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1 {n8}Louis, this is your Uncle Jack and your Aunt Rose's son, Art Garfunkel,

{n8}and I'm talking to you through my camera in this hotel room

{n8}to make a little tape for your 50th birthday

{n8}because our Garfunkel family has always loved you

{n8}and I especially, Louis. So happy birthday, Lou.

{n8}All right, everybody knows it's Saturday night, right?

{n8}All right, it's time to party. Here we go! Whoo!

{n8}Hands up in the air.

{n8}I know you're eating, but come on, it's time to clap.

Every year, Lou had a lavish birthday party.

{n8}His 50th was unbelievable.

{n8}There were powerful politicians. There were music people.

Hold on, everybody. Hulk Hogan's got him in a headlock.

They wanted the glitz and glamour that Lou brought.

He created musicians who became extremely famous,

and everybody wanted a piece.

Hello, everybody.

My name is Howie D from the Backstreet Boys,

and, uh, I just wanted to come out and say a couple of words to Lou,

who, uh, as I know, is, uh, Big Poppa.

I remember feeling a little weird

because I kept on going to the Trans Continental parties.

The guys didn't really agree with me.

But I was like, "This is Lou. This is the guy that gave us our dream."

You've been a great inspiration, my mentor in life.

And God bless you. Happy 50th birthday, buddy.

Lou was a very, very smart man.

And he had enough stories, enough knowledge, enough energy to himself

that you would believe whatever he said.

Betrayal is such a hard word.

For many, many years, I didn't see it.

Enjoy the party. Thank you for coming. Thank you.

What do you think about the hysteria of boy bands?

That there are so many girls screaming?

People tell me, you know, that boy bands are over.

And I know boy bands are not over

because boy bands are over when God stops making little girls.

Until then, it's working.

You ever heard him say that?

Have I ever heard him say that?

Too many times to count.

But at that time, the world was changing.

The pop world was changing. Music was changing.

And everyone was pretty much, like, over boy bands.

Didn't realize Chris Kirkpatrick rhymed with "get your ass kicked."

♪ Anybody who's talking this and that ♪

♪ Chris Kirkpatrick You can get your ass kicked... ♪

Like, we have Eminem. We have Kid Rock. Diddy. No more boy bands, please.

Izzy, you're crazy.

Even though people had moved on,

in 2005, Lou made a television show in Europe called Big in America.

{n8}♪ Big in America ♪

{n8}♪ This is a chance to become a star ♪

I played the role of a tour manager for a few episodes.

The following two days you'll be shooting the video at Universal Studios.

Following that, you're going to New York for press, live radio, PR meetings.

The day after that you're performing live for 2,000 people.

Two weeks.

The premise of the show was that this band was big in America.

♪ There is so much a man can tell you So much he can say ♪

♪ You remain my power, My pleasure, my pain ♪

♪ Baby ♪

Turns out they'd never even played a show or sold a record or anything in America.

♪ Baby, I compare you to A kiss from a rose on the gray ♪

But, hey, it worked for him.

- Thank you. - Thank you.

All right.

He titled himself as the Big Poppa of Natural.

Mm-hmm.

Is he the Big Poppa of you?

Yeah. I mean, he's... he's definitely a father figure.

He's an inspiration because no matter what,

he figures out a way to make everything work.

Mike.

I was like...

How you feel?

Once my band broke up,

Lou and I were gonna start a business together.

I wanted to sign some alternative bands

and start this, like, TV business with him.

At this point, he was no longer my manager. We were partners.

But it was also, on the personal level, very mentor-protégé.

Outside of all the glitz and glamour and the huge houses

and the Rolls-Royces and everything,

he was an insecure kid whose nickname was "fat boy"

and would get picked on all the time.

He found his alternate reality in this world, in the pop music world.

My business associates often give me a hard time for being too nice

in negotiations and deal-making.

But at the end of the day,

{n8}I'd rather have the people I do business with

feel like they've been treated fairly.

Remember that what you are really trying to build

is a life that you can look back on and feel good about.

What'd you think of Lou's book?

Br...

Brands, Bands...

And Billions.

Brands...

