Frauds and Swindling

Subterms

    More stories

    • 113 Shares199 Views

      in Television

      Jennifer Shah, ‘Real Housewives’ Star, Sentenced in Fraud Scheme

      by

      Ms. Shah, who appeared on “The Real Housewives of Salt Lake City,” was sentenced to more than six years in prison for her involvement in a telemarketing scheme, prosecutors said.Jennifer Shah, who gained fame as a cast member on the reality television show “The Real Housewives of Salt Lake City,” was sentenced on Friday to six and a half years in prison for her involvement in a telemarketing scheme that defrauded thousands of victims, prosecutors said.Ms. Shah used the scheme to finance her luxury lifestyle, which included a rented 9,420-square-foot mansion in Park City, Utah, that she referred to as the “Shah ski chalet,” a rented apartment in Midtown Manhattan and a leased Porsche Panamera, prosecutors said.The criminal case against Ms. Shah had been heavily featured on the Bravo reality series, which turned the charges against her into a dramatic plot point.In her tagline for the second season of the show, she declared, “The only thing I’m guilty of is being Shah-mazing.”In court papers, prosecutors cited that line to argue that Ms. Shah had mocked the charges against her.Ms. Shah’s lawyers wrote in court papers that the show was a “semi-scripted, heavily edited facsimile of ‘reality’ intentionally manipulated to maximize ratings” and that it did not accurately reflect her feelings about the case.Her lawyers blamed the show for making it seem, as her sentencing date approached, as if Ms. Shah was “intransigent, defiant, and often even unrepentant, about her actions here.”“Nothing could be further from the truth,” Ms. Shah’s lawyers wrote. “Just as Jen Shah has never been a ‘housewife,’ little else is real about her persona and caricature as portrayed by the editors” of “The Real Housewives of Salt Lake City.”A spokeswoman for NBCUniversal, Bravo’s parent company, declined to comment.The show, which premiered in 2020, purports to depict women living glamorously while negotiating issues like sex and religion in a city that is home to the headquarters of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.At her sentencing in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York on Friday, Ms. Shah said she was sorry for her role in the scheme, which prosecutors said had defrauded victims by selling them bogus “business services” that promised to help them make money online.She was ordered to pay about $6.6 million in restitution and to forfeit $6.5 million and 30 luxury items, including designer handbags and jewelry, prosecutors said.In addition to the 78-month prison sentence, Ms. Shah, 49, of Salt Lake City, was sentenced to five years of supervised release.“I want to apologize to all the victims and families and I take full responsibility for the harm I caused and will pay full restitution to all of the victims,” Ms. Shah said, according to NBC News. She added, “I recognize that some of you lost hundreds, and others lost thousands, and I promise to repay.”Prosecutors said that from at least 2012 until March 2021, when she was arrested, Ms. Shah had been a leader of the wide-ranging scheme and had facilitated the sale of leads, or contact information for potential victims.Victims were told during “coaching” sessions that the sessions would help them earn money from online businesses, prosecutors wrote in court documents.Instead, the coaching sessions were designed to convince victims that, to make their internet businesses succeed, they would need to buy additional products and services, which were of little or no value, prosecutors wrote.Many of the victims were over 55 and some reported losing tens of thousands of dollars, depriving them of much of their life savings, prosecutors said.Ms. Shah was not deterred by Federal Trade Commission investigations and enforcement actions or by the arrest of dozens of others involved in the scheme, prosecutors said.Instead, they said, she tried to cover up her criminal conduct by telling others to lie and delete text messages, placing businesses and bank accounts under other people’s names and taking steps to move some of her operations to Kosovo.Before she pleaded guilty in July to one count of conspiracy to commit wire fraud, Ms. Shah sold “Justice for Jen Shah” T-shirts that featured “NOT GUILTY” on the front and “#justiceforjenshah” on the back, prosecutors said.“With today’s sentence, Jennifer Shah finally faces the consequences of the many years she spent targeting vulnerable, elderly victims,” Damian Williams, the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, said in a statement.“These individuals were lured in by false promises of financial security, but in reality, Shah and her co-conspirators defrauded them out of their savings and left them with nothing to show for it,” Mr. Williams said.Prosecutors had asked the judge to sentence Ms. Shah to 10 years in prison. Ms. Shah’s lawyers had asked for a sentence of three years, writing in court papers that she was “an exceptional mother and a good woman who has already been punished extensively as a result of the sins of her past.”“Though Ms. Shah admittedly played an important role in the particular fraud in which she was involved, she was only one of many people involved, was not involved in all facets of the conspiracy, never communicated with any of the victims, and she clearly did not invent this particular fraud,” her lawyers wrote. “Nor was she a mastermind.”Claire Fahy More

