Barry Minkow founded the fraudulent ZZZ Best company at the center of a 1980s business scandal.
Minkow started ZZZ Best as a carpet-cleaning business while he was still a teenager. The company later claimed to have lucrative restoration contracts, but many of those contracts were fictitious. Forged documents, fake references, and staged offices helped persuade investors and lenders that the business was much larger than it really was.
ZZZ Best went public in 1986, briefly giving Minkow a fortune and a high public profile. Investigations soon exposed the fraud, and the company collapsed. Minkow pleaded guilty to fraud and racketeering and received a prison sentence.
The case is notable because it used the appearance of a successful public company to conceal fabricated operations. It is sometimes grouped with Wall Street insider-trading scandals of the period, but ZZZ Best was primarily an accounting and securities-fraud case built around nonexistent business.