The first time that I ever heard about Lou Pearlman

was when I got a call from a reader.

"What do you know about this Lou Pearlman

and Trans Continental Airlines, this investment?"

They said that it was some kind of FDIC-insured investment,

and it was going to have this nice yield

which was higher than the highest yields people could get anywhere.

And then some of them are like, "Oh, look."

"It's got extra insurance from Lloyd's of London."

It also was being called an Employee Investment Savings Account,

but Lou said that everyone in the world could buy into it.

So, something was not right.

Soon after I started writing about it,

that caused this whole flood of people asking for their money back.

After the litigation and stuff with the Backstreet Boys,

Pearlman just went on with his life.

But you know, the son of a bitch owes me money.

And by the way, even today, 16 million dollars will get my attention.

He'd paid us a million and a half, but then it stopped and there was no more.

Then he tried to have a check sent to me from a bank in Munich.

I called my friend in Munich, and he checked it out.

The address was a vacant lot.

You can reasonably assume here that I was pissed,

and I would devote my time and my energies to square that.

By 2006, it was starting to get a little bit rough,

and people were calling for their money.

All Ponzi schemes grow to a certain point,

and if you don't bring in new investors to cover the old investors,

you'll have trouble.

That's when the first signs of trouble come.

They'd tell friends and family,

"Hey, this investment I told you about is being looked into."

And once those people started to request their money, it just snowballed.

Nobody wanted to talk to the shareholders,

and I was the only one that was continuing to answer the phones.

They'd call up furious and fuming,

and some even came actually up to the office.

Investors started coming into all of the different entities

looking to get money,

to where there would be, like, scenes being made.

"Where's my money?" "How can I get my money?"

People were stealing things from the studio and the mansion,

trying to get whatever they could.

At that time, there were different investors coming around,

and I'm not gonna say "shady," but I might say "shady."

Just didn't seem like these people were people that you'd wanna be involved with

unless you needed something really desperate.

I started seeing a lot of cars parked out front of the house.

Cars I had never seen. I lived there for seven years.

Gated, people are waiting, following people in.

You know, and I grew up with guns, like, something just was like,

you need to have the gun in... in your room.

Before that, I knew that he had an investment savings account.

It got high yields, and he would never let me do it.

"No, no, no. You don't want to do that. No, no, no."

And I don't know, like, what eventually made him change his mind

and say, "Okay."

But I had a lot of my own money, over 100,000 dollars, invested in this.

I am curious to know if you invested.

I'd rather not talk about it.

Yeah, so...

- Understood. - Yeah.

A lot of people lost money,

Um, Frankie's mom being one of them.

Frankie would still be alive today.

We'd all be much better off today if...

if Lou didn't do any of this.

It was sad, the whole situation.

Um, I think Frankie took, uh, the bad way out if he did commit suicide.

Do you believe that Frankie's death was a suicide?

I believe that it was.

Lou did not believe that it was.

What he told me, probably two months after the fact,

was that Frankie was murdered.

And I go, "Who did this?"

"Well, I don't know, but I'm gonna find out."

And I told him, "One minute, you don't care,

and the next minute, 'He was murdered, ' and now you care?"

"That doesn't make any sense."

But knowing what I know now,

I believe that Lou was, at that point, probably starting to panic, in a way,

because his stories are spiraling out of control.

We had this beautiful space downtown.

I'm standing in front of the elevator, and as it comes down, he comes into frame.

Doors open up. He's like,

"Hey, I gotta run. I just want to say I love you."

"I'm going out. I'm gonna be on vacation a while."

"Thank you for everything."

"Okay?" Okay.

A few weeks later, the FBI raided that space.

We had a warrant for the Church Street office.

We seized a ton of documents.

I was able to go in with the FBI that day and bring out boxes of evidence.

I was sitting typing and they said,

"Would you please lift your hands off your keyboard."

"Do not touch one thing, and please would you come with me."

And I thought, "That's it. I'm done."

There was also a search warrant for his home,

and I went with the team that day as well.

{n8}Lou Pearlman wasn't there,

{n8}but there was a young man there that was taking care of the house.

