The King of Cons

Fortune features Barry Minkow:

Frenetic energy was the signature feature of the ZZZZ Best (pronounced Zee Best) crimes. To launch the business, Minkow borrowed money from a loan shark. To expand it he stole jewelry from his grandmother; stole and forged checks and money orders; kited checks; altered customers' credit card receipts and forged their names on new charges; staged burglaries at his own offices and filed bogus insurance claims; fabricated invoices, financial statements, and tax returns; led lenders on a tour of a phony work project; defrauded banks; and, finally, hoodwinked a Big Eight accounting firm and a Wall Street law firm into helping him pull off a public stock offering. While doing all this he starred in the company's funny TV commercials, which played off the notion that most carpet cleaners were scam artists.
After the company collapsed, but before his arrest, his mother suggested he see her Christian spiritual counselor. (She had converted earlier.) Calculating that a quicky conversion might help him with his looming legal problems, Minkow agreed.
"But God took my wrong motives and accepted me despite my manipulative personality," he later explained in the second of his four autobiographical books. (Minkow disavows the first, Making It in America, which was published during his ZZZZ Best crime spree.)
At first, Minkow's conversion did not crimp his penchant for rococo lying. In a 60 Minutes segment that aired in early 1988 he told Diane Sawyer that all the ZZZZ Best crimes were committed without his knowledge by his top lieutenants. Later, he switched defenses, testifying at trial that, yes, he had committed the crimes, but had done so under duress from mobsters. "Thus," writes Minkow in his second autobiography, "I put my relationship with Jesus (now well over a year old) on the back burner and lied under oath to avoid prison and impress the public."

That was just when he was young.  After prison, he ended up running a big evangelical church, and managed to get back to the con.  The whole article is worth reading, as the guy is crazy crooked.  He ended up stealing from trusting churchgoers as he tried to maintain his scam.  Pretty amazing.