*(at the time)

DESERTED ISLAND The island of Great Exuma, in the Bahamas, site of the failed Fyre Festival, on April 28.

h e first chartered jets came in low over the island of Great Exuma’s aquamarine waters that Thursday morning. Most of those who clambered down onto the tarmac were young and excited, anticipating a once-in-a-lifetime weekend adventure on the sparkling white beaches of the Bahamas. There would be rock bands, private villas, celebrity chefs, all promoted by the rapper Ja Rule and a gaggle of supermodels on Instagram. For tickets costing up to $12,000 apiece, the inaugural Fyre Festival, its organizers promised, was to be an ultrachic “Coachella in the Caribbean.”

Shivi Kumar, a 33-year-old North Carolina sales executive, landed with a group of her girlfriends around six p.m. on a flight from Miami to celebrate a birthday. One or two of the group were already nervous. They had heard Internet rumblings that the festival was having organizational troubles. A friend who had arrived on the island earlier called, saying the festival site wasn’t ready. “We kind of had a feeling something was not right,” Kumar recalls, “but you thought, This is the first time they’re doing this—you expect some glitches.”

Outside the terminal they were met by two or three Fyre staffers.

Asked how to get to the festival, the staffers were unsure. Told a bus was coming, the friends waited 45 minutes. No bus appeared. So they hailed a taxi, which after a circuitous drive took them to the festival entrance, leading to what appeared to be a muddy building site. Loudspeakers blared music. More than a hundred concertgoers were milling about as a pair of staffers with aging laptops attempted to register them.

“This is where it first hit us: This is a total shit show,” Kumar recalls. “No one knew what was going on. The most alarming part was, they had hired all these models to walk around giving people tequila shots. This was a recipe for disaster, everyone young and drunk, with no information.”

By and by a beefy young man rolled up in an A.T.V.: this was Billy Mc Farland, the 25-year-old downtown-Manhattan entrepreneur who was the festival’s main organizer. Appearing frazzled, Mc Farland suggested that everyone who had booked one of the private villas follow him. But there were no private villas. There were no buildings to stay in, period. Instead, there was a cluster of carpeted tents.

“Suddenly,” Kumar says, “there was this mass rush of people running to the tents. It was just chaos. What should we do? We ended up grabbing two tents. The beds were damp. The carpet was completely soaked. It was like Survivor or The Amazing Race, gone real ly bad. People were stealing bedding. People were getting more and more drunk. We couldn’t leave our things, so we just stayed in the tents. It was just epic chaos. Their plan was to get everyone really drunk and they’ll forget how shitty this really is.”

Hundreds of would-be concertgoers were experiencing the same feeling— and this was only the beginning of the end. That night, as it became clear that the festival was collapsing, they were forced to scramble to find a way back to the mainland. Many took to chronicling their plights on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter, and that was what transformed the Fyre Festival from a failed music venue into a richly symbolic moment in Donald Trump’s deeply divided America. The Internet was ablaze in a firestorm of ridicule, with thousands of people without the money to frolic at Caribbean music festivals heaping abuse on “spoiled” millennials, who were freaking out because they were forced to sleep in tents and eat cheese sandwiches instead of sushi. “I can’t figure out what #fyrefestival is,” tweeted one, “but it seems like rich people having a bad time, which I fully support.” One woman tweeted: “I’ve always dreamed of building elaborate deathtraps that attract the 1%, but #fyrefestival actually went and did it, kudos.”

On the morning after, many searched for a precedent. “There is no precedent,” says Dan Berkowitz, the C.E.O. of CID Entertainment, a travel-experience provider best known for organizing V.I.P. packages for festivals such as Coachella and Bonnaroo. “At Lollapalooza it rained one year, but everyone just drove off. There’s never been something like this where people were stranded on an island. There’s never been anything of this magnitude. Thank God nobody got hurt. People could have died.”

“I cannot emphasize enough how sorry I am that we fell short of our goal of providing the experience we envisioned for the event, and I’m committed to, and working actively to, find a way to make this right, not just for investors but for those who planned to attend,” Billy Mc Farland said in a statement to Vanity Fair.

In the days following the disaster, journalists and lawyers rushed to pick over the festival’s corpse, churning out stories and lawsuits that painted its organizers as either clueless or fraudulent. The real story, it turns out, wasn’t in the mud and trash and beer cans left behind. It was back north, in New York, where for five years the boyish Mc Farland had charmed scores of writers, rappers, venture capitalists, and other denizens of the downtown club scene, including more than a few of his fellow millennials and their parents, into furthering his entrepreneurial dreams. A preppy kid prone to salmon-colored pants, he became a prisoner of his own promises, a believer in his own bull, and it led to one of the most spectacular failures yet in this new era, where social media, high finance, and high tech are jostling for ways to connect.

