Cool Hand Lou - A disgraced boy-band impresario has a new act: managing a group from his jail cell.
by Tyler Gray April 2009 Issue
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Photograph by: Red Huber/MCT/Landov
Editors note appended.
What could Lou Pearlman do for an encore?
In the course of his long, checkered career, the Svengali behind ’NSync and the Backstreet Boys has been sued for fraud by all the bands he’s worked with, save one. He’s operated an online talent agency accused of scamming applicants for fees, and he’s been convicted of running a $300 million Ponzi scheme. His latest act: promoting a Southern rock band called Biteboy from his cell in a federal prison, 50 miles outside of Orlando.
Pearlman, just one year into a 25-year sentence for fraud and money laundering, has a verbal contract with Biteboy’s manager, Rick Namey. He calls Namey collect several times a week to discuss strategy and provide music-industry contacts to help promote the band. In an arrangement that borders on parody, Pearlman has also facilitated what could be Biteboy’s breakthrough—a reality-TV series about the group’s attempts to become famous, put together by Jonathan Murray, the television producer behind MTV’s The Real World.
If it pans out, the project will not only reconfirm Pearlman’s eye for talent, it will also feature his disembodied voice on speakerphone. “There’s a lot of money to be made,” says Namey. “It’s part Charlie’s Angels, part Making the Band,” he adds, referring to the reality show about the boy band O-Town, another of Pearlman’s former clients.
In the media, Pearlman’s often depicted as preying on unsuspecting investors and wannabe stars with little or no hope of hitting the big time. Yet in this latest chapter of his life, it’s hard to sort out who’s using whom. Biteboy, by any definition, is a long shot. No recording label has ever shown interest in the band, and its biggest gig to date was in 2006 for an audience of about 1,000 at Orlando’s Hard Rock Live venue.
The one thing the band did have going for it: the 21-year-old frontman, Ricky, who just happened to be Rick Namey’s kid. And Rick, who had known Pearlman for years, had been pushing his son on Pearlman since Ricky was a 13-year-old foul-mouthed rapper calling himself MC Bunz. In the past, Pearlman had shown little or no interest in Ricky. But with Pearlman in jail, Namey had the ultimate captive audience with time on his hands. Namey didn’t even have to do a hard sell—a crew of FM-radio shock jocks did it for him in a broadcast ridiculing Biteboy for trying to milk a murder for publicity.
It was August 2008, and reporters had gathered outside the home of Casey Anthony, the Orlando mom accused of killing her two-year-old daughter, Caylee. Biteboy rolled up to the Anthony home on a flatbed truck and played a song they had written for Caylee.
The stunt didn’t generate any positive press, but it impressed Pearlman, who had stayed in touch with Namey from prison. To give Pearlman a better sense of the band’s music (he is not allowed a CD player in his cell), Namey bought a half-watt radio transmitter, the kind used by real estate brokers to broadcast information about homes for sale to listeners in the immediate area. He then transmitted Biteboy tunes over the airwaves while driving by the Orange County Jail. “We called it Radio Free Lou,” Namey says.
Pearlman especially liked “Cheap Gasoline” and “Don’t Drag Me Down,” two songs that sympathize with U.S. troops in Iraq. He also told Namey he thought Ricky had the look of a frontman and that he saw a potential story in the combination of Ricky; Dorothy Hall, the band’s “plus-size biker chick” drummer, as Namey describes her; and Hall’s 60-year-old father on keyboards. It was then that the two began discussing Biteboy’s future in earnest.
“He’s very detailed in his advice—not just who to call but what to say, what to do,” Namey says. Pearlman, for example, suggested that Namey reach out to Murray and say he was calling “from the office of Lou Pearlman.” (According to Namey, that line got Murray on the phone. “I wasn’t aware Lou Pearlman had an office anymore,” Murray responded.) Starting in late 2008, Namey began videotaping footage of his son’s performances and his calls with Pearlman for the show.
Whether or not Pearlman believes that Biteboy has talent, he stands to gain from the show, tentatively titled Jailhouse Rock. Namey has promised him any profits the program generates, and Pearlman in turn can use the money to pay off victims of his Ponzi scheme to shorten his time in lockup. (Upon sentencing Pearlman in May 2008, Judge Kendall Sharp specified that he would take a month off of Pearlman’s jail term for every million dollars he recovered for his bilked investors.)
It’s unclear if the show will air or generate profits for Pearlman. Under U.S. Department of Justice Federal Bureau of Prisons rules, inmates are not allowed to operate a business. Yet Pearlman—who, in the waning days of the Bush administration, lobbied through friends for a pardon—could skirt the prohibition under the so-called Son of Sam laws. This legislation, passed in the 1970s, allows inmates to participate in biographies and documentaries if the profit goes directly toward restitution for their victims. Pearlman’s bankruptcy trustee, Soneet Kapila, who’s charged with recovering creditors’ assets, was unaware of the potential TV deal but says he’s fine with the project. “I’m happy for him to make money as long as it goes to me and not into his own pocket,” Kapila says.
If anyone can pull off the stunt, it is Pearlman. Before he filed for bankruptcy in early 2007, Pearlman had parlayed a cash-strapped helicopter service into a blimp company, crashed his first blimp minutes after its launch, then used the insurance money to take a second blimp company public. At the same time, he lured investors by selling shares of 727s and 747s in his charter airline fleet—jets he never owned. Except for the moment in court when he read a rote apology to his victims, Pearlman has been unrepentant.
Today, he is not permitted to speak directly to reporters but allowed a phone call to be tape-recorded for this story, in which Namey asked questions provided by Condé Nast Portfolio. Mostly Pearlman dodged, but he did say his days typically involve “trying to help better the situation and trying to find a way to help earn money so I can help get people compensated.” Asked what he would say to his former investors or to those who say he shouldn’t be trusted to do any business from jail, Pearlman said, “I’d question their understanding of what we’re trying to do. Right now, they wouldn’t be getting anything while I’m incarcerated, and that’s a long time, and I’d think they’d want to get monies back along the way.”
EDITOR'S NOTE: Richard E. Namey, the manager of Biteboy, takes issue with some of the characterizations of the band and its activities in this article about Lou Pearlman. Namey asserts that some recording labels have shown interest in the band and that Biteboy has chosen not to seek to negotiate a recording contract until it is announced that it has a reality television show in production. Namey also states that Pearlman was interested in Biteboy prior to its performance of a song about Casey Anthony outside her home, that Biteboy’s manager has a written contract with Pearlman, and that the band and Pearlman will share any profits from the reality show.
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