately, molested them or sought to exchange sex for help with their careers.

In the November issue of Vanity Fair, Pearlman, for the first time publicly, is described by several former singers, aspiring singers and their parents as a lecher, who used the same deceptive charms to cop cheap feels off teenage boys as he did to allegedly bilk 1,400 investors out of more than $300 million.

Pearlman has since denied the allegations from prison.

In the late '90s, just as the Backstreet Boys and 'NSync, Pearlman's biggest boy bands, hit it big in the United States, Pearlman was grooming a stable of youngsters to take their place. After auditioning, these kids, some as young as 13, were relocated to Orlando where they would regularly rehearse and spend their free time at Pearlman's home.

Another group of young men regularly at the house were a staff of personal assistants, some of whom told Vanity Fair they were promised jobs in bands in exchange for providing sexual favors to Pearlman.

While some boys and young men heard only rumors, others told Vanity Fair and ABCNews.com that Pearlman exposed himself to them, showed them pornography, took them to strip clubs, gave them sensual massages and openly propositioned them. They also said they saw other young people leaving Pearlman's bedroom late at night.

"Some guys joked about it. I remember [one singer] asking me, 'Have you let Lou b*** you yet?'" Steve Mooney told Vanity Fair. In his early 20s Mooney worked as Pearlman's personal assistant and lived in his home for two years in the hopes that he would be put into one of Pearlman's bands.

"I'll never forget this as long as I live," Mooney told the magazine one evening in 2000, when the members of the group O-Town were being selected. "He leaned back in his chair, in his white, terry-cloth robe and white underwear and spread his legs. And then he said, and these were his exact words, 'You're a smart boy. Figure it out.'"

While Mooney and some of the older band members accuse Pearlman of outwardly looking for sexual favors in lieu of advancing their careers, the younger boys remember Pearlman more as a "sleazy uncle."

"Lou's house was a fun place to hang out," Tim Christofore, 24, told ABCNEWS.com. "There was a pool table and slot machines." Christofore moved to Florida from Minnesota at 13 as part of the band Take 5. Christofore recalls two incidents in which Pearlman exposed himself in front of him.

"There was one time where he answered the door naked," he said.

Another time Christofore and band mate Jeff "Clay" Goodell, then also 13, had fallen asleep at Pearlman's house. They woke up to Pearlman jumping into bed with them.

"He jumped into the bed in his towel," said Goodell, now 23 and a senior in college. "He rolled all over us and the towel fell off."

Goodell said that when he was 13 or 14, Pearlman took him and his brother Ryan, then 17 and also a member of Take 5, to a strip club.

"It was one of those days where we had gone through our normal routine and ended up hanging out together at Lou's," he said. "The strip club came up and we ended up going ? That was weird, but it wasn't happening all the time. My mom had a sense that things shouldn't be like this, 13-year-olds shouldn't be going out with adults and hanging out until midnight."

At the time, one parent of each of the five boys lived in a house with the boys on a rotating basis. Goodell said his mother didn't know about the strip club incident at the time.

On another night, a brother of one of the boys was injured in a car accident. His mother left for the hospital in Miami and dropped off the boys for the evening with Pearlman. Pearlman screened a Star Wars film, but the movie was interrupted with a pornographic video.

"Because we were minors there was always at least one parent at the house. That night was the only night I ever stayed at Lou's house," said Ryan Goodell, 27 and now a second year law school student in Los Angeles.

"We were watching Star Wars and all of a sudden a porno came on. It was literally 10 seconds and then it got turned off. We were all teenagers snickering and he made some excuse," Ryan said.

"Who knows what he was thinking. Was he trying to be the cool 'Big Poppa' uncle?" asked Ryan referring to the nickname Pearlman used for himself. "Or was he trying to get a sense of how we would react?"

Ryan said that despite the incident with the pornography and the strip club, he is skeptical of some of the stories he has heard.

"Maybe it's just that Pearlman was only willing to take that extra step with guys like Mooney who were older than 18, which is why I never saw it. But some of these guys always wanted to be in bands and never got into them and you have to question their motives ? If the things they say they saw happen are true, and they didn't say anything at the time, that is just wrong."

Many of the boys interviewed by Vanity Fair and ABC News said that Pearlman would often offer them massages that he said would "balance their aura" or "help build bigger muscles."

"The aura massage thing," said Christofore. "He always said he had a way to feel up on your arm or bicep so that when you curled your arm it would make your muscles look bigger. He was a weird, touchy guy and would sometimes rub kids' abs."

The boys from Take 5 resent Pearlman for other reasons, however. They said that when the Backstreet Boys and 'NSync, backed by their record companies, sued Pearlman to get out of their contracts and collect moneys owed them, Pearlman switched tactics in promoting Take 5. In an effort to keep the bands making him money, but not enough that the labels would support them in a protracted legal battle, the members said Pearlman never let them get too big and barely paid them after five years of extensive touring in Europe and Asia. They sued Pearlman before breaking up the band and leaving Florida.

None of the members of the Backstreet Boys or 'NSync would speak to ABC News or Vanity Fair.

Jane Carter, mother of Backstreet's Nick Carter and his brother Aaron, a solo act managed by Pearlman, however, spoke to the magazine.

"Certain things happened, and it almost destroyed our family. I tried to warn everyone. I tried to warn other mothers," she told Vanity Fair. "I tried to expose him for what he was years ago ? I hope you expose him, because the financial [scandal] is the least of his injustices."

That financial scandal landed Pearlman in prison in June. On the lam since the beginning of the year, Pearlman is accused of running a $300 million pyramid investing scheme. His victims allegedly include retirees who entrusted their life savings to the smooth-talking Pearlman. He was picked up by federal agents on the resort island of Bali, Indonesia.

"Our case has nothing to do with those other allegations," Fletcher Peacock, Pearlman's court-appointed attorney, told ABC News. "Mr. Pearlman obviously denies all of the allegations."

Following the Vanity Fair article, Pearlman denied the allegations to Radaronline's Tyler Gray.

"I think Vanity un-Fair sought out anyone who had a lawsuit or grudge with me or my company to help make disparaging remarks. They never sought any proof or checked for accuracy," Pearlman told Gray as reported in the New York Post.

"I've never owned a towel that could wrap all around me anyway," he said from his Orange County jail cell.

Pearlman is expected to be tried in March.

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By Jim Leusner

Orlando Sentinel - October 15, 2007

http://www.orlandosentinel.com/news/local/orange/orl-bk-pearlman101507,0,1981198.story

An Orlando-area lawyer must produce records and sit for a deposition about business dealings about jailed music executive Lou Pearlman or face "severe sanctions," a U.S. bankruptcy judge ruled today.

Today, Greg Garno, a Miami attorney for bankruptcy trustee Soneet R. Kapila, charged that Reca Rene Chamberlain of Gotha "engaged in a pattern of conduct to frustrate, impede and delay" inquiries into Pearlman's financial activities. He charged that she repeatedly ignored letters, three judge's orders and subpoenas to produce mail she collected for Pearlman while he was in hiding overseas or electronic records he kept as his attorney.

Two central issues involved Chamberlain's previous admission that at Pearlman's direction, she turned over a box of financial records in May or June to a man she didn't know on the side of a Central Florida road with a British or Australian accent, Garno said.

This happened after Pearlman and his companies were forced into involuntary bankruptcy by creditor banks – and after the trustee sought records from Chamberlain.

The other was Chamberlain's account of losing her laptop computer while traveling around the state on Aug. 9. She did not file a police report for fear that she would be charged with filing a false report, Garno said. She also did not file an insurance claim and resisted turning over 15 or 16 computer discs with laptop information stored on it, Garno said.

"We are seriously considering making a criminal referral" to federal prosecutors, Garno said. "She has been an obstructionist and may have perjured herself."

Robert Feinstein, a New York attorney for a committee representing nearly 2,000 individuals and investors who are among creditors and bank who claim to have lost $467 million in Pearlman-related ventures, urged the judge to jail Chamberlain immediately for civil contempt.

"This absolutely is an appropriate case for incarceration now and sanctions now," Feinstein said.

Chamberlain's lawyer, Alan Perlman of Fort Lauderdale, tried to argue that his client was unaware of all of the developments in the case involving her.

"She knew what was going on," U.S. Bankruptcy Judge Arthur Briskman snapped. "It was in the paper. She never acknowledged to this court she didn't know what was going on."

Ultimately, Perlman offered to produce his client for deposition and to produce the computer data, though reserving the right to raise client privacy issues for Pearlman or her other clients. The data will be turned over to a court-appointed data recovery expert, who will provide a list of records so Chamberlain can decide which to challenge on attorney-client privilege grounds.

After records are finally turned over and analyzed by trustee attorneys, Chamberlain will then be questioned in detail under oath. That could take weeks.

Pearlman was arrested June 15 in Guam after Indonesian authorities and the FBI tracked him to the resort of Bali. Two weeks later, a federal grand jury in Orlando charged him with scheming to defraud banks out of $100 million. He pleaded not guilty and is being held without bail at the Orange County Jail.

Jim Leusner can be reached at jleusner@orlandosentinel.com or 407-420-5411.

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WFTV (Orlando) - October 15, 2007

http://www.wftv.com/news/14346011/detail.html

ORLANDO, Fla. -- A bankruptcy court wants to find every cent belonging to accused con man Lou Pearlman and they think his former lawyer may be the key. Monday, a judge demanded she hand over records that may shed light on hidden assets.

Only Channel 9 was there when a judge threatened severe sanctions for Rene Chamberlain if she didn't hand over the information. Chamberlain has ignored repeated requests by the trustee in charge of recovering Pearlman's assets.

The money's being used to refund the banks and investors who say they've lost millions of dollars in business dealings with Pearlman. He's now facing a federal indictment.

The team that's working to recover Pearlman's assets asked a bankruptcy judge to throw Pearlman's former attorney in jail Monday for ignoring repeated orders to turn over documents. There's still a missing, mysterious box of documents that she says she handed over to a mystery man with an accent, because Pearlman told her to and now no one knows where it is.

Entertainment lawyer Rene Chamberlain of Gotha wouldn't answer Eyewitness News questions and she did not go to jail Monday, but the bankruptcy judge threatened severe sanctions if she does not turn over her computer records involving accused con man Lou Pearlman in one week.

