Barry Minkow: The Con Artist Who Faked Redemption

A Hollywood biopic celebrated a teenage con artist turned crusading fraud-busting pastor, with the real man playing himself, until he was arrested again for multimillion-dollar fraud and the ending had to be reshot. This episode deconstructs the cyclical life of Barry Minkow.We trace his path from a 16-year-old running a carpet-cleaning company out of his parents' garage to the mastermind of the ZZZZ Best accounting fraud, and then from prison to celebrated fraud investigator and, finally, back to disgrace.Building ZZZZ Best on a fake insurance-restoration division that was most of its revenueFooling auditors with staged job sites and forged documents before a Nasdaq IPOA persistent homemaker's credit-card complaint that unraveled the whole schemeReinventing himself as head of the Fraud Discovery Institute and running short-and-distort schemesThe Lenar case, a 583.5 million dollar judgment, and embezzling from his own congregation