Fyre Festival Organizer Billy McFarland Granted Early Prison Release

According to a TMZ exclusive published Thursday, Fyre Festival organizer Billy McFarland was released from a low-security prison in Michigan on March 30. McFarland, who was sentenced in 2018 to six years in prison, is being released almost two years ahead of schedule for earned good time credit.

NBC News also reported that the Bureau of Prisons confirmed the news in a statement. McFarland's attorney, Jason Russo, later clarified that his client was held at a secondary location since his release before being transferred to "community confinement" in a New York City halfway house on Wednesday. The disgraced promoter will supposedly remain there until the end of August.

For those of you who don't remember, McFarland was the mastermind behind the infamous 2017 music festival, which was billed as a weekend-long luxury experience in the Bahamas, complete with celebrity attendees, fine dining and five-star accommodations. However, the festival ended up being a hellish failure that left concertgoers stranded without shelter and eating those viral cheese sandwiches, as shown in several documentary series.

As a result, McFarland was charged with scamming over $27 million from investors, leading him to plead guilty on two counts of wire fraud. That said, Russo insists that McFarland — who's released a podcast and been working on a memoir from prison — is going to "put together a team of good people for a solid plan to make amends and pay" the millions in restitutions he owes to various people.

Read TMZ's original report here.

Photo via Getty / Patrick McMullan