The Latest on the Con Man and His Victims
(Fyre: The Greatest Party That Never Happened, Netflix)
These days, when I’m not rewatching Forensic Files on TV, I’m restreaming Fyre: The Greatest Party That Never Happened on my MacBook.
You can see the Netflix Fyre documentary half a dozen times and pick up something new every time.
Blue-eyed bandit. The 97-minute original production tells the excruciating story of a music festival founder who believed that a high-profile social media campaign would magically compensate for severe unpreparedness and underfunding.
Billy McFarland promised ticket buyers private-jet transportation, ahi sliders, luxurious villas on a nirvana-like private island in the Bahamas, and performances by 10 major recording artists.
The Fyre Festival failed on all accounts.
Most of the well-to-do millennials who spent upward of $4,000 per person to experience a luxurious bacchanalia ended up receiving no-frills flights, sleeping on rain-soaked mattresses in FEMA tents on a gravelly construction site, scrounging for food, and listening to excuses from McFarland instead of performances by Blink-182 and Tyga.
Infernal mess. In a way, even the locale for the festival didn’t exist. McFarland said he had purchased Pablo Escobar’s island, where organizers shot a promotional video featuring such supermodels as Emily Ratajkowski and Hailey Baldwin — who then publicized the upcoming event via Instagram — but the sale never actually happened.
The organizers then arranged to have the festival on Great Exuma, a Bahamian island that isn’t private, so they photoshopped out parts that weren’t.
Before Fyre, McFarland, then 25, probably imagined himself as the next under-30 entrepreneur headed for the Forbes 400 list.
Card game. Described as charming, intelligent, and persuasive, the towering and slightly tubby New Jersey native first made a name for himself by establishing Magnises, a credit card whose fee included perks like discounted Beyoncé tickets and social events at a Manhattan townhouse.
That venture, targeted at millennials, got off to an impressive start, then fizzled after not delivering on promises. But it didn’t get enough bad press to cloud McFarland’s image as a young visionary.
It was the Fyre Festival flameout that exposed McFarland as a fraud for all the world to see. Virtually every major news media outlet covered the April 2017 disaster.
Schadenfreude samba. The public delighted in watching video footage of privileged 26-year-old attendees having to practically beg just for drinkable water.
“Every time a rich kid gets scammed, an angel gets its wings,” tweeted @snarkycindy, one of many Fyre detractors.
Fyre: The Greatest Pary That Never Happened offers a look at the timeline of the disaster and the financial dealings behind it.
The chronology actually starts before Fyre became synonymous with a fiasco in the tropics. McFarland and Ja Rule created the Fyre brand as an app for anyone who wanted to book musical talent — the “Uber of entertainment.”
Naysayers shrugged off. The Fyre Festival was intended as a vehicle to promote the Fyre app. McFarland’s company, Fyre Media, planned the event.
For the most part, Ja Rule came off as an innocent dupe who believed McFarland’s assurances that he could assemble infrastructure for a new music festival in just four months.
Others, like consultants Marc Weinstein and Keith van der Linde — both featured in on-camera interviews in the Netflix documentary — were either rebuffed or fired when they warned McFarland that his brainchild was looking less like a hedonistic fantasy and more like a dream about having final exams when you haven’t gone to class all semester.
Locals stiffed. Fyre recounts how McFarland lied on financial statements, paid some vendors via a Ponzi-like scheme, and cheated others.
It’s sad to hear Bahamian catering contractor Maryann Rolle talk about losing $50,000 because of Fyre.
The most upsetting part of the saga is that some or all of the Bahamian construction workers who labored under the hot sun for Fyre didn’t get paid.
Still, the documentary leaves open the possibility that McFarland was just a dishonest but well-intentioned kid who got in over his head and lied out of desperation.
William tell. That is, until the last 15 minutes, which shows footage of McFarland gleefully perpetrating a new con — selling phony tickets to events like the Met Gala — while he was free on bail after the FBI arrested him over Fyre offenses.
He attempted some semi-honest hustling, too. According to the LA Times, McFarland told Fyre director Chris Smith he would appear on camera for a $125,000 fee, but the filmmakers declined because “it wasn’t right for him to benefit when other people had been hurt by his actions.”
Prosecutors said that McFarland cheated 80 investors out of $26 million. Victims of the Fyre fraud filed a $100 million class-action lawsuit against McFarland and Ja Rule.
