- January 5th, 2012, 5:48 pm
#374362
This guy is often tied to Lu through some LUSLL classes he took in prison. But this is a fascinating story ...
Fortune wrote:Barry Minkow: All-American con manClick Here for Full Story
January 5, 2012: 5:00 AM ET
His many lives: entrepreneur, fraud fighter, pastor, movie actor - and serial swindler.
By Roger Parloff, senior editor
FORTUNE -- In 2009 a writer named Jon Meyers was hired to furnish a screenplay for what soon became the strangest movie project of his life. The film was to star a number of well-known actors -- James Caan, Talia Shire, Mark Hamill, Ving Rhames -- and it would chronicle the life of Barry Minkow.
Minkow (rhymes with Kinko) was the boy-wonder business phenom of the 1980s. In 1982, at age 16, he started ZZZZ Best, a carpet-cleaning company, from his parents' garage in Reseda, Calif., in the San Fernando Valley. The business expanded rapidly and went public in 1986, making Minkow, at age 20, worth more than $100 million on paper. But it was a giant Ponzi scheme and collapsed in May 1987. Minkow was convicted of 57 federal felonies, sentenced to 25 years, and ordered to pay $26 million in restitution.
Though raised as a Jew, Minkow then became an evangelical Christian. In prison he also began giving seminars and shooting videos designed to help detectives and accountants catch fraudsters of the type he had been. Paroled in 1995, he became the pastor of a San Diego church, where membership would more than quintuple under his charismatic leadership. In 2001 he founded the Fraud Discovery Institute (FDI), which assisted the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the Securities and Exchange Commission, and others in shutting down at least 20 serious Ponzi schemes, including one that had swept up $500 million in investor money, and another whose ringleader was sentenced to 30 years.
- By Chippy
- By jmclaughlin