The Redeemed Sinner in our popular culture is a mirror-image of the Fallen Saint; each inspires the suspicion that his transformation is never quite complete -- just as the latter's halo can never be entirely sullied by waywardness, the former's sin can never be totally expiated.
This thought is prompted by the saga of former white-collar jailbird Barry Minkow, 42, who got back in the news recently by taking the stock of Lennar Corp. down 20% in a single day.
Minkow accomplished this feat by posting online a 30-page screed accusing Lennar of cheating its land development partners for years, and its chief operating officer of making a suspicious deal for a third mortgage on his Laguna Beach home, possibly as a kickback (though to whom and for what isn't clear). He compared Lennar to Bernie Madoff and Enron, and not in a nice way.
Miami-based Lennar, as one would expect from the nation's second-biggest home builder, has fired back with both barrels. It denies cheating its partners, characterizes the mortgage as a legitimate deal to finance the COO's purchase of Lennar shares, and notes that Minkow is working for a man involved in pending litigation against the company. Last week, Lennar sued Minkow and his self-styled investigative outfit, Fraud Discovery Institute, alleging libel.
It's worth stepping back for a moment to consider Minkow's career. As a kid from Inglewood, he built his home-grown carpet cleaning company, ZZZZ Best, into a $200-million behemoth. Except it wasn't. ZZZZ Best was exposed in 1987 as a Ponzi scheme fueled by credit-card fraud and partially financed by a mobster. Minkow, who had taken the company public, claimed a net worth of $90 million and appeared on Oprah as an entrepreneurial whiz kid, served seven years in prison.
The rest of the story is sadly familiar. Minkow experienced a religious epiphany in prison, a phenomenon I like to think of as the Chuck Colson Conversion, after a certain Watergate conspirator. Following his release in 1995, Minkow lined up a pastorate at a Christian church in San Diego and set up Fraud Discovery Institute, the mission of which is to expose investment scams very much like ZZZZ Best.
Minkow's pitch is based on the principle of setting a thief to catch a thief, the same rationale for FDR's appointing the stock manipulator Joseph P. Kennedy as the first chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission. Minkow sometimes talks as though he thinks his past is his best credential as an investigator, constantly referring to himself in conversation as "a former perpetrator of fraud."