I could see local news trucks, unmarked cars,

people in the FBI jackets that you see on TV.

Every drawer, every cabinet, everything is open.

And then I saw Scott Skinner, and he's like,

"Patrick King, we've been waiting for you."

There was a safe at the house

that you could tell had been cleaned out in a hurry.

By the time we did the search on his office and his house,

he had been gone, from what I understand, approximately six weeks.

Lou left the country,

and his story to everybody that was asking questions about it was

he was gonna get the money out of the lock boxes.

He was going to make this all right. He'll be back, and he'll figure it out.

Meager cash flow is the primary cause of migraine headaches

and upset stomachs among entrepreneurs and new business owners.

Cash flow is the fuel to get your business started

and keeps it running.

Without the dough, it won't go.

It was a few weeks after the raid on Church Street

when I started hearing about the investment scheme.

I didn't know anything about it.

Somebody from the inside

must have been giving the feds information.

There was somebody at Trans Con that was probably a snitch.

Did you have anybody from within the company

that you guys were working with?

No.

Uh, Lou kept everybody at a distance.

He didn't want anybody to be able to say what was going on.

Lou and I were starting our company together, so we went on the road.

Our first stop was Dublin.

He was gonna accept a Lifetime Achievement Award at this big award show.

We went from Dublin to Berlin.

We had some investor meetings there.

From there, we would go to Spain, down to Panama,

and we ultimately wound up in Bali.

When I was traveling with Lou, I wasn't on the lam.

I wasn't on the run. I was starting a business.

I had no freaking idea what was going on.

A close friend of Lou's called me

and told me what was going on with the investments.

I didn't think my son would have been involved in taking money

and wasting somebody else's money.

My son was not that kind of a guy.

Frankie was so loyal to Lou Pearlman.

He defended him.

And I think it broke his heart when he learned about this.

There's a reason people want their money out

because they heard their cousin tried to get their money out,

and they couldn't.

And their friend tried to get their money out, and they couldn't.

You start seeing things in the news,

and that's when the collapse begins.

Connie and Pat Caesar say they've been badly burned

by Trans Continental Airlines and the man who runs it,

boy band mogul Lou Pearlman.

According to the Caesars, they invested 300,000 dollars

in the company's savings program

that offered the public big returns and no risk.

He's just taken our lives away.

Two months ago, the Caesars tried to get their investment back,

but the money, their life savings, never arrived.

What these people were promised was that their account was held in their name

with their own account number in a bank.

If the bank were to collapse for some reason,

then the funds would be FDIC-insured.

But their statement didn't come from a bank.

It came from Trans Continental Airlines.

Lou had Trans Continental Airlines,

which ironically, I never, not once, saw a Trans Continental airplane.

When you're a naive kid and see airplanes on somebody's desk

and they say they own an airline, you believe them.

Trans Continental Airlines was supposedly an airline company

that he ran that owned, I think it was, like, maybe 50 planes,

and supposedly celebrities or corporations would lease and rent jets from him.

We started leasing airplanes,

{n8}and we started leasing them to not only airlines

{n8}but also to people in the rock and roll industry

like New Kids on the Block.

Ultimately, we discovered that none of that was true.

He didn't have any planes.

There were no operations at all other than this investment scam.

They had this little brochure about Trans Continental Airlines,

where he had this picture that was actually someone holding up

a model plane with the airport in the background.

The hand of the person is just cut off so that it doesn't appear in the picture.

Pearlman was a master forger.

He would forge signatures and create false seals.

He provided us with a statement from German Savings Bank

showing he had 30 million dollars in this bank in Germany.

And it turned out, of course,

that the German Savings Bank was never a legitimate bank.

Lou Pearlman had totally false bank statements, tax returns.

State documents also accuse Pearlman of using a mysterious accounting firm

to hide the scheme from investors and Wall Street.

He did create this fake accounting firm

called Cohen & Siegel,

{n8}which was named after two gangsters, Mickey Cohen and Bugsy Siegel.

And then a couple of investors got a letter signed by Harry Milner,

CFO of Trans Continental Airlines,

assuring them that this was all just a big misunderstanding

and that everything was gonna be fine and they'd be able to get their money out.

