Netflix’s new series Dirty Pop: The Boy Band Scam exposes the dark side of the music industry – namely, the con man behind two of the Y2K era’s most iconic boy bands, NSync and the Backstreet Boys. The shocking docuseries follows the rise of pop music “kingmaker” Lou Pearlman and his decades-long fraudulent enterprise and exploitation of young talents, as seen in a number of interviews and old footage. Whether you’ve watched the docuseries yet, here’s what you need to know about the man behind “one of the longest-running Ponzi schemes in American history”, per Netflix: Lou Pearlman’s early life {"@context":"https://schema.
org","@type":"ImageObject","caption":"Lou Pearlman poses outside his office’s at Church Street Station in Orlando, Florida, in 2006. Photo: AP Photo","url":"https://img.i-scmp.
com/cdn-cgi/image/fit=contain,width=1024,format=auto/sites/default/files/d8/images/canvas/2024/08/12/02654f0e-1ba6-424b-a6e8-31562efade78_d15284c3.jpg"} Lou Pearlman poses outside his office’s at Church Street Station in Orlando, Florida, in 2006. Photo: AP Photo According to People, Pearlman was born on June 19, 1954, and raised in New York City by his parents Hy and Reenie Pearlman.
He was also the cousin of American singer Art Garfunkel from the folk rock duo Simon & Garfunkel. Per Forbes, he founded a helicopter taxi service in the 1970s, then got into leasing blimps though his business, Airship International. However it didn’t start off well – the compa.