BOOK REVIEW : 2 Authors Put Minkow and ZZZZ Best Under Microscope

Wonder Boy: Barry Minkow--The Kid Who Swindled Wall Street by Daniel Akst (Scribner’s: $19.95, 288 pages).

Faking It in America: Barry Minkow and the Great ZZZZ Best Scam by Joe Domanick (Contemporary Books: $19.95, 288 pages).

Barry Minkow was a crude but gifted young hype artist from Reseda who scammed a couple of hundred million dollars in a vast Ponzi scheme that masqueraded as a carpet-cleaning business called ZZZZ Best Co. The story of Minkow’s rise and fall is so weird and wacky, and yet so revealing about the dark side of the American dream, that it readily supports not one but two new books.

“Wonder Boy,” by veteran business reporter Danny Akst, is full of the bells and whistles of what used to be called New Journalism--at times, the book is so dazzling that it seems to hype the hypester. “Faking It in America,” by free-lance journalist Joe Domanick, is a yeoman-like book of reportage, full of hard facts and clear exposition.

“In a real sense, there really was no ZZZZ Best,” writes Akst in the slick, savvy prose that characterizes his version of the Minkow story. “What there was, mainly, was the 3-D, Technicolor, Sensurround imagination of young Barry Minkow. . . . His whole life was a fiction. . . . His fraud was an imaginative triumph, and in fact its success and sweep may be attributed to Barry’s towering imagination. . . . Barry may have been crazy, but he certainly wasn’t blind. On the contrary, Barry Minkow was a visionary.”

Both Akst and Domanick tell the Minkow story in all its bizarre and sometimes prurient detail, and both books are populated with the oddballs and money-grubbers who surrounded Barry Minkow and helped him work the ZZZZ Best swindle: “ . . . the Nazi and the Ultimate White Man . . . former UCLA halfback . . . a specialist in applied physics . . . a stock swindler . . . a former Brooklyn holdup man, the world’s most oleaginous attorney, and various cops, call girls, bankers, brokers and weight lifters,” as Akst puts it.

What is shocking about the ZZZZ Best story is that Minkow, a feral but charismatic child-savant from the San Fernando Valley, managed to mesmerize not only a gang of low-life hangers-on, the “widows and orphans” who invested in ZZZZ Best, and the gullible and overstimulated media that turned Minkow into a celebrity, but also the Wall Street attorneys, accountants, bankers and stockbrokers who should have known better.

“He had the same gift as Adolf Hitler,” says Tom Padgett, a white supremacist and Odin-worshiper who became one of the unlikeliest of Minkow’s minions. The story of Barry Minkow and ZZZZ Best Co.--a story that starts with penny-ante credit-card and insurance swindles and quickly soars to securities fraud on a truly audacious scale--is nothing less than a vast epic of greed and villainy.

Both of these books began as journalism. Akst reported on ZZZZ Best for the Los Angeles Times; Domanick wrote about Minkow for Los Angeles Magazine. (And Domanick, a gracious and scrupulous reporter, credits Akst with the early revelations of the crimes behind the Minkow’s public relations facade in Akst’s stories for The Times.) Domanick has dressed up his reporting, packed it with colorful anecdotes, but he still seems to favor short, fact-filled, one-sentence paragraphs. I had the sense, too, that Domanick managed to get closer to his sources, especially Tom Padgett and Mark Morze, two of Minkow’s cohorts who allowed Domanick to interview them for “well over a hundred hours apiece,” according to the author’s acknowledgments.

Akst, on the other hand, apparently set out to make “Wonder Boy” into a hot read--and he mostly succeeds. Indeed, Akst does such a furious tap dance that we are almost invited to break into applause. He is the Sammy Davis Jr. of business reporting, a performer who delights in showing off his stuff. Akst gives us a kind of running patter with asides about everything from Southern California cultural anthropology to the medical treatment of hyperactivity--we know that we are in the hands of a virtual rapmaster in the realm of button-down business journalism. If I had to choose between “Wonder Boy” and “Faking It in America” for sheer entertainment value, I would have to choose “Wonder Boy.”

Both Akst and Domanick, for example, describe the San Fernando Valley, where Minkow grew up and learned the rackets, as “sun-baked.” But Akst goes on to rhapsodize that the Valley “sprawls hot and recumbent across the hills from Los Angeles like the city’s feverish hallucination of itself.” Domanick is accurate but hardly lyrical when he calls the Valley “a place characterized by endless rows of tract housing interrupted only by mini-malls and golden-arched, plastic-chicken-bucket signs that clutter its main thoroughfares.”

Both “Wonder Boy” and “Faking It” reveal how the ZZZZ Best scam worked in all its squalid and sometimes comic detail. But Akst is more illuminating about why it worked. During the 1980s, he points out, America “elevate(d) money-making to the level of a sacrament.”

“Guilt--healthy, civilizing, ennobling guilt--was out. We became so narcissistic that our sheer grasping selfishness didn’t interfere with our obsessive need to feel wholesome, to love ourselves. Echoing across the decade were the words of Ivan Boesky, that consummate crook, who proclaimed: ‘Greed is healthy. You can be greedy and still feel good about yourself.’ ” What we come to realize--more so in “Wonder Boy” than in “Faking It”--is that a manic hunger for love and money burned in Barry Minkow, his partners in crime, and even many of his victims. That crazy need to make it, that coked-up moral recklessness, is what enabled the bewitching carpet-cleaner from Reseda to run his scams for so long and at such an impressive scale. And that’s why the Minkow story is much more than a particularly colorful example of white-collar crime; it is, above all, a passion play with a peculiarly American setting.

“To those cursed with an apocalyptic perspective about the giddy prosperity of the decade and its flimsy financial and moral underpinnings,” Akst concludes, “(Minkow’s) story feels like a requiem.”