Having established an impeccable track record of pulling off ambitious plans in the Caribbean without a hitch, Billy McFarland has decided to raise the stakes by trying something obviously life-threatening in those same waters.
McFarland shot to fame nearly a decade ago after putting together the Fyre Festival, an event so spectacularly disastrous that it has entered the language as a byword for spectacular disaster.
After several other, less-dramatic flops, he’s now almost literally jumping the shark.
McFarland tells Page Six he will be jet skiing from Utila — an island off Honduras — all 1,500 nautical miles to Venezuela.
Meanwhile, the masses can live-stream his journey, during which — if his previous form is anything to go by — he will surely perish cinematically.
“I expect to be the first American to arrive since capturing Maduro,” McFarland tells us. (The South American country is in the midst of upheaval after President Donald Trump arrested Nicolas Maduro on January 3 and brought him to New York City on drug charges).
The scammer — who served four years in prison over the Fyre catastrophe — says that he’ll have a boat following him and he’ll be pulling over to sleep on land.
McFarland tells us his goal is to throw an event with his new company, PHNX, on Margarita Island, 24 miles off the coast of Venezuela.
He picked the start-off point, Utila, because he actually did manage to put on an event there in December in front of what one web site described as “tens” of people.
Since the Fyre debacle in 2017, the convicted con has promised several projects that ultimately never happened including Fyre Festival II and an ill-conceived virtual events company called PYRT, which led to a lawsuit from his business investor whom he’d met in prison.
The scammer, who owed $26 million in restitution, claims he is being paid to make the Baywatch-esque voyage to Venezuela by a third party streaming platform through which users will be able to watch his journey.
He declined to name which platform.
“The only way to pay back $20 million is to work, have concepts, and bring people together. By doing that over the past three years I have been paying restitution every month,” he tells us. “I need to do these things to earn money whether it’s getting paid for a TV show, marketing or brand sponsorships or, in this case, a live streaming platform. This is how I pay back restitution.”
McFarland says he’s not waiting for the geopolitics to cool off, and he’ll depart as soon as the weather is appropriate.
When asked if he felt that a party is what the Venezuelans need right now, McFarland told us he thinks it could use some tourism.
“What we are really good at, and what we just proved we are great at, is driving tourism particularly for island destinations. We bring exposure and people and hoping to make a positive impact on the area,” he said.
Mcfarland held a concert with French Montana, Bobby Shmurda, and Slim Jxmmi in Honduras this December that actually happened.
McFarland has also been trying to make money off a site called Create PHNX, which is reminiscent of the Black Mirror episode “Common People” in which a broke husband performs humiliating acts online to pay for his wife’s cancer treatment.
The site allows users to pitch concepts that others can fund to “make real.”
Some ideas including having someone “throw a water balloon at Taylor Swift,” or release live crickets into a luxury department store. (When we drew McFarland’s attention to these likely criminal ideas, they disappeared from the site).
Still available: donating toward a $50,000 goal to have UFC champ Conor McGregor punch McFarland in the face on a live stream.
McFarland was found guilty of two counts of wire fraud and served four years in prison from 2018 to 2022 for his involvement in the doomed Bahamian festival that sold high-priced tickets and devolved into chaos when they failed to deliver on everything from bands to lodging to famously, Evian water.
The ex con sold the Fyre brand over the summer on eBay for a $245,300.
On Wednesday, Trump stated the United States would remain in Venezuela and extract oil for years.
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