    • 150 Shares189 Views

      in Music

      Billy McFarland Is Out of Jail and Ready for His Next Move

      by

      Five years after the Fyre Festival, the convicted fraudster is planning a comeback.“Is this technically Dumbo?” Billy McFarland asked, walking toward the East River shoreline. “It’s super cool. Are the rents here crazy too?“I never spent much time in Brooklyn, until the Brooklyn detention center,” he continued. “I was always like, ‘I’m never going to live in Brooklyn.’ Now, I think it’s kind of nice.”Mr. McFarland, who in 2018 entered guilty pleas for fraud stemming from his role in organizing the Fyre Festival — a Coachella-for-the-Bahamas affair that went spectacularly awry and established him as the Elizabeth Holmes of party promoters— had been a free man for all of 15 minutes. And he didn’t seem inclined to lay low after spending close to four years in prison, plus another six months of additional confinement.Moments after removing an electronic ankle monitor at the Gold Street halfway house where he had stayed earlier this year, he was posing for a New York Times photographer and talking to a reporter whom he’d approached toward the end of his confinement with the help of a publicist.“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, 30, who is 6-foot-3 and post-prison lean. He was wearing a dark T-shirt and navy pants that he said were from Uniqlo. On his feet were Gianvito Rossi sneakers that looked like Converse All Stars, but retail for around $700.Mr. McFarland — who has little money in the bank, around $26 million in financial amends to make and no immediate job prospects — said he had purchased the shoes before his legal problems.“Friends joke that my entire wardrobe is from 2016,” he said.Back then, Mr. McFarland — who grew up in Short Hills, N.J., and dropped out of Bucknell University after less than a year — was known as the founder of a company called Magnises, whose flagship charge card was pitched as a kind of American Express Black card for millennials.Mostly, those who joined were given access to an open bar at a Greenwich Village townhouse where he held parties. Another membership perk: Bahamian excursions, including to Norman’s Cay, a small island that once served as a hub for the Medellín Cartel’s cocaine-smuggling operation.That was the site Mr. McFarland had selected to hold an epic coming-out festival for his next invention, Fyre, an Uber-like app through which people could book their favorite celebrities for special events. He enlisted Ja Rule, Kendall Jenner, Bella Hadid and Emily Ratajkowski to help promote the 2017 party, which featured more than 30 musical guests, including Blink-182 and Tyga. Tickets cost up to $12,000.But the Fyre Festival — which would go on to achieve cultural notoriety, if not for the reasons Mr. McFarland had intended — was poorly planned, and its finances were a mess.The night before the first attendees arrived on the island, an intense rainstorm hit.The site of the Fyre Festival in Exuma, Bahamas, in 2017.Scott McIntyre for The New York TimesPeople showed up to find that the “luxury villas” that came with their ticket packages were, in fact, disaster relief tents located on a makeshift camping ground.And the “uniquely authentic island cuisine” guests were promised in promotional materials turned out to be cheese sandwiches served in plastic foam containers, though Mr. McFarland countered in our interview last week that reports of the meals had been vastly overblown.“There’s a reason there’s only one photograph of that,” he said, referring to a viral shot of a sad pile of lettuce topped by two tomato slices, above two slices of prepackaged cheese serving as a sort of garnish for two slices of untoasted wheat bread.Ultimately, the event — which stranded thousands of attendees in the Bahamas and left them scrounging for makeshift shelter on a dark beach — was scrapped without a single performance taking place. Less than two months later, Mr. McFarland was arrested and charged with fraud.“They took me to the Brooklyn detention center for one night,” he said. “My head was swirling with all these things, and I panicked like, ‘I need to pay everybody back tomorrow or else this is real.’”Class-action lawsuits followed.While on probation, Mr. McFarland launched a V.I.P. ticket service that promised users tickets he didn’t have to events including the Broadway musical “Hamilton,” the Victoria’s Secret fashion show and the Met Gala.There was another round of fraud charges.“I probably added years on to my sentence by doing that,” he said. “I just was making bad decision after bad decision.”By the water in Dumbo, Mr. McFarland struck a few plaintive poses. “I can’t wait to go swimming,” he said.Mr. McFarland was weighing a return to the tech world.Ben Sklar for The New York TimesHe then took an Uber to his small second-floor apartment in the Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood.On the curb outside his new building, he continued to speak of the borough with tourist-like wonder. “Was this street terrible years ago?” he asked. “Because there are all these nice new buildings.” (Before the Fyre Festival, Mr. McFarland had lived in the meatpacking district. “I was 21 when I moved there — cut me some slack,” he said.)With characteristic vagueness, Mr. McFarland said the rent for his new place was being paid by “family and friends.” He did not say whether that included his parents, Steven and Irene McFarland, who are real estate developers based in New Jersey.It had taken a lot, Mr. McFarland said, for his parents to understand that “someone they were so close to was capable of lying like I did.” He continued, “I hurt them, and it sucks.”Had he personally apologized to his victims? “No,” he said, then posed a question of his own:“What would you say to them if you were me?”The terms of Mr. McFarland’s six-month house arrest allowed him to go outside only to go to the grocery store or the gym. He chose a membership at Blink Fitness, which he paid for with a debit card. “I don’t think I can get a credit card,” he said.His new apartment was Airbnb-neutral. The only decorations were a few plants he’d picked up at Trader Joe’s — a bird of paradise, two money trees — along with a white board that was blank as the decor. The bed was perfectly made, the floor immaculate.The work of a cleaning service? “You’re never going to believe it,” he said. “I learned how to do it!”As Mr. McFarland recalled it, his housekeeping education began at the Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn, where he was first held, then continued at the Otisville Correctional Facility in upstate New York, where he was transferred in early 2019. “It was like Danbury,” he said, referring to the less hard-line cushy-by-prison standards facility where Martha Stewart did her time. “But I messed it up.”How?