MiniScribe designed and sold stepper motor-based hard disk drives with a large amount of onboard logic for the time.

MiniScribe became a major player when it won a series of contracts to supply IBM's PC division, and their subsequent rapid growth led to an initial public offering in late 1983, opening for trading in January 1984.

Wiles took over the CEO position from Gower, running the company remotely from his office in Sherman Oaks, Los Angeles,[4] with a management team made up primarily of accountants.

This implied the cost to produce those drives that did sell was higher than initially thought, which, if properly booked against sales, would mean their operating margins would be unimpressive.

The managers rented a second warehouse in Colorado, where they personally packed 26,000 bricks into hard drive boxes and shipped them to Singapore to bolster the inventory count.

The directors began an internal investigation in October, while the company reported another record-setting quarter for that period in spite of failing to win either the Apple or DEC contracts.

Wiles responded to these positive reports by setting even higher sales targets, leading to ever-increasing fraud to meet them.

The directors report was released in the summer, stating that Wiles and his management team had "perpetrated a massive fraud" in a "company run amok".

When the company embarked on a round of layoffs just before the 1989 Christmas shutdown, including several of the employees who were involved in the brick scheme, they immediately called the Denver area newspapers, who broke the story.

[6] The company declared bankruptcy on January 1, 1990,[6] and was quickly liquidated with Maxtor acquiring its assets in a $46 million cash and stock deal in 1990.

Wiles was convicted of fraud and insider trading in July 1994 following a federal jury trial,[5] and sentenced to 36 months imprisonment.