TWISTED FYRE STARTERS
How ‘VIP’ guests paid fraudster £300k to ‘live like movie stars’ at luxury Fyre festival but ended up sleeping in refugee tents and being fed cheese sandwiches
Ticket packages for the festival ranged from £400 to £300,000
MOST con artists dream of taking money from rich people.
Billy McFarland went one better — he took their cash, sent them to a remote island and left them fighting over cheese sandwiches.
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The extravagant fraudster, 28, teamed up with US rapper Ja Rule and whipped up a social media frenzy over a promised weekend of VIP partying on a private island.
The Fyre Festival, marketed with a glossy video featuring models Bella Hadid, Emily Ratajkowski, Elsa Hosk, Hailey Baldwin and Rose Bertram, offered revellers the chance to live it up like the super rich.
Ticket packages ranged from £400 to more than £300,000 to secure a place sipping cocktails on a tropical island listening to some of the coolest acts around.
But there was NO festival. NO stars had been booked, NO staff hired, NO marquees ordered. They had not even secured the paradise island venue.
For the hundreds who turned up, what should have been the festival of a lifetime was instead more like a scene from a disaster-relief camp.
They had to bed down in cramped tents on a concrete building site and were deafened by a DJ while they squabbled over soggy mattresses and munched on limp sandwiches.
In October 2018, McFarland was jailed for six years over the fiasco — and now the full story is being told in Netflix documentary Fyre, available from Friday.
The show reveals how McFarland and Ja Rule — who enjoyed hip-hop success in the early 2000s — raised a toast to “living like movie stars, partying like rock stars and f***ing like porn stars” while planning the festival.
The idea actually began with an app — and a cynical awareness of the buzz social media can create.
Having made his name among investors by developing a credit card aimed at millennials, McFarland gathered a team of web developers to create an app called Fyre, which people could use to book celebs for their own parties.
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Although the app was not even finished, McFarland wanted to launch it in style — and came up with the idea of a super glam festival.
So in December 2016 some 400 well known social media users — dubbed Fyre Starters — were paid to post a picture of a simple orange tile to their Instagram pages. Kendall Jenner was allegedly paid nearly £200,000 for one post.
Alongside the image was a caption inviting followers to join them at Fyre Festival. Organisers also uploaded a promotional video to YouTube.
It depicted a bevy of top models swimming in crystal-clear waters, swaying to music on the ivory sand and skipping waves on jet skis.
The text promised a festival taking place “on a remote and private island” which was “once owned by Pablo Escobar”, the former Colombian drug king.
That island was Norman’s Cay, in the Bahamas, and acts were set to include Blink 182, Major Lazer and Migos.
Festival packages peaked with the £312,000 “Artist’s Palace” — offering four beds, eight VIP tickets and dinner with one performer.
Excited punters snapped up every last ticket, leaving McFarland and Ja Rule rubbing their hands — but still with a festival to organise.
They hit their first stumbling block when the island’s owner became angry they had exploited the association with Pablo Escobar and promptly banned them.
They found a new site on the nearby, but populated, island of Great Exuma — on a building site awaiting a new development.
'PRIVATE JET' WORSE THAN ECONOMY CLASS
The web geeks who had developed the app were asked to book the acts. This was outside their experience and they are said to have run up huge bills with agents.
As the chaos intensified, one senior member of staff was asked to engage in a sex act with a customs official to secure a shipment of drinking water.
He tells the documentary how a colleague pleaded: “You have to take one big thing for the team. Will you suck d**k to fix this water problem?” He declined.
Every time they hit an obstacle, McFarland would jet off to New York and come back with another few million from investors. But suspicion began to grow online. Twitter account @FyreFraud pointed out the event did not appear to be on a private island after all.
Yet revellers wanted to believe, and one balmy Friday night in April 2017, Miami airport was filled with stylish festival-goers ready to party.
McFarland had promised them a private jet to the site.
What they got instead was an ordinary Boeing 737.
One social media influencer filmed herself on the flight saying: “It’s actually worse than economy class.”
At the island, guests were rushed straight to a “beach party” — at a restaurant — and plied with free tequila. Meanwhile, at the festival site organisers ran around putting up tents and stages. Mobile phone footage from the TV docu shows guests arriving by coach, seeing the condit- ions and yelling: “Turn this bus around!”
Instead of luxury beach huts, what they saw were rows of white-domed tents of the type used for displaced hurricane victims.
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The site was littered with cargo freight boxes of towels and sheets soaked by overnight rain.
They had been told the event would be catered by top restaurateur Stephen Starr, but were instead offered a few depressing cheese sandwiches.
A photo of one such snack was shared over the same social media channels that created the hype about the festival in the first place.
Within hours news had spread around the world that this VIP shindig had turned into a farcical flop.
Mick Purzycki, who worked for McFarland, said: “A couple of powerful models posting an orange tile is what essentially built this entire festival.
“Then one kid with probably 400 followers posted a picture of cheese on toast and essentially ripped it all down.”
To rub salt in the wound, there were no flights back to the US that evening so everyone had to stay the night.
One guest said: “There was a definite turning point when the sun went down. The camaraderie was over.”
Fuelled by the free tequila and an increasing rage, guests began to lug any pillows and mattresses they could lay their hands on to any free tent.
One guest said: “We didn’t want neighbours. Our strategy was to ransack the tents around us, rip holes and p**s on a few of the beds.”
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Another guest said: “It became very barbaric”. While another dubbed it: “Lord Of The Flies with Instagram’s top influencers.”
In the morning it was, unsurprisingly, announced that Fyre Festival was cancelled.
McFarland, from New York, was charged with defrauding investors and pleaded guilty to one count.
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Ja Rule was not charged with any offence.
McFarland had promised that the festival would be “on the boundaries of impossible”.
It was a boast that turned out to be all too true.
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