Attorneys for the trustee are trying to recover as many assets as possible to compensate Pearlman's victims and told the judge Monday they might ask for a criminal investigation into what they called Chamberlain's "remarkable" behavior. They said she claimed her laptop computer had been stolen, but never reported it and then later said she had back-up discs for the records.

Attorneys said she didn't show up after agreeing to answer questions under oath in August. Monday, Chamberlain's attorney promised she'd turn over the computer records, but what about that mysterious box of documents?

"I think you'd have to ask Mr. Pearlman that. She's the one who gave them to somebody," explained Alan Perlman, Chamberlain's attorney.

"Is she gonna be able to identify that man by phone number or whatever?" WFTV reporter Kathi Belich asked.

"She's looking into it. She's looking into it," Perlman said.

The bankruptcy trustee's lawyers say Chamberlain claims to have lost her cell phone too, which might have captured the mystery man's phone number. She testified that Pearlman called her four or five months ago, when he was on the run, and told her to meet someone and give him the box of documents. All she's said is that the man spoke with either a British or Australian accent.

Chamberlain said she met the mystery man along the side of the road and handed over the box. She won't say what kinds of documents were in the box.

The bankruptcy trustee is hoping to find trails to transfers of money to financial institutions or documents leading to other assets that Pearlman is hiding.

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Mitchell Gardens would never be mistaken for a palace, but inside the Pearlman family's tiny third-floor apartment, little Lou was king.

By Helen Huntley

(FL) St Petersburg Times - October 21, 2007

At Flushing Airport in 1966, Lou Pearlman, right, with Alan Gross, center, and Lou's cousin Larry Zeitlin.

FLUSHING, N.Y. - Mitchell Gardens would never be mistaken for a palace, but inside the Pearlman family's tiny third-floor apartment, little Lou was king.

His parents, Hy the dry cleaner and Reenie the school lunchroom aide, slept on a fold-out couch in the living room, giving their only child the bedroom.

Lou spent hours on that bedroom floor, playing the board game Life with Alan Gross, his childhood buddy who lived one floor up. Gross still recalls a time Mrs. Pearlman watched them play. Lou gave the spinner a whirl, then cheated by moving his car game piece an extra space.

"I called Lou out on it and his mother, seeing what he did, admonished me," Gross said, still indignant more than four decades later. Gross was three years older - about 12 at the time - and Mrs. Pearlman thought he should let Lou win.

"Even though I was very young, it made me realize how our upbringings differed," Gross said. "If my mother saw me cheat, she would never let me hear the end of it."

Until his world came crashing down nine months ago, Pearlman was a celebrated Orlando music producer known for introducing the Backstreet Boys and *NSYNC to the world. But long before that, he was a kid from the New York City borough of Queens with a reputation for cutting corners and embellishing the truth.

Their parents are now dead, but Gross still lives in the building where he and Pearlman grew up and got their feet wet in the aviation business before taking different paths. He vividly remembers both the old grudges and the good times they spent together.

Now a part-time interviewer for the Census Bureau, Gross, 56, suffers from a blood disorder and struggles to pay his bills. But he turns passionate when the subject is air pollution, blimps or his childhood playmate. Pearlman, 53, is an inmate in the Orange County Jail, indicted on bank fraud charges and accused of swindling banks and investors out of nearly $500-million. He lost his possessions in bankruptcy and is now reduced to calling old friends collect.

Gross said the phone calls bring out mixed feelings. He said he hurts for the elderly investors who trusted Pearlman with their life savings, now gone, but he can't turn his back on his childhood friend.

"We grew up as brothers and we have this special bond," he said. "As much of a liar as he is, I tend to believe that he didn't want to hurt anybody. I think he thought he'd make enough money to pay everyone back. He was always looking for the next big score. It just unraveled a little too quickly."

The lower-middle-class neighborhood where the two of them grew up is in transition, single-family homes giving way to high-rises and the old neighborhood stores to Asian-run restaurants and beauty shops. Everywhere there are Chinese and Korean signs alongside English. At Flushing High School, which the two boys attended, the gargoyles are shrouded in construction mesh. The six-story brick buildings of Mitchell Gardens are nestled amid well-kept landscaping, but up close they show the wear of more than half a century.

Gross' apartment is a monument to his fascination with blimps and his inability to part with any artifact, document, audiotape or videotape that ever caught his fancy. "I still have everything I ever collected," he said of his blimp memorabilia, which includes swatches of blimp envelopes that he carries in his wallet. He proudly displayed a wide and very crinkled red plastic ribbon that a Ronald McDonald clown cut to launch a McDonald's blimp more than 20 years ago.

With his three cats in hiding and a TV playing in the background, Gross pointed to the living room window that sparked dreams of flight for two young boys. Today it looks out on the Whitestone Expressway and a New York Times printing plant. In the 1960s, it offered Al and Lou a view of the blimps taking off and landing at the now-abandoned Flushing Airport.

Pearlman's autobiography, Bands, Brands & Billions, tells how the boys begged the crew for blimp rides, how Pearlman used a story in his school newspaper to get media "credentials" for a ride, how he got a job helping out at the airport. Gross said the stories were true except it was his newspaper story, not Pearlman's, that earned them a blimp ride and he, not Pearlman, who got the paying job, with Pearlman tagging along.

In fact, he claims Pearlman was so shy around strangers that he made the blimp crew uncomfortable. Gross takes credit for helping Pearlman emerge from his shell.

"In some ways, I feel responsible for creating Frankenstein," he said. By the time Pearlman was 18, he usually had an entourage wherever he went, Gross said. "He was very charming."

Gross said Pearlman also embellished his music history when he wrote about playing and singing with Flyer, a band he managed. "He couldn't play or sing; all that was totally made up," Gross said.

But part of Pearlman's early music story is true. He really is Art Garfunkel's first cousin; their mothers were sisters. Gross said he and Pearlman went to hear Garfunkel and partner Paul Simon perform in Greenwich Village before they were big stars.

"Art's parents would drive us back to Mitchell Gardens," he said. Gross said that because of Pearlman's reputation as a storyteller, his friends didn't believe him when he told them Garfunkel would be at his bar mitzvah. By then Garfunkel was a celebrity - The Sound of Silence hit No. 1 on the Billboard charts the previous year. However, Garfunkel showed up to celebrate with Pearlman's family and friends at Leonard's of Great Neck. More recently, Garfunkel recorded a video greeting for Pearlman's 50th birthday party, proclaiming his love for Pearlman. However, Garfunkel has not spoken publicly about Pearlman's arrest.

After college - Gross went to Syracuse University and Pearlman to Queens College - Gross' apartment became a staging platform for one of Pearlman's early ventures in aviation, Airship Enterprises, which they began working on about 1978. Gross' parents had died, leaving him the Mitchell Gardens apartment and a small inheritance.

"What my ex-wife didn't get, Lou got," he said. Gross developed brochures and video presentations, housed crew members, bought them uniforms and paid other expenses. He says that for three years of work and an investment of more than $30,000, he received $11,000. "I was his stepping stone," he said.

That early venture produced both the Jordache blimp and a rift between the two friends. As Gross tells it, Jordache signed a contract based on marketing materials he prepared showing a German advertising blimp.

"What they got was a blimp built by a stunt pilot and never rated other than as a logging balloon," he said. It crashed on its initial voyage and Pearlman won $2.5-million in court-ordered damages from the insurance company, which initially refused to pay the claim.

Pearlman went on to start up Airship International, raising $3-million in a 1983 public offering, which allowed him to buy a functioning German blimp. He came back to Gross for another marketing video, but denied him the job he coveted as the company's public relations representative. Gross spent 3 1/2 years on the blimp crew, "feeding my blimp addiction," as he puts it.

There were grand times, including a trip on the Concorde to the Paris Air Show, but Gross says he got fed up with the way Pearlman was running the company.

Although his employment ended, Gross continued to scrutinize and complain about Pearlman's business practices, especially after a fourth Pearlman-owned blimp crashed under what Gross thought were suspicious circumstances.

"Each airship that the companies lost had problems which, if handled properly, would have cost them a lot of money," Gross wrote in a 1994 letter to the National Transportation Safety Board.

"Instead, the airships are destroyed and they produce millions of dollars in insurance awards." The board's investigation led to sanctions against the German company that made the blimps, but none against Pearlman or his companies.

The next year, Gross complained to the Securities and Exchange Commission after Airship International canceled his 500 shares of stock. He got the stock back, but it became worthless as the company faltered. He also got a letter from Pearlman's lawyer telling him to stop making defamatory comments.

Pearlman next shifted into the music business and created a raft of entertainment and aviation companies under the Trans Continental banner. Gross was no longer involved, although he says he found out later that Pearlman used a photo of a model plane Gross had made on a brochure for one of his companies. Gross said Pearlman put a Trans Continental label on the 747 model and photographed it at La Guardia Airport, making it appear the company owned a real 747.

Though they were no longer close, the two men remained friendly despite their differences. Gross said they always called each other on their birthdays and he joined Pearlman and his posse a few times for fun, attending two Super Bowls with him and Pearlman's 50th birthday party, a lavish affair at Disney World's Dolphin Resort. And when he needed $1,800 two years ago for a down payment on a HyundaiAccent, Gross said Pearlman sent him the money.

"Lou had all these weird love-hate relationships with almost everybody," he said. "But nobody tried to stop him other than me."

Frank Vazquez Jr., who also grew up in Mitchell Gardens, often acted as mediator between the two. Last November, Vazquez, 45, died of carbon monoxide poisoning sitting in his Porsche with the motor running in the closed garage of his Orlando home. Vazquez, who headed operations for Trans Continental, had recently found out the savings he had invested with the company were worthless. However, neither Gross nor Pearlman accepts the ruling that the death was a suicide.

Gross said he is saddened by the way Pearlman's life turned out.

"This is a true story of American greed like no other," he said. "He could have had so much."

Helen Huntley can be reached at hhuntley@sptimes.com or 727 893-8230.

