Barry Minkow
When former federal prosecutor James Asperger first laid eyes on Barry Minkow in a California courtroom in 1988, he saw all the traits of a financial kingpin in the musclebound "whiz kid" of Wall Street. "He was cocky; he was charismatic; he was arrogant," Asperger recalls. "His talents and charisma were so strong that he could have succeeded in a legitimate enterprise."
But he didn't. Minkow was a white-collar crook extraordinaire, a greedy college-age swindler with an eye for the ladies and the loot. Now, 16 years and one prison term after his conviction on fraud charges, Minkow spends his days telling businesses how to watch out for the likes of him--the old, lawbreaking him, that is. In presentations before everyone from FBI agents to corporate CFOs, Minkow confides the secrets of hiding debt and faking revenue. Follow the money, he says, and, perhaps even more important, follow the postman. "When we go on a job, the first question I ask is who gets the mail. They think I'm crazy," Minkow says. "I know that to hide debt we had hidden bank accounts nobody knew about."
His company also provides consulting and has exposed an estimated $1 billion in fraud. "I had to do eight Super Bowls in prison," says Minkow, 38, who lectures in an orange prison jumpsuit. "When you've done that kind of time, you get credibility."
Minkow began his career with a carpet-cleaning business in his family's Los Angeles garage, which he expanded into a home restoration empire. "Barry represented the perfect Republican dream--a 16-year-old kid starts his own business in the valley while he's still in high school and builds it up into a multimillion-dollar organization," says journalist Joe Domanick, who wrote a book about Minkow. But Minkow had built his ZZZZBest by defrauding investors. By 1988 he went on trial, at the age of 21. A judge ordered him to pay restitution and handed down a 25-year sentence. Minkow served nearly eight years and, armed with two master's degrees in religion, now serves as pastor of Community Bible Church, a nondenominational evangelical Christian congregation in San Diego. "Everybody thought I'd be one of those born-again-until-you're-out-again people," he says, but his faith persisted. Married to a former makeup artist, he lives modestly in a beach town and just traveled to Guatemala to adopt 1-year-old identical twin boys. His conviction, however, will always follow him. While he's been released from parole, Minkow is still making payments to a bank. And he discloses his past on his church's Web site and from the pulpit. "When I get up there, I'm worse than anybody in my congregation," he says. "I always let them know that." -Randy Dotinga
This story appears in the May 10, 2004 print edition of U.S. News & World Report.