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Not that there was much opportunity for lolling around. Like many who make their fortune before they shave, he was an obsessive worker and something of an office tyrant. Former staffers recall that he insisted on being called "sir" or "Mr. Minkow," yet would habitually forget their names or call them by unflattering sobriquets. Challenged, he would reply, "My way or the highway." He once reportedly boasted that he would fire his own mother if she stepped out of line.
The problems began last May when the Los Angeles Times published a report alleging that in 1984 and 1985, ZZZZ Best had rung up $72,000 in false credit- card charges. The paper also reported that the same thing happened a year later at a flower shop owned by ZZZZ Best's chief operating officer, this time for a total of $91,000. Minkow blamed both overcharges on unscrupulous subcontractors and an employee, and repaid all the customers.
Although his explanations were riddled with troubling contradictions, it looked as if Minkow was going to come out of the controversy relatively unscathed. Then, two weeks ago, he abruptly resigned from the company he had founded, citing unspecified health problems. Four days later, ZZZZ Best's new management filed a suit charging Minkow with several multimillion-dollar deceptions, including allegations that he had withdrawn $3 million from company accounts for his own personal use and diverted an additional $18 million in company funds to a firm owned by an associate.
The most stunning revelations, however, were those unveiled two days later by the Los Angeles police. In a dramatic midweek press conference, Chief Daryl Gates revealed a three-month investigation that had linked ZZZZ Best to the drug-profit laundering operation. As the police tell it, ZZZZ Best was probably acting as a front for organized crime figures, who would buy equipment for the company with "dirty" money and replace their investment with "clean" cash skimmed from the proceeds of the firm's legitimate business. According to Gates, the spectacular growth in revenues that led to Minkow's fame was in fact an elaborate fiction.
Shares of ZZZZ Best stock, which had traded for more than $18 a share three months ago, plummeted last week to less than $1, triggering suits by flabbergasted stockholders. One investor is reported to have lost $7 million in the debacle. But the hardest hit was Minkow. Not only had his $100 million stock holdings shrunk to less than $6 million, but his oft announced dream of making ZZZZ Best the "General Motors of carpet cleaning" was irrevocably shattered. Once lionized as an emblem of what brash youth can do, he had become, almost overnight, a symbol of where overreaching ambition can lead.