Today's Outrage: Skeptics Missing at SEC

As soon as the ink was dry on the bad news about Minkow, I and several dozen other recipients were instantly bombarded with emails from Patrick Byrne, CEO of Overstock.com(OSTK). Byrne, best known for blaming his company's endless problems on the "Sith Lord," was exultant about Minkow's woes. Minkow had never written about Byrne, but he was close to another convicted felon named Sam Antar, who masterminded the Crazy Eddie fraud and now exposes the kind of creeps that he used to be. The problem, for Byrne, is that Overstock is no Lennar, and Antar's posts on Overstock's accounting irregularities have been proven correct by Overstock's multiple restatements. Byrne, undeterred, had an Overstock employee post a blog item comparing his boss to that poor lady in Libya who came to the foreign media with rape allegations. Yep, you read that correctly.

Companies can get away with stuff like that -- phony blogs, mendacious lawsuits or just acting like creeps -- because we live in a society where CEOs can get away with murder and which relies on private research firms, short sellers and ex-cons to blow the whistle on them. Minkow, who once gave every sign of turning over a new leaf, has given a new lease on life to corporate charlatans everywhere. I hope he rots in jail.

>To order reprints of this article, click here: Reprints