The Hit Charade: Lou Pearlman, Boy Bands, and the Biggest Ponzi Scheme in U.S. History

Tyler Gray

Oct 2008 · Harper Collins

About this ebook

Journalist Tyler Gray’s The Hit Charade is the true story of boy band manager Lou Pearlman’s epic rise and fall.

Without Lou Pearlman, there would have been no Backstreet Boys, no *NSYNC, and possibly no Justin Timberlake. In the late 1990s, Pearlman’s boy bands ushered out guitar-and-angst-driven grunge music and began to dominate the television and radio airwaves. At the core of this squeaky-clean pop revolution was a sinister international fraud conceived by Pearlman, a huckster who first honed his crooked business skills as a teenage math nerd and blimp enthusiast in Flushing, Queens. From the mid 1980s through 2007, he cheated hundreds of investors out of nearly $500 million. When they finally caught on to him and demanded their money, the “Sixth Backstreet Boy” had already fled to Germany and then to Indonesia, where he was eventually nabbed by authorities and charged with a historic federal fraud.

In The Hit Charade, Tyler Gray (the only journalist to speak with Pearlman while he was in jail) weaves together the fascinating behind-the-scenes story of the greedy desperation of this boy-band mogul and monumental scam artist. Gray unravels Pearlman’s twenty-year long Ponzi scheme and explores persistent rumors about alleged inappropriate behavior by Pearlman toward members of the boy bands and other young men. Along the way, former friends, family members, Pearlman business associates, and band members themselves reveal detailed accounts of everything from the heyday of their stardom to Pearlman’s more troubled times.

“Lou Pearlman’s schemes were so outlandish they can’t possibly have been real. But Tyler Gray exposes him as one of the most sinister scam artists in history.” —Joe Levy

About the author

In his thirteen years as a journalist, Tyler Gray has covered everything from a teenager's death-penalty trial for murder to the drug- and sex-fueled shenanigans of fuzzy theme park characters in Orlando, Florida. His stories have appeared in the New York Times, Esquire, Radar magazine, Men's Journal, the New York Daily News, the Orlando Sentinel, the St. Petersburg Times, and other publications. He has appeared as a pop-culture and news commentator on ABC, CNN, MSNBC, FOX, Comedy Central's the Daily Show with Jon Stewart, and other television broadcasts. Gray is currently a senior editor at Blender magazine in New York City.