Barry Minkow: ZZZZ Best Whiz Kid, Fraud Hunter, and Crooked Pastor

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Barry Minkow was a telemarketer for a carpet cleaner at nine and the founder of ZZZZ Best at 16, running it from his parents' garage before he had a driver's license. By 1987 Wall Street valued the company at $280 million. This episode explains what the valuation rested on: a fake insurance restoration division, verified to banks by a phantom firm called Interstate Appraisal Services, that supplied 86 percent of reported revenue. A homemaker he had overcharged by a few hundred dollars took her diary of his frauds to the Los Angeles Times, and the empire fell.

The second act is stranger. Released in 1995 after about seven and a half years, Minkow became pastor of the Community Bible Church in San Diego and founded the Fraud Discovery Institute, earning praise on 60 Minutes as a reformed con man. The episode shows how he turned that reputation into a short and distort operation against public companies, how an attack on homebuilder Lennar exposed him, and how he was stealing from his own congregation the whole time.

• To fool auditors, Minkow bribed a security guard at a Sacramento building under construction, hung ZZZZ Best banners, and gave a tour of a site he did not own.
• He planned a $25 million merger with KeyServ, the authorized carpet cleaner for Sears, hoping its real cash flow would fill the hole in his Ponzi scheme.
• Herbalife paid him $300,000 to withdraw his claims, and his 500-page report on Usana sent its stock from over $61 to under $35.
• He pleaded guilty in 2011 to conspiracy to commit insider trading and was ordered to pay Lennar $583.5 million in restitution.
• He embezzled more than $3 million from his church, including $75,000 a widower meant for a hospital in Sudan and $300,000 from a grandmother.