Case Study Of Barry Minkow

In 1995, Barry Minkow was released from prison for good behavior. During his eight-year prison term, he earned advanced degrees from Liberty University in divinity. He also became a fraud investigator. The FBI used Barry as an informant because of his knowledge of fraudulent practices and journalist enlisted him to provide tips. Even though Barry claimed that God was the reason for his early release from prison and transformation, it was most likely because he was so helpful to the FBI (Lewis, 2014). After getting out of prison, Barry Minkow was chosen as Pastor of a San Diego-based church. While he was spending time building up his congregation at the San Diego Community Bible Church; he also spoke at seminars, gave speeches and wrote
He claimed that the President of Herbalife, Gregory Probert lied about having a Masters of Business Administration degree. Mr. Probert claimed in 19 SEC filings that he had the required degree from the California State University, but upon further investigation from Barry Minkow’s company it was determined that Mr. Probert did not have a degree in which he claimed (Winstein, 2008). The day this information was made public, the stock for Herbalife took a downfall and was priced at $40.08, it took a 9% hit. Barry Minkow made $50,000 after this stock took a nosedive. This activity proved to be legitimate because both the FBI and SEC had access to the trade account prior to anything occurring, and Minkow had revealed to them that he was betting that the stock would dip. (Bauder,
Marsch told Minkow his allegations against the Lennar Corp., which due to its ranking on the Fortune 500 list, this company was a totally different animal than what Minkow was used to. Marsch alleged that the Lennar Corp. had swindled him concerning two development projects. Marsch claims that they misappropriated his $39 million investment and then denied him his share of the proceeds. Lennar countered these allegations in a legal suit by saying that Marsch was the one cheating and that he was attempting to extort money from Lennar. Marsch decided to send a letter to seven of the outside directors for Lennar stating that he knew of dirty secrets that the CEO and COO were hiding and that if they did not want these secrets exposed they needed to resolve this legal matter in Marsch’s favor. This claim in turn prompted Lennar to file a new legal suit against Marsch on extortion charges. With these new charges being brought against Marsch, he decided to hire Minkow. Minkow emailed Marsch what he called an engagement letter; this email contained a confidential proposal which laid out their plan of attack. Phase I of their attack would be to investigate not only the claims by Marsch, but to look at other lawsuits brought against Lennar and make videos of these; this would lay out the foundation for their case. This evidence was