Barry Minkow Waking It In America Summary

At the age of 20, Barry Minkow executed a con so risky, that some accounting and business schools teach it as a case study. He founded ZZZZ Best Carpet & Furniture Cleaning Co., Inc. when he was just 16 years old, operating out of his parent’s garage (Parloff, 2012). Then he franchised it into a chain and finally took it public. On paper, he was worth $100 million dollars. He drove a Ferrari and even appeared on Oprah Winfrey, upping himself and his stock. “Think big, be big.” is what Barry told Oprah to which she responded, “Really?”, almost rolling her eyes. He responds with, “End of story.” before giving her a smirk. Barry claims he started his business with the best of intentions but lie, stole, and cheated when he could not pay

It worked temporarily. Joe Domanick, author of Faking It In America, a book about Barry Minkow claims the reason it took so long to catch onto Minkow was because everyone was making a lot of money and not looking too hard at what is really going on. He backs the idea that an 18 year old, already a millionaire, either made it by fraud or legitimately and no one wanted to believe it was by fraud. Ironically, auditors did not detect Minkow’s fraud. As he became the boy wonder, the small people he scammed early in his fraud career started to make some noise. The noise came from a Los Angeles housewife. One of Minkow’s many tricks to raise money was to overcharge customers who put carpet-cleaning services on a credit card. If they complained, he would eventually return their money. If not, he’d keep it. This particular housewife could not understand why Minkow would not refund her money. She finally called a local newspaper reporter who discovered that Minkow has cheated hundreds of customers in the same way. Within days of printer an exposé, the price of ZZZZ Best had fallen through the floor. At this point, Minkow had begun preliminary negotiations to buy an owner’s stake in a Major League Baseball team and had only owed the