Goldberg: Remember that amazing music festival
a couple years ago on an island in the bahamas?
The coachella in the bahamas on the beach.
Goldberg: The one with all the a-list supermodels, luxury villas,
and champagne-soaked yacht parties.
This is gonna be something that's crazy and big,
and if you're not there, you're gonna miss out.
Goldberg: The one that everyone couldn't wait to get to...
[ indistinct shouting ]
man: Everybody relax.
Goldberg: ...And then couldn't wait to escape.
Man: Welcome to the crazy [bleep]
I am stranded in the bahamas.
Goldberg: That's right. Fyre fest.
Known for wet mattresses...
Woman: What is this? Man: Oh, jesus!
...Cheese sandwiches...
And it went viral like that.
Goldberg: ...Bands that never showed...
"we're not going. Are you kidding me?
This is a farce."
"oh, no."
goldberg: ...Oh, and master con man billy mcfarland...
He screwed us over big-time.
They need to be held responsible
because they basically abducted us.
Goldberg: ...Who tonight, for the first time on tv,
gets asked the tough questions.
What do you say to people who would just call you a con man?
I'm whoopi goldberg, and this is "the con."
-- captions by vitac --
and we're gonna turn now to that trouble
for the fyre music festival.
The nightmare in paradise.
Fyre festival trending along with the hashtag "fyrefraud."
reporter: Fyre music festival creator now arrested
and charged with wire fraud.
Woman: We heard from the attorney just moments ago,
saying, and this is a quote, "when this is all over,
you will see that he is hardly the villain
the government portrays him as."
[ gavel bangs, echoes ]
goldberg: In 2018, fyre festival creator billy mcfarland
went to prison for fraud,
leaving behind a lot of unanswered questions,
including the big one --
was billy just a dreamer who couldn't deliver,
or was there a darker side to his character?
Billy is 100% a con artist.
Man: He's a narcissist.
But he's all of that and a con artist.
I don't think he's a horrible guy.
I just think that he's got a really crappy character
if he feels he can get away with what he did.
Goldberg: And what's billy's side of the story?
Let's ask prisoner 91186054,
currently housed at a federal prison in ohio.
Recorded voice: This call is from a federal prison.
Mcfarland: William mcfarland.
Goldberg: Turns out not even prison bars
can stop billy from hatching a new venture.
Man: Are we rolling?
Goldberg: He and some partners
have started a new podcast,
appropriately titled "dumpster fyre."
billy's a 50% owner,
and he promises his share of any profits
will go to paying back the victims of his failed festival.
But is this a legit rehab tour or just another scheme?
Whatever it is, the producers have allowed us
to be in their studio
for the taping of the first episode.
Also invited, independent interviewer
and podcaster jordan harbinger,
who has been given free rein to ask the tough questions.
I'm obsessed with human behavior and why people do what they do,
so, naturally, billy mcfarland was a good interview for me.
It's important to me to get a real story
and not just be another element or rube in someone's narrative.
Man: Alright, marker.
Hey, it's jordan.
Goldberg: Billy begins with a statement
he's clearly had a lot of time to get just right.
Billy hits all the right notes. But talk is cheap.
Has he really changed?
What do you say to people who would just call you a con man?
Goldberg: That right there is the million-dollar question.
But before billy answers it, let's go back to see
just how the whole debacle unfolded
and meet some of the people burned by the fyre
when billy's bahamian boondoggle went up in flames.
♪
king: I met billy six years ago.
He was a young kid and as I would label
as like a serial entrepreneur.
I thought, "wow, this is someone
that I can really help guide and mentor
and kind of help him build his career."
what is magnises?
It's a card, but it's more than that.
It's a card. It's more than that.
But let's take it back to where it all started.
Goldberg: Billy's first big venture,
a kind of elite membership card for millennials,
puts him in the national spotlight.
And he uses that buzz
to launch fyre,
a talent-booking app with a clean design
that makes hiring big-name artists and celebs look easy.
He even attracts a high-profile partner, the rapper ja rule,
and they announce it at web summit,
one of the world's biggest tech conferences.
I really wanted to book talent
for these small private concerts.
And that's why I built fyre -- to change all of this
and to make the entertainment industry
more accessible and transparent through technology.
