PORTLAND, Ore. — Before his reputation spectacularly soured, Andrew Wiederhorn was one of Portland's business luminaries. Now, two decades after a scandal and criminal conviction , he's back in the news for eerily similar accusations in California.
With the new federal indictment, Wiederhorn is accused of taking millions of dollars in bogus loans over the course of decades from companies he controlled — loans which were later forgiven. The government argues that the money was income he should have paid taxes on, but he did not. His lawyers claim that he did nothing wrong.
Wiederhorn was a Portland wunderkind. He grew up in the Rose City, the son of a single mom, becoming a self-made millionaire at a young age. Oregonian reporter Jeff Manning covered Wiederhorn during his rise and fall in Portland.
"Boy, I can tell you a lot more than you'd ever want to know," Manning told The Story's Pat Dooris. "I've been following him since, believe it or not, the early '90s. And, uh .
.. he's a newsmaker.
You've got to give that to him." Manning said he recalls that Wiederhorn went to Lincoln High School, and has told stories of being either a busboy or a waiter at a long-shuttered restaurant in Northwest Portland. "He liked the buzz.
He liked the people that he helped order," Manning said. "He was really, really brilliant. And he started a company in his 20s and built it into a multimillion-dollar operation.
It was called Wilshire Financial, and for a while, it seemed like the real dea.