“I brought in a USB drive.”He was storing notes for a possible book on his saga, he said, which had already been memorialized in dueling documentaries for Hulu and Netflix.Mr. McFarland pleaded guilty in 2018 to two counts of wire fraud.Mark Lennihan/Associated PressGuards confiscated the drive and Mr. McFarland spent three months in solitary confinement, where he said he fell asleep to the sounds of a screaming gang member known as the White Tiger, so named because of tattoos of the animal that covered his face and other areas of his body.After that, he was resettled at FCI Elkton, a low-security federal correctional institution located in Ohio.Then, in 2020, the coronavirus pandemic hit. Mr. McFarland appealed for compassionate release, claiming that allergies and asthma placed him in a high risk category for health complications. His efforts were unsuccessful. “Hope clouds your judgment,” he said. “There was no way I was going to get out.”In the fall of that year, he wound up in solitary confinement again, this time for participating by pay phone in a podcast (“Dumpster Fyre”) about the Fyre Festival.Ultimately, prison records show, Mr. McFarland spent six months there, though the records do not specify why. His lawyer, Jason Russo, said in a phone interview that he had written letters to prison officials attempting to get Mr. McFarland out of solitary confinement, only to be stonewalled at every turn. Mr. Russo said he could not even get a specific answer as to why Mr. McFarland was there for such an extended period of time. Emails and phone calls to the prison by The New York Times were not returned.Mr. McFarland read a lot during those months. “There was nothing else to do,” he said.One of the books he finished was Simon Sinek’s “Start with Why: How Great Leaders Inspire Everyone to Take Action.” Another was Gregory David Roberts’s novel “Shantarum.”“It’s about an Australian who breaks out of jail and joins the Indian mafia,” said Mr. McFarland. “Really cool.”In Mr. McFarland’s Bedford-Stuyvesant living room, on a small shelf by the gray couch from Wayfair — “A friend bought it for me,” he said, “I couldn’t afford it” — were copies of Don Winslow’s “City on Fire” and Sebastian Mallaby’s “The Power Law: Venture Capital and the Making of the Future.”But Mr. McFarland said hadn’t been doing as much reading since he began home confinement and acquired a Mac desktop computer with a Westinghouse screen. “I just missed the computer so much,” said Mr. McFarland. “I missed that more than anything.”Mr. McFarland owes tens of millions of dollars to his victims.Ben Sklar for The New York TimesAs part of his plea, Mr. McFarland is barred for life from serving as a director of a public company. His earnings will be garnished until he pays back the full amount he owes his victims, more than $25 million.“Obviously, he’s got a lot of work ahead of him,” Mr. Russo said.At least for now, Mr. McFarland has abandoned the idea of writing his memoir.“The book’s not going to pay the restitution, let me put it that way,” he said.So what will?“I’d like to do something tech-based,” he said a few minutes later, walking to BKLYN Blend, where he ordered an egg sandwich and a coffee. “The good thing with tech is that people are so forward-thinking, and they’re more apt at taking risk.“If I worked in finance, I think it would be harder to get back,” he continued. “Tech is more open. And the way I failed is totally wrong, but in a certain sense, failure is OK in entrepreneurship.”Seated at a quiet table in the corner — no one at the coffee shop appeared to recognize him — Mr. McFarland mulled whether he’d prefer to work for himself or someone else. “At the end of the day, I think I could probably create the most value by building some sort of tech product,” he said. “Whether that’s within a company or by starting my own company, I’m open to both. I’ll probably decide in the next couple of weeks which path to go do.”He said he was “not particularly interested in crypto,” though he would make an exception for the latest frontier in blockchain technology, decentralized autonomous organizations, which he said were “allowing people to come together online to effect real world change in a way they previously couldn’t, taking people to places they couldn’t get to — and, once they’re there, enabling them to effect real-world change.”In April 2020, while in prison, Mr. McFarland made his first foray into philanthropy. He led a drive called Project 315, which raised money to cover the costs of calls between underprivileged inmates and their families. Four days after the project’s Instagram launch, fees were waived nationwide. “We did it,” the Instagram account associated with Mr. McFarland’s “non profit organization” said, claiming credit. (In fact, the suspension of fees came after campaigning by Senator Amy Klobuchar and a group of other Democratic senators that had begun well before Mr. McFarland got the idea.)But it whetted his appetite for good works, he said. Now, Mr. McFarland is talking about forming a charity that would pay travel costs for the families of prisoners.“I met some really amazing people in prison,” he said. “Half the people are just naturally bad and the other half are great.” (Mr. McFarland hedged, when asked which group he belonged to. “But I think I’m a better person than I was four years ago,” he said.)Mr. McFarland said he wanted people to know that he was sorry for what went wrong with the festival and for his actions. “I deserved my sentence,” he said. “I let a lot of people down.”He attributed his choices in part to “immaturity” and hubris.“I didn’t know what I didn’t know,” he said.Partly, he blamed the tech world — the very same world he was musing about re-entering — which he said sometimes operates by an “ends justify the means” ethos.Still, he took some issue with news articles that compared him to Bernie Madoff; he wasn’t running a decades-long scheme to defraud people of their life savings, after all. Plus, he said, he hadn’t planned for things to end up the way they did.Much was made in both the Hulu and Netflix documentaries about the local workers in the Bahamas who were stiffed when the festival was canceled and debts piled up.Mr. McFarland argued that this characterization was somewhat misleading because, he said, most of them were working on a day-to-day or week-to-week basis, and therefore suffered limited losses. (One restaurant owner said in the Netflix documentary that she spent $50,000 of her savings preparing for the festival and received no compensation from organizers. In May 2017, she told The New York Times that she was owed $134,000.)Two of his former Bahamian employees traveled to New York for a post-house-arrest party Mr. McFarland hosted on the evening of his release at Marylou, a French bistro in the East Village.Ozzy Rolle, Mr. McFarland’s principal consigliere in the Exumas, an island district in the Bahamas, said the following afternoon that he’d been paid almost everything he was owed for the festival, before it imploded. “I was treated good. Probably a week I wasn’t paid for.” He even went as far as to say the Fyre Festival had been good for tourism in the Bahamas. “So many people came after reading about what happened,” he said.But Scooter Rolle, his cousin and travel companion, said he had yet to get a dime of what he was owed for his work, in the days before Fyre. “I came to clarify things,” he said.That didn’t exactly happen, but Mr. McFarland did buy him a post-party lobster roll at Sarabeth’s Kitchen. “Billy tried his best,” he said.Back at the Bed-Stuy cafe, Mr. McFarland said the biggest sin he had committed was digging himself in deeper with dishonesty.“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.” More