To promote the fyre app,
billy comes up with his biggest idea yet --
a monster concert for 7,000 lucky people
on the remote bahamian island of great exuma,
300 miles off the florida coast.
Fyre festival is born.
So just how much time does billy give himself?
Like any good businessman,
billy knows if he builds it, they will come.
So before he even knows what the festival is,
he uses capital from his start-up fyre app
to shoot a splashy video
and shells out $1.7 million
to get some of the most famous supermodels in the world
to be part of his, you know, vision.
Cameron davison is part of the crew
shooting the infamous video
and sees firsthand billy's unique leadership style.
I went to the bahamas thinking that I was going there
for a music-video shoot on some tropical island
with a bunch of models.
Something about this job just seemed like
it was way more off the rails than the average film shoot.
We were at the mercy of billy and his friends.
Whatever they wanted to do, we were doing.
Billy, all day, his office was a jet ski.
He always acted like he had way more work
than he really had to do,
and he would just get on the jet ski
and just drive and circle back and come right back around.
It was the weirdest display of immaturity and stupid wealth
I've ever seen in my life.
Goldberg: Maybe billy's just a "play hard, play hard" kind of guy.
Either way, he hires a social media team
to stir up some buzz
and curiosity around the festival.
They come up with a unique and colorful idea.
Man: I remember that day, scrolling through instagram,
you just basically couldn't not see an orange tile.
It was bizarre.
I almost thought it was a glitch at first.
And then it became clear it was, like, a very coordinated,
expensive marketing effort.
That kind of built all of our excitement.
They found their niche crowd, and they absolutely attacked it.
Every model or celebrity we were following
seemed to be participating.
Goldberg: And for kendall jenner,
participating means posting about it once
for a cool $275,000.
Hey, you know I'm on instagram, too, billy.
We started seeing, like, kendall jenner post about it,
and all these celebrities, and we're like, yes,
this is gonna be legit.
Goldberg: Soon, e-mails start going out
listing the festival's lineup.
Conlin: For the artists that were going,
I remember g.O.O.D. Music, major lazer, blink-182,
disclosure, migos, lil yachty.
I mean, it was advertised amazingly.
Man: The actual experience exceeds all expectations
and is something that's hard to put into words.
Goldberg: And that was just the tease.
Billy then drops the actual promo video,
which creates even bigger waves.
The trailer was spectacularly well done.
You almost thought of it as like
the coachella in the bahamas on the beach.
Like, what could be better than that?
Caccamesi: It's luxury, it's once in a lifetime,
it's the first ever.
This is gonna be something that's crazy and big,
and if you're not there, you're gonna miss out.
And that was basically how they pitched it,
and that's how it was sold.
That's why I bought, and it's why, it seems,
everybody else did, too.
The public nature of the con
was actually what made the con work.
Goldberg: Maria konnikova is a psychologist and author
who has studied con artists
and the fyre festival in depth.
Konnikova: It wouldn't have worked without instagram.
It wouldn't have worked
without all of these celebrity photos and endorsements.
It wouldn't have worked as a private con.
He's brilliant.
Goldberg: Yep, for billy, it's either go big or go home.
He designs a slick pitch deck to get investors on board.
He also dazzles them with the fyre app's impressive earnings.
But billy's selling much more than just dollars and cents.
We see people like billy, people who are savvy
and who realize, "what does the world want?
They want to be close to celebrity.
They want to be close to cool.
How do I do that? Okay, I know how to do that."
and the con is born.
Goldberg: Tickets are going fast, and the fyre fest website
is promising festivalgoers a lot more
than just a few bands on the beach.
It included lodging,
which was promised as a cabana with queen-size beds.
Goldberg: Don't want to spring for a cabana?
Get a nice luxury dome with plush furnishings
and a gorgeous view of the ocean.
And that's just for starters.
The massive packages were
I believe it was about $200,000.
You and your 16 closest friends
could split a yacht for the weekend.
I came up just a couple pennies short of that one.
Goldberg: The only problem?
Billy doesn't actually have any of this stuff yet.
Yeah. Funny how that happened.
I mean, it's not like vip packages,
luxury accommodations, and international chefs
are on the website from the beginning.
But with just six weeks to go,
it's obvious billy isn't going to get
his festival done in time, so he dials up his mentor, andy.
