Billy McFarlandThe long, strange arc of redemption takes another strange turn tonight in Austin, Texas, where the doomed Fyre Fest cheater will compete in a karate tournament organized to entertain podcaster Joe Rogan and several hundred crypto executives attending a blockchain conference and Web3.
McFarland will face Justin Custardo, best known as the founder of the Web3 Breakfast Club YouTube channel, which has approximately 1,000 subscribers. Organizers of the conference, dubbed Consensus 2024, insist the match is an officially sanctioned match from Karate Combat, a martial arts league based on cryptography that fans can trade watching matches between former Olympians in their late 30s and early 30s. early 40s. McFarland and Custardo will compete in the heavyweight division of Karate Combat's Influencer Fight Club series, with Karate Combat punters giving Custardo a 52%-48% advantage over McFarland.
Since being released from prison in May 2022 after serving most of his six-year sentence on fraud charges related to the disastrous 2017 Fyre Festival in the Bahamas, McFarland has managed to stay in the spotlight through a variety of stunts and promises to repay the $26 million he admitted to stealing from investors. This includes a long-standing promise to successfully host Fyre Fest. The date for this event has been pushed back several times – now supposedly scheduled for sometime in 2025 – with location, line-up and design of any kind all TBD at this time.
Tonight's fight will be streamed on Karate Combat's social media pages starting at 6 p.m. CT and will be attended by Rogan, who told his podcast viewers earlier this week that he would be in attendance to watch the main event between American fighters Ross Levine and Adrian Hadribeaj.
McFarland has posted several videos on Instagram showing him training for the race, including one where he punches through a pizza box containing a large pepperoni pizza and another in which he kicks a watermelon.
McFarland's opponent, Custardo, appears to take a more holistic approach to training for the fight, focusing on losing weight, working on technical skills and training mental acuity through philosophical puzzles posed by his followers.
The men have been exchanging shots on social media ahead of the fight. Yesterday, McFarland and Custardo came face-to-face at the official weigh-in in Austin, where the two men, dressed in blue jeans and white button-down shirts, traded jabs and put each other down, almost appearing to be fighting at once. point.
“I've been training Muay Thai and I'm going to kick (Custardo) really hard,” McFarland warned when asked about his training schedule by the event's emcee. In a post-weigh-in press conference, Custardo fired back, warning that “every punch [McFarland] takes is in honor of every person who cheated.'
McFarland told the audience that he would donate all profits to the victims of his scam.
In addition to his restitution fund, McFarland faces a civil lawsuit in which he claims he defrauded an investor who gave him $740,000 after getting out of prison. 54 year old lawyer Jonathan Taylor of New York — who met McFarland while they were both serving prison terms at Elkton Federal Correctional Institution in Ohio — claims McFarland must appear in court and agree to pay him back or face prosecution for political fraud, conversion , conspiracy, breach of contract and unjust enrichment.
An attorney for McFarland said that Taylor is trying to take advantage of his connection to McFarland, stating, “we have tried many times to pay John his money, but his lawyers have remained silent despite our repeated attempts to contact them. We remain open to a settlement.”