    • 75 Shares179 Views

      in Movies

      The Unraveling of an Award-Winning Documentary

      by

      The director of “Sabaya,” about Yazidi women who had been sexually enslaved by ISIS, says that he wasn’t present for a key scene and that he substituted footage.BAGHDAD — In a pivotal scene of the 2021 documentary “Sabaya,” two men rescue a young woman named Leila from a Syrian detention camp for the families of ISIS fighters, bundling her into a car and driving her to safety as shots are fired behind them.In interviews with BBC Radio and others, the film’s Iraqi-Swedish director, Hogir Hirori, recounted the tension of the rescue and the terror of the ride as they raced from Al Hol detention camp with the young woman, one of thousands of women and girls from Iraq’s Yazidi religious minority who had been sexually enslaved by ISIS.The dramatic scene helped the Swedish-government-funded film garner glowing reviews and awards, including best director for a foreign documentary at the Sundance Film Festival last year. But following an investigation by a Swedish magazine, Kvartal, Hirori has admitted that he was not there when Leila was freed, that he substituted another woman instead and that he lied to a BBC interviewer.The admissions follow findings by The New York Times last year that many of the traumatized women either did not initially consent to be in the film or refused but were included anyway. The director’s admissions have also renewed accusations that the documentary played down the coerced separation of mothers from their young children, born during enslavement by ISIS — and turned the very men responsible for that separation into heroes for rescuing them.While Yazidi women sexually enslaved by ISIS were welcomed back by their communities after ISIS was defeated, the children were not. Some women did not want the children, but for most, the forced separations have had serious repercussions, including suicide attempts.In a statement issued after the Kvartal investigation, Hirori acknowledged that he had depicted Leila’s escape “using a rescue scene of another woman which I participated in.” He said the woman who was presented as Leila, the main character, did not want to be filmed after the rescue and so he did not mention her in the documentary.Speaking in Swedish through an interpreter, he told BBC Radio last year, “It was important for me to film it as it was happening because that was the reality.” In the interview, one of several in which he expressed the same sentiment, he also spoke of the Yazidi women: “They aren’t just numbers, they are people just like you and me.”The BBC has removed the lengthy interview from its website after press queries. A BBC spokesperson said it was being reviewed. Hirori said in his statement that he regretted not telling the BBC the truth about the rescue scene.A timeline by Kvartal also showed that in three scenes that included news reports about the battle against ISIS and a Turkish invasion, audio was inserted from events that had occurred several months earlier or weeks later. In at least one of the scenes, the film’s hero reacts to news from the car radio that he could not have been hearing.Hirori and the film’s producer, Antonio Russo Merenda, a former Swedish Film Institute commissioner who has said he was heavily involved in the film’s editing, did not respond to requests for comment by The Times.In his statement following the Kvartal investigation, Hirori said that the film was not intended to be journalism and that Swedish documentary tradition allowed filmmakers “to express their own unique view of events.”Kristina Eriksson, a communications officer at the Swedish Film Institute, said, “We follow the debate about the role of documentaries and welcome the discussion, but nothing has emerged so far that gives us reason to act in relation to the film.” She declined to clarify whether the institute had procedures governing the veracity of documentary films it funded.The issue of forced separations is the single most contentious one among Yazidis. While the Yazidi Home Center featured in “Sabaya” was responsible for finding and caring for hundreds of Iraqi Yazidis freed from ISIS captivity, the organization, acting on instructions from Yazidi elders in Iraq, also arranged for the children to be taken from their mothers. Most were sent to an orphanage in northeastern Syria that the women were not allowed to visit once they returned to Iraq.Almost all the women were told that to go home after being rescued from Al Hol camp, they would have to give up their children. The women were also told, falsely, as was one of the woman in “Sabaya,” that the separation would be temporary.Hirori has said he did not have space in the film to address the issue. “My focus was in trying to document how these women and girls were saved and not to go into the whole giving up the children,” he said in an interview with The Times last year.Sherizaan Minwalla, a human rights lawyer based in Erbil, Iraq, who has worked extensively with Yazidi genocide survivors, said, “The film portrayed a false narrative of women with children being rescued when in fact they were hiding with their children to avoid being forcibly separated before returning to their families in Iraq.” Some of the women were so afraid they would be separated from their children that they chose to stay in the Syrian detention camp rather than be rescued.A limited number of freed Yazidi women have been reunited with their children. Because those mothers and their children face threats from the Yazidi community in Iraq, almost all have been relocated to other countries.“The director doesn’t need to show situations that are wholly invented falsehoods in the film to have it be a false portrayal,” said Jennifer Crystal Chien, director of Re-Present Media, a San Francisco nonprofit that advocates for storytelling from underrepresented communities. Omitting key information means the viewer can “draw the wrong conclusions,” she said.The documentary was rejected by the Human Rights Watch Film Festival last year because of concerns over consent by traumatized ISIS survivors, but it was shown at the Sundance Film Festival.Months after the release of “Sabaya,” the filmmakers obtained written consents but in languages most of the women do not understand. The agreements entitled the filmmakers to use their names, stories and all footage for any project, in perpetuity.“There are certain types of things that seem in some way exciting or dramatic or have a kind of heroic outcome,” Chien said. “These kind of things are very appealing to people who are making decisions about funding and programing even though they may not know anything about the actual situation in the region or whether the footage that’s being gotten could possibly be gotten with informed consent at all.”Sangar Khaleel More