Billy said, "andy, I have an issue
with a project I'm working on."
fyre took place on an area that was going to be developed
as a waterfront community.
So no plumbing, no electricity, no running water.
They all looked at me and said,
"andy, I mean, is this possible?
Can we make this work?"
and I basically said, after two hours,
it will work as long as we get the word out
to all the ticket buyers
that there aren't any luxury accommodations
and most of the guests
will predominantly be staying in a tent.
Goldberg: But billy says that he'll take care of the messaging
and not to worry about it.
He's not about to give up
on his half-baked tropical field of dreams.
Goldberg: Billy mcfarland is in the middle of a big-time con,
one that's slowly spiraling out of his control.
But who exactly is billy,
this millennial who has the power to dupe
so many rich and famous people?
King: My first impressions of billy were pretty favorable.
I grew up in a little town in new jersey,
and he grew up in the next town over.
Goldberg: Billy grew up in a picturesque town
with loving parents and a sister.
King: So I felt like he came from a good family,
and he seemed like a good kid.
Goldberg: He might have seemed like a good kid,
but according to billy himself, when he was an actual kid,
he was already, uh, looking for opportunities.
In grade school, billy says he had a crush on a girl.
And when she broke a crayon one day,
he decided to charge her a dollar to fix it.
Classic pickup move.
Then, billy hacked into the school's computer system
and posted an ad to promote his new venture.
Clearly, billy was on his way to bigger and better things.
People see the fyre festival, and they're like,
"oh, first con." no.
No, this guy has been misrepresenting,
crafting his own world for a very, very long time.
King: I had five weeks
to try to build this luxury music festival
with zero infrastructure, with a new team.
Vargas: The first time I went to the bahamas,
it was a group of maybe 12 or 14 of us,
just scouting and brainstorming,
what can we do here, where will the deejay booth go?
Goldberg: It's felix's job to turn billy's festival pipe dream
into a reality.
It seemed like there was money. There was a lot of money.
So in my mind, well, if you have the money, it'll be fine.
Goldberg: Hoping to pull off a miracle,
the team begins hiring local island workers.
Ferguson: Weeks leading up to the festival,
I started off with a crew of probably about 35 people.
It went from there to over 400 people, I'm sure.
Basically, a lot of them were not even hired.
They were just pulled off the street
just as day laborers, to say,
"well, you know what? Come and help us out.
You know, we're paying you this amount of money."
goldberg: But according to felix,
some red flags start appearing.
Vargas: We had these water stations for the guys,
but then the money stopped coming in.
There were two water suppliers on exuma,
and I remember they were just pissed off.
They were like, "we're not giving you any more water."
so I took it into my own hands to pay,
and every water purchase
were about anywhere between $1,000 and $2,000
out of my pocket.
Goldberg: Thanks to billy's negligence,
there are other challenges mounting.
We started running into issues of,
well, we haven't paid the people
that are holding the shipping containers for us in miami,
so they're not releasing the shipping containers
to send them over to exuma.
Goldberg: As the festival date approaches,
billy and his team have set up the aptly named war room,
and it's the site of chaos and conflict.
Everyone knew the deal. All hands on deck.
Even billy and all of those people,
like, you guys have to be here to help us put this together.
Sometimes he would be there for maybe 10 minutes.
He'll ask one or two questions,
then he'll step out 'cause he had a phone call,
and then he'll come back in towards the end of the meeting.
And it's like he wasn't involved,
but he was, but he wasn't.
It was just really weird.
King: Every night when I turned to him and said,
"billy, we probably need to pull the plug.
We're three weeks out. This is not going to work."
and he'd say, "andy,
you tell me what we need to fix, I'll fix it.
We'll just throw money at it. We'll make it work."
after the meeting was done, I would just go outside
and I'd burst into tears.
Goldberg: And what do you know?
Billy does find another way to cash in.
Caccamesi: So the weeks leading up to the festival,
we had gotten a lot of e-mails
about, you know, load money onto your bracelet
because it's going to be a cashless, cardless festival.
That was basically like you were gonna get a wristband
where you can put all of your funds on.
And that was to pay for any experience,
so, like, island hopping, or getting onto a yacht.
And then I think they suggested some absurd amount of money
that you should put on it -- um, like thousands of dollars.
