Barry Minkow - Cleaning Up. One Mans Redemptive Journey Through the Seductive World of Corporate Crime

CLEANING UP

BARRY MINKOW

Copyright 2005 by Barry Minkow

All rights reserved. No portion of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any meanselectronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, scanning, or otherexcept for brief quotations in critical reviews or articles, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

Published in Nashville,Tennessee, by Nelson Current, a subsidiary of Thomas Nelson, Inc.

Nelson Current books may be purchased in bulk for educational, business, fundraising, or sales promotional use. For information, please email SpecialMarkets@ThomasNelson.com.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Minkow, Barry.
Cleaning up : one man's redemptive journey through the seductive world of corporate crime / Barry Minkow.
p. cm.
ISBN 1-59555-004-6
1. Minkow, Barry. 2. BusinessmenUnited StatesBiography. 3. Swindlers and swindlingUnited StatesBiography. 4. Christian convertsUnited States Biography. 5. FraudUnited States. I. Title.
HC102.5.M5A3 2005
364.16'3'092dc22

2004025940

Printed in the United States of America
05 06 07 08 09 QW 5 4 3 2 1

CONTENTS

To Lisa,
my loving wife and best friend who always chose to focus on
my potential rather than my past.
And to Peanut, whose influence in my life
lives on even after he died.

SPECIAL THANKS: First, I would like to thank my two editors, Joel Miller and Erin Hattenberg, who tirelessly labored over not only the contents of this book but having to work with the likes of me! Their work and labor of love should not be overlooked. I would also like to thank my agent Joni Evans from the William Morris Agency. If there is a better agent out there and a more loving and encouraging one, I never met him/her. And finally to Ted Squires at Thomas Nelson, who has the dubious honor of being the first non family member to believe that in 1995, when I was released from prison, I really had changed. In prison, we have a saying for people like Ted: Youre the man...

21 YEARS OLD + 25 YEAR SENTENCE + 26 MILLION IN RESTITUTION = 1 BILLION IN FRAUD FINDINGS

I f failure were a pair of shoes, mine would be dingy gray athletic sneakers with zero traction. My name is Barry Minkow, and Im intimately familiar with failure. By the time I was twenty-one I was the renowned wiz kid of Wall Street. That same year I traded a sprawling Southern California mansion for a tiny piece of real estate on the cellblock.

I committed a white-collar crime that ultimately earned me a twenty-five year prison sentence handed down by Judge Dickran Tevrizian in federal court. He also ordered me to repay twenty-six million dollars in victim restitution. These judgments were dealt at the request of my prosecutor, James Asperger, who was at the time chief of the Major Frauds Division of the United States Attorneys Office in Los Angeles. He actually authored the restitution order that the judge signed. I refer to the obstacles that I had to overcome as the 21, 25, and 26 problem. I never want you to forget those three numbers because it is highly probable your current situation is not nearly as bad as mine was!

I have one objective with this autobiography: encouragement. I would like to inspire anyone who has failed to realize they can overcome failure. Any failure. It may sound trite, maybe even too simplistic, but its true. If God had enough grace to deliver me from the 21, 25, and 26 scenario, He can and will do the same for you.

Your failure does not necessarily have to be criminal in nature, although that is certainly my story. (Please understand I am not equating crimes with other less victim-impacting errors.) However, failing at anything seems to elicit similar emotions of devastation, rejection, and grief. Only those of us who have experienced failure know how debilitating these emotions can be.

Admittedly the journey to failure recovery is difficult and riddled with challenges. You will likely experience disappointment and temptation to return to habits that caused you to fail in the first place. My story definitely includes those battles. But I believe my story can provide one thing that all of us require: hope, joyous hope. Failure is temporary, and Gods forgiveness is permanent. If I can overcome the 21, 25, and 26 problem, so can you.

Still have doubts? Consider the following facts. The judge who sentenced me to that twenty-five-year prison sentence wrote a letter to the parole board seven years and four months into my sentence demanding my release. Years later on August 2, 2002, that same judge dismissed my twenty-six-million-dollar restitution order in federal court and released me from probation three and a half years early. Why would a federal judge, who at one time said on the record that I had no conscience, do such a thing? Because the prosecutor who demanded those harsh penalties, James Asperger, wrote a three-page letter to Judge Tevrizian asking him to do so.

Now the same prosecutor who asked Judge Tevrizian to sentence me to twenty-five years and twenty-six million in restitution asks me regularly to speak to the summer interns at his law firm. Of course I am no longer twenty-one years old, but neither do I have a twenty-five-year prison sentence hanging over my head, or a twenty-six-million-dollar restitution order to pay.

There is one more part of my story that you need to know about. You can still call me a fraud... investigator, that is. I remember the techniques I used to deceive people and now apply them to fraud detection. In the process I have uncovered over one billion dollars in fraud, and I am not finished. That is why 21 plus 25 plus 26 equals one billion!

E ight hundred million dollars is a lot of money. And twenty years is a long time. There is no way that this deal is a Ponzi scheme, Fred Kirshner challenged as he sat across from me sipping his steaming coffee. No mutual fund on Wall Street has outperformed the Financial Advisory Consultant Funds income and growth funds. I know one investor who has one hundred million dollars in the fund and has been in it for fifteen years. He paused and raised one eyebrow. And Mr. James P. Lewis, the manager of the fund, is a business genius! he declared. I stared back without blinking.

It was far from an idyllic Orange County Saturday afternoon. I glanced out the window of Starbucks at the smoky skies, black from the ash of fires blazing across Southern California. I quickly checked my watch: 1:00 p.m. I had to leave no later than 2:30 if I wanted to be back to the church in San Diego in time to preach the 5:15 p.m. service. The dual life of pastor and fraud investigator may seem ill matchedand its certainly no easy task attempting to tend a flock of parishioners while warning a nation of unwitting investors.

I flipped through the pages of the prospectus and listened with one ear to Kirshner while nodding periodically. My mind raced through several scenarios until my eyes rested on graphs and charts comparing growth rates, which averaged 38.8% annual returns. I hit a mental speed bump.

So the guy is a good money manager, I thought. These type of consistent highreturns may be unlikely but not impossible. I knew that fraud is never found on the back-end, the returns offered to the investor. Fraud is found in the front-end, by how the person offering the high returns claims to be earning them.

Accountants and other professionals call this sources and uses of cash. I call it the if-then test. If this mutual fund claims to be earning 38.8% annual returns for twenty years,