‘King of the Con’ depicts how repeat swindler Barry Minkow suffered for the ‘devastating’ consequences of his crimes
Convicted conman Barry Minkow’s life has been one big lie, but he swears he’s telling the truth this time.
The docuseries “King of the Con,” which hit streamer discovery+ last Friday, tells the story of a whiz kid-turned-grifter who at 16 founded a successful California carpet-cleaning company as a way to make big headlines and bigger bucks.
But what started with a bogus money order to make payroll four decades ago quickly became a life of swindling — leading to multiple prison sentences, an addiction to drugs and the loss of his family.
Claiming that he agreed to tell his side of things in the three-part series to let fellow former convicts know they, too, can get out of their own way, a recently released — and supposedly reformed — Minkow told the Daily News, ”There’s hope. And it’s one step at a time and one meal at a time and one workout at a time.”
The San Fernando Valley native, now 55, gained national fame after founding ZZZZ Best cleaning company in 1982. At 20, he became a Wall Street star as the youngest person then to take a company public. He even made an appearance on “The Oprah Winfrey Show” in 1987.
By 21 Minkow was a fraudulent millionaire, his company basically a Ponzi scheme controlled by mobsters. He was convicted of 57 fraud counts in federal court by age 22. The former star entrepreneur was sentenced to 25 years, served eight and was out by age 30.
A few years later he was back behind bars, this time convicted for shorting homebuilder Lennar’s stocks. While in custody Minkow was sentenced to an additional five years for defrauding the church where he was pastor.
There’s little that Minkow isn’t willing to discuss on screen, from trading in his pride for piety via converting to Christianity in prison and his addiction to both attention and drugs.
Minkow also reflects on the affair he had with his church secretary, letting down congregants, and his return to prison, in turn abandoning wife Lisa, who went on to divorce him, and their twin sons when the kids were just 8.
But there are some things about Minkow that the series doesn’t show: the personal toll his actions took on his family.
“I think it was the relationship with the boys in just how difficult it was initially ... when I came out of prison and [my son] Dylan looked at me and said, ‘I don’t know you.’ And that was devastating,” Minkow told The News. “I started thinking, how many of my friends in prison had a similar experience, and how many people are out there today with drug addiction and betrayed their kids and let them down?”
Minkow was released from prison in 2018 and has since mended his relationship with his sons, who are now seniors in high school, and remarried Lisa. But for a guy who masterminded multiple schemes, Minkow admitted to The News that he never used to give much thought to the consequences his actions would have on his family.
“When you’re counting the cost before you commit a crime, you need to factor that in,” he said. “And when I found out it just killed me.”
