Fyre Festival fraudster Billy McFarland celebrated his release from four-year prison sentence by throwing a PARTY at Manhattan cocktail lounge – and now lives in a Brooklyn Airbnb paid for by family and friends
- Notorious Fyre Festival fraudster Billy McFarland is a free man once again
- He celebrated his release by throwing a party in a Manhattan cocktail lounge
- He still owes $26m in compensation to his fraud victims over the Fyre Festival
- He was put in solitary confinement in many occasions due to breaking the rules
- He plans to make money – which he’ll have to pay his victims – by going into tech
Notorious Fyre Festival fraudster Billy McFarland celebrated being released from prison by throwing a throwing a party in a plush Manhattan cocktail lounge.
The convicted scammer, who went down in 2018 for orchestrating the Fyre Festival fraud in 2017 that left him owing $26million to its victims, revealed he is also staying in a Brooklyn Airbnb paid for by family and friends.
In an interview and photoshoot with the New York Times, organized by his PR on McFarland’s initiative while still in confinement, he expressed his desire to get back into tech entrepreneurship – although any money he makes will have to go to compensating his Fyre Festival fraud victims.
McFarland pleaded guilty to counts of wire fraud in March 2018 after scamming 80 investors into putting money in the bogus ‘luxury’ Fyre Festival – with much-touted ‘gourmet food’ being barely passable cheese sandwiches served in Styrofoam containers.
Sentenced to six years, it was revealed back in March that he had been released from FCI Elkton, a low-security federal correctional institution located in Ohio, after only four.
Notorious Fyre Festival fraudster Billy McFarland celebrated being released from prison by throwing a throwing a party in a plush Manhattan cocktail lounge (Pictured after pleading guilty on March 6, 2018)
McFarland enlisted numerous models and celebrities to help promote the fraudulent ‘luxury’ festival
The much-touted ‘gourmet food’ turned out to be barely passable cheese sandwiches served in Styrofoam containers
He was ordered to spend the following six months in confinement at the Gold Street halfway house in Brooklyn, where he had to wear an ankle bracelet and was only allowed out to go to the shops or visit the gym.
‘I thought it was going to be a big process, but it turns out they just hand you scissors and you cut it off,’ said Mr. McFarland on removing an electronic ankle monitor.
In the interview he revealed that he was flung into solitary confinement on multiple occasions during his incarceration due to his continual flouting of prison rules.
His first violation was to try to smuggle in a USB drive on which he was storing notes for a future memoir on the Fyre saga, which was discovered by guards and led McFarland to spend three months in solitary.
In the fall of 2020, he took part in a podcast about the Fyre Festival, called ‘Dumpster Fire’, over the prison pay phone – also in contravention to prison rules.
Prison records show that he spend six months in total in solitary confinement (12.5 per cent of his time in jail), although it is not clear what for.
Businessman Billy McFarland teamed with rapper Ja Rule to create Fyre Festival, which was touted as a once-in-a-lifetime event filled with glamour, big-name bands and luxurious experiences; promotional materials such as the video above painted a picture of beauty and fun in the sun
All efforts by McFarland’s lawyer, Jason Russo, to get his client out of solitary were stonewalled. They did not even answer his calls.
Having abandoned thoughts of writing a memoir – profits from which would necessarily go towards paying his victims – he declares his wish to do something ‘tech-based.’
‘If I worked in finance, I think it would be harder to get back,’ he said. ‘Tech is more open. And the way I failed is totally wrong, but in a certain sense, failure is OK in entrepreneurship.’
McFarland said he wanted people to know that he was sorry for the festival and for his actions around it. ‘I deserved my sentence,’ he said. ‘I let a lot of people down.’
He put his choices down to ‘immaturity’ and hubris.
‘I didn’t know what I didn’t know,’ he said.
He put some blame on the tech world, which he said sometimes operates by an ‘ends justify the means’ ethos.
But he confessed that his greatest error was to keep on digging once he was already in a hole.
Festivalgoers – mostly from the millennial generation, the event’s target audience – had shelled out thousands of dollars to attend, with one package costing a whopping $250,000
Fyre Festival was scheduled to take place on a private island in the Bahamas over two decadent weekends in Spring 2017 – but the promised luxury accommodation was replaced by disaster recovery tents and bare mattresses on an unfinished gravel site
Fyre Festival guests paid $13,000 for a trash-filled, unfinished site and canceled performances
‘I lied,’ he said. ‘I think I was scared. And the fear was letting down people who believed in me — showing them they weren’t right.’
Back in 2017, McFarland had teamed up with rapper Ja Rule to draw millions in investments with the promise of putting on a first-of-its-kind, luxury music festival event in The Bahamas with models, DJs, luxury dwellings and extravagant meals.
They paid models like Kendall Jenner to promote the event on Instagram and blasted seduction promo videos and pictures to lure people into buying tickets that were sold at thousands of dollars each.
But the event was a disaster, with people arriving on the island of Great Exuma to find a scene more closely resembling a disaster relief camp than a luxury festival.
Court filings documents described the scene met by concert goers upon their arrival as ‘total disorganization and chaos.’ The ‘luxury accommodations’ were FEMA disaster relief tents, the ‘gourmet food’ was barely passable cheese sandwiches served in Styrofoam containers and the ‘hottest musical acts’ nowhere to be seen.
Fyre Festival was the brainchild of businessman Billy McFarland, right, and rapper Ja Rule, who both heavily promoted the event – and now face multiple lawsuits
The festival sold a total of around 8,000 tickets for two weekends. With attendees having spent between $1,000 to $12,000 on ticket to the festival, it was cancelled on its opening day, leaving people stuck on the island without many basic amnesties.
Two documentaries, one on Netflix and another on Hulu, were made detailing the event’s organisation and ensuing chaos.
McFarland was arrested in June 2017 and pleaded guilty to numerous fraud charges relating to both the Fyre Festival and his company NYC CIP Access, which also sold fake tickets to events such as the Met Gala.
He was sentenced to six years in prison in October 2018 and ordered to pay $5 million to two North Carolina residents who spent about $13,000 each of VIP packages to the Fyre Festival. Ja Rule was cleared of any wrongdoing a year later.
Numerous lawsuits were also filed against the pair, and McFarland apologised.
‘I cannot emphasize enough how sorry I am that we fell short of our goal,’ McFarland said in a statement in 2017, but he declined to comment on specific allegations.
‘I’m committed to, and working actively to, find a way to make this right, not just for investors but for those who planned to attend.’
The organizers attributed the event’s cancellation to a number of factors, including the weather. But some employees of the Fyre company said its bosses has invented features of the event – such as $400,000 accommodation called the ‘Artist’s Palace ticket package – just to see if people would by them.
‘Billy went to jail, ticket holders can get some money back, and some very entertaining documentaries were made,’ Ben Meiselas, a partner at Geragos & Geragos and the lead lawyer representing the ticket holders told the New York Times in an email. ‘Now that’s justice.’
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