Billy McFarland is all excited.
The creator of 2017’s infamous Fyre Festival is set to rise from the ashes, after a four-year stint in federal prison — and they could get another entertainment company involved.
The 30-year-old disgraced promoter “brought together a team of professionals to brainstorm and come up with ideas for entertainment and other ways to generate revenue,” his lawyer Jason Russo said, according to The Guardian.
In October 2018, McFarland was sentenced to six years in prison for fraud for his role in organizing the disastrous and aborted music festival in the Bahamas. During his sentencing in Manhattan Federal Court, U.S. District Judge Naomi Buchwald called him a “serial fraudster” whose “fraud – like a circle – has no end”.
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McFarland was serving his sentence in federal prison in Milan, Michigan.
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Earlier this week, multiple news outlets reported that McFarland had been released early from federal custody. He was moved to a halfway house in New York on Wednesday, his attorney told USA Today.
Halfway houses, also known as residential rehabilitation centers, are designed to “help inmates reconnect with the community and reduce the likelihood of them re-offending.”
Inmates are allowed to leave the facility for work, seeking counseling, visiting others, and similar activities, provided they are cleared to do so.
McFarland is expected to be released Aug. 30, according to the Federal Bureau of Prisons.
According to his lawyer, the disgraced promoter now wants to be able to repay the $26 million he was ordered to repay to investors in the failed festival.
“His only priority and focus is how to make these people whole and get their money back,” Russo said. “That’s what he focuses on.”
McFarland is ‘relieved to be out and done with the incarceration part of his sentence’ – and also ‘looking forward to being reunited and seeing his family and really focusing on his efforts to get this huge amount of restitution paid’ , according to Russian.