The Fyre festival fraudster is back – and I’m fascinated by his brazenness | Emma Brockes

He's done his time in jail and now Billy McFarland has something new to sell. But who's going to buy it this time?

You may remember Billy McFarland, if not the name then the image that, six years ago, frequently accompanied public mention of him: an open cheese sandwich sweating gently on a bed of white polystyrene. McFarland was jailed in 2018 for fraud after the collapse, a year earlier, of his Fyre festival, the disastrous party on a Bahamian island that took down a generation of mid-list influencers.

Failure so large that it results in not one, but two documentaries, not to mention the prison sentence, might inspire shame in a lesser individual. But McFarland is back in business, and his plans are bigger than ever.