I put $300 on mine.
I think between $100 and $500.
Goldberg: That's right.
Billy had festival guests load up their prepaid wristbands
with a ton of cash
at the exact moment he happens to be desperate for it.
Huh. That's convenient.
But I'm sure billy has
a perfectly reasonable explanation.
Okay. Suddenly, billy is hitting up ticket buyers for cash 24/7.
Every once in a while, we got a message about,
like, flights and stuff like that,
but those were only a couple
in comparison to the amount of e-mails
we were getting, probably daily,
about loading extra money onto the wrist bands.
♪
king: We just kept being handed
all these incredible challenges --
people needing more money
and trying to build the villages where all the tents were.
And every day that went by, we were just always behind.
Goldberg: And there's one tiny problem.
What's being built is very different
from what's been promised to the ticket buyers,
and andy wants to make sure billy is lowering expectations.
It was a challenge of mine every day, saying,
"how are we doing on messaging?"
like, "andy, don't worry. We're working on the messaging."
I said, you know, "these kids have to know
what they're getting into."
goldberg: But billy once again flat-out ignores andy's advice,
which means everyone is still expecting
those top-notch accommodations that they paid for.
King: 24 hours before the festival,
we have 400 people working day and night.
As a team leader, billy was almost aloof.
He was on the phone, he was in the computers,
he had like two phones at his ear.
He was always moving. He was always pacing.
He was just fidgety. He was just always busy.
I remember we worked probably 18, 19 hours.
My goal was just to have enough tents
for the people that were showing up on Thursday.
We have, you know, a couple hours left.
We were, like, burning the night oil.
And then that night, it looked a little weird,
where it was just getting a little cloudy.
And shortly after midnight, it just started.
[ thunder crashes ]
it was pouring rain sideways, and the winds came up.
[ wind blowing ]
and the texts just kept coming through.
"another tent blew into the ocean."
"whoops, another tent is down." "another tent."
and I just thought, "oh, no!"
♪
when we got over in the morning, it was a nightmare.
Ferguson: Everything was drenched.
We had puddles and pools inside the tents.
All the furniture was wet.
The mattresses were soaked.
It was just crazy.
Everyone stood, just looking around, like, in despair.
And I said, "look, god has spoken,"
I said, "this is it."
goldberg: On Wednesday night,
less than 24 hours before the first band
is supposed to hit the stage at billy mcfarland's fyre festival,
a storm lays the site to waste.
And today, the guests arrive!
♪
when the rain came, everything was drenched.
This whole entire property was a mess.
Billy said to me, "get more people.
Let's just get more people. We got to get this done."
goldberg: And now it's too late,
because ready or not -- and by that I mean not --
hundreds of attendees are flying in.
We didn't know what time people were arriving.
That was the one piece of information
that no one ever told us.
Goldberg: Plane after plane
filled with festivalgoers descends on great exuma.
We landed around like 8:00 or 9:00 a.M.
Goldberg: Desperate to buy his team some time,
billy has the new arrivals shuttled to a nearby restaurant.
They give us, like, breakfast and some drinks.
I'm like, "okay, well, it's like 9:00 a.M.,
but why not have a margarita?"
goldberg: Meanwhile, back at the festival site...
We took everything to the laundromat
and made sure we dried everything.
But what about the mattresses?
You know, the mattresses are gonna be wet.
During that time, I was working with the gas company,
the water company, caterers, everything,
trying to get the food tent ready
to make sure that we were gonna be able to serve dinner
to these kids when they arrived.
Goldberg: But will billy be able
to keep the kids distracted long enough?
Yeah, right. When pigs fly.
Wait. Did somebody say "pigs"?
[ pig squealing ]
behold, pig island,
full of cute pigs that you can swim with.
So we went to go, like, see the pigs and swim with the pigs.
Barron: It was adorable.
There were real pigs. Very large ones, small ones.
Everybody was pretty giddy.
Like, it was like, "let's have fun.
This is just, you know, a prelude, right?"
goldberg: Unfortunately, even swimming drunk with pigs
gets old after a couple of hours.
I am sunburned. Everyone is just stranded.
Finally, billy makes the call,
and 600 twentysomethings,
many who'd been drinking all day,
get onto buses and head off to -- well, this.
