Billy McFarland—founder of Fyre Festival, frenemy of Ja Rule, one-time landlord of Anna Delvey—is giving the more deluded members of society another chance to spend $499 to eat a cheese sandwich with him on urine-soaked mattresses. News of the cost-of-living crisis apparently didn’t reach McFarland in federal prison, where he spent the last few years before relocating to BedStuy with an ankle monitor for company. As he magnanimously told the New York Times: “I never spent much time in Brooklyn, until the Brooklyn detention center. I was always like, ‘I’m never going to live in Brooklyn.’ Now, I think it’s kind of nice.”
But if you’re worried McFarland frittered away his time behind bars trying to figure out how he would pay back $26 million in debt or feeling penitent about the members of the Bahamian community he defrauded, fear not. Rather, he put “a seven-month stint in solitary confinement” to good use, devising a plan for Fyre Festival II that—despite being 50 pages long—includes neither an exact date (“December 2024”) nor setting (currently the location is listed, somewhat ominously, as “The Caribbean Sea”).
After all, as McFarland wrote on Instagram, “Since 2016 Fyre has been the most talked about festival in the world”—much like Bay of Pigs has been one of the most talked about military operations since 1961. I, for one, can’t imagine anyone passing up another chance to participate in an event that promised attendees the chance to “become Pablo Escobar” (???????) and cruise around with pilots who taught themselves to fly using Microsoft simulators. As chief management officer Grant Margolin assured staff afterwards, “nobody got murdered.” Not a single person! That being said, maybe Delvey can take a break from her Dinner Party series to do the catering this time around? Hold the cheese.