A Hollywood biopic celebrated a teenage con artist turned crusading fraud-busting pastor, with the real man playing himself, until he was arrested again for multimillion-dollar fraud and the ending had to be reshot. This episode deconstructs the cyclical life of Barry Minkow.

We trace his path from a 16-year-old running a carpet-cleaning company out of his parents' garage to the mastermind of the ZZZZ Best accounting fraud, and then from prison to celebrated fraud investigator and, finally, back to disgrace.

• Building ZZZZ Best on a fake insurance-restoration division that was most of its revenue
• Fooling auditors with staged job sites and forged documents before a Nasdaq IPO
• A persistent homemaker's credit-card complaint that unraveled the whole scheme
• Reinventing himself as head of the Fraud Discovery Inst ...