And we were all saying, "Who's Harry Milner?"

We've been working on this for a year and never heard of this person.

We kept trying to contact Harry Milner

to ask him, "Hey, what's going on here? Where are you getting these numbers?"

Sadly, we'd come to find out that Harry Milner had passed away

long before any of these returns had been signed.

There was an association between Lou Pearlman and Harry Milner,

but it was many, many years ago.

And when we actually went into the offices,

they found where Lou Pearlman had actually written the letter

and given it to his assistant to type up.

There were a couple of files that I took of Lou's

that I was just kind of iffy about.

Letters that maybe could be perceived differently

that I'd written to some people.

I just was... I thought, I don't want anybody...

I didn't want anyone else reading them.

Ultimately, we found

over 1,000 people had invested in this plan.

It had gotten up to probably 300 million dollars.

He also ran a bank Ponzi scheme, if you will,

because he went to one bank and he'd borrow 100,000 dollars.

When that became mature, he'd go to the next bank

and borrow 200,000 dollars, so he could pay this money back

and then still have some money to take out.

And he kept building on that until the loans were in the millions.

{n8}Lou's investor Ponzi scheme was like 300 million,

{n8}and the bank fraud was like 200 million.

That we know about.

This Polk County man who wants to be anonymous

had invested nearly a quarter of a million dollars.

Pearlman himself picked him up in a limo, took him to dinner,

and showed him documents to prove that the savings program was FDIC-insured.

When he picked that paper up with the seal, I believed him.

As the things with the news started picking up more and more,

then I started knowing something serious was going on.

{n8}It has affected my grandchildren because that money was there

for their college education.

It... it's gone.

When all of the news started coming out about that stuff,

I recall feeling a sense of being used,

but also, like, and these people must think that we were in on it with him.

{n8}He should be put in jail and kept in jail until he dies.

I was floored.

Wait, hold on, ripped off people from their retirement?

You know, I was a cop. To hear that, it... it was devastating.

He's a crook. He's a crook. Put him in jail.

Traditionally, in the FBI, you don't have any formal relationships with the media.

But Helen was writing a lot of things about the Pearlman investigation,

and I just called her up one day and said, "Hey, can we help each other out here?"

You know, that sort of thing.

I had this blog that was part of the St. Petersburg Times.

It's called Money Talk, and a lot of people followed that

because they were interested in Lou.

And so people would be posting rumors about, you know,

he's here, he's there, and of course,

the investors really wanted him to be brought to justice.

You got to realize that once you become a fugitive,

that next knock at the door, what is that?

Where am I gonna go today?

{n8}During the time we were in Bali,

he was relying on me solely for his freedom.

I didn't know at the time.

His assets had been frozen,

which forced all of the travel to be on my credit card.

So it was chaos, but I was like,

there's been 12-15 lawsuits every other time,

and he's gotten out of them and just cruised on.

I start to go down to the business center of the Westin in Bali,

and I'm, like, seeing all of these news reports about Lou.

And this woman, Helen Huntley, had a message board,

and people that I recognize are trying to find Lou.

So I'm sitting next to him in this business center,

and he's sketching away over there,

and then he picks up the... the paper, and he shows it to me,

and he says, "Does this look real to you?"

And it says "German Savings Bank" on it,

and he had hand-drawn this bank seal for, like, a loan document,

and he faxed it off from the business center to Bank of America

I think it was for a million dollars.

And he got the damn loan.

And I was like, "Dude, you got to tell me what's going on. This is not right."

"Oh no, buddy. This is how you have to do business on a global scale."

The next day, I called my family.

And I left.

{n8}I did get a call from a reader

{n8}who was also staying at this resort in Bali.

{n8}He was walking on the beach with his wife and saw Lou out there.

{n8}Helen's contacted me saying, "Hey, I got this reader

who thinks he's seen Lou Pearlman in the hotel he was at."

Okay. I said, "Well, where's the hotel?" "Indonesia."

"Okay, let's go."

{n8}So, the reader had his camera, and he and his wife,

they were eating breakfast in the hotel, and they saw Lou.

And they took a picture.