About this story

The Times began writing about Lou Pearlman last December after Tampa Bay investors complained they couldn't get their money out of a savings plan run by Pearlman's Trans Continental Airlines. More than $317-million of investor money is missing in one of the largest investment schemes in Florida history. Pearlman owes millions more to banks who loaned him money based on fraudulent financial statements and has been indicted on bank fraud charges. Pearlman claims he is indigent, but a bankruptcy trustee is searching for assets he might have hidden away.

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Officially, he isn't talking. But in friendly chats, he says he has been set up.

By HELEN HUNTLEY,

St. Petersburg Times -  October 21, 2007

http://www.sptimes.com/2007/10/21/Business/In_jail_and_on_the_ph.shtml

As he sits in an Orange County jail cell, Lou Pearlman dreams of pitching a reality show called Second Chance featuring losers from shows like American Idol and hosted by a celeb who has done jail time -- maybe even Paris Hilton.

Facing federal fraud charges, he imagines himself getting out on bond and moving in with his longtime girlfriend.

Most of all, he proclaims his innocence.

"Somebody's been trying to frame me in this thing," Pearlman claimed in one of his phone calls to Alan Gross, 56, his childhood friend and onetime business associate.

"I'm being blamed for a lot of stuff. I'm being made a patsy here."

Boy band producer Pearlman has yet to agree to a formal interview since he was jailed. But he offers revealing glimpses of his life and thoughts behind bars in these phone conversations with Gross, who grew up with Pearlman in the same apartment building in Queens, a borough of New York City.

Pearlman has called Gross six times in the past two months, calls that cost Gross about $15 a pop under the jail system for reversing the charges. Gross, a professional interviewer for the Census Bureau, took careful notes each time. Pearlman is free to call anyone he likes, but cannot receive incoming calls. All calls are recorded and available to investigators.

Arrested in Bali, Indonesia, four months ago, Pearlman, 53, is being held in Orlando without bail on federal charges of bank fraud. His trial is scheduled for March, but could be delayed since investigators are working on additional charges related to a $317-million investment scheme run by Pearlman's company, Trans Continental Airlines.

Although millions are missing, Gross said the former music mogul's calls offer no hint of where the money might be or whether any is left at all.

One minute Pearlman acknowledges responsibility as Trans Continental's president. But the next minute, he tries to dodge it, saying he got involved with people who were bad news and disputing investor claims. Gross said Pearlman complained to him that investors exaggerated their claims by doubling or tripling their actual losses.

The conversation makes life a little less lonely for Pearlman, who is not allowed contact with other inmates. He is permitted out of his cell twice a day, including an hour to walk and do a few calisthenics on an outdoor court. He also gets an hour of indoor time for showering, watching television and making phone calls. He has no access to the Internet.

His 8-by-16-foot cell, which ordinarily would house two inmates, is furnished with bunk beds, a toilet and sink. He eats kosher meals, which he described as TV-dinner type meals that are better than regular jail fare. They are served on a tray pushed through a slot in his cell door, which also has a window. The cell has no bars; frosted exterior windows let in natural light.

Pearlman says he spends his time "chilling out, thinking, reading."

Like O.J. Simpson, Pearlman says he wants to find the real perpetrators of the crimes he has been accused of committing. "We're going to track by track, step by step, find out what happened," he promised Gross. To do that, he said he needs to get out of jail. Gross said that in every conversation Pearlman talks about his plans for bonding out, saying he wants to throw a barbecue when he is released.

So far federal public defender Fletcher Peacock has not requested bond for Pearlman, a move that prosecutors certainly would oppose since Pearlman is considered a flight risk. When his business empire was falling apart last January, he left the country, traveling to Europe, Central America and Asia. Pearlman eventually was captured in Indonesia, where he was registered at a Bali resort under the name "A. Incognito Johnson."

Pearlman says his actions have been misinterpreted.

He told Gross he was not hiding, saying "I stay under Incognito names all the time when I travel." He even claimed to have turned himself in in Guam. In reality, FBI agents and Indonesian police escorted Pearlman to Guam, a way station on his trip back to Orlando.

Pearlman would have no home to return to if he were released. His creditors forced him into involuntary bankruptcy and a bankruptcy trustee has been selling off all his property and possessions, including his Windermere mansion, which is mortgaged for more than its value.

"It's like I'm dead and they're trying to bury me," Pearlman told Gross.

If he is released, Pearlman told Gross he wants to move in with Tammie Hilton, 36, an Orlando nurse he has dated for about seven years who visits him two or three times a week.

Each week he is allowed three visits in which he and his visitors see each other on television screens and talk by telephone. When Hilton visits only twice, his third visitor often is Dave Hedrick, 46, of Apopka, owner of a business installing audio and video systems. Hedrick became fascinated with Pearlman after attending one of the two bankruptcy court auctions of his possessions. While he mostly bought items to resell on eBay, Hedrick spent $6,000 to buy Pearlman's clothes just to give them back to him. He said he also plans to return to Pearlman photographs, diplomas and other personal items he bought at the auctions if Pearlman is found innocent.

"I asked him, 'Is it possible you did what they said?' And he said 'Dave, there's no way. The truth will come out.' I've got to take his word for it and see how the courts come out."

Gross hasn't heard from Pearlman since Vanity Fair published a report claiming Pearlman was a sexual predator who took advantage of the teenage boys in his bands. Others who have asked about the allegations say Pearlman is denying them.

Pearlman does most of the talking in their phone conversations, but Gross asks some pointed questions like what Pearlman would say to investors who have lost their money.

"Tell them I feel bad for them," he says Pearlman told him, promising "I will do my damnedest to make sure everybody's made whole. I will not stop until this is done."

Helen Huntley can be reached at hhuntley@sptimes.com or (727) 893-8230.

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by Bryan Burrough

Vanity Fair - November 2007

http://www.vanityfair.com/fame/features/2007/11/pearlman200711

Until he fled the country in January, accused of embezzling more than $300 million, Lou Pearlman was famous as the impresario behind the Backstreet Boys and 'NSync. Turns out his investors weren't the only victims, colleagues reveal: Pearlman's passion for boy bands was also a passion for boys.

The crowds began gathering outside Orlando's Church Street Station complex early on a sweltering June morning, waiting in line to wander through the abandoned offices of the unlikely multi-millionaire who had transformed this central Florida city into a music-industry mecca. Lou Pearlman, the rotund impresario who created the Backstreet Boys and 'NSync and guided the early recording careers of Justin Timberlake and scores of other young singers, had been an international celebrity, a popular, easygoing local businessman known as "Big Poppa." In his heyday, 5 to 10 years ago, he was profiled on 60 Minutes II and 20/20 and produced a hit ABC/MTV series, Making the Band.

Pearlman was long gone now, vanished, one step ahead of the F.B.I. and investigators from the state of Florida, who had rocked Orlando months before by accusing him of being a con man. Gone too were Justin and JC and Kevin and all the other young singers he had made into stars. What remained of Pearlman's empire, mostly memorabilia and office furniture, was to be auctioned later that day. Up in his gaudy third-floor corner office, with its rust-colored shag carpet and walls lined with gold and platinum records, would-be bidders poked into his cabinets and rifled through his desk drawers; the only secret they uncovered, alas, was Pearlman's passion for breath mints. At the back, a cavernous storeroom was stacked with framed posters of his bands.

Most of those milling about Pearlman's offices had scant idea what he had done wrong, much less where he had fled to. Some said Israel, or Germany, or Ireland, or Belarus. He had left the country last January, just days before the state sued him, alleging that he had bilked nearly 2,000 investors, many of them elderly Florida retirees, out of more than $317 million in a Ponzi scheme lasting at least 15 years. A dozen banks also sued for more than $130 million in back loans. Later the indictment would come. Big Poppa, it turned out, had been an accomplished swindler long before he formed his first band. His were scams of jaw-dropping audacity. Pearlman's largest company, a colossus he boasted was bringing in $80 million a year, was ... well, not. For years his investors, starry-eyed after rubbing elbows with 'NSync and the Backstreet Boys, never questioned his promises of forthcoming riches. When they finally did, he fought back with lawsuits, forged documents, and fictitious financial statements. When the truth began to come out, he ran.

That much any reader of the Florida newspapers might know. What no one knows, however, is that Pearlman's sins appear to have been far more sordid than conning kindly grandmothers. What no one knows, because it is described here for the first time, is that while the King of the Boy Bands was smitten with the music industry and the millions he made there, while he adored his gold records and his television appearances, what Lou Pearlman loved at least as much were the attentions of attractive young male singers.

Some, especially the teenagers, shrugged and giggled when he showed them pornographic movies or jumped naked onto their beds in the morning to wrestle and play. Others, it appears, didn't get off so easily. These were the young singers seen emerging from his bedroom late at night, buttoning their pants, sheepish looks on their faces. Some deny anything improper ever happened. But the parents of at least one, a member of the Backstreet Boys, complained. And for any number of young men who sought to join the world's greatest boy bands, Big Poppa's attentions were an open secret, the price some paid for fame.

"Some guys joked about it; I remember [one singer] asking me, 'Have you let Lou blow you yet?'" says Steve Mooney, an aspiring singer who served as Pearlman's assistant and lived in his home for two years. "I would absolutely say the guy was a sexual predator. All the talent knew what Lou's game was. If they say no, they're lying to you."

To a number of his former band members, Pearlman seemed so enamored of his male singers that it called into question his motivations for entering the music business in the first place. "Honestly, I don't think Lou ever thought we would become stars," says Rich Cronin, lead singer of the Pearlman boy band Lyte Funky Ones (LFO). "I just think he wanted cute guys around him; this was all an excuse. And then lightning crazily struck and an empire was created. It was all dumb luck. I think his motives for getting into music were very different."

Pearlman was already the 37-year-old millionaire C.E.O. of a publicly held company when he entered the music business, in 1992. He wasn't raised rich, though. Born in 1954, he grew up in the Mitchell Gardens Apartments, a collection of six-story brick buildings on a tidy street in Flushing, in the northernmost reaches of Queens, New York, below the Whitestone Bridge. His father, Hy, worked in dry cleaning; his mother was a homemaker. His cousin the singer Art Garfunkel was among those who encouraged Pearlman's interest in music. In his 2002 book, Bands, Brands & Billions, Pearlman describes an idyllic childhood in which he grew up a kind of miniature Bill Gates, earning money with lemonade stands and paper routes.