    • 163 Shares109 Views

      in Television

      Todd and Julie Chrisley, Self-Made Moguls on Reality TV, Are Convicted of Fraud

      by

      The couple, who star on the popular show “Chrisley Knows Best,” used money from fraudulently obtained loans on luxury cars, designer clothes, real estate and travel, the Department of Justice said.Todd and Julie Chrisley, the stars of “Chrisley Knows Best,” a reality TV show in which the couple project themselves as real estate moguls who judge PG-rated family squabbles according to strict standards for comportment, were convicted on Tuesday of conspiring to defraud banks out of $30 million and avoiding years of tax bills, the Department of Justice said.After a three-week trial in Federal District Court in Atlanta, a jury found the Chrisleys guilty on all counts — jointly, eight counts of financial fraud and two counts of tax evasion, with Ms. Chrisley also being convicted of additional counts of wire fraud and obstruction of justice.Their accountant, Peter Tarantino, was found guilty of filing false corporate tax returns for the Chrisleys’ company.“When you lie, cheat and steal, justice is blind as to your fame, your fortune, and your position,” Keri Farley, special agent in charge of the F.B.I. in Atlanta, said in a statement.The Chrisleys could each be sentenced to as much as 30 years in prison. U.S. Judge Eleanor L. Ross of the Northern District of Georgia set sentencing for Oct. 6.“Disappointed in the verdict,” Bruce Howard Morris, a lawyer for Todd Chrisley, wrote in an email on behalf of the couple. “An appeal is planned.”Lawyers for Mr. Tarantino did not immediately reply to requests for comment.Despite the Chrisleys’ self-presentation as self-made businesspeople, their wealth depended in large part on fraud, according to the indictment against the couple.They obtained loans, for example, by using a bank statement saying they had $4 million at Merrill Lynch when they did not even have an account with the bank, the indictment said. Mr. Chrisley directed his accountant to perform actions he himself suggested would be “crooked,” and Ms. Chrisley repeatedly used glue and tape to falsify documents, according to the indictment.The couple used money from loans for “luxury cars, designer clothes, real estate, and travel,” the Department of Justice said, even as they also filed bankruptcy and walked away from more than $20 million in loans. They did not pay the Internal Revenue Service in a timely manner for the 2013 through 2016 tax years, the indictment said.NBC Universal announced last month that “Chrisley Knows Best” had been renewed for a 10th season. The network also said that “Growing Up Chrisley,” a spinoff starring two Chrisley children, Chase and Savannah, had been renewed for a fourth season, and that a new series, “Love Limo,” a dating show hosted by Todd Chrisley, would begin next year.The release described “Chrisley Knows Best” as USA Network’s “most-watched current original series,” with an average of 1.8 million total viewers.A spokesman for NBC Universal declined to comment on the verdict or on the company’s plans regarding any of the shows. The second half of Season 9 of “Chrisley Knows Best” is still scheduled to air starting June 23.Following a proven American formula, the show depicts a family with traditional values and a down-home style of self-expression who just happen to be fantastically rich.In the show’s trailer, Mr. Chrisley describes himself and his wife as people from a “small rural town” who now live in a “gated neighborhood” outside Atlanta alongside “celebrities.” Their “main home” is 30,000 square feet, they spend at least $300,000 per year on clothes and Mr. Chrisley earns “millions of dollars a year” — but the Chrisleys still face the same issues as families making $40,000, he says.Mr. Chrisley plays the controlling and fastidious patriarch, the sort of father who responds to his son’s misbehavior by throwing his laptop into the pool. His wife’s role is to comment sarcastically yet forgivingly about her husband’s foibles.The Chrisleys join a growing roster of reality TV stars who have gotten into legal trouble.In 2018, Michael (The Situation) Sorrentino, an actor in MTV’s “Jersey Shore,” was sentenced to eight months in prison for violating federal tax laws, and in 2014, Joe and Teresa Giudice, two stars of “The Real Housewives of New Jersey,” were sentenced to prison after pleading guilty to bankruptcy fraud, among other charges.Eduardo Medina More

