Schadenfreude-tacular, part 1

NOTE: This is the first in a two-part series of stories about the sufferings of others that brought me an inordinate amount of enjoyment today.


Lou Pearlman, the evil mastermind who unleashed the boy-band craze of the late 90s onto the world like a plague of locusts, is going to prison. While creating the Backstreet Boys and N'Sync should be reason enough for his incarceration, the actual reason is that he has stolen over $300 million from investors over the last three decades.

ABOVE: I would typically caption this
by saying either Bye Bye Bye or N*Jail,
but various other articles beat me to it.

And it couldn't have happened to a nicer guy. To quote the article:

U.S. District Judge G. Kendall Sharp noted that many victims were Pearlman's relatives, friends and retirees in their 70s or 80s who lost everything.

"The sympathy factor just doesn't run very high with the court," Sharp said.

The judge's "sympathy factor", however, was just enough to allow Perelman the chance to make it right: his 25-year sentence will be reduced 1 month for every $1 million he returns to the innocent people he screwed over. To this end, he Pearlman had an Ebay auction of some of his treasures. (sorry, it's closed now)