His life, Pearlman wrote, changed forever in 1964, when, looking across the Whitestone Expressway from his bedroom window, he spied a Goodyear blimp landing at Flushing Airport for the World's Fair. At the airport, he begged the blimp men to let him take a ride. When they said only special guests and journalists were allowed on board, the 10-year-old wangled an assignment from his school newspaper, presented his "credentials," and was duly lifted into the skies above New York City. A dream was born. The blimps returned to Queens every summer for years, and Pearlman was always there to meet them, helping around the hangars and becoming an unofficial mascot.

"I was ecstatic," Pearlman wrote in his book. "The airport became my summer playground and my after-school hangout."

But there are other versions of Pearlman's early years one hears at Mitchell Gardens. The most compelling is told by Alan Gross, who for 55 years has lived in Apartment 4C, a narrow space crammed with flotillas of blimp models, blimp posters, blimp photos, blimp key chains, and a cat. "This is the window Lou always talks about," Gross tells me, pointing across the Whitestone Expressway toward the long-closed Flushing Airport. "Lou's apartment is on the other side of the building. He couldn't even see the blimps from there. He saw them here, because I showed him."

After a career in aviation, Gross is now a census worker in poor health, a worn man with a luxuriant gray pompadour, dark circles beneath his eyes, and blue-jean shorts cut off with scissors. Though he has never spoken publicly about his longtime friend, Gross lives in a kind of Pearlman museum, his apartment stacked with boxes bursting with Pearlman correspondence, Pearlman news clippings, Pearlman family photos, even tape recordings of 25-year-old arguments the two had over the telephone. Gross is a kind of ramshackle Inspector Javert to Pearlman's Jean Valjean, a man who has spent years trying to warn investors and government agencies about the kid he first knew as "Fat Louie."

"I remember him in a baby carriage," Gross says, taking a seat on an old couch. "Louie was a very shy kid, didn't have many friends. Wasn't very friendly, a little overweight. He wasn't comfortable with who he was, you know? I'm three years older, but we were the only only children in the building, so we became friends. We went on family outings, to the Statue of Liberty, to Coney Island. I went to their family circles, where I listened to his cousin Artie sing as a kid."

As Gross tells it, it was he, not Pearlman, who first glimpsed the blimps that day in 1964. It was he, not Pearlman, who scurried there to befriend the blimp men; he, not Pearlman, who got the press pass necessary to get a ride; he, not Pearlman, who snagged the job of gofer around the blimp's hangar. "The stories he tells?" Gross says. "They're not about Lou. They're about me. He's taken episodes from my life to make his own. He always has."

Pearlman did join Gross at the hangar, doing odd jobs, but, as Gross tells it, Pearlman did little but sit and stare, which, he says, "made the blimp guys uncomfortable. I had to tell him to stop staring, to come out and talk a little, or they wouldn't let him hang around. That's really when he started coming out of his shell, you know. Sometimes I feel like the Dr. Frankenstein who created a monster."

The two lost touch when Gross left to attend Syracuse University and Pearlman enrolled in accounting classes at Queens College. It was for a class assignment that Pearlman, infatuated with aviation, worked up a business plan for a commuter helicopter service. When the two friends returned to Mitchell Gardens after college, Apartment 4C became the headquarters for Pearlman's first aviation company. He persuaded a small group of Wall Streeters living on Long Island to buy a helicopter, which he leased and flew around New York. In his book, Pearlman claims he made his first million at 21. This is at best doubtful. (The company was later merged into a competitor.)

Helicopters were fine, but what Pearlman really wanted was a blimp. He had never shaken the bug he caught in 1964; he and Gross were proud members of the airship fraternity who call themselves "balloonatics" and "Helium Heads." Some of the best blimps in the world were built by a German company, headed by an industrialist named Theodor Wüllenkemper. In 1978, when the 24-year-old Pearlman heard that Wüllenkemper would be visiting the U.S. around the time of his 50th birthday, he mailed him a two-foot-high birthday card covered with glitter, along with an invitation to dinner in New York. To Pearlman's amazement, Wüllenkemper accepted. Pearlman picked him up at the airport in a helicopter and ferried him to dinner at, of all places, Apartment 3F, Mitchell Gardens, Flushing, Queens. Pearlman's mother hosted. Wüllenkemper, charmed by Pearlman and his enthusiasm to start a blimp business, invited Pearlman and another Mitchell Gardens friend, Frankie Vazquez Jr., to train at Wüllenkemper's facilities in Germany.

Returning to the U.S. in 1980, Pearlman formed a company he called Airship Enterprises Ltd., and, after making the rounds of potential corporate sponsors, persuaded the owners of Jordache Jeans to lease a blimp for promotional purposes. Unfortunately, Pearlman had neither a blimp nor the money to buy one. According to Alan Gross, who joined Airship as its public-relations manager, Pearlman wangled a used balloon "envelope" from a California man and hired a New Jersey aluminum contractor to build a frame for it. The blimp was assembled at a naval base in Lakehurst, New Jersey, the same one where the German zeppelin Hindenburg crashed in flames, in 1937. There were problems from the beginning, among them the fact that the gold paint Jordache demanded tended to turn brown after several days in the sun, making the blimp look, in Gross's words, "like a giant turd." On its inaugural flight, on October 8, 1980, the new Jordache blimp floated into the New Jersey sky on its way to New York Harbor, where it was to circle a promotional party Jordache was throwing. It made it less than a mile, however, before losing altitude and forcing the pilot to crash-land in a garbage dump.

The crash made national headlines. Pearlman blamed the weight of the gold paint. In the airship community, however, there were darker whispers. "Lou never intended to fly that blimp," asserts Gross, who says the airship hadn't flown anywhere near the number of practice runs required under federal law. "He could have been arrested if it had left that base." Pearlman and his insurer ended up in court; seven years later a New York jury awarded Pearlman $2.5 million in damages.

It took years for him to rebound. After moving into a penthouse apartment in Bayside, Queens, however, Pearlman met a Wall Street broker well versed in the market for small, fly-by-night "penny stocks" who proposed a way he could return to the blimp business: Go public. Though he had little to sell but an idea, this was the go-go 1980s, and Pearlman's new company, Airship International, managed to raise $3 million in a 1985 public offering, which he used to purchase a 13-year-old blimp from Wüllenkemper. In short order Pearlman secured a promotional contract with McDonald's, and with his new McDonald's blimp in the air most of the year, he was able to rent office space on Fifth Avenue. In time Pearlman had enough money to begin flying in a rented Learjet. By 1989 he owned a 6,000-square-foot vacation home on a leafy street in Orlando.

A large, pale man with thinning red hair and glasses, Pearlman had a style that was enthusiastic, giving, and nonconfrontational. He picked up every check and seldom if ever said no. A big talker and a better listener, Pearlman drew people into his world by deducing their dreams and promising to deliver them. But his soft edges cloaked an unyielding will and the purring persuasions of a televangelist. "You could point your finger in his face and hold a Bible in one hand and tell him your name, and he could tell you you were wrong and make you believe it," recalls Jay Marose, Pearlman's publicist in later years. "He could make you believe anything. Anything at all."

In the late 1980s, Pearlman began to grow restless after he suffered two profound losses: the 1988 death of his mother and the 1989 destruction of his blimp in a San Antonio windstorm. Some suggest he went through an early midlife crisis; maybe, at the age of 35, he was just lonely. Whatever happened, within two years he had moved into new offices on Sand Lake Road in Orlando and begun talking about getting into the music business.

The seeds of Pearlman's rise—and his fall—were laid soon after he relocated Airship International to Florida, in July 1991, when he began attracting a massive inflow of new money, investors, and business partners. One was a suave 22-year-old British heir named Julian Benscher, who met Pearlman when he acquired a replacement blimp from a British company Benscher was negotiating to buy. After touring Airship's U.S. facilities and poring over its financials, Benscher bought into the company, becoming its second-largest shareholder. It seemed a bargain. As Pearlman explained it, his little empire now had two strong legs, the publicly traded Airship and a rapidly growing private company called Trans Continental Airlines, an aircraft-leasing business Pearlman co-owned with Theodor Wüllenkemper. According to Dun & Bradstreet, Trans Con Air operated more than 49 aircraft, including 14 727s, and had annual revenues of $78 million.

Benscher pushed Pearlman to expand Airship, and he did, eventually acquiring four more blimps, which were leased to SeaWorld, Metropolitan Life, Gulf Oil, and others. To raise the needed funds, Pearlman, true to his penny-stock roots, turned to a shady Colorado brokerage house, which in two public offerings helped raise about $17 million selling Airship stock to investors. The firm was what Wall Street calls a "boiler room," that is, it hawked risky, overpriced stock to unsuspecting investors. In 1993, shortly after the Pearlman offerings, the firm, Chatfield Dean & Co., was hit with $2.4 million in fines by the National Association of Securities Dealers for swindling investors; it later agreed to a settlement with the Securities and Exchange Commission (S.E.C.). Among the allegations were charges that Chatfield brokers took investors' orders for one stock but actually bought Airship shares instead.

Pearlman was thrilled with Chatfield's work. When one of its brokers, Anthony DeCamillis, was banned for a year from the securities industry and fined $25,000, Pearlman hired him to help raise still more money for Trans Con Air from banks and private investors. Another Chatfield executive was hired as well and ended up handling merchandising for the Backstreet Boys. "I remember asking Lou, 'You know, do you think it's wise to hire a guy who's been banned from the industry?'" Benscher recalls. "And he said, 'Oh, Tony'll be great for getting us financing!'"

The real problem, Benscher saw, was Pearlman's spending. He and his men hired private jets and helicopters for every business trip; every meal seemed to be a dozen people on the company's tab, a habit that drove up not only Pearlman's expenses but his weight, which hit 316 pounds and may have gone as high as 350. ("He was so unbelievably fat—he used to sit down and his middle tire was down to the floor," recalls Jennifer Emanuel, one investor's daughter. "His favorite place was that all-you-could-eat buffet at Olive Garden.") "I remember sitting his guys down and saying, 'Look, at this rate, you'll go through this $17 million in no time,'" Benscher says.