    • 125 Shares99 Views

      in Theater

      A Producer Seeks a Broadway Comeback, Mired in Offstage Drama

      by

      With the musical “Paradise Square” preparing to open Sunday, Garth Drabinsky is hoping to re-establish himself after serving time in a Canadian prison for fraud.Ten days before opening night of his Broadway show, “Paradise Square,” Garth Drabinsky was sitting at a breakfast table at the Peninsula Hotel in Midtown Manhattan, fending off a stream of cellphone calls from members of his production team.That morning’s crisis: Chilina Kennedy, one of the show’s lead actresses, had called in sick (and would be out for nine days after testing positive for coronavirus). Drabinsky decided which of the two understudies should take her place. A few minutes later, he spoke with the director Moisés Kaufman.“You’re happy with the choice?” Drabinsky asked. He listened. “Yeah, right, but make sure that she can really deliver ‘Someone to Love,’” one of the musical’s big ballads. “And the comedy.”The days before an opening are always stressful for a Broadway producer. But few have been under a harsher spotlight than Drabinsky, a storied Canadian impresario whose return to Broadway has generated the sort of drama that even he couldn’t have scripted.First came the pandemic, which delayed the show’s Broadway opening by two years. Then an out-of-town run in Chicago last fall drew mixed reviews and (hampered by the Covid-19 surge) disappointing sales. The show’s preview performances on Broadway have earned only around $350,000 per week at the box office, with most of the seats filled by heavily discounted or even free tickets. That’s not the best omen for a producer who is staking everything on his big comeback after an ignominious fall.He was a brash outsider even during his heyday in the 1990s, when he took a string of Tony-winning musicals to Broadway, among them “Ragtime,” “Kiss of the Spider Woman” and a revival of “Show Boat.” Then, in 1998, his company, Livent, imploded, and Drabinsky was accused of understating expenses and inflating profits in order to disguise the company’s precarious financial state. He was eventually convicted of fraud and forgery in his native Canada, and served 17 months of a five-year sentence, before being paroled in February 2013.Now, he’s back. And he hasn’t lost his salesman’s bravado, his lawyerly verbosity or his passion for theater, even though his show has faced many challenges, including questions about its financial health.Sidney DuPont, left, and A.J. Shively in the musical “Paradise Square,” which opens Sunday at the Barrymore Theater.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesAs New York rehearsals started in February, stories began circulating about slow payments, contract problems and a budget ($13.5 million, according to Drabinsky) that seemed on the slim side for a big Broadway musical with a performing company of nearly 40 and a producer known for lavish spending. Actors Equity, the performers’ union, even instructed the cast not to show up for rehearsals one day, so that it could deal with a “failure to provide our members with contracts reflecting their agreed-upon terms of employment” and “a myriad of other significant contract violations,” according to an Equity statement.“When Garth Drabinsky is involved, people are rightly concerned that all the I’s are dotted and the T’s are crossed,” said David Levy, an Equity spokesman. The problems were apparently resolved, but it was hardly the sort of incident anyone wants at the outset of a Broadway run.Drabinsky blamed a delay in delivering final contracts for the dispute, and misunderstandings about what the actors were owed when the show transferred to New York from Chicago. “The Chicago contract froze the deal for New York,” he said. “There was no variation allowed. They were asking for something we were not committed to give.”What’s more, Drabinsky stressed, he is not in charge of the show’s finances — an arrangement made explicit by the limited partnership formed to bring it to Broadway. “I walked away from every element of fiscal control of this show,” he added. “I don’t sign checks. I don’t get involved. I never want to live through the horror of what I went through in 1998 again.”Instead, he’s been working to get “Paradise Square” in shape for Broadway. The show began life nine years ago with a small-scale musical called “Hard Times,” written by the Irish American musician Larry Kirwan, lead singer of the rock band Black 47. It is set during the Civil War, in the gritty Five Points neighborhood of Manhattan, where Irish immigrants and freed Black Americans lived together — and where Stephen Foster (whose music formed the bulk of the score) resided during his final years. The show climaxes with the draft riots of 1863, when white working-class New Yorkers formed violent racist mobs following a draft lottery.Drabinsky loved the concept, but shied away from anchoring the show in Foster’s music, with its romanticization of the slavery-era South. So he set about reworking the piece, hiring the composer Jason Howland to write a new score (only two Foster songs remain), a succession of writers to shift the story’s focus to the owner of a neighborhood saloon (played by the Tony nominee Joaquina Kalukango), and a top-notch creative team, including Kaufman, as the director, along with the choreographer Bill T. Jones.The themes of racial justice and the immigrant experience have long attracted Drabinsky, and their currency has only grown in the years of development, which included a 2019 workshop production in Berkeley, Calif. “When the show began to parallel what was happening today in America and the world, it was sort of freaky,” he said. “And it hasn’t stopped changing. Even to the point that days before our first preview, Russia invades Ukraine. Three million immigrants are now looking for a new home.”Drabinsky also made an effort to diversify the creative team, hiring Christina Anderson, a Black playwright, to revise Craig Lucas and Kirwan’s script, and the composer-lyricist Masi Asare, who collaborated with Nathan Tysen on the lyrics.Still, suspicion of Drabinsky runs high in the Broadway community, where many were burned financially by his company’s bankruptcy.Yet some people clearly are willing to give him another shot. The list of more than 30 producers for “Paradise Square” includes few established Broadway names, but many who have confidence in Drabinsky’s record as a dedicated, hands-on producer. Among them are the former Queens congressman Joe Crowley (who was brought into the project by Kirwan); Matthew Blank, the former head of Showtime who is now interim chief executive of AMC Networks; and Richard Stursberg, a former top executive at the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation.Drabinsky’s former company, Livent, brought a critically acclaimed revival of “Showboat” to the Gershwin Theater in 1994.Sara Krulwich/The New York Times“I liked the dynamic of this motivated producer, needy of success, putting it all on the line,” said Jeffrey Sine, another producer, whose Broadway credits include “Beautiful: The Carole King Musical.” “I think people deserve a second chance.”Or third or fourth. Drabinsky, 72, grew up in Toronto. At age 4 he contracted polio and spent much of his childhood in hospitals, distracting himself with music on his transistor radio — everything from ’50s rock ’n’ roll to Charles Aznavour. He earned a law degree, but soon turned to the entertainment business, building the Cineplex Odeon chain of movie theaters, before resigning in 1989 amid concerns about the company’s financial health.He re-emerged as a theater mogul, parlaying a long-running Toronto production of “The Phantom of the Opera” at his Pantages Theater into a far-flung company, Livent, that owned theaters (in New York, Chicago and elsewhere) and produced the shows that went into them. He pioneered a new business model for Broadway: Rather than cobbling together investors for each new show, Livent was a vertically integrated company that used the profits from its theaters and touring shows to finance the new work.But it all came crashing down in 1998, after the struggling company was bought by the Hollywood agent Michael Ovitz and the investment banker Roy Furman, who discovered bookkeeping irregularities. Drabinsky was fired; bankruptcy followed; and fraud charges were brought against Drabinsky and his longtime associate Myron Gottlieb, both in the Southern District of New York and (after Drabinsky fled to Toronto) in Canada as well.Drabinsky doesn’t like to talk much about that time. His finances were decimated, and his reputation a shambles. A rare bright spot was the Orthodox rabbi who began visiting him in prison. “It came at the time when I was at my absolute lowest emotionally,” he said. “It gave me a bit of a second wind.” He said he and the rabbi have met regularly for lunch ever since.Two years after his release from prison, he received a diagnosis of Stage 4 melanoma, cancer of the skin that had metastasized to his lungs. (After a year of immunotherapy, he said he is cancer free.) He returned to producing with the musical “Sousatzka” (backed by a Canadian company in which he has no financial interest), but that closed in Toronto after poor reviews. And still, Drabinsky was unable to travel to the United States because of the pending indictment against him in New York. That changed in July 2018, when the New York prosecutors dismissed the charges, noting that he had already served time for essentially the same crimes.“Paradise Square” is the sort of serious, original musical that Broadway claims to want more of. Yet without a major star, or a presold brand to market (and little advertising thus far), it faces a tough road. Much is riding on the critics’ reactions, which will come after Sunday’s opening. But Drabinsky remains upbeat, citing the “wonderful” audience response and positive tweets.“I made the decision, in terms of marketing, that our best course was to ensure that we filled the previews to capacity at whatever average ticket price we could get, and let word of mouth take over,” he said.His showman’s optimism is bolstered by a sober, even sentimental, belief in redemption. “There is a spirit in the soul of this country,” he said, “that allows somebody the opportunity to come back and work hard and be able to deliver a cultural work hopefully that will be meaningful. It’s one of the things that fills my heart every day.”Whether “Paradise Square” fills the seats at the Ethel Barrymore Theater will decide if Drabinsky has a future on Broadway — or whether it’s back to square one. More

