Five days before his May 2008 sentencing, Pearlman, who will be 74 when he gets out, issued a formal request to be permitted to develop bands while behind bars all he would require was a telephone and an Internet connection two days a week.

Since authorities caught up with him at a Bali resort in June 2007 (following a yearlong independent investigation that led to an FBI raid on his house and offices in February of that year), Pearlman, now 59, has clung tenaciously to the notion that he can conquer the charts once more. Furthermore, to fuel his extravagant Orlando-based entertainment empire, Pearlman persuaded trusting investors - what one former employee calls the 'South Florida retiree yarmulke gang' - to sink their life savings into a fleet of charter airplanes that turned out to exist only in brochures.

I, of course, got my piece, and it was very nice and very substantial.' But in fact a knowledgeable source confirms that the band members never received more than $300,000 each while the former head of Trans Continental Records walked away with tens of millions. Backstreet Boys each made well over $50 million apiece. 'He didn't have any real way to make money,' repeats Pearlman, 'but I had the music. PHOTOS: Lou Pearlman, From Boy Band Mogul to Convict (Madoff is serving a 150-year sentence for a Ponzi scheme worth $18 billion, the costliest in U.S. Pearlman, who launched Justin Timberlake's recording career with 1990s pop sensation 'N Sync and is serving a 25-year prison sentence for masterminding a half-billion-dollar Ponzi scheme, wants to make it clear he's not the same type of criminal. 'Well, Bernie, I mean, he didn't have anything that really made money,' says Lou Pearlman by phone about Wall Street pariah Bernie Madoff, sounding level-headed and upbeat in his first prison interview since his 2009 incarceration in Texas at the low-security Federal Correctional Institution Texarkana. 31 issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine.

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