So Pearlman raised more money. He had been gathering small amounts from family and friends, mostly in the New York area, but in the early 1990s he aggressively began soliciting outside investors. Some, such as the late Eric Emanuel, a Wall Street investment banker, were sophisticated; Emanuel ponied up several million dollars and persuaded a Long Island real-estate mogul, Alfonse Fuglioli, to do the same. Many others weren't as savvy. Dr. Joseph Chow, a Chicago engineering professor whose wife ran a successful long-term-care organization, entered Pearlman's orbit when a Chatfield Dean broker cold-called him. Pearlman took it from there, wooing Chow intensely, sitting next to him at his daughter's wedding and, in later years, inviting him to kibitz with the Backstreet Boys and 'NSync. Chow came to consider Pearlman the son he never had and eventually lent him more than $14 million.

At first Pearlman's new investors received Airship stock. Then he began selling small lots of Trans Con Air stock, which paid an annual dividend of about 10 percent. At some point in the early 1990s, Pearlman began offering investors a new option, a chance to participate in Trans Con Air's federally insured employee stock-ownership plan, what he termed an Employee Investment Savings Account, or eisa. Trans Con's eisa, which paid an annual return of about 8 percent, was a rock-solid investment, Pearlman said, guaranteed by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (F.D.I.C.), the giant American International Group (AIG) insurance company, and Lloyd's of London. In time Pearlman began selling eisa investments through a series of small brokerage houses in Florida. Many of his buyers were retirees.

Typical of Pearlman's investors was the Sarin family. Steven, a Manhattan dentist, his brother, Barry, and their parents began investing with Pearlman in the 1980s, after the elder Sarins heard someone in their Florida retirement community speak glowingly of Pearlman. "He constantly sent promotional materials, you know, first on the blimps and the airplanes, then later on boy bands," recalls Steven Sarin, who occasionally stayed in Pearlman's home when he visited Orlando. "The company was always doing phenomenal. He kept saying it would all go public. And, you know, we were getting a decent return, so we were happy. Besides, we got to meet 'NSync and the Backstreet Boys." Over a span of 15 years, the Sarins invested more than $12 million with Pearlman.

There was just one problem: neither the Sarins' investments nor those of Dr. Chow or any other Pearlman investor were actually guaranteed by the F.D.I.C. Or AIG. Or Lloyd's of London. It was all a lie. In 1999, Lloyd's caught wind of it and fired off a letter to Pearlman demanding that he stop. He said it was all a misunderstanding. Lloyd's went to the S.E.C.; there is no evidence the agency followed up on the complaint.

For the most part investors simply took Pearlman at his word. When someone did ask to see proof of AIG and F.D.I.C. backing, Pearlman invited them to his office and displayed what appeared to be a massive AIG insurance policy, as well as a letter confirming F.D.I.C. protection. According to Bob Persante, a Tampa lawyer representing 15 Pearlman investors, the AIG policy was unrelated and the F.D.I.C. letter a fake, believed to be dummied up by Pearlman himself.

The bigger lie, though, was the simplest: there is no such thing as an eisa account. There is a legitimate, federally insured vehicle called an erisa—an Employee Retirement Investment Savings Account—but, according to Persante and others, Pearlman's fictitious eisa accounts were nothing more than a transparent attempt to capitalize on confusion between the two names. It was a startlingly simple, and fabulously successful, con. Between the early 1990s and 2006, Pearlman took in more than $300 million in eisa sales. In fact, the state of Florida alleges, it was a straightforward Ponzi scheme: Pearlman paid old investors with money from new ones. "What he told people was that 'I've got this eisa plan, and normally these plans are restricted to employees, but I've built in a special clause that allows me to give it to friends and family,'" says Persante. "The genius was he promised only a point above prime or so, so people never got suspicious."

There is scant evidence many other than Pearlman knew the extent of his frauds. One way Pearlman protected himself was hiring inexperienced people. In a business that rarely numbered more than a few dozen employees, several top Pearlman aides, including both his general counsel and his last right-hand man, Robert Fischetti, began their careers as Pearlman's driver. Fischetti's earliest duties, one investor recalls, included handing out paper towels in a Trans Con men's room. Pearlman found another of his top men, Paul Russo, working at a convenience store. "None of these guys knew anything," remembers Jay Marose. "If you needed a decision made, they would listen to you and go, 'Uh-huh, uh-huh, uh-huh,' and then go back to Lou."

As he told the story in later years, Pearlman began to think about entering the music business during the late 1980s, when one of his charter planes flew New Kids on the Block to several concerts. His epiphany, Pearlman claimed, came when the band's manager told him New Kids was grossing $100 million a year. Pearlman wanted in.

Julian Benscher says he sensed Pearlman's love of the blimp business waning as early as 1991. "I remember we were in his living room, and I said to him, 'Lou, what is your dream? What do you really want to do?'" Benscher says. "And he said, 'The music business.' He wanted to start a group like New Kids. I said, 'Well, then, let's do it. You put up half, I'll put up half.'"

In early 1992, Pearlman placed an advertisement in the Orlando Sentinel, announcing auditions for a band to be composed of teenage boys. Among the first to reply was Denise McLean, whose son, A.J., was an aspiring singer; after A.J. auditioned for Pearlman in his living room, he became the group's first member. The McLeans came with a pair of music managers, Jeanne Tanzy Williams and Sybil Hall, who began working with Pearlman to complete the group. Dozens of teenage boys auditioned for them at Pearlman's home. Eventually, in January 1993, Pearlman held an open casting call in which hundreds of young performers danced and sang at his blimp hangar in Kissimmee, south of Orlando. After several starts and stops, four young men—Brian Littrell, Nick Carter, Kevin Richardson, and Howie Dorough—were selected to fill out the group. Pearlman came up with a name, the Backstreet Boys, after Orlando's Backstreet flea market.

The rest is music history. The group staged its first show, at SeaWorld in May 1993, and soon went on the road, appearing at amusement parks and malls. Pearlman brought in a pair of professional managers, Johnny and Donna Wright, and within a year the Backstreet Boys had a deal with Jive Records. After U.S. radio stations ignored its first single, the band began touring in Europe, where its first album, released in 1995, became a smash hit. Through it all, Pearlman remained a smiling father figure to the boys, paying for everything, the tours, housing, clothes. He preached that they were all a "family" and urged the boys to call him "Big Poppa."

Even though the Backstreet Boys would not find success in America until 1997, Pearlman was soon spending so much time on the music business he all but lost interest in blimps. As a result, Airship International went down in flames. The company posted a $2 million loss in 1992 and a $4 million loss in early 1994; by late 1994 its stock had fallen to 13 cents a share, down from $6. Of its five blimps, only one was still flying in late 1994. The SeaWorld blimp was dismantled after the park declined to renew its lease. Another, leased to promote a Pink Floyd tour, was damaged in a windstorm. Another crashed in North Carolina. Yet another, en route to the U.S. Open tennis tournament in September 1994, crashed into a Long Island man's front yard. The end came when the lease on Pearlman's last blimp expired, in 1995.

Pearlman's investors didn't care much about Airship's death. Most, like Pearlman, were too excited about the music end of the business. But what made many investors feel secure was the knowledge that, even with Airship gone, the second and far larger leg of Pearlman's empire, the $80 million Trans Continental Airlines, was thriving. Its income grew steadily through the 1990s. In fact, almost all Pearlman's ventures became subsidiaries of Trans Con Air—the Backstreet Boys, the Chippendales male-stripper franchise (acquired in 1996), Trans Con Records, Trans Con Studios, even Trans Con Foods, which included a string of TCBY yogurt franchises and a small chain of deli-cum-pizzerias called NYPD Pizza. Pearlman regularly mailed out glowing letters to Trans Con Air shareholders, detailing how the aircraft-leasing and other businesses were doing.

By and large Pearlman's investors owned only tiny lots of Trans Con Air stock; he told people Theodor Wüllenkemper controlled most of it. Only Julian Benscher, after years of pestering Pearlman, was able to buy a significant stake in the company, about 7 percent. It wasn't until the late 1990s, after Benscher began disentangling his affairs from Pearlman's, that he stumbled onto the truth. When Benscher complained that he wasn't receiving dividends on his Trans Con stock, Pearlman blamed Wüllenkemper, saying the German magnate was refusing to pay out. Irked, Benscher flew to Germany in November 1998 and pleaded his case directly to Wüllenkemper, with whom he had become friendly.

As Benscher remembers their meeting, "Wüllenkemper said, 'What are you talking about?' I said, 'Trans Continental Airlines.' He said, 'What's Trans Continental Airlines got to do with me?' I said, 'You own it. You own 82 percent of it.' He starts laughing. [I said], 'Trans Con Air? Forty-nine airplanes?' He said, 'I have planes, but not this Trans Con Air. Julian, this has nothing to do with me.' I went cold inside. Everything I had believed for eight years was a lie. I didn't know what to do."

There was no Trans Continental Airlines.

Stunned, Benscher investigated how many airplanes Pearlman actually owned. He found precisely three, and all appeared to belong not to Trans Con but to a small charter service Pearlman had formed in 1998, Planet Airways. "Trans Con Airlines existed only on paper," Benscher explains. "But it was always so believable. There was always a plane or helicopter there whenever he wanted. When we flew to L.A. on MGM Grand Air, Lou said the jet was one of his. When he said he owned the plane, well, how could you tell he didn't?" But Benscher struck a settlement agreement with Pearlman in which he promised not to publicly disparage him, and he has never revealed his discovery to a soul until now.

When I mention Trans Con Air to Alan Gross, he grins and disappears into another room, then returns with a pair of faded Polaroids. Both show a massive "Trans Continental Airlines" 747 landing at what appears to be New York's La Guardia Airport; they are the same photos, I realize, that adorned the Trans Con Air brochures Pearlman had shown Benscher and other investors for years.

"Look closer," Gross says, eyeing the photos. "You notice you can't see the entire airplane. You can't see the tail numbers. You know why? Because that's where Lou was holding his fingers!"

Gross erupts in gales of laughter.

"It's a model!" he guffaws. "It's one I built for him. Louie was using those fake pictures all the way back in the late 70s to try and raise money. Can you believe it? People thought it was all real!"

