If only he had enough time, Fyre Festival could have been criminal fun.
In a new interview in prison, incarcerated party organizer Billy McFarland admitted to lying to the investors who put millions into funding his infamous 2017 luxury retreat failure – but blamed an impossible timeline for the scam he is now making time for co-organization.
“I think the biggest mistake before I went wrong was simply an unrealistic timetable for the festival,” McFarland, 29, told Jordan Harbinger in an unapproved interview that the scammer has since ended up in solitary confinement, the radio personality said.
“ If we had given ourselves a year or two and I clearly hadn’t made the terrible decision of lying to my backers, I think we could have been in a slightly better place, but regardless of the mistakes I made or caused things have gone wrong. “He went on. So that’s where things started and things ended.”
McFarland is not shy to admit he lied, and later repeat, “I knowingly lied to them to raise money for the festival. Yes. And that was the crime. The crime inexcusably lied about the company’s status in order to get the money I thought I needed for the festival. ”
The hustler – who is serving a six-year sentence for fraud, currently in Lisbon, Ohio’s Elkton Federal Correctional Institution – swears the biggest lie he told was to himself and that he sincerely upheld the madness he could keep from the festival until the end.
“I rightly thought the festival was going to be run,” he said, before starting a story about trying to charter a cruise ship to accommodate the guests who had been promised luxury housing but slept in FEMA tents instead.
In retrospect, he is remorseful and sorry.
[There’s] no excuse and I wish I could have just woke up one of those mornings in the beginning and I had just stopped, ”he said, acknowledging that he hadn’t had the patience at the time to get help to stop and his impatience had cost him his morals.
The interview ends with McFarland admitting that he has a hard time apologizing and that, regardless of how old or freezer burned, “I love shrimps.”