TRIAL BY FYRE Clockwise from top left: the site the day after the festival’s cancellation; would-be festival-goers leave the island; “deluxe” breakfast offerings; McFarland addressing attendees; the scene at the airport; welcome to Fyre

House of Cards

The Billy I knew at the beginning changed entirely,” says a downtown consultant who worked with Mc Farland. “At the beginning he was this young kid, from a nice family out in Jersey. He kind of progressed into somebody who was scamming and lying. It’s sad. You know, when they come to New York, the bright lights, some people can fake it till they make it, and other guys, well ... ” Ô

The son of real-estate developers, Billy Mc- Farland had more going for him than many of the ambitious New Jersey kids who barrel through the Holland Tunnel each year to find their fortunes in Manhattan. Raised in the tony suburb of Short Hills, Mc Farland has described himself as a “serial entrepreneur,” who started and sold three companies before graduating from the exclusive Pingry School in 2010. The first, an Internet hosting service, he claims to have begun at the age of 13.

“When he came to Pingry, he was already running some overseas server operation, renting out server space to various Web sites, most of which were porn sites,” a high-school classmate, Aaron Davis, told the Death and Taxes Web site. “He always kind of toed that line of whether it was a scheme or legitimate.” (Davis could not be reached for comment. Through a lawyer, Mc Farland declined to discuss any specific issues or allegations raised in this article.)

the time he entered Bucknell University, in 2010, Mc Farland had roped three pals into another venture, Spling, a socialmedia site that allowed users to share music and video and form circles of friends based on common interests. His big break came fast, after his freshman year, when Spling was accepted into Philadelphia’s Dreamit, a top venture-capital “accelerator” that plies promising start-ups with everything from office space and lawyers to introductions to investors. Every year hundreds apply for only 10 or 15 positions. Mc Farland dropped out of Bucknell and moved to Philadelphia, where, even in such rarefied air, he and Spling stood out. “Billy was already rolling pretty fast,” says a former Dreamit source who worked with Spling. “Plenty of connections, a great kid. Super-nice, gregarious, attractive, charismatic, very smart. This idea could’ve been a hit.” Could’ve been, that is, if not for the debut of Google+, whose “circles” feature provided most of the services Spling planned. “Google circles came at a bad time; they got this feedback all the time, ‘Why is Spling different than Google circles?’ ” says the Dreamit source. “And then, you know, it just kind of fizzled out.”

With Spling no longer viable, Mc Farland, looking for another big idea, moved to a Manhattan apartment. In the summer of 2013, he caught a glimpse of his friends’ ultimate fantasy: an American Express Centurion Card, known as “the Black Card,” a credit card, forged of anodized titanium, pitched to ultra-wealthy customers.

“I was at dinner at La Esquina with friends, and we were all talking about how much we wanted a black card,” Mc Farland told The New York Times for a brief story in 2013. None of them made enough money to qualify. But, Mc Farland thought, what if he could create his own black card, with his own membership benefits, and simply graft his existing credit-card data onto it?

Just the sight of a black credit card would carry cachet. “So,” Mc Farland said, “that night, I did a ton of research on how to add a magnetic strip to a metal card without demagnetizing it and ruining data.... I got ahold of a place in China that could embed the magnetic strip onto the metal, and I had one made.”

Mc Farland, partnering with two friends, called his new card “Magnises,” which, as he later told a New York Post reporter, is “Latin for absolutely nothing. The name is made up, but it sounds grand, doesn’t it?” (Not everyone agreed. “It sounds like a brand of condom,” observed a former cardmember, Molly Krause.) What Magnises quickly became was an invitation-only club located in a town house Mc Farland rented in Greenwich Village. For a $250 annual fee, its early members, many of them Mc Farland’s young friends, got his new black card, plus all-day access to the town house and its open bar. In the evening Mc Farland held parties there, often in partnership with restaurants or art galleries in the neighborhood. As Magnises grew, the parties became more elaborate, featuring brand-name rappers such as Rick Ross and Ja Rule, who joined the company’s board. Aided by a rush of stories portraying Mc Farland as a millennial hybrid of Steve Jobs and Steve Rubell, Magnises began attracting minor celebrities and investors. Rosario Dawson hosted one party; an N.B.A. player or two soon joined. Among the early investors was said to be the late Oklahoma oil-and-gas king Aubrey Mc- Clendon, whose daughter was named Magnises’ chief financial officer.