By his own estimate, Pearlman sank $3 million into the Backstreet Boys before he saw a penny of profit. Still, the music business thrilled him. Even before the band hit it big, he began planning more groups. The first was 'NSync—composed of Justin Timberlake, JC Chasez, and three other singers—which Pearlman formed and dispatched to tour in Europe in 1995. Other groups were soon in the works, including a five-teen band named Take 5, a three-teen group called LFO, and an all-girl group named Innosense. With money pouring in from investors, Pearlman began work on a state-of-the-art recording studio. When it was finished, artists as varied as Kenny Rogers and the Bee Gees would record there.

From the very beginning, people remarked how odd it was for a blimp-industry executive to be diversifying into boy bands. In fact, insiders raised questions about Pearlman's motivations almost from the moment the Backstreet Boys was formed. The group's initial co-manager Sybil Hall and her partner, a singer named Phoenix Stone—he had been one of the original Backstreet Boys before starting his own company—remained close to Pearlman as co-investors in the band. "Basically this was an excuse for Lou to hang around with five good-looking boys," says Stone, who now runs a record label with Hall in Los Angeles. "He was along for the ride. What he liked to do was take boys out to dinner."

From outward appearances, Pearlman was not gay; in fact, over the years he dated several women, including a nurse. But even in those early years, when Pearlman shepherded the Backstreet Boys to appearances around the U.S. and Europe, members of the group and their families frequently gossiped about his sexual proclivities. "As a mother, you kind of put two and two together," remembers Denise McLean, A. J. McLean's mother. "Yet there was always that fine line where you sat back and went, 'O.K., is this a guy who always wanted to be a father or an uncle? Is this all innocent? Or is it more?' I kind of thought that there might have been some strange things going on. But you just didn't know."

Others felt Pearlman was above reproach. "I spent quite a lot of time with Lou from '90 to '94 and never did he behave inappropriately in any sexual fashion," says Julian Benscher. "Did I a couple of times think that maybe with one of the drivers he had an unusually friendly relationship? Sure. But I spent a lot of time with the boys and Lou, and I can tell you there was no inappropriate behavior. No way."

For Pearlman, and for all the people around him, everything changed in June 1997 when the Backstreet Boys charted their first U.S. hit, "Quit Playing Games (with My Heart)." Overnight the band became an international sensation. Reporters rushed to profile Pearlman as the unlikely impresario—some said "Svengali"—of a new era of boy bands. The success of the Backstreet Boys and later 'NSync created a huge new music scene in Orlando, with thousands of fresh-faced boys, and girls, flocking to audition for Pearlman.

It was during this period, in 1997 and 1998, that the first allegations of inappropriate behavior involving Pearlman appear to have surfaced. One incident centered on the youngest of the Backstreet Boys, Nick Carter, who in 1997 turned 17. Even for many of those closest to the group, what happened remains unclear. "My son did say something about the fact that Nick had been uncomfortable staying [at Pearlman's house]," Denise McLean says. "For a while Nick loved going over to Lou's house. All of a sudden it appeared there was a flip at some point. Then we heard from the Carter camp that there was some kind of inappropriate behavior. It was just odd. I can just say there were odd events that took place."

Neither Nick Carter nor his divorced parents, Robert and Jane Carter, will address what, if anything, happened. But at least two other mothers of Pearlman band members assert Jane termed Pearlman a "sexual predator." Phoenix Stone says he discussed the matter with both Nick and his mother. "With Nick, I got to tell you, this was not something Nick was comfortable talking about," says Stone. "What happened? Well, I just think that he finally, you know, Lou was definitely inappropriate with him, and he just felt that he didn't want anything to do with that anymore. There was a big blowup at that point. From what Jane says, yes, there was a big blowup and they confronted him."

In a telephone interview, Jane Carter stops just short of acknowledging Pearlman made improper overtures to her son. "Certain things happened," she tells me, "and it almost destroyed our family. I tried to warn everyone. I tried to warn all the mothers." Told that this article would detail allegations that Pearlman made overtures to other young men, she replies, "If you're doing that, and exposing that, I give you a big flag. I tried to expose him for what he was years ago.... I hope you expose him, because the financial [scandal] is the least of his injustices." When I ask why she won't discuss it further, Carter says she doesn't want to jeopardize her relationship with Nick. "I can't say anything more," she says. "These children are fearful, and they want to go on with their careers."

Since Pearlman's financial collapse, a number of his onetime band members have told Vanity Fair they experienced behavior that many would consider inappropriate. Much of what is described occurred at Pearlman's two Orlando-area homes, the white house he owned on Ridge Pine Trail and, after 1999, the sprawling Italianate mansion he acquired from Julian Benscher, in suburban Windermere. Tim Christofore, who joined Pearlman's third boy band, Take 5, at the age of 13, remembers one sleepover when he and another boy were dozing and Pearlman appeared at the foot of their bed, clad only in a towel. According to Christofore, who now runs a small entertainment business in St. Paul, Minnesota, Pearlman performed a swan dive onto the bed, wrestling with the boys, at which point his towel came off.

"We were like, 'Ooh, Lou, that's gross,'" Christofore recalls. "What did I know? I was 13."

On a separate occasion, Christofore and another band member telephoned Pearlman to say they were coming to his home to play pool. When they arrived, Pearlman met them at the door naked, explaining he was just getting out of the shower. Another time, Christofore remembers, Pearlman showed him security-camera footage of his girl group, Innosense, sunbathing topless. On still another occasion, Pearlman invited all five band members to watch the movie Star Wars in his viewing room. At one point the film switched off and was replaced by a pornographic movie. At the time, Christofore says, "We just thought it was funny. We were kids. We were like, 'Great!'"

"No one ever complained," says Tim's mother, Steffanie. "Most of the stuff, we learned about only after the group broke up [in 2001]. Lou played this game of trying to alienate the parents. Every time he dropped the boys off, it was 'Don't tell the parents anything.' They pretty much had a pact with him and they kept it." Only later did Merrily Goodell, who had two sons in Take 5, learn that Pearlman had taken one to a strip joint. "Did Lou rape my boys? No, he didn't," she says. "But he put them, and a lot of others, in inappropriate situations. I know that. To me, the man is just a sexual predator."

To this day, the question of Pearlman's behavior remains a sensitive topic among former members of his boy bands. For every young man or parent who says he experienced or saw something inappropriate, there are two who won't discuss it and three more who deny hearing anything but rumors. More than a dozen insiders told me they heard stories of Pearlman's behavior while insisting they experienced nothing untoward themselves. Asked who might have been targets of Pearlman's overtures, the names of seven or eight performers are repeatedly mentioned. Only two of these men would talk to me, and while one acknowledges hearing stories from other boys of inappropriate behavior, both strenuously deny experiencing it themselves.

"None of these kids will ever admit anything happened," one attorney who has sued Pearlman told me. "They're all too ashamed, and if the truth came out it would ruin their careers."

Among the few who will discuss Pearlman's behavior in detail is one of his former assistants, Steve Mooney. In 1998, Mooney, then a strapping 20-year-old with flowing blond hair, was trying to get started as a singer when a Pearlman aide approached him at an Orlando mall, where he was working at an Abercrombie & Fitch store, and told him, "The big man wants to see you." Mooney visited Pearlman in his Sand Lake Road offices and performed a Michael Jackson song, but instead of a singing job Pearlman offered him a job as his personal assistant. Pearlman explained that JC Chasez of 'NSync had gotten his start this way. Mooney signed on, and Pearlman soon invited him to live in his home. All the time Pearlman held out the chance that Mooney could join one of the groups he was planning, called O-Town. According to Mooney, Pearlman told him, "By this time next year, you'll be a millionaire."

From the outset, Mooney noticed how Pearlman enjoyed hugging him, rubbing his shoulders, and squeezing his arms, usually in conjunction with one of his odd pep talks. "He would say, 'Do you trust me?' [And I would say], 'Of course I trust you, Lou,'" Mooney recalls. "He always said, 'I want to break you down, then build you up, so we can be a team together.' Then he would say, 'Your aura is off,' so he begins rubbing my back. I was like, 'Whoa!' And he's going, 'It's O.K., we've got to get your aura aligned.'" It got to the point, Mooney says, where every time they were alone Pearlman would rub his muscles. "As soon as the elevator doors close, he would grab you and rub your abs," he recalls. "The first few times, it's O.K. But it gets to be too much. It's like you have this creepy friend who's always touching you."

"That was the line, the 'aura,' I definitely heard that aura bullshit," says Rich Cronin, lead singer of the Pearlman band LFO. "It took everything in me not to laugh. He was like, 'I know some mystical fricking ancient massage technique that if I massage you and we bond in a certain way, through these special massages, it will strengthen your aura to the point you are irresistible to people.'

"I swear to God," Cronin goes on, "I had to bite my cheeks to stop from laughing. I mean, I now know what it's like to be a chick.... He was so touchy-feely, always grabbing your shoulders, touching you, rubbing your abs. It was so obvious and disgusting.... He definitely came at people. He came at me. In my situation I avoided him like the plague. If I went to his house, I went with somebody. I would never go with him alone. Because I knew every time I was over there by myself it always led to some weird situation. Like he'd call late at night to come over and talk about a tour, and you'd get there and he'd be sitting there in boxers. The guy was hairy as a bear."

Steve Mooney shared his concerns with his father, who joined the two for dinner. While they ate, Mooney says, Pearlman kept putting his hand on his leg. Finally he asked him to stop. Afterward, he was surprised when his father said Pearlman seemed O.K. "It's weird," Mooney says. "But when you start talking about the money and fame, it's like Lou's got this mind control over people."

Mooney remembers having a heart-to-heart talk with a young man I'll call "Bart," a singer in a second-tier Pearlman band. "I said, '[Bart], does he ever grope you?,' and he said, 'Yeah, all the time,'" Mooney recalls. "[He said] Lou once grabbed him 'down there.' I said, 'Well, what do you do about it?' [He said], 'Look, if the guy wants to massage me, and I'm getting a million dollars for it, you just go along with it. It's the price you got to pay.'"