-What is this? -I don't know.
Oh, jesus!
Barron: We approached the campgrounds on the school bus.
I think that's when a lot of, like,
our anxieties started to build.
It looks like a hurricane came through here.
Look at those mattresses.
What's happening?
We were very much gonna stay in emergency tents
rather than, you know, the cabana we had paid for.
Goldberg: Yep, you may have dropped two months' rent
on a cabana or a villa,
but instead, you're getting one of these.
That's kind of where it was like, "whoa. This is bad."
harbinger: Take me back to the day
when everyone arrived on the island.
There's not enough accommodations,
there's not enough food, there's not enough water,
there's not enough toilets.
What's going through your mind?
Goldberg: Yeah, maybe.
Or maybe promising people luxury accommodations by the beach
and then giving them saggy tents with soggy mattresses
had something to do with it.
And billy's bad decisions don't stop there.
He looked extremely unwell and very uneasy
as he, you know, addressed the attendees
that were all howling at him.
Goldberg: Their number-one question --
"where are we gonna sleep tonight?"
we'd already designed a map system with reservations,
and everybody had their own tent.
Billy got very nervous, and he stood up on a table
and he said, "everybody, go find a tent."
"go find your luggage, and go grab a tent."
you know, "we're not gonna do the assignment thing anymore."
a sea of people just sprinting off into the distance.
We're gonna have a free-for-all.
[ people shouting ]
vargas: I was so busy
trying to fix some of the last-minute tents,
it wasn't until, like, I came out of one the tents
that I was just looking around, like, "why is everyone running?"
conlin: All this luggage on a freight truck
just being thrown out.
It's dark, so you're using just, like, your iphone flashlight
to try and find your luggage.
Caccamesi: There was really no law and order.
Everyone that was working
or had some semblance of authority had just disappeared.
King: They began ransacking every tent,
throwing mattresses outside.
And the whole thing was, as you can imagine,
just a [bleep] show.
Caccamesi: We ended up finding a nice tent, you know?
Beautiful two-bed. Fantastic.
Welcome to the crazy, [bleep] ridiculous, awful,
crazy, ridiculous life of dylan.
I am stranded in the bahamas amidst hundreds of other
extremely unlucky festivalgoers.
This is just [bleep] crazy.
This is crazy.
Goldberg: Believe it or not, despite all that has gone wrong,
billy still has not canceled the festival.
There is still a concert planned for the next day,
and it just might have taken place,
except that's when a cheese sandwich takes center stage
and blows up the internet.
I'm like, "no, no, it's not happening.
We can't make it up."
goldberg: On the remote island of great exuma,
where the fyre festival is awash in drunk, restless partygoers,
andy's meal kitchen is not up and running yet.
So he is trying to keep the situation under control.
King: One young couple came up.
They were drunk, and I said, "you guys need to eat something.
And over there is the employee tent and one of the chefs.
Just say, listen, andy sent you over,
and he'll make you a sandwich."
that was the employee lunch.
I'm thinking of liability and alcohol poisoning
and what have you.
So they went over to get a sandwich,
and when I came back 10 minutes later,
there were probably 500 kids in line
for this damn cheese sandwich.
Everybody had their phones out,
and they were photographing this sandwich.
And I'm like, "no, no, it's not happening."
and it went viral like that, around the world.
♪
that's when all the acts started to cancel right and left.
They literally saw the image on the internet
and said, "we're not going. Are you kidding me?
This is a farce."
and I blame the cheese sandwich for bringing down the festival.
Goldberg: With the tsunami of band cancellations pouring in,
billy puts out an e-mail
saying that the festival is officially over.
The message is sent in the dead of night,
so most festivalgoers crash, having no idea
that the festival's not happening.
♪
they've given us little to no information.
People are evacuating.
They're changing their stories every couple of minutes.
[bleep] getting really wild.
I remember waking up with just, like, hundreds of text messages
of like, "are you okay? What's going on?
Oh, my god, this is everywhere."
we, like, had no clue.
When we finally got wi-fi, that's when it all started
to like -- "oh, okay. Everything is canceled.
This is, like, the biggest joke in the world right now,
and we're still here."
goldberg: Also still there, billy and andy,
trying to cope with the fallout from the festival.
King: Billy was outside by the pool, pacing back and forth.