{n8}And when he took the picture, not only did he get Lou,

{n8}he got my two agents at the table next to Lou,

watching him at the time.

I'm getting contacted by the guys in Jakarta. "Yeah, that's Lou."

I said, "Well, we got an arrest warrant for him."

"Get him out of there."

Good morning. Good morning, everyone.

Boy band mogul, Lou Pearlman, has been arrested.

Pearlman appeared in court in Guam today

after spending months hiding from authorities.

The creator of *NSYNC and the Backstreet Boys

is accused of bank fraud and faces several lawsuits.

{n8}Pearlman was picked up in Indonesia Thursday and turned over to the FBI.

Three days after I came back from Bali,

woke up 6:45 in the morning to a call saying,

"Michael Johnson, this is Agent Scott Skinner from the FBI."

"We've arrested Lou Pearlman in Bali,

and he was under the name Incognito Johnson."

I'm Michael Johnson.

He registered as Incognito Johnson because we were on my credit card.

Through that, the investigation was tied back to me.

I had depositions of ten hours.

I mean, it was just horrible. I...

And the person that interviewed me, Agent Skinner,

he was just very harsh, and I felt like I'd done something,

and I... and I hadn't.

Lou never involved me in any of that stuff.

Yes, I'm guilty

of making a profit after taking a huge risk,

and I'm guilty of making multi-millionaires

out of a whole bunch of young singers too.

I don't think that makes me a bad person.

When Lou Pearlman was caught,

I felt relieved and glad that they found him.

Happy.

When Lou was caught, the cop in me cheered.

You know, like, "I can't believe you did this to people."

"I can't believe that I'm somehow associated with that."

He betrayed the family.

Lou was a snake.

He was so busy seeing the shiny objects

that he didn't see who he hurt.

Several investors say Pearlman would remind them

he ran a major entertainment empire.

I'm going to be doing this contract with Michael Jackson.

These broken promises left the Caesars devastated.

We don't know where the next dollar is going to come from.

We don't have any other money.

If I went to sleep tonight and didn't wake up,

I'm fine with that

because at least I can find some peace.

But three years before federal agents stormed into

Lou Pearlman's entertainment empire,

{n8}then Assistant State Attorney General Jackie Dowd had been hot on the trail

of another Pearlman company.

- You felt you had a case. - I very strongly felt I had a case.

According to Dowd,

the state had 2,000 complaints from consumers who felt misled

by Pearlman's model scouting company, Trans Continental Talent,

but Dowd says just when she was ready to file a massive consumer fraud case,

she was forced to resign,

{n8}and several months later, the Attorney General's office

{n8}shut down the investigation and cleared the company.

A lot of people thought that investigation was dismissed

because of Lou's relationship with certain people, okay?

That's as far as I'm gonna go with that.

You know, there were rumors that he had relationships

with the Attorney General of the state of Florida at the time.

A federal lawsuit filed this week

accused Crist of not doing his job then

and claims that investigation could have uncovered

the Pearlman savings program in 2004.

But ultimately, the suit against Crist was thrown out.

It's such a great honor

to have right here in our hometown

probably the number one sheriff in the United States.

People will do anything for fame.

But people will do almost anything for the proximity to somebody famous.

Whatever we have to do

to get him re-elected over and over again, brother,

we'll do it!

And Lou used that to bring in more and more investment.

Everything he'd always been doing, it was always a front for investment.

Graphic depictions...

It snowballed over 40-something years,

and it had different heads,

but the heart of it was always the same.

On the federal level,

the case against Lou was brought by the District Attorney's office in Orlando.

Seems to me that it was pretty quick from indictment

to him negotiating and entering a plea of guilty.

I was very happy that he pled guilty

because the way he was and the way his personality was,

you know, you kind of thought he would go down fighting.

You know, there were investors who came to the sentencing

and talked about how he had ruined their lives.

There was no remorse, nothing. I... I don't understand people like that.

You don't expect to see a penny back?

No, not at all.

Lawyers who packed today's Lou Pearlman hearing

circled like sharks afterward.

Each wants his client at the top of the payback list.

{n8}I do feel confident that he has, uh, money.