Soon café-society photographer Patrick McMullan emerged as the town house’s unofficial housefather. After wooing him by staging a showing of his photos, Mc Farland cemented their friendship by slipping McMullan a key to the town house and hiring his 26-yearold son, Liam, as its disc jockey. “Billy was this successful guy who had sold a company and made millions of dollars, this new tech genius who was going to make us millions—we were all going to be rich!” McMullan says today. “I liked him. He was a little overweight, a little awkward with girls—he was just, like, this big kid. The town house, it was a lot of young techies. It was fun for me.”

Their relationship foundered, McMullan says, when Mc Farland and a friend promised to build McMullan a new Web site. Unfortunately, McMullan grouses, he never got the Web site or his money back. “This is nothing new,” he says about accusations that the Fyre Festival was a scam. “It’s not like these guys were in over their heads. These are fraudulent people. I had no idea [Billy was working on] this festival, going around paying $125,000 to models. I thought he was busy building my Web site.”

Party Foul

The quality of Magnises parties began to decline after Mc Farland brought in a 24-year-old self-proclaimed marketing “prodigy” named Grant Margolin, according to the downtown consultant. The difference was painfully evident at a party Magnises held with Galore, a lifestyle magazine for young women, in February 2015. “When we did the Galore party, we had a press pre-party dinner, C and it ended up being cold chicken fingers and plastic cups,” he says. “It was really kind of embarrassing. Grant wanted to change Magnises into something that would scale [into something bigger]. Which meant spending no money. That changed the direction of everything. They began trying to do things bigger and cheaper. The original kids, these rich kids, got disillusioned and began to leave. It was a mess.” (Margolin chose not to comment for this article.)

“To me the problem was they let in anyone who wanted to be a member—anyone could get in,” says a former Magnises employee.

In May 2015, McFarland announced that the Magnises clubhouse was expanding to larger quarters, a three-story penthouse atop the Hotel on Rivington, on the Lower East Side. (Expansion was just a cover story for moving to the new venue, says one Magnises member. “The fact was they got kicked out of the town house.” The landlord subse- quently sued, citing $62,000 worth of damage.)

Meanwhile, McFarland peppered members with scores of offers—everything from Hamilton tickets to flights to Cuba and the Hamptons. Molly Krause, a communications strategist who joined Magnises in 2014 to use the town house as a workspace, says the strangest proposal was a text from McFarland early last year in which he offered to have Ja Rule write her name into an upcoming song for $450.

This was followed by a string of Mc Farland texts offering what Krause calls “sketchysounding ‘V.I.P. experiences.’ ” One read, “Hey, I’m travelling this week, so letting friends rent my Maserati Quattroporte. LMK if you want my driver to take you around in it for the next few days.” Adds Krause, “He never mentions the insane price until he’s finished with his creepyfriendly pitch. He’s kind of a cross between a post-aughts Meatpacking [District] promoter and a gypsy-cab driver waiting to give a tourist a quote until after their luggage is loaded.”

By the time Magnises moved to the Rivington, the company had around two dozen employees working in an office on lower Madison Avenue, but many of the new staffers were young and inexperienced. Members began to complain: tickets arrived late, if at all, and charter flights were overbooked or unavailable, among other perks that didn’t come through.

“By that point Billy was really bored by it all,” says the downtown consultant. “You could see he was looking for something else. I just think he likes the lights and the glitter, and once it’s not all that, he loses interest.”

In fact, the Fyre Festival itself was never really about the Fyre Festival. It served primarily to promote McFarland’s newest idea, a product that few of the concert goers even knew about, in large part because it didn’t yet exist: the Fyre Media app. Designed by a group of techies in Oregon, the app was intended to be a clearinghouse where bands and musicians could be hired directly, cutting out the booking-agent middlemen. Ja Rule, a rapper well past his early-2000s heyday, signed on as a partner. “Everyone likes Ja,” says the downtown consultant. “He’s this utterly guileless guy, with a family out in New Jersey.” (A lawyer representing Ja Rule did not return a request for comment.)

As McFarland has told the story, the idea for a promotional music festival occurred to him when he and Ja Rule were aboard a private plane that was running low on fuel and was obliged to land in the Exumas. “Both of us immediately fell in love [with the island],” Mc- Farland told Rolling Stone in April.