It was just -- you can't even describe it.
And then the phone started to ring,
and it was one my lawyers saying,
"andy, it's all over the news around the world.
This thing has failed, and you need to get off that island."
and I said, "I'm not going anywhere.
We have all these kids that have arrived.
I'm not going. I can't go."
goldberg: And many of the workers
still have not been paid,
and they're not too happy about it.
King: There were hundreds of workers
trying to get into the gate to come into the village,
which was locked.
A lot of the vendors were arriving, saying,
"we know there isn't gonna be a festival,
and we want to be paid right now."
and they were angry, and I didn't blame them.
They just were all turning to me, "please, andy, please."
I went straight over to find billy.
"billy, what is the plan? Like, what are we doing?
How are we going to make a safe environment
for these kids that are here,
and how are we going to pay everybody?"
goldberg: While andy is trying to figure out
how to handle the frustrated workers,
many of the festivalgoers are trying to get off the island.
And they're not shy about sharing their feelings.
Reporter: Nightmare in paradise.
Thousands stranded at an island music festival
promising a luxury getaway.
The reality?
It was basically the exact opposite
of everything we were promised.
Woman: We had no electricity, there was no showers,
there was no bathrooms, there was no, like, running water.
They need to be held responsible,
because they basically abducted us.
Goldberg: Meanwhile, andy's still stuck on the island.
And very important, very unhappy people are on his doorstep,
demanding answers.
King: I got a call from one of my assistants
that said that there were three high-level government officials
waiting for me at my villa to talk to me.
And I was doing everything in my power
to fix the situation, but two people had said,
"listen, andy, it's a witch hunt.
Like, they're gonna hold you responsible.
You need to get off this island."
goldberg: With the fyre festival falling apart
and billy's deep pockets totally empty,
people are angry and want answers.
And they're coming to andy to get them.
King: And I was doing everything in my power
to fix the situation, but my lawyer said,
"andy, you're not jesus, and you're not mother teresa.
Like, this has gone beyond what you can do as an event producer.
You cannot fix this situation now."
my lawyer sent a plane,
but they said it can't get there for five hours,
and someone picked me up in a pickup truck.
I laid down in the back of a pickup truck
for four hours with palm fronds on top of me.
We were parked in a corner parking lot of the airport.
And by the time the sun started to set
and I got word that the jet had arrived,
we went screaming out onto the runway
and I jumped onto that plane and screamed,
"go, go, go!"
goldberg: And what's billy up to?
Damage control.
He gets in front of the cameras to try to make things right.
Reporter: The weather is one of the reasons given
for that epic vacation disaster
for thousands attending a music festival in the bahamas.
For the first time,
organizers explaining why things went so wrong.
We tried to create this amazing experience.
The first version did not work,
and for that, we are sorry.
And we want to let everybody know,
the first thing for us is all about safety,
and we are very happy that everybody got home safely,
and that was the most important thing for us.
Next is refunds.
Everybody will be fully refunded for the experience,
regardless of when they arrived here
and when they got home.
And finally, they will all be given a free ticket
to the festival next year so we can prove ourselves
and make this dream a reality.
Goldberg: Huh. That's strange.
I seem to have missed the part where he talked about
making things right for the workers he stiffed.
They are going to get paid, right?
Ferguson: He bailed. He left the island.
I don't know how he left. I'm sure, probably, privately.
I had all these people calling me, looking for money.
It was hard because I was being threatened.
I had no money to pay anyone.
You know, "I'm working just like you."
I had to keep my phones off. I changed numbers.
And I have a family here, too,
so I also have to take that into consideration.
He really put us all in an extremely difficult spot.
Goldberg: Billy's back in the u.S.,
and people are starting to see through
his "we got this, everyone's getting paid back,
it's all good" attitude.
And the refunds he promised, well, they never showed up.
Caccamesi: I was just hoping
that they were going to figure their stuff out
and refund us.
I figured, "any day now,
it's bound to drop back into the account,"
and it never did.
Goldberg: And so a big fat $100 million class-action suit
gets filed against billy and ja rule
on behalf of the fyre festival workers and attendees.
