Zzzz Best Co

ZZZZ Best Co., a Reseda carpet-cleaning firm headed by 21-year-old entrepreneur Barry Minkow, saw its market value shoot up $39 million Thursday in heavy stock trading fueled by an upbeat earnings projection. The stock closed at $10.125 a share, up $3.375 in over-the-counter trading, as a record 2.1 million shares of ZZZZ Best changed hands.

Barry Minkow, 30, was voted class clown by his graduating class at Cleveland High School in Reseda. In 1987 he proved that he deserved it, after his Reseda company, ZZZZ Best, collapsed like a house of cards. Minkow and his associates hoodwinked Wall Street firms, investors, accountants and lawyers through an elaborate series of cover-ups into believing that his company had won multimillion-dollar damage- cleanup contracts.

ZZZZ Best Co., the Reseda carpet cleaning firm headed by 21-year-old entrepreneur Barry Minkow, said Wednesday that Ernst & Whinney has resigned as the company's independent auditor and will be succeeded by Price Waterhouse. William Carter, vice chairman of Ernst & Whinney in Los Angeles, would not disclose why his firm parted company with ZZZZ Best.

Pacing up and down the aisles like a talk-show host, Barry Minkow exhorts his audience of accountants to stop cozying up to their corporate clients. "You're perceived as the corporate cop," he tells them. But auditors aren't doing their job, he says, if they let someone like him create 20,000 phony documents and then sweet-talk them out of checking his records properly. "When the auditor comes in, he's ready to fight," Minkow says as he jumps into a boxing stance.

A federal judge on Wednesday ordered a former ZZZZ Best Co. official to disgorge profits and pay damages totaling nearly $900,000 stemming from insider trading violations while at the now-defunct carpet cleaning firm. Jack N. Polevoi of Woodland Hills, who pleaded guilty in June to four counts of stock and tax fraud and other violations and is serving an 18-month prison sentence, was ordered by U.S. District Judge Robert J.

On a crisp Sunday last November, an official of the ZZZZ Best carpet-cleaning company took the firm's lawyer and accountant on a tour of an office building in Sacramento, a final inspection before they gave their go-ahead for a public stock sale that would bring the company into the Wall Street limelight. The lawyer and accountant were there to see how ZZZZ Best's most profitable line of business worked.

Attorneys representing Bruce Doniger filed the class-action lawsuit, seeking unspecified damages. The suit claims that Minkow manipulated the price of ZZZZ Best Co. through fraud and manipulation. Minkow is president of the carpet cleaning company.

"I am expanding to the hilt, and I have no shame." --From Barry Minkow's "Making It in America." Even as his financial empire was collapsing last summer, Barry Minkow planned to host a television show designed to counter the negative image of America's younger generation. A brochure for "Class of Tomorrow," which was being marketed by two producers to various networks, hailed the 21-year-old Wunderkind as nothing less than "what tomorrow's youth is all about."

Barry Minkow, once the FBI poster boy for fraud, teased the audience at an FBI-sponsored seminar Thursday in Santa Monica about being as stodgy as, well, bank executives. Which is what they were, 400 strong. Minkow paced and punched the air, half comic, half revival preacher. He told of convincing banks that he was a teen-age business genius.

Described by law enforcement officials as one of the most notorious white-collar criminals ever, Barry Minkow says he is now eager to make restitution for his crimes. Minkow swindled investors out of more than $26 million by falsely claiming his company ZZZZ Best--which he started as a teen-ager out of his parents' Reseda garage--could cheaply restore damaged office buildings. During his trial he contended he had been manipulated by organized crime figures.

From the moment authorities tried to brand him as the mob-connected mastermind behind the fraud-ridden ZZZZ Best carpet cleaning company, Maurice Rind issued a challenge: "They can investigate . . . until the world comes to an end, and they wouldn't come up with nothin'." Then, for nearly seven years, it looked like he might pull it off.

The Supreme Court, ruling in a case that grew out of the financial collapse of Barry Minkow's phony carpet-cleaning business, said Wednesday that banks and other lenders are entitled to keep recent interest payments from a bankrupt company, rather than turn them back to a bankruptcy trustee. The 9-0 ruling is a victory for lenders and a setback for the remaining creditors of a bankrupt firm, although the actual amount of money involved in the ZZZZ Best Co. case is relatively small.

Shares of ZZZZ Best Co., a fast-growing Reseda-based carpet-cleaning concern, tumbled Friday in very heavy over-the-counter trading. The stock closed down $4.25 at $11.125 as more than 1 million of the 11 million shares in public hands were traded. Traders said the selloff was a reaction to a story in The Times on Friday which reported that ZZZZ Best had submitted thousands of dollars in false credit card charges.