    • 138 Shares169 Views

      in Movies

      ‘The Rise and Fall of LuLaRoe’ Review: Success? That’s a Stretch.

      by

      This formulaic documentary focuses on the individuals swindled by the multilevel marketing company known for leggings, LuLaRoe.In 2013, Mark and DeAnne Stidham founded LuLaRoe, a multilevel marketing company specializing in the sale of women’s clothing — namely “buttery soft” leggings in bold prints. According to The Wall Street Journal, LuLaRoe grew to a business generating $2.3 billion in retail sales in the span of four years thanks to its ever-increasing team of “retailers” who were mostly mothers seduced by the promise of financial success that could be reaped by buying and selling LuLaRoe merchandise from the comfort of their homes. In short, the company was a pyramid scheme.“The Rise and Fall of LuLaRoe” is essentially a documentary version of a 2020 investigative report by the BuzzFeed News writer Stephanie McNeal. Produced in association with BuzzFeed Studios, it’s a redundant effort given Amazon’s recent mini-series, “LulaRich,” though at least it’s less of a time commitment.“LuLaRoe” follows the template of most scandal-laden investigative documentaries, like the competing 2019 Fyre Festival exposes, “Fyre” (Netflix) and “Fyre Fraud” (Hulu), or Alex Gibney’s “The Inventor,” about Theranos and its former CEO Elizabeth Holmes.It begins with a montage that jumps from enthusiastic retailers touting the benefits of the LuLaRoe lifestyle to footage from the 2020 trial of the Stidhams. The rest fills in what comes between these two points, with a particular focus on the individuals victimized and brainwashed by the company, many of whom are interviewed, along with experts on entrepreneurship, linguistics and cults.One could go on about the fraudulent American dream that LuLaRoe represents — a sort of up-by-the-bootstraps mentality with a social media assist and the ideals of women’s empowerment, all of which are taken advantage of by manipulative crooks.But unless you’re really hankering for a visual component and video testimonies, you’d be better off simply reading the article than watching this thoroughly formulaic explainer.The Rise and Fall of LuLaRoeNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 45 minutes. Watch on Discovery+. More

    • 88 Shares159 Views

      in Movies

      ‘Misha and the Wolves’ Review: Fuzzy Memories

      by

      Did an ostensible Holocaust memoirist really spend her childhood running with wolves? This documentary has answers.The documentary “Misha and the Wolves” revisits a semi-infamous episode in Holocaust appropriation. In a 1997 book, an author named Misha Defonseca claimed that, as a child during World War II, she had trekked through the woods living with a pack of wolves.The spoiler-averse will want to stop reading. But about a decade later, her story was exposed as a fraud. The film, directed by Sam Hobkinson and streaming on Netflix, recounts how various people — a publisher, Jane Daniel; a genealogist, Sharon Sergeant; and a Holocaust survivor, Evelyne Haendel, who tirelessly researched the case in Belgium — uncovered information about Defonseca’s real wartime experiences.The movie also tries to illustrate the nature of deception, to the point of lying to the viewer. A person labeled by name as an ordinary talking head turns out to be a performer on a set; at a critical moment, we see her wig removed. But “Misha and the Wolves” is most absorbing when it deals with the search for truth. Haendel, who spent her own childhood during the Holocaust hiding as a Catholic, recalls how she pored over old phone books and other records.“Misha and the Wolves” plays best on first viewing, with its surprises intact. The current documentary “Enemies of the State” deals more provocatively with verification issues in a less publicly settled case. Still, “Misha and the Wolves” shows how, in certain situations, people too polite to demand evidence can be hoodwinked. The film’s late efforts to portray Defonseca as at least some sort of victim don’t wash.Misha and the WolvesRated PG-13 for lies. Running time: 1 hour 30 minutes. Watch on Netflix. More