Meiselas: As we filed the lawsuit that weekend,
the amount of attention that was created
from whistleblowers on the island,
media who covered the lawsuit,
to kind of the social media frenzy that took place,
you know, really kind of galvanized the public
to realize that billy mcfarland was gaslighting everyone
by claiming that nothing was going wrong
and this was what was planned.
It shows kind of how insidious
what billy and people like billy do.
Goldberg: But the lawsuit's the least of billy's legal problems.
Because not long after he's back in the states,
the government discovers just how big his con really was.
Fyre music festival creator now arrested
and charged with wire fraud.
Goldberg: The feds claim that billy swindled his investors
out of $26 million,
all to pay for the festival he couldn't deliver.
King: When billy got charged with wire fraud,
I was taken aback,
but I understood and I realized that that was one of
the biggest issues throughout the building of the festival,
was the constant probably lying.
So the wire fraud, to me, made total sense.
Goldberg: Billy doesn't fight the charges
and in March of 2018 pleads guilty to wire fraud.
And he's ordered to pay his investors back
the entire $26 million he bamboozled them out of,
and he's sentenced to six years in the can.
King: I never thought of billy as a con artist.
But as things unfolded, it was painfully obvious
that he wasn't totally in touch with, like,
the damage that he had done
and the damage that he does when he's acting this way.
Goldberg: Which brings us back to our million-dollar question.
You let down so many people.
What do you say to people who would just call you a con man?
Goldberg: Billy?
Billy?
You let down so many people.
What do you say to people who would just call you a con man?
♪
did you knowingly con the investors
to get their backing?
Goldberg: So, what exactly did billy do when he lied?
Well, according to fbi files, to reassure his investors,
billy altered his own stock statements,
changing roughly $1,000 to over $2 million.
He also said the festival was backed
by a big fat insurance policy, which was a big fat lie.
Plus, he claimed that fyre media
had brought in millions in months
when it was really more like thousands.
And get this --
he started pushing some of these lies right around the time
he made that internet-busting promo video,
barely a month after he came up with the festival idea.
The evidence is damning.
He was lying to people pretty much from the get-go.
How does billy explain?
What's your biggest regret, 20/20 hindsight?
Goldberg: People like andy,
who, despite everything he went through,
isn't part of any lawsuit against billy.
King: I know that he embarked on this mission
thinking he could pull it off.
He felt playing with numbers, falsifying some documents,
but raising the money and creating a product
that the world raves about,
that he would have been able to pay everybody back
and continue to rise to the top.
And so the scam really grew and grew for him.
There was only one scam artist in the entire group,
and it was billy.
He duped us. He screwed us over big-time.
When you put your all into something
and then you get duped, it hurts.
The exuma people are a striving people,
and we're resilient and we bounce back.
But, you know, it's gonna take some time.
Konnikova: Billy mcfarland is 100% a con artist.
And I think that part of his hubris was thinking,
"ah, maybe somehow, it'll get pulled off."
but it was a con because he didn't care if it didn't happen.
Goldberg: Whatever his motivations were,
billy's going to be paying for his con for a long time.
He owes millions to his investors,
and he's still potentially facing
that $100 million class-action lawsuit.
A default was recently entered against billy
when he failed to appear in court.
And what about his former partner, ja rule?
Well, he was dropped from the civil case
and was never implicated
in billy's criminal case.
Billy isn't scheduled to be released from prison until 2023,
and he recently did a stint in solitary confinement
because of this podcast interview.
But it's doubtful even that can hold him back.
I can pretty much guarantee you that he's going to come up
with another get-rich-quick scheme
and try to sell that to the public.
Goldberg: Once a pitchman, always a pitchman.
In fact, billy has come up with many ideas
since he's been in the big house,
like a phone calling card for inmates, and, well --
well, a lot more.
Mcfarland: My overall concept and, really, vision
I'm putting together in jail...
...Now is more about using technology to connect...
...Kind of around the world...
...And our physical plans,
maybe a hotel, maybe a festival,
maybe a fashion line part of that.
But are all his big plans just more shady schemes
or a real attempt to make a fresh start?
For now, only billy knows.
Let's give the last word to the man billy looked up to,
the one he brought in to save the festival.
King: Billy did take some of my advice,
and so I think I've been a positive influence on billy.
Um...
But, you know, he only listens
to whatever he wants to hear,
and, you know,
I think that's why he's in prison today.
♪