Post Hasty

While McFarland knew little about staging a concert, he knew plenty about fund-raising and social media. In fact, Fyre’s Instagram-fueled kickoff, in December, was one of the more eye-popping social-media campaigns in recent memory. McFarland had met his share of models and their managers, and he wanted to get as many as possible to promote the festival on Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook. Luckily the supermodel Bella Ha did—represented by IMG Models—expressed interest. “They got one of the big models, Bella, and she told [other IMG models] how fun this island trip was going to be, and they all decided to go do the shoot,” says the downtown consultant. “It was this incredible stroke of luck. That’s what put the festival on the map.”

The slick promotional video was only the beginning. By one count, McFarland arranged for some 400 social-media “influencers,” including more models, surfers, D.J.’s, and even a few football players, to take part in the kick off announcement. Many were paid, though few would ever disclose it. Probably the largest outlay, a reported $250,000, went to the model and reality-television star Ken dall Jenner, whom Mc- Farland had long admired. “Billy was always going, ‘I love Kendall—Kendall’s the one for me,’ ” remarks the downtown consultant. “In a weird way, this was all about getting Kendall.”

On December 12, McFarland’s in flu encers, including Jenner, all simultaneously posted a mysterious orange square. Clicking it started the promotional video of the supermodels frolicking and dancing on a beach. “Two Transformative Weekends,” the copy read. “An Immersive Music Festival ... On a Remote and Private Island in The Exumas ... The Best in Food, Art, Music and Adventure ... On the Boundaries of the Impossible.”

“You were like, ‘Whoa, what is this?’ ” says a money manager for a famous rapper. “I mean, it was perfectly executed. It’s one of the greatest social-media campaigns I’ve ever seen. They got the most beautiful women in the world, with the largest social following. And then the photo shoot ... It was just incredible.”

This manager had no clue who was behind the audacious festival. Intrigued, he made some calls, and before long he was talking to Mc Farland, who pitched him to invest. “He was a little brash, a little bro-ey, a little fratty, but not a total asshole,” the manager says. “He was pitching me this app, which was the sort of thing I had seen before. Then he kind of randomly throws out there that his partner in all this is Ja Rule, which floored me. I would’ve assumed a guy like Kanye West or Jay Z was behind the scenes᠁ Anyway, I knew we wouldn’t invest in it. I was surprised at all the artists who committed, because we didn’t take this seriously at all.”

At least initially, McFarland found no shortage of investors. Perhaps the best known was the fashion executive Carola Jain, who is believed to have invested in Fyre Media, putting together a loan of as much as $4 million. McFarland was able to lease a suite of offices on Lispenard Street, in Tribeca.

“I remember the first time I walked in that place, just this huge space, three stories high, a mezzanine and kitchens and offices, all empty. No furniture, just folding tables, nobody working, Billy and his posse hanging out in their ‘boardroom’—it was definitely a big frat-house kind of thing,” says the downtown consultant.

It’s tempting to say nothing went as planned, but that would assume actual plans had been made. In fact, McFarland seems to have assumed he could outsource much of the actual festival management, paying for it with investor money.

His dreams, however, quickly encountered reality. Early promotional materials said the festival would be held on the remote private island of “Fyre Cay”—only there was no such place. The islands he did scout as possible venues lacked infrastructure. Finally the Bahamian government let him take over Roker Point, a waterside development under construction on Great Exuma, at 37 miles in length the largest in the Exuma archipelago of glittering isles, many of them privately owned by the likes of Johnny Depp, Faith Hill, Eddie Murphy, and David Copperfield. Great Exuma, however, was neither private nor remote, and it had not, as Fyre’s promotions promised, been owned by the Colombian narco-billionaire Pablo Escobar.

McFarland’s preparations provoked skepticism in the tight-knit concert industry. “When something new like this pops up, we follow things pretty closely,” says Dan Berkowitz of CID, a concert-management company. “When I saw their Web site, I was like, ‘Wow, that seems adventurous.’ Then I noticed the language on the Web site started changing. They were flying everyone down on private planes from Miami, then a seat on a commercial flight. Things started getting vaguer and vaguer. It really didn’t seem they could deliver on what they promised.”

n an effort to do so, McFarland and his team reached out to CID and a similar company, the New Jersey–based Diversified Production Ser vices, about four months before the festival was to be staged. “They wanted everything: concierge service, festival management, V.I.P. amenities,” says one executive involved in the process. “When we started asking questions— you know, What are these luxury villa units you have?—there was this awkward silence. Then they said, ‘That’s where you guys come in.’ We were like, What? We thought they had units, or Billy’s dad was a builder, or something. These units never existed.”