{n8}Uh, but, uh, if I had the ability to prove that he had money I'd have already got it.

I was on the front row, and Pearlman turned around.

He's kind of ashen-looking.

I said, "You should've paid me, you asshole."

I wanted to be there when the hammer came down.

{n8}Lou Pearlman sentenced today for defrauding banks and investors.

The judge handed down a 25-year prison sentence,

but Pearlman can have a month reduced for each million he pays back.

The Federal District Judge told Mr. Pearlman,

"For every million dollars you can turn over to the government,

I'll reduce your sentence by a month."

In essence, you can buy your way out of prison.

His sentence was 25 years, which is unheard of.

Murderers don't get 25 years, and this was a financial crime.

They would've hung him if they could.

I never thought

Lou was going to meet any sort of consequence.

I thought when he went to prison, he was going to be out fast.

I was so confused when Lou went to prison.

The emotion of it, it's still cloudy, you know, it's still cloudy for me.

I never went to go see him.

I never saw him in jail. I didn't go visit him.

There was no contact from me.

I knew I needed to separate myself from the situation, so I didn't call him.

That was it.

I still had that feeling of friendship,

but at the same time, I was kind of glad he was where he was.

Did you visit him?

Uh, well, they wouldn't let me

because I had some, uh, legal problems myself at the time.

So they, actually... I tried to, and they kept denying me.

But when he was in prison, a guy named Peter contacted me.

He was telling me they loved Lou. They loved him in jail.

Ex-wife would always say, "You have an evil laugh."

I'd go...

I was like, "You don't know what's going on."

I knew the Lou Pearlman that was in the real world,

and I knew the Lou Pearlman in prison.

Right around 2000, I met Lou in his office.

He was very down-to-earth, great guy, and we hit it off right away.

We were gonna do the deal with the Church Street Station.

I met the owners.

And then, unfortunately, I got arrested.

I was arrested for RICO, mail fraud, bank fraud, and conspiracy to all those.

I was in county jail awaiting sentencing, and I opened up the newspaper,

and I see, right on the front page, him getting on a plane with shackles.

I'm like, "Oh my God, if he actually goes to prison,

we can hang out together. It'd be great."

So I'm sitting at lunch, and I look outside,

and I said, "My God, that's Lou!"

I ran out of the chow hall.

I walked over to him,

and he was like, "Oh my God, Peter. What are you doing here?"

This call is from...

Lou Pearlman.

...an inmate at a federal prison.

I have hundreds of missed calls and voicemails

from when Lou would call me from prison.

- So, how are you? - I'm doing great, buddy.

I'm walking up by the track, doing my thing, and...

A number of times he got beat up

trying to, like, rat people out

and, like, trying to get deals for ratting people out,

and he'd get beat up for it.

Hello?

- Mikey Mike. What's happening? - How's it going?

It's going good. Chilling out, doing my thing, you know.

I got your email, it says

you have some meetings coming up with your lawyers?

Yep.

He didn't have any lawyers.

So it looks really, really good.

Right.

I would always know that most of what he's saying is not true.

So he's, like, just making up all this stuff

in this, like, fantasy world that he built for himself in prison.

And I never got a sense, in talking with him or visiting with him,

that he felt that he deserved to be in prison.

It was frustrating.

He just never copped to it.

I personally believe that Lou wanted to handle the situation

by paying his investors back

because I feel, in his mind, he wasn't doing anything wrong.

{n8}I don't think he ever had any intention to pay anyone back,

{n8}and I don't think he would have ever been able to.

I mean, he spent the money.

At the end of the day, I believe everybody would have been made whole.

You know, time. He needed a little bit more time.

Everybody believed he really had all this money buried somewhere,

of which nobody found.

I don't believe it was true.

He never did account for about 125 million dollars.

But keep in mind, we all had tried to estimate what it was

based on his financial bank statements and tax returns

that we know were all false.

I mean, so, you know, it could have been a billion dollars.

He told me that he had two and a half to three billion in the Cook Islands hidden,

that no one will ever get to.

Criminals don't understand that criminals lie to each other.

They backstab each other because this one wants what that one has.

