[Mag] Boy Band Czar is a Predator

Jesus, that guy just looks creepy. I wonder if Justin Timberlake took it up the ass...




Music impresario Lou Pearlman - who guided the early careers of Justin Timberlake and ’N Sync, the Backstreet Boys and Kingston homey Rich Cronin’s LFO - was a pervy predator who preyed on young boy-banders promising them fame and wealth, according to the new issue of Vanity Fair magazine.

“I mean, now I know what it’s like to be a chick,” Cronin told the magazine. “He was so touchy feely, always grabbing your shoulders, touching you, rubbing your abs. It was so obvious and disgusting. He definitely came at people. He came at me.”

Another local music manager, who worked with Pearlman in the past, told the Track that the sick-o Svengali would tell his pop proteges that they could “practice” on him.

“He would tell the guys that he had investors who ‘could really help your band,’ ” said the source, who asked not to be named. “He would tell the kids, ‘Listen, these guys will expect something in return . . . so I am going to let you practice on me so you will feel comfy when it happens.”

Pearlman, who is currently jailed in Orlando awaiting trial on charges that he embezzled more than $300 million, would summon boys to his Orlando home late at night and “it always led to some weird situation,” Cronin told VF.

“I avoided him like the plague. If I went to his house, I went with somebody. I would never go with him alone . . . He’d call late at night to come over and talk about a tour and you’d get there and he’d be sitting there in boxers. The guy was hairy as a bear.”

Cronin, who didn’t return our calls, is currently attempting a career comeback after he left LFO and the music biz to battle leukemia. Rich, who had a big single with “Summer Girls” in 1999, is one of the stars of VH1’s “Mission: Man Band,” with three other former boy-banders trying to get back on the charts.

Rich tells VF that he was never personally victimized but that Pearlman offered to perform a “mystical fricking ancient massage technique” on him that would strengthen his “aura.”

“I had to bite my cheeks to stop from laughing,” Cronin said.

Other young performers weren’t so jovial when a Pearlman aide spotted them emerging from their fat mentor’s bedroom late at night, “buttoning their pants, with sheepish looks on their faces.”

“Some guys joked about it; I remember one singer asking me, ‘Have you let Lou (bleep) you yet?” said Pearlman’s ex-assistant Steve Mooney, an aspiring singer who lived in his home for two years. “I would absolutely say the guy was a sexual predator. All the talent knew what Lou’s game was. If they say no, they’re lying to you.”

Jane Carter, mother of former Backstreet Boy Nick Carter and his brother, Aaron, tells VF “Certain things happened and it almost destroyed our family. I tried to warn everyone. I tried to warn all the mothers.”

“I tried to expose him for what he was years ago,” Carter said. “The financial (scandal) is the least of his injustices.”

Cronin said he thinks Pearlman got into the music biz originally because “He wanted cute guys around him. This was an excuse.”

He said he believes that the manager never expected any of his acts to actually hit.

“Then lightning crazily struck and an empire was created,” he said. “It was all dumb luck.”

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