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Count Barry Minkow as one of the more unlikely people ever to be a law-enforcement lecturer. A felon, he was busted in his early 20s by the FBI for engineering one of the biggest frauds in U.S. history. His ZZZZ Best carpet-cleaning scam, a mid-1980s securities caper, was worth $300 million before it went up in smoke. That rap landed him in a federal pen on a 25-year sentence. After serving seven years and four months, he got out in 1995 and, like the con man portrayed in the hit movie Catch...
Given his history, one can't help wondering whether Minkow's reincarnation is a story of redemption or just another clever ploy. (Of course, there's not a lot of money in teaching FBI recruits.) A nerdy kid, the son of lower-middle-class parents in California's San Fernando Valley, Minkow says he got into scamming at the age of 16 and set up ZZZZ Best in his parents' garage so he could impress girls. "I learned that money brought respect, and it was like a narcotic," he says. "I couldn't live without it." At its peak, ZZZZ...
...million from more than 1,200 people, largely by targeting church-affiliated African Americans. In 2003 he managed to shut down another scheme, a California operation that targeted retirement funds worth $813 million. "Barry has a lot of insight into the many ways scams work," notes Peter Norell, an FBI supervisor who helped arrange Minkow's stint at the FBI's Quantico training facility. "That helps him ask perpetrators the right questions, which can lead to indictments and convictions...
...took yet another case to the office of New York attorney general Eliot Spitzer, who was in the midst of a spree of high-profile fraud prosecutions. Spitzer's experts contacted the FBI, and after Minkow agreed to wear a wire and record phone conversations with the purported scam artists as they solicited new money, the agency verified that the suspects were using an offshore shell company to bilk hundreds of millions of dollars from investors by pledging annual profits of more than 38% and an eight-year rate of return in excess of 1,000%. TIME has confirmed that...
These days, when he isn't preaching or scam busting, Minkow delivers speeches on fraud to corporate officers, insurance companies, accountants and law-enforcement groups, often appearing in a bright orange prison jump suit. At Quantico, as his 150 student FBI agents scribbled notes, he walked through Fraud 101, explaining the psychology of the scam. "A lot of con men just want to please everyone," he says. He stresses that in a successful con game, appearances are everything. "After all," says Minkow, "fraud is nothing more than the skin of the truth stuffed with a lie." Spoken by the master...