    • 125 Shares99 Views

      in Movies

      MoviePass Deceived Users So They’d Use It Less, F.T.C. Says

      by

      Federal regulators detailed tactics the company, which settled accusations against it, used to try to make its most active users go to the movies less.MoviePass, the failed subscription service that promised unlimited moviegoing for $9.95 a month, agreed on Monday to settle Federal Trade Commission accusations that it knowingly deceived customers, making the service difficult to use, and exposed their personal data.In the process, the F.T.C. revealed the elaborate obstacles that MoviePass executives made the most active users overcome, including forcing them to reset their passwords and setting unannounced limits on their accounts.The proposed settlement bars MoviePass’s parent company, Helios and Matheson Analytics, and its top executives, Mitchell Lowe and Theodore Farnsworth, from misrepresenting their business and data security practices. Any businesses controlled by them must also use information security programs.“MoviePass and its executives went to great lengths to deny consumers access to the service they paid for while also failing to secure their personal information,” Daniel Kaufman, the F.T.C.’s acting director of the Bureau of Consumer Protection, said in a statement.Those “great lengths,” as detailed in the F.T.C.’s complaint, revealed that top MoviePass executives were not only aware of efforts to keep users from going to the movies, but led the execution of schemes they knew to be deceptive.The service, which began in 2011, attracted more than three million subscribers after it offered a deal in 2017 that seemed too good to be true: unlimited movies in theaters for $9.95 a month, or less than the cost of a single ticket in many locations. Its marketing materials said it was good for “any movie, any theater, any day,” including “all major movies” and “all major theaters.”The company hoped that by subsidizing full-price tickets for millions of users, it could negotiate bulk prices from theaters and find other ways to make money from its users. That never happened, and executives, looking to cut costs, focused on trying to make its most active users less active, according to the F.T.C. complaint.In one effort, the company invalidated the passwords of the 75,000 subscribers who used the service most often, while falsely claiming “we have detected suspicious activity or potential fraud” on their accounts, the F.T.C. said. Many of the people who tried to reset their passwords were unable to because of technical problems; the app would not accept their email address, they would not receive a password-reset email, or the email would link to a nonworking website, the F.T.C. said.When users complained, customer service would take weeks to respond, the F.T.C. said. About half of the users successfully changed their password within a week, the F.T.C. said.When an executive warned that the practice would catch the attention of federal regulators and state attorneys general, Mr. Lowe responded in writing “OK I get it,” suggesting the company try it with “2 percent of our highest volume users,” the F.T.C. said..css-1xzcza9{list-style-type:disc;padding-inline-start:1em;}.css-3btd0c{font-family:nyt-franklin,helvetica,arial,sans-serif;font-size:1rem;line-height:1.375rem;color:#333;margin-bottom:0.78125rem;}@media (min-width:740px){.css-3btd0c{font-size:1.0625rem;line-height:1.5rem;margin-bottom:0.9375rem;}}.css-3btd0c strong{font-weight:600;}.css-3btd0c em{font-style:italic;}.css-w739ur{margin:0 auto 5px;font-family:nyt-franklin,helvetica,arial,sans-serif;font-weight:700;font-size:1.125rem;line-height:1.3125rem;color:#121212;}#NYT_BELOW_MAIN_CONTENT_REGION .css-w739ur{font-family:nyt-cheltenham,georgia,’times new roman’,times,serif;font-weight:700;font-size:1.375rem;line-height:1.625rem;}@media (min-width:740px){#NYT_BELOW_MAIN_CONTENT_REGION .css-w739ur{font-size:1.6875rem;line-height:1.875rem;}}@media (min-width:740px){.css-w739ur{font-size:1.25rem;line-height:1.4375rem;}}.css-1dg6kl4{margin-top:5px;margin-bottom:15px;}#masthead-bar-one{display:none;}#masthead-bar-one{display:none;}.css-12vbvwq{background-color:white;border:1px solid #e2e2e2;width:calc(100% – 40px);max-width:600px;margin:1.5rem auto 1.9rem;padding:15px;box-sizing:border-box;}@media (min-width:740px){.css-12vbvwq{padding:20px;width:100%;}}.css-12vbvwq:focus{outline:1px solid #e2e2e2;}#NYT_BELOW_MAIN_CONTENT_REGION .css-12vbvwq{border:none;padding:10px 0 0;border-top:2px solid #121212;}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-rdoyk0{-webkit-transform:rotate(0deg);-ms-transform:rotate(0deg);transform:rotate(0deg);}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-eb027h{max-height:300px;overflow:hidden;-webkit-transition:none;transition:none;}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-5gimkt:after{content:’See more’;}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-6mllg9{opacity:1;}.css-1rh1sk1{margin:0 auto;overflow:hidden;}.css-1rh1sk1 strong{font-weight:700;}.css-1rh1sk1 em{font-style:italic;}.css-1rh1sk1 a{color:#326891;-webkit-text-decoration:underline;text-decoration:underline;text-underline-offset:1px;-webkit-text-decoration-thickness:1px;text-decoration-thickness:1px;-webkit-text-decoration-color:#ccd9e3;text-decoration-color:#ccd9e3;}.css-1rh1sk1 a:visited{color:#333;-webkit-text-decoration-color:#ccc;text-decoration-color:#ccc;}.css-1rh1sk1 a:hover{-webkit-text-decoration:none;text-decoration:none;}In a separate effort, the company required the 20 percent of subscribers who used the service most often, about 450,000 people, to submit photos of their physical movie tickets for approval through the app, telling them they had been “randomly selected” for the program, the F.T.C. said. Those who failed to properly submit the tickets more than once would have their accounts canceled, the F.T.C. said.The automated verification system often did not work on common mobile operating systems, and the software failed to recognize many user-submitted photos, the F.T.C. said. The program blocked thousands of people from using the service, the F.T.C. said.Mr. Lowe personally chose how many people would be required to submit photos, the F.T.C. said.In a third effort described by the commission, the company created a “trip wire” by imposing a limit on how often certain users could use the service, but did not disclose the limit in its advertising or terms of use. The company grouped subscribers based on how often they used the service, then, once the group hit an unannounced limit, the people in the group would be unable to use the service, regulators said. The users often did not know they had been cut off until they arrived at the theater, expecting to use their subscriptions, they said.The trip wire was typically set on users who went to more than three movies per month, the F.T.C. said. Mr. Lowe set the thresholds, it said.In addition, a data breach in 2019, which was previously reported, exposed the personal and financial information, including credit card numbers, of more than 28,000 customers, the F.T.C. said.After three million people signed up — many more than executives had expected — the company perpetually struggled to bring in enough cash to offset costs. In April 2018, the company disclosed to regulators that it had been losing about $20 million a month for several months. In July 2018, it borrowed $5 million after it said it could not pay its bills and experienced a service interruption, but the company insisted its service remained stable.In August of that year, MoviePass limited users to three movies a month from a rotating list of films. In January 2019, it increased prices and installed new leadership, promoting Khalid Itum from executive vice president.All the while, customer complaints piled up, and analysts were skeptical the business could continue. They were right: The company shut down in September 2019.It was always a nuisance for theater operators, who thought the low price set by MoviePass would devalue their product.“In AMC’s view, that price level is unsustainable and only sets up consumers for ultimate disappointment down the road if or when the product can no longer be fulfilled,” the theater chain said in 2017 when MoviePass announced its $10 monthly rate. More