From sell to cell. McFarland pleaded guilty to two counts of wire fraud related to Fyre in 2017. The following year, he pleaded guilty to additional wire fraud charges plus bank fraud and making false statements to a federal law enforcement agent regarding his fake-ticket business, NYC VIP Access.
In October of 2018, a federal judge sentenced McFarland to six years in prison.
Here’s an update on McFarland as well as others depicted on the documentary:
• BILLY McFARLAND, now 27, resides in the Federal Correctional Institution at Otisville, a medium-security penitentiary known for housing white collar criminals. The Orange County, New York, facility offers bocce ball, horseshoes, handball and tennis courts, a baseball field, and cardio equipment. Otisville has a satellite camp for minimum security inmates.
In May 2019, New York magazine reported that McFarland has started a memoir, “Promythus: The God of Fyre,” to explain his side of the story, which he was planning to self-publish. McFarland’s girlfriend, Russian model Anastasia Eremenko, was coordinating the effort.
McFarland has said he’d like to use the proceeds toward the $26 million in restitution he’s been ordered to pay.
As far as McFarland’s quality of life today, it’s not clear whether he lives in minimum security or medium security in Otisville. He’s inmate No. 91186-054, in case that’s a clue to anyone.
From the list of commissary items, it looks as though McFarland has access to more and better food than the festival attendees did.
The Otisville website lists his release date as September 1, 2023.
There have been reports that McFarland wants to try for another Fyre Festival when he gets out.
Update to the update: McFarland may have his bocce balls taken away. On Sept. 24, 2019, the Daily Beast reported that he violated Otisville’s rules by obtaining a recording device and he will likely be sent to a less-luxe higher-security prison, according to the story, which cited two unnamed sources.
• JA RULE didn’t face SEC charges over the Fyre Festival. He has started his own talent-booking business, ICONN, which offers access to such luminaries as Ashanti, DJ Connor Cruise, Alexander Great, Nazanin Mandi, and Ja Rule himself.
• MARYANN ROLLE, the cheated owner of Exuma Point Bar and Grille, tallied up $231,000 in donations from a GoFundMe campaign set up after she appeared in Fyre. According to Marie Claire, Rolle had made 1,000 meals a day for workers connected with the festival and housed some attendees in villas she and her husband own. (The $50,000 loss she mentioned in the documentary went toward paying extra food service workers hired for the festival, but her total losses were in the six-figure range, Marie Claire reported.)
In January 2019, Maryann Rolle announced her intention to share the crowdfunding windfall with other locals who worked on the Fyre Festival, according to Bahamian newspaper Tribune 242.
In May 2019, the Daily Mail reported that Pamela Carter, the friend who set up the GoFundMe account for Rolle, attempted to steal half the proceeds.
When she’s not grappling with dubious characters, it sounds as though Rolle knows how to have a good time. She’s a singer and songwriter and her husband, Elvis, is a dancer.
• GRANT MARGOLIN, the Fyre marketing executive who viewers may remember as the guy who said he wanted a “big, big, big, big, big bonfire,” was apparently no innocent victim. He settled SEC charges that he “induced investors to entrust him with tens of millions of dollars by fraudulently inflating key operational [and] financial metrics.” Margolin avoided jail time but had to agree to not serve as a company director or officer for seven years and pay a $35,000 penalty.
• ANDY KING, the gray-haired event planner who appeared on camera in Fyre, told Vulture in February that he had received offers to star in his own reality TV series.
• MARC WEINSTEIN, the young Sacha Baron Cohen lookalike who warned McFarland he needed to abandon the notion that Fyre was a luxury festival and uninvite some of the social media influencers who had been promised free housing, started an LA-area venture capital company called Wave Financial in 2018, according to his LinkedIn profile.
I had no luck finding an epilogue for Keith van der Linde, the pilot whose practical advice about capacity and logistics was ignored. A different Keith van der Linde (there are a few out there) seems amused about being mistaken for him by online researchers.
Hulu has also produced its own documentary about the debacle, Fyre Fraud, which features a post-disaster interview with a slimmed-down McFarland as well as input from his girlfriend. It’s not as absorbing as Netflix’s offering but is definitely worth a watch or two, and you can take advantage of Hulu’s free one-week trial offer.
That’s all for this post. Until next week, cheers. — RR
Watch Fyre: The Greatest Party That Never Happened on Netflix. Watch Fyre Fraud on Hulu.