That one wants what this one has, and they just play this song and dance

until somebody goes to jail, somebody gets caught, somebody dies.

"This document originated from a correctional facility."

That's always nice on a piece of mail.

He wrote me several letters while he was in jail.

"Hi, babe. I'm still doing my thing."

"It's crazy being in a medium prison

with life-sentenced inmates and drug dealers."

"I've also been getting tons of rappers auditioning."

And he's got a helicopter flying over the Orange County Jail

to break him out.

One day, I'm in the chow hall, and I said, "Where's Lou?"

So I talked to one of the officers. "We took him to the hospital."

I said, "Oh my God."

He got an infection around his heart

because he had had a valve replacement.

He agreed to go into a voluntary coma

so he could have the operation to replace the heart valve,

and he didn't make it.

Lou Pearlman, the disgraced star-maker

behind *NSYNC and the Backstreet Boys

has died in prison.

{n8}Some of Pearlman's former boy band members

{n8}took to social media to pay their respects.

{n8}Justin Timberlake tweeted

{n8}that he hoped Pearlman had "found some peace."

{n8}Everybody really trusted him, and loved him and believed in him.

{n8}But... it was all a facade.

He hurt a lot of us, you know.

♪ Happy anniversary Donna and Johnny... ♪

I wanted to tell him how I felt, but...

I didn't get that chance.

I was in the studio producing a band.

And I remember just being at the mixing board

and everything just going white.

And I was like, "It's over."

I remember calling the coroner a couple days later

and he was like, "Man."

"I was starting to wonder what to do with his body

'cause nobody has contacted me."

And the next week or so was a roller coaster

of trying to get ahold of Art Garfunkel,

and he wouldn't claim the body either, and it was just this whole circus.

There was only a couple of us

that was trying to get his body back up to New York.

{n8}Eventually, Lou ended up in the family plot in New York,

{n8}and only five people went to the funeral.

And there's no stone marking where he's buried in the cemetery.

Like a... a forgotten person.

When somebody dies,

I'm not the person to say he deserved to die or something.

I'm not that person.

Because everybody deserves to live.

♪ Ha-ha-ha-ha ♪

♪ I may run and hide ♪

{n8}♪ When you're screaming my name ♪

{n8}♪ All right ♪

♪ But let me tell you now... ♪

We truly owe, not everything, but we do owe a lot to Lou.

Thirty years is a long time.

And that's why I wanna start by saying thank you, all you guys,

for helping us create our legacy.

But we've been the ones to continue this

by having loyalty to each other

and a commitment to see this thing through until it's over.

You guys are pop personified, so to receive this

from your golden pop hands is... It's... it's too much.

I think we should remember Lou as a crook

who got what he deserved in the end,

and there are people that are still in pain and hurting

because of his actions.

But at the same time,

there was a crazy explosion of culture

that started in Orlando, Florida, with an idea.

My feelings on Lou Pearlman create quite a duality.

How do I feel this way about this one individual

that really took a lot from a lot of people,

but also gave so much

to millions all over the world still to this day.

In general, I think that no one has anything bad to say about Lou.

Nobody?

Nobody. Except maybe people that lost money

have to say he's the worst guy in the world,

but, uh, you couldn't have a better friend.

Lou was amazing.

And he was as dishonest as everybody else on this planet.

It's not worth hating him.

In my estimation,

I think he's nothing more than a fraudster, a scam artist.

He was a full-time fraud

from the time he got up until the time he went to bed at night.

And so, I guess in some regard,

he was a genius to be able to keep doing it.

In all of this, there is the success on a level

that has never been seen in pop music history.

But the fact that all of this was financed by people's life savings

is disgusting.

And it's only now that I can look back at that,

and that's the fucking monster...

That's the monster that was my best friend.

When you help people as a way of life,

they tend to pass it on.

That is the greatest thing about doing what I do.

Suppose I came to you

when you were an aspiring singer trying to make ends meet,

and I told you I was willing to invest three million dollars to make you a star.

If it all works out, you'll make 10 to 20 million,

and I'll make 20 to 50 million.

Does that sound like a good deal to you?