[6] Pearlman's home at Mitchell Gardens Apartments was located across from Flushing Airport, where he and childhood friend Alan Gross would watch blimps take off and land.

During his first year as a student at Queens College, Pearlman wrote a business plan for a class project based on the idea of a helicopter taxi service in New York City.

On the advice of a friend, Pearlman started a new company, Airship International, taking it public to raise the $3 million he needed to purchase a blimp, falsely claiming that he had a partnership with Wüllenkemper.

[10] After he took the company public in 1985, Pearlman became personally and professionally close to Jerome Rosen, a partner at small-cap trading firm Norbay Securities.

In return for keeping his penny stock liquid, Pearlman allegedly paid Rosen handsome commissions, according to a mutual friend, that reached into 'the tens of thousands of dollars' per trade.

Pearlman became fascinated with the success of the New Kids on the Block, who had made hundreds of millions of dollars in record, tour and merchandise sales.

The record label's first band, the Backstreet Boys, consisted of five unknown performers selected by Pearlman in a $3 million talent search.

The band's dissatisfaction began when member Brian Littrell hired a lawyer to determine why the group had received only $300,000 for all of their work while Pearlman and his record label had made millions.

[8] At the age of 14, Aaron Carter filed a lawsuit in 2002 that accused Pearlman and Trans Continental of cheating him out of hundreds of thousands of dollars and of racketeering in a deliberate pattern of criminal activity.

Regardless of the name, all incarnations were based on the business model used by Emodel founder Ayman "Alec" Difrawi, himself a convicted con artist,[17] who played a principal role in running Options/TCT/WSN[18] and setting up Fashion Rock.

[22] The New York State Consumer Protection Board issued an alert, naming it the largest example they had found of a photo mill scam.

[26] One of the accused, a Canadian consumer-fraud expert Les Henderson, successfully pursued a libel lawsuit against Pearlman, Tolner, El-Difrawi and several others.

[29][30] Difrawi continued filing lawsuits that were all dismissed and was most recently running Expand, Inc. dba Softrock.org aka Employer Network, from the same address as former TCT.

In 2006, investigators discovered Pearlman had perpetrated what was then thought to be the longest-running Ponzi scheme in American history and had defrauded investors out of more than $1 billion, out of which $300 million is still missing.

[31] Pearlman used falsified Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, AIG and Lloyd's of London documents to win investors' confidence in his program titled Employee Investment Savings Account, and he used fake financial statements created by the fictitious accounting firm Cohen and Siegel to secure bank loans.

[8] In February 2007, Florida regulators announced that Pearlman's Trans Continental Savings Program was indeed a massive fraud, and the state took possession of the company.

Orange County Circuit Judge Renee Roche ordered Pearlman and two of his associates, Robert Fischetti and Michael Crudelle, to bring back to the United States "any assets taken abroad which were derived from illegal transactions.

[38] On May 21, 2008 Sharp sentenced Pearlman to 25 years in prison on charges of conspiracy, money laundering, and making false statements during a bankruptcy proceeding.

[40] Trustees and lenders intended to auction off Pearlman's assets and personal belongings, including a mansion full of well-known works of art and priceless memorabilia.

[42] In a 2009 interview with Howard Stern, Rich Cronin, the former lead singer of LFO, said that he had only received a fraction of the money owed to him from record sales.

Fellow LFO band member Brad Fischetti, however, continued to refer to Pearlman as a friend, and expressed sadness at the news of his arrest, imprisonment, and death.

[44] In an interview conducted by the Orlando Sentinel, former NSYNC member Lance Bass, when asked about the claim, stated that Pearlman had never behaved inappropriately with them.