On several occasions in the late 1990s, Phoenix Stone says, he felt obliged to confront Pearlman over his behavior. "We were trying to build a company, you know, build a brand, a worldwide brand," says Stone. "And this kind of thing, I mean, it looks bad for your reputation. We didn't want the reputation of Lou as a predator.... So, yeah, I did have a conversation with him. I was worried about the under-aged kids. He never admitted to being gay or anything. I said, 'Look, I know exactly what time it is with you, and I don't care whether you're gay or not, but this is a business, and you can't come on to these guys like this. And if you do, none of them can be under-aged.' He just kind of laughed and said, 'I got it all covered, I got it all covered.' This was still at the height of [his fame]."

"I tried to protect the kids," says the publicist Jay Marose. "You'd see Lou kind of moving in on one of them, and you'd just tell someone, Get that kid away from Lou before it's too late."

Living at Pearlman's home, Steve Mooney believed he saw firsthand the price many young men were paying. Pearlman's bedroom lay behind a pair of double doors, and when they were closed, Mooney knew not to intrude. More than once, he says, he encountered young male singers slipping out of those doors late at night, tucking in their shirts, a sheepish look on their faces. "There was one guy in every band—one sacrifice—one guy in every band who takes it for Lou," says Mooney, echoing a sentiment I heard from several people. "That's just the way it was."

As Mooney tells it, matters came to a head in 2000, during the final stages of the O-Town selection process. Pearlman was resisting his entreaties to join the group. According to Phoenix Stone, who consulted on the selection process, he and Pearlman were at his home late one night discussing Mooney's future when Pearlman telephoned Mooney, explaining he needed someone to take out the garbage.

"It was very clear to me what was going on," Stone recalls. "I stopped it right then and there. When Lou called Steve, they had an argument. Steve got very mad, you know, [saying], 'I'm not coming over.' [I said to Pearlman], 'If it's about the garbage, there's plenty of people who can take out your garbage. If it's not, well, leave the kid alone. It's late.'"

Stone left, believing the matter had been resolved. In fact, Mooney says, there was a second phone call. At Pearlman's insistence he drove to the mansion at two a.m. and found Pearlman in his office, clad in a white terry-cloth bathrobe. A long argument ensued. It climaxed, Mooney says, when he beseeched Pearlman, "What do I have to do to get in this band?" At that point, Mooney says, Pearlman smiled.

"I'll never forget this as long as I live," Mooney says. "He leaned back in his chair, in his white terry-cloth robe and white underwear, and spread his legs. And then he said, and these were his exact words, 'You're a smart boy. Figure it out.'"

Mooney says he left the house without further incident. He knew, however, that his days with Pearlman were numbered. Afterward, in an effort to protect himself, he says, he returned to Pearlman's office when Pearlman was out. He had perused Pearlman's private files in the past, curious to see what they contained. Now he removed three items he had seen before: a photo of a longtime Pearlman aide posing as a Chippendales dancer; a photo of Pearlman and one of the Backstreet Boys on a ski vacation, apparently alone; and a photo of a young singer naked in Pearlman's sauna, his hands covering his genitals. After making copies of the photos, Mooney says, he contacted the aide who posed as a dancer. "I went to [him] and showed it all to him," he says. "He's like, 'Listen, all you got to do is keep your mouth shut and you're in this company for life. That photo? I'd burn it.'" When Pearlman learned of the theft he confronted him. Mooney says he turned over the copies and resigned. Today he sells real estate in Orlando. "Nobody will talk about this stuff," Mooney says, "but plenty of guys were willing to go along to get what they wanted."

In late 2000, Phoenix Stone and Sybil Hall say, they took an odd phone call from Pearlman: he said he had found a listening device in his home. The two joined Pearlman in an impromptu grilling of an assistant, a young man I'll call "Jeremy," who according to several people had begun an affair with Pearlman. Stone and Hall say Jeremy admitted to placing the device because he was jealous of the attention Pearlman was lavishing on another young man, whom I'll call "Peter," a member of one of Pearlman's bands. "He told me that he and Lou were in a relationship and that he thought Lou was cheating on him with [Peter]," Hall recalls. "He wanted to find out what they were doing." Jeremy couldn't be located for comment, but after his dismissal—Hall and Stone say he received an Escalade to keep quiet—Peter continued to work for Pearlman for years.

Despite innuendo that dogged him for years, Pearlman faced the prospect of public allegations only a handful of times. Once, an unidentified male singer—there may have been more than one—made it clear to Pearlman that he was about to go public. Pearlman's longtime attorney, J. Cheney Mason, of Orlando, confirms that he turned the matter over to the F.B.I. for investigation as a possible extortion. No charges were ever brought, the boy or boys never went public, and Mason, despite filing suit against Pearlman for unpaid legal fees, says he never heard a single reliable account of improper behavior on Pearlman's part.

Almost from the moment Pearlman achieved his first real success in the music industry, in 1997, the foundations of his little empire began to quake. It started when one of the Backstreet Boys, Brian Littrell, couldn't understand why he was seeing so little income from their nonstop touring and European record sales; Littrell hired attorneys who calculated that, while Pearlman had taken in several million dollars in revenue since 1993, the five singers had received barely $300,000, about $12,000 per member each year. Littrell sued, and in May 1998, his bandmates joined the litigation; during discovery they learned that, among other things, Pearlman was paid as the sixth member of the band.

"He totally deceived me," Kevin Richardson told Rolling Stone in 2000. "It's 'We're a family, we're a family,' then you find out 'It's about the money, it's about the money, it's about the money.'" Pearlman and the band eventually reached a series of settlements, details of which were never disclosed. In general, the band got cash and its freedom; Pearlman retained a portion of its future revenues.

In the wake of the Backstreet lawsuit, Pearlman's bands began to realize how much of their income was flowing to Big Poppa. One by one they sued or disbanded. Despite success in Europe and Asia, Take 5 broke up in 2001; LFO, after two top-10 singles, did the same. The biggest loss by far was 'NSync, whose members sued, settled, and broke all ties with Pearlman in 1999, a struggle memorialized by the title of their platinum-selling 2000 album, No Strings Attached. None of 'NSync's members would comment for this article, but in a 2006 interview, Justin Timberlake said the band felt it "was being financially raped by a Svengali."

After that, the lawsuits just kept coming. The Backstreet Boys' first managers, Jeanne Williams and Sybil Hall, sued. Phoenix Stone sued. Pearlman ran up $15 million in legal bills with just one lawyer, J. Cheney Mason. Yet even with all the legal fees, Pearlman, who retained royalty interests in both 'NSync and the Backstreet Boys, was still swimming in cash. He bought the 12,000-square-foot lakeside mansion in suburban Windermere, along with two condominiums in Orlando, a waterfront condo in Clearwater, two Las Vegas penthouses, a house in Hollywood, and an apartment in Manhattan. He had at least two Rolls-Royces.

The slowing of the boy-band craze in 2001 and 2002, however, meant Pearlman needed new income streams to keep paying his investors. He signed a slew of new artists, but none, other than Nick Carter's brother, Aaron, a solo act, had any real success. Pearlman tried to break into Hollywood, developing a script titled Longshot, written by Tony DeCamillis, the once banned stockbroker. As its stars Pearlman cast one of his singers, a teenager named Joey Sculthorpe, more than a dozen Trans Con artists, and Britney Spears, the Rock, and Justin Timberlake in a series of cameos. Released in 2002, Longshot was a complete flop. According to one source, the movie cost $21 million and brought in barely $2 million.

Chastened, Pearlman next attempted to capitalize on his image as a molder of young talent, co-producing the successful Making the Band series for ABC and MTV and, in September 2002, acquiring a controversial talent-scouting bureau known as Options Talent. The Options acquisition proved a nightmare; several of its executives had criminal records, and its clients, mostly young people seeking careers in acting and modeling, had filed hundreds of complaints with Better Business Bureaus around the country alleging they had received little in return for fees they paid. Under Pearlman, Options endured a series of name changes, a lengthy Florida state investigation into its methods—Pearlman was never charged with any wrongdoing—and a 2003 bankruptcy before emerging as a new company called Talent Rock, a small and rarely profitable business that held open casting calls for singers, actors, and models at venues around the U.S. and Mexico.

While Pearlman's celebrity dimmed, he remained a star in Orlando, where he was given a key to the city and named an honorary sheriff's deputy. In 2003 he used this goodwill to strike a deal with the city council to assume control of the Church Street Station complex, a cluster of historic buildings in downtown Orlando. Promising to refurbish the complex and create 500 jobs, Pearlman relocated all his businesses there, and, despite construction delays, the opening of several restaurants and stores in the next several years slowly brought Church Street back to life.

Still, by 2004, Pearlman had yet to find anything to replace the income lost from Airship International, 'NSync, and the Backstreet Boys. He continued pumping out new singing groups, including a Latin boy band and a Euro boy band called US5, but none caught fire. Yet his hundreds of investors still needed to be paid. In time he faced the squeeze every Ponzi scheme ultimately confronts—where to find new cash to pay the old investors. In 2003, with his cash crunch growing worse by the month, he began taking out bank loans. In the next three years, in 13 separate loan packages, Pearlman pledged every asset he possessed in return for cash: the condominiums, the mansion, Church Street, his three airplanes, even his shares of band royalties. In return he received about $156 million. Just as important, he gained time.

The mind-boggling thing is that not one of Pearlman's new banks discovered that the emperor had no clothes. Not one realized that his largest asset by far, Trans Con Air, didn't exist. Not one realized that his financial statements and tax returns were a tissue of lies. In hindsight, these deceptions should have been easy to discern. All it would have taken was a single phone call to Harry Milner, the attorney who signed Pearlman's returns. Milner wouldn't have come to the phone.

Because he was a dead man.

For Pearlman, the beginning of the end came in mid-2004, when 72-year-old Joseph Chow succumbed to pancreatic cancer in a Chicago hospital. Over the years Chow had become Pearlman's dream investor, a virtually unlimited source of money with total faith in Pearlman's promises of future riches. The loans, however, were a source of tension within the Chow family. "From the very beginning, my mom was very skeptical of Lou Pearlman," recalls the Chows' 32-year-old daughter, Jennifer. "She didn't trust him. My parents argued about it quite a bit. She had me talk to my father a number of times, to see if we could get some money out. Or slow it down. My father would get very defensive. He just had so much confidence in Lou and everything he told him. He was always promising to expand into TV, movies, recording studios, the charter-airline business. He was always promising there would be an I.P.O."

