Posted on 01/23/2014 1:26:10 PM PST by RBStealth
Barry Minkow has been a teenage millionaire, a convicted con artist, a fraud investigator and a religious leader - and now he can add 'church thief' to his list of vocations.
On Wednesday, Minkow, 46, pleaded guilty to embezzling funds from the San Diego Community Bible Church over the course of nearly 10 years, a U.S. attorney's statement said.
He was already serving a five-year sentence for a securities fraud conviction in Florida and could get five additional years when he is sentenced for the new conviction April 7.
Under the plea deal, Minkow admitted that he opened unauthorized church bank accounts, forged signatures on checks and pocketed member donations for himself.
'Barry Minkow is again convicted of fraud, this time for stealing money from the parishioners of San Diego Community Bible Church," U.S. Attorney Laura Duffy said. 'We stand vigilant against those who cheat and steal without regard to the consequences wrought on their victims and their communities.'
Minkow gained national attention as a teenager in the 1980s by founding the ZZZZ Best carpet cleaning company in Southern California at age 16.
(Excerpt) Read more at dailymail.co.uk ...
They were strangers and I took them in...
He cleaned your carpet and then cleaned your accounts too.
Big Dummy!
If only he had used his smarts for good.
Yep -- he had a multi-million dollar corporation listed on the big board all for cleaning carpets. He would have to be cleaning every carpet in LA to have justified the valuation. Many thought he was just laundering money for the mob.
I believe the financial statements of ZZZZ Best Carpet Cleaning were audited by a big international CPA firm. The CPA’s gave ZZZZ Best a clean bill of health. Maybe it was Arthur Anderson.
Maybe Hillary was helping him. Cleaning carpet, I mean.
Why, Barry might have been another of Barry Sorteros’ sons! I wonder!?
I began a pastorate at a church in N. Ohio in about '83, and one of our youth leaders had been charged "when younger" with gross sexual imposition with a minor. I immediately relieved him. Caused a stir, but I was new so no one wanted to push against me. They were being all forgive and forget. He and his family quit. I had offended them.
Toward the end of my time there, a police woman came to inform me that he'd gotten into trouble again in the neighborhood....same thing with kids.
You don't give anyone access to an area in which they've got a known weakness. Let them work elsewhere where they can do no damage.
LOL!
I think there were several big firms taken in by him including Ernst and Drexel and Sears. When it was over FBI said that 90% of the revenue that ZZZZ Best reported was fraudulent and yet the kid came up with $25M to buy a shortened sentence.
It appears it was easier to just steal the money.
Many people today dont know the difference between forgiveness and reconciliation.
Forgiveness is forgiving an offense and putting it in the past, but may not extend to putting trust in that individual.
Reconciliation is forgiveness plus reinstalling that person with your trust, bringing them back into the family/neighbor fold.
Forgiveness is all thats required!
However, reconciliation demands a certain amount of discernment. You dont just willy nilly forgive and forget and reinstall that person to his previous level of incompetence.
Yes, there are different types of mistakes. One goes to character and the other goes to experience, knowledge, etc.
A lieutenant platoon commander who makes a bad decision about where to locate his platoon has probably not displayed a character flaw. You educate and drive on.
A teacher who hits on his female students is a character issue, and that teacher should be removed. A paper trail should be started. Hopefully, you get him out of teaching. If not, getting him out of your school is better than nothing.
Not really. I was involved with a similar business once, which included both water and fire damage restoration, as Minkow's did, in a relatively small community. We grossed about $100 per capita for our market area. That was in the 80s, so considerably more today. Although there's a lot less carpet out there than then, at least in homes.
Carry that out for a market area of 10M, and that's $1B/year.
I'm perfectly well aware of the difficulties in any such extrapolation, and IMO it would not be even vaguely possible to acquire such market penetration in a large market. But the money is there.
The real problem is that the various agencies and "experts" investigating him did not bother to use any experts from the field itself. How could MBAs and CPAs learn anything useful from people who actually clean carpets or restore buildings for a living?
IIRC his problem was that he wasn’t cleaning many carpets.
He was spending his time cooking the books.
90% of the revenue that he reported was non-existent.
His ZZZZ Best vans were mostly for show — just buzzing around Lalaland so as to be seen but seldom stopping to clean any carpets.
The carpet cleaning business was very real, and indeed was widely respected as high quality. I had friends in the area who had to compete against him, and you couldn’t fool them.
The insurance restoration business was entirely fraudulent, and by the time the scam collapsed, it was almost 90% of company “revenues.” The carpet cleaning business, which did not generate nearly enough income to pay for itself, was very largely kept in operation by the loans received as a result of entirely fictitious insurance restoration contracts.
As with most major scams, this was not (mostly) a case of Minkow and others stealing money and salting it away. It was Peter robbing to keep Paul operating.
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