Case 2: ZZZZ Best Company (1987)

The story of Barry Minkow, the amazing teen-age swindler, may resemble the tale of “The Emperor’s New Clothes”. Minkow turned a small, door-to-door carpetcleaning business into a public company with a paper value of more than USD 200 million. He was lionized in the press, feted on the Oprah Winfrey Show and given a hero’s welcome on Wall Street. Minkow’s life seemed like a movie plot: a skinny 16-year-old boy from the LA suburbs who starts his own company in his parents’ garage, and ends up a celebrated teen-age millionaire. But only a few people saw, or wanted to see, that his business scarcely existed. The story of Barry Minkow is an insightful account of how an amoral individual still in his teens was able to sell what one journalist called a “hologram” of a corporation to Wall Street.

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