IMMOKALEE, Fla. — Gary Morgan wants his $1,500 dollars back. He lost it when The Charity Pros canceled Harvest Nights Music Festival in Immokalee.
"I feel like me and my wife were scammed with the way it was presented and what ended up happening in the time frame it did," Morgan explained.
He planned to drive down from Virginia to see Train, Brad Paisely, Deff Leppard and other big names.
However, Morgan and all the other ticket holders got an email four days before the festival to let them know it was canceled.
Immokalee Community Correspondent Ella Rhoades met with The Charity Pros Director of Operations Bradley Maloney about the festival in December. And she's been trying to get an update for people like Morgan, so they know when they'll get their money back.
But Maloney hasn't returned her calls.
She's also trying to ask him about a 2015 federal lawsuit.
At the time, Maloney worked for a company called 'Blu Entertainment Group'.
Watch Immokalee Community Correspondent Ella Rhoades report below:
He and two partners planned to put on the Country Life Musical Festival in Illinois, in July of that year.
They said they had big names like Keith Urban and Toby Keith signed up to play, but like Harvest Nights Music Fest, the show never happened.
Blu hired a company called Total Merchant Services to handle credit card transactions for customers who bought festival tickets online.
Leading up to the show, Blu posted on Facebook, that the festival was "almost sold out."
A few days later they posted, "less than 1500 seats remain."
But in a federal civil lawsuit, TMS said, "Country Life Music Festival was not close to selling out," and accused Maloney and his partners of fraud.
The lawsuit says the concert promoters were using ticket sales from the Illinois festival, "To pay the artists who performed at [an] earlier Country Life Music Festival which took place in February of 2015 in Punta Gorda, Florida."
The lawsuit says Maloney and his partners knew the Illinois festival wouldn't happen, but kept collecting money, and waited until the last minute to cancel the show.
Flash forward ten years and another of Maloney's festivals was canceled.
Morgan said, he can't believe something like this has happened before.
"You kind of would hope somebody would've known that. I can see forty years ago, but today you know everything about everybody," Morgan said.
TMS eventually withdrew it's lawsuit, after one of Maloney's partners filed for bankruptcy.
Since 2021, Maloney has organized several other concerts in Southwest Florida that went on as planned, but he has not said exactly why the Immokalee festival was canceled.