When the event producers did the math, it estimated the cost to provide temporary “villas” alone at $10 million. Worse, concerned about a neophyte promoter’s ability to pay, the event producers demanded full payment and expenses up front, an estimated $12 million or more. “We were all ready to go, but they were so shocked by our numbers that it just didn’t come to fruition,” says the executive, adding that “a couple more staging companies” had a similar experience. “They would say, ‘It’s going to cost, like, $5 million to stage this thing,’ and the Fyre guys would say, ‘No, it’ll cost $300,000.’ There was a complete detachment from reality.” The executive chuckles. “They were sure the costs were nowhere near what the experts were telling them.”

McFarland moved on, but by the end of February he still had no professionals to manage the actual festival site. As late as March, when he and his team moved to Exuma to oversee preparations, Fyre’s Web site was still advertising luxury packages including a $400,000 “Artist’s Palace,” with four beds and dinner with a festival performer.

At Roker Point, where McFarland and Ja Rule could be seen many days popping wheelies on their A.T.V.’s, local workmen were hired to prepare the site. Because the building site was covered in crushed white rock, sand was trucked in and spread about; a trio of bar cabanas were built. The site itself had no beach, so McFarland’s crews improved a potholed road at Coco Plum Beach, six miles away, where they fixed up a pair of cabanas and sank swing sets into the surf. “They tried to do it all on their own,” the production executive says. “What I heard was Billy literally Googled ‘How to rent a stage,’ and he rented a stage, and that was it. That was all they had.”

Ticket sales were strong: around 5,000 people were expected on each of the festival’s two weekends. A charter air service was hired to ferry many of them from Miami. A caterer and a medical-services vendor, both from Philadelphia, were hired, but the caterer thought better of it and dropped out in early April. A number of bands, including Blink-182, tentatively agreed to perform, though Blink, too, would back out at the last minute.

An event producer, industry veteran Yaron Lavi, was hired and began work March 6. Lavi brought in a team and toured the site. “The site was great: It was secluded. There was water in the middle of it. It could work,” says a member of Lavi’s team. “But of course there was no time. I thought in the beginning they would push [the festival] to November, but then they decided not to. I was pretty shocked.”

To Lavi’s team, it was clear the only way the festival could be staged was to jettison the villas and replace them with the only thing they could arrange in such a short time: tents. “We started putting together all the elements, the tents, the interior of the tents, putting together a budget, a production schedule, just hiring more and more people, so we can cover all corners,” says the team member. “Immediately we saw the difference between what they sold and what we were bringing. [We] said to them, ‘You guys are going to kill your brand. You’ve got to send out some kind of communication to [concertgoers] to tell them what they are going into down there.’ They basically assured us there will be a communication that’s going out to people. To this day I don’t know if it ever went out.”

“We kept asking him, ‘Can you finish this in time?’ ” recalls Elvis Rolle, whose Exuma Point Bar & Grille was making 500 meals a day for McFarland’s workers. “He just said, ‘Yes, we’ll be fine.’ But they couldn’t finish! You could see, they would never be ready.”

Amazingly, McFarland found a major company to put serious money into the Fyre app: according to a March 21 term sheet first obtained by Bloomberg News, Comcast Ventures, a venture-capital arm of cable and entertainment giant Comcast, tentatively agreed to invest $10.5 million in Fyre, with the potential to pour as much as $25 million into the startup’s coffers. The agreement was conditioned on standard due diligence, and there was a catch: McFarland had apparently valued Fyre at an astonishing $90 million, and Comcast wanted proof that was somehow true.

It wasn’t, naturally, and the deal quickly fell apart—though it appears McFarland, after crowing about the investment, didn’t go out of his way to inform his employees it was dead. And with Comcast out of the picture, McFarland was left grasping for cash. Many of those he hired, including contractors and carpenters on Great Exuma, worked on credit and have yet to be paid. According to several sources, the festival’s credit cards were canceled at some point in April.