When Joseph Chow died, his family, faced with a large bill for estate taxes, had an uncle approach Pearlman about repaying the loans. "He told my uncle that he would think about it and try to work out a payment plan," Jennifer says. "My uncle essentially responded, 'What's the situation with the I.P.O.?' Lou sounded skeptical. That's when Lou said to him, 'If anything, Joseph's investments are worth maybe 10 cents on the dollar.' We were pretty stunned. Then Lou comes back and says he could repay a hundred thousand every quarter or so until the full $14 million was paid down. That wasn't really acceptable."

The Chows hired a lawyer. Before they could do more, however, Pearlman sued them, in a Chicago court, seeking to stop the family from demanding repayment. "We get sued and I'm scratching my head: why the hell does this guy want to be in my jurisdiction instead of Florida?" remembers the Chows' attorney, Edwin Brooks. "It turns out the courts down there all have his number. They're all sick of him."

Filed in late 2004, the centerpiece of Pearlman's lawsuit was what's called a "forbearance letter," in this case a one-paragraph note signed by Joseph Chow saying, in essence, that his loans could be forgiven if Pearlman didn't feel like repaying. To Brooks the letter made no sense: why would anyone forgive $14 million in loans? "What really got me, late one night, poring over all these documents, was that Joseph Chow's signature looked familiar," Brooks recalls. "And so that's when I started going through the notes my client had signed. Then I saw it. I grabbed one of the old letters, with his signature, held it up to the light, and compared it to the forbearance letter. The signatures were identical. Absolutely identical. You lay them over the top of each other, it's one signature. At that point I realized I was looking at a forgery." It would take another year, however, Brooks says, to gather the original loan documents, hire experts, and prove it.

In the meantime, after a counterclaim against Pearlman was filed, discovery got under way. Needing to study Pearlman's finances, Brooks subpoenaed the accounting firm that had certified his financial statements. The firm's name was Cohen & Siegel; it was the same firm that had been furnishing Pearlman's statements since at least 1990. But when Brooks dispatched a process server to the firm's Coral Gables headquarters, "the process server calls back and tells me, 'There's no accounting firm at this address, just a secretarial service,'" Brooks recalls. "At which point I realized I was onto something."

Brooks deposed the woman who ran the secretarial service. She said Cohen & Siegel had no offices or employees she knew of; Pearlman had simply paid her to take calls on its behalf. When a call came in, she forwarded it to Pearlman himself. "He paid for the whole thing," Brooks says. "I realized there was no accounting firm." Not long after, Brooks discovered a Cohen & Siegel Web site, apparently a new one. "Lou claimed it was a German accounting firm, but it was a joke," Brooks says. "It had no contact information. We hired investigators to find it. It didn't exist."

By the middle of 2005, the Chow family and its attorney had solid evidence Pearlman had perpetrated a massive fraud. Other investors, however, knew nothing of this and continued to shovel money Pearlman's way. He needed it—badly. By 2006 few if any of his remaining businesses—a handful of obscure bands, Talent Rock, Planet Airways, the recording studio, the delis, and a few restaurants—were making money, yet Pearlman, thanks to bank loans, kept mailing interest checks to hundreds of investors. He was able to borrow from an Indiana bank as late as August 2006, but by then he was all but broke.

Soon after, investors stopped receiving their checks. That September, Steven Sarin, the dentist, heard rumors of the Chow family's litigation. Sarin's family had given Pearlman so much money—$12 million—that he still lived in a studio apartment, awaiting the day Pearlman went public. When Sarin telephoned, Pearlman dismissed the Chow litigation as a mix-up. A few weeks later he went to Queens and met Steven Sarin and his brother, Barry, at their usual spot, Ben's Deli, in Bayside. Barry demanded his money back. "Lou said, 'No problem—I can pay you back with one hubcap from my Rolls-Royce,'" Steven recalls. "He showed us a financial statement showing we're doing phenomenal. He told us Trans Con had 60 jets. It was only after the meeting was over, I remember, I noticed for the first time in 22 years he didn't use a credit card for the meal. He paid in cash."

The Sarins would never see their money again. Nor would many of Pearlman's aides, including Frankie Vazquez Jr., who had been at his side since boyhood; Vazquez's father had been the super at Mitchell Gardens. In early November, when Vazquez sought to withdraw a portion of the $100,000 or so he had with Pearlman, "Lou told him he was on his own, the money was gone," recalls Kim Ridgeway, a friend of Vazquez's. "After all the years Frankie had devoted to Lou, he turned his back on him. Frankie, I knew, felt totally betrayed."

Afterward, Ridgeway says, Vazquez grew distraught. He couldn't sleep. On November 11, a neighbor heard a car running for several hours in his garage. Police were called. Opening the garage, they found Vazquez sitting in his white 1987 Porsche, the motor running, a T-shirt wrapped around his head, dead.

The state of Florida's Office of Financial Regulation began examining Trans Con's eisa program after investors started complaining in the fall of 2006. Pearlman did his best to delay state auditors, but when word of the probe leaked to the press in mid-December, he knew the end was near. According to one report, he attempted to buy an apartment in Berlin, but the purchase fell through. He began selling or giving away his automobiles, including a Rolls, and laying off Trans Con employees. He stopped paying his banks, and they began to sue. Every day last January seemed to bring a new lawsuit. Just days before the state filed its own lawsuit charging Pearlman with operating a Ponzi scheme, a group of banks petitioned an Orlando judge to place Trans Con in bankruptcy. An attorney named Jerry McHale was assigned to begin liquidating Pearlman's assets.

By the time McHale entered Trans Con's offices on February 2, there had been no sign of Pearlman for weeks. "The situation was a disaster," McHale recalls. "There were actually no employees left when I arrived. It appeared that everyone was aware that this thing was falling apart and had just left." That same day, Pearlman wrote an e-mail to the Orlando Sentinel from Germany, where the night before he and his band US5 had attended an industry awards show. While declining to comment on the allegations against him, he said, "My executive team and I are working hard to resolve the issues."

It was over. In mid-February the F.B.I. raided Pearlman's mansion, hauling out cartons of documents and quizzing his assistant when he drove up in Pearlman's last Rolls, a bright-blue model with "LP" license plates. At the same time, Jerry McHale gained entrance to Pearlman's office computers and realized the enormity of the scandal. All told, McHale identified $317 million in missing money that was supposed to be in Trans Con's eisa accounts, not to mention the $156 million in vanished bank loans.

There was no money left. McHale got busy selling Pearlman's remaining real estate and his last functioning business, Talent Rock, for next to nothing. His only real success came when he received an anonymous tip that Pearlman, wherever he was, was attempting to transfer $250,000 from an account at the Bank of New York to Germany. McHale managed to get the money frozen before it left the U.S.

By the time McHale wrapped up his work, in April, there had been no reliable sighting of Pearlman for six weeks. There were reports he had been seen in Israel, Belarus, and Brazil. Every day more angry investors thronged to one of several blogs dedicated to the scandal to pour out their rage and hatred. But Big Poppa was gone.

Thorsten Iborg, a 32-year-old German computer programmer, arrived on the Indonesian island of Bali on June 9, checking into the five-star Westin Nusa Dua resort for a scuba vacation with his wife. After a day or two, Iborg noticed a pale, overweight American on the terrace. Back in Germany he had seen a newsclip about boy bands, and he was certain the man was Pearlman. Later, Iborg found himself sitting beside the man in the hotel's Internet café. It was him. He was sure.

Pearlman arrives at court in Orlando, Florida, on July 11, 2007. Orlando Sentinel/MCT/Landov.

At breakfast on June 14, Iborg secretly snapped a photo of the man. Scanning the Internet, he found a blog written by a St. Petersburg, Florida, newspaper reporter, Helen Huntley, which was jam-packed with articles and complaints written by people Pearlman had scammed. Iborg uploaded the photo and e-mailed it to Huntley. Huntley turned everything over to the F.B.I. Agents attached to the American Embassy in Jakarta appeared at the Westin the next day and led Pearlman away; he had been registered under the name "A. Incognito Johnson." His passport stamps indicated he had spent time in Panama before arriving in Bali. U.S. marshals loaded him onto a plane to Guam, where he remained in jail for nearly a month before being returned to Orlando in mid-July. At the end of June, federal prosecutors had announced his indictment, on three counts of bank fraud and single counts of mail and wire fraud. More indictments are expected.

Today, Pearlman sits in Orlando's Orange County Jail. Repeated calls to his court-appointed attorney went unreturned. He is scheduled for trial next spring.

A few days after Pearlman was returned to Orlando, I drove through the gates of his sprawling lakeside mansion, amid the steamy walled communities west of the city. The house, which had been on the market for months, was vacant. Weeds grew in the side yards. The pool, housed in a mosquito-proof enclosure out back, remained a brilliant blue. Down by the lakefront, where Spanish moss dripped from towering pines, the water lapped quietly against the shore.

A back door was unlocked, allowing entrance into his wood-paneled office. The house was still. Blueprints lay on a kitchen counter. Pearlman had ambitious plans for his compound, envisioning a massive, 30,000-square-foot edifice complete with indoor and outdoor performance stages and a bowling alley. In the marble foyer, twin staircases curled up to the second floor, like something out of Sunset Boulevard. In the master suite, all that remained was a hulking, four-foot steel safe. Wires sprouted from the walls. I could just make out impressions on the carpet where Pearlman's bed had stood.

Outside, the real-estate agent, Cheryl Ahmed, met me in the driveway. She had gotten the listing from Pearlman's assistant but hadn't heard from him since Easter. "You hear a lot of stories about what went on," she says. "Big, big parties. Lots of pretty boys. Lots of boys."

Later, I chatted with the couple who live next door. They never saw much of Pearlman, they say, but he was always polite when they did. Parties? Not many, they say. In fact, the only time they ever wondered about their neighbor was several years ago, when a gardener motioned toward Pearlman's mansion and made what seemed like a strange comment. "If you have a little son," the gardener said, "don't let him go to that house. Bad things happen there."

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Updated Last:  10/24/2007

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