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It was a rock and roll scam with a happy ending. Amazon exec Brian Valentine booked Tom Petty & The Heartbreakers to play his wedding, or so he thought. After giving a “talent agent” a $165,000 down payment to get the Rock and Roll Hall of Famers to play the reception, he learned that he had been defrauded.
According to The Smoking Gun, Valentine first approached a man named Chris Lund through his “LundLive” website (which has since been taken dow); the site said that Lund represented Petty and several other big-name performers.
After receiving the down placement, Lund gave Valentine contact info for someone who he said was Petty’s production manager, but provided a bogus email address. So, Valentine contacted Petty’s manager Tony Dimitriades to discuss the planned performance. That’s when he realized he’d been a victim of fraud, as Dimitriades told him he had no connections to Lund and no contracts had ever been signed.
The FBI arrested Lund on three counts of wire fraud on August 2, but that wasn’t the end of the story. Valentine, a deep-pocketed exec, was determined to have Petty perform at the wedding (he proposed to his wife at a Tom Petty concert). So he paid the proper people and the band did perform a full concert at the reception for the new couple.
- Matt Dolloff, 100.7 WZLX
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