Six thousand dollar shower curtains. West Coast blackouts. Shredded documents. The list of corporate misdeeds around the turn of the millennium goes on and on.

Then, there’s the story of Allied Capital, as told by David Einhorn, founder of hedge fund firm Greenlight Capital who shorted the company and found himself in a six-year battle over that position. For those readers looking for salacious details like the ones in the introductory paragraph, they will be few and far between.

However, readers who want to find out, in detail, what a successful (and persistent) hedge fund manager does to earn his fees, Einhorn’s book, Fooling Some of The People All of The Time (John Wiley & Sons Inc. 2008), is a recommended read.

Einhorn claims that when he got up at a charity event on May 15, 2002 where he and other investment luminaries had been invited to present their best investment idea, he had no idea that his speech would send him on his odyssey against Allied, a business development company that provides financing for small- and mid-market, mostly private companies.

Einhorn had concluded that Allied was over-valuing a number of problematic investments, in an effort to hide losses from investors and regulators. He also thought that the company was taking much too long to write down losses from those investments.

One of the main investments that set off alarms for Einhorn was in Business Loan Express, an Allied subsidiary, which arranged government-backed Small Business Association loans. Einhorn’s research led him to believe that Business Loan Express was making poorly documented loans and sticking taxpayers with the bill when the loans defaulted.

Einhorn took a small short position in Allied since he was sure that the company’s aggressive accounting techniques would catch up to it. He related his findings to the assembled charitable donors.

The day after Einhorn’s speech, Allied’s stock fell almost 20%.

Allied went on the offensive immediately, tooting the old horn that short sellers were trying to run a good business into the ground.

The rest of the book is devoted to detailing Einhorn’s struggle to get Allied to ‘fess up to its misdeeds and to get lawmakers, regulators and business journalists interested in what the author believes is a fraud against shareholders and taxpayers.

That struggle included Einhorn himself coming under the gun from the Securities and Exchange Commission and then Attorney General Eliot Spitzer for his short-selling activity. Einhorn also discovered that Allied had gotten his personal phone records under false pretenses, an illegal action called “pretexting” now made famous by disgraced Hewlett Packard Chairwoman Patrician Dunn. Allied eventually admitted that it had gotten his phone records, but it never explained or apologized.

There are points in the book where a reader might sympathize with those who were, “Shocked. Shocked!” about Einhorn’s allegations (and then ignored them). Einhorn is so focused on making his economic points against Allied that he appears to have missed that the main reason nobody cared was because there was no high-level corporate theft and Allied managed to keep its stock prices up. Although Greenlight Capital has generated greater than a 25% annualized net return for its partners, according to the firm, the Allied investment was not one of its big winners.

Yet, in his geeky, micro-finance way, Einhorn tells a good story about the kind of exacting, balance-sheet due diligence investors should hope their private money managers employ. Not to mention their Wall Street banks.

History also provided Einhorn with the perfect moral for his story. As the subprime debacle and credit crunch have proved, when bad investments start to unravel, they can unravel fast.