Much has been made of McFarland’s ability to solicit investments from forward-looking New York businesspeople, such as Carola Jain, but with time running out, he resorted to a more prosaic lender: Ezra Birnbaum, a New York investor with a Securities and Exchange Commission settlement agreement on his résumé. According to Bloomberg News, the terms of Birnbaum’s $3 million loan on April 10 were harsh: Fyre had to repay $500,000 in 16 days, make several other payments on time, and raise the company’s valuation to more than $75 million or face a $900,000 penalty—equivalent to an annualized interest rate of 120 percent.

With those terms hanging over his head, McFarland began sending e-mails to concertgoers saying the festival was going cashless and would instead accept funds uploaded onto electronic wristbands (“FyreBands”). He suggested uploading $300 to $500 for each day an attendee planned to be at the festival. Terms of the Birnbaum loan called for his firm to receive at least 40 percent of this money. Fyre managed to pay Birnbaum back only $108,400 before the festival, and no more, according to the suit Birnbaum later filed.

By the week of the festival, the site remained little more than a stage, a few hastily built cabanas, and a massive pile of white tents.

Afterward, many wondered why Mc- Farland had gone through with an event that obviously wasn’t anything like what anyone had been promised. “I’m actually not surprised,” says Dan Berkowitz. “Remember, Bernie Mad off went to work up until the day he was arrested, because he had to keep up airs, because that was his whole life. These guys let it go on because, if they admitted on Monday this was crumbling, they had four less days of glory as kings of Fyre Festival.”

While ego no doubt played a role in Mc- Farland’s decision, an equally compelling answer was there in black and white. With an estimated $7 million in loans outstanding, the only chance he had to repay any of them was with proceeds from concertgoers. Unless the Fyre Festival went on as scheduled, Billy Mc- Farland was doomed.

Face the Music

Early in the morning of April 27, just hours before concertgoers began arriving, a downpour drenched the festival site, leaving little but confused staffers and waterlogged tents to greet people. The site was so damaged, in fact, that the first 800 or so arrivals that Thursday were shuttled to Elvis Rolle’s restaurant, where Rolle plied them with drinks and food. Today he says Mc Farland has yet to pay his $135,000 bill.

By midafternoon, with crowds building at the restaurant and the airport, buses began ferrying people to the festival site, where McFarland awaited in the planned residential development’s single model home, known as “the Blue House.” Seth Crossno, a North Carolina blogger, thought there was a misunderstanding. “You see the tents and you’re like, ‘Oh God, this is not what we signed up for,’ ” he remembers. “‘Maybe this is just a different section of the island and our villa is somewhere else, please, dear God.’ We were put in line, like a hundred of us. Billy was up front, standing on a table, trying to yell directions. There was loud music. You couldn’t hear anything. He was nice, just overwhelmed and disorganized.”

A Manhattanite named Matt, who asked that his last name not be used, remembers approaching a festival staffer and asking for a V.I.P. tent. The staffer just shook his head. “Honestly, man,” he said. “It’s every man for himself.”

Thus began a very long 24 hours for the concertgoers. Shivi Kumar was among the lucky few; she found a room at the nearby Grand Isle resort and enjoyed a restful weekend on the island. Others, including Jesse Stoll, a Florida concert promoter, landed at the airport that night, learned that the festival had been canceled, and grabbed seats on planes returning to Miami.

Still others boarded buses back to the airport, trying to get flights home. “We got on a plane at 1:30 in the morning, but the head count didn’t match the manifest, and people wouldn’t answer the flight attendants’ questions,” says Crossno. “So they herded us back into the terminal and locked the doors. It was really hot. A guy passed out. We got back on the plane and waited till dawn. We finally got a flight back to Miami later that morning.”

Matt discovered that the festival had been canceled only when he woke the next morning in his soggy tent. “The craziest thing was there wasn’t a single Fyre Festival employee there anymore,” he says. “It was just locals. No one knew what was going on. People back in the States knew more than we did.”

Later that day McFarland did his best to contain the damage, placing much of the blame on the sudden rainstorm and promising to resurrect the festival next year. “We were a little naïve in thinking for the first time we could do this ourselves,” he said in a statement.

Ja Rule, guileless or not, threw Mc Farland under the bus. “This is not my fault,” he tweeted.

The first lawsuit arrived over the weekend, quickly followed by about a dozen others. The New York tabloids ran updates for weeks, complete with reports of an employee revolt at Fyre Media’s Lispenard Street headquarters. Then came news of a federal investigation. McFarland has remained out of sight ever since. Today, there’s at least a chance his next public appearance could be in handcuffs.

“These guys wanted to become legends,” says Dan Berkowitz, of CID. “Well, now they are.”