Criminal - Crazy Eddie

Episode Date: March 17, 2023

In the 1980s, the discount electronics chain store Crazy Eddie was so famous, its commercials were parodied on "Saturday Night Live." So when the family business began selling its company shares on Wall Street — making millions — nobody questioned its success. Gary Weiss’ book is Retail Gangster: The Insane, Real-Life Story of Crazy Eddie.  Say hello on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram. Sign up for our occasional newsletter, The Accomplice. Follow the show and review us on Apple Podcasts: iTunes.com/CriminalShow. Listen back through our archives at youtube.com/criminalpodcast.  We also make This is Love and Phoebe Reads a Mystery. Artwork by Julienne Alexander. Check out our online shop.  Episode transcripts are posted on our website. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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It's Crazy Eddie Day. Say big, big, big bucks during Crazy Eddie's Crazy Eddie Day sale. Crazy Eddie, his prices are insane! The Crazy Eddie commercials were forever blasting, 24 hours a day, particularly at night. And if you were an insomniac, maybe you'd see 14 Crazy Eddie commercials in the course of an evening. Because they were constant. They were everywhere. Crazy Eddie was a chain store that sold discount electronics. It ran over 7,000 radio and TV commercials in the late 1970s and 80s. Edison came up with lots of great ideas, but nothing as great as a new Crazy Eddie Edison New Jersey Superstore. Yes, Crazy Eddie. Almost all the commercials followed a simple formula. They started a disc jockey named Jerry Carroll,

standing in front of some assortment of electronics, wearing a gray turtleneck under a black blazer. He repeated the same catchphrases over and over. Crazy Eddie, his prices are insane! Crazy Eddie, light up your life with prices that are insane! Crazy Eddie, his prices are portably insane. At its peak, Crazy Eddie had 43 stores in four states across the Northeast. Crazy Eddie was known for its sales. If you saw something listed for a lower price at another store in the city,

you were encouraged to bring the evidence to Crazy Eddie. Salesmen were known to match prices right there on the floor. Author and journalist, Gary Weiss. It became almost a symbol of New York, Ed Koch, did at the time. In 1977, the Village Voice ran an article titled, Crazy Eddie Revealed. It said, The article asked, Who is Crazy Eddie anyway? No one from the company offered a direct answer.

They seemed to encourage the mystery. The director of advertising said, quote, I suppose in the past, there was a Crazy Eddie. He continued, there are several Eddies among the people who work here and own the place. But in reality, there is only one Crazy Eddie. Eddie was peculiar, you know, he was a peculiar guy. He was very superstitious. Eddie Antar declined to do interviews with the press.

He often refused even to be photographed and wore the same old sweater for years. People knew to expect Eddie to bring his dog to important meetings, a German shepherd named Sugar. One person who worked with him told the New York Times, if Eddie and the dog don't like the deal, it's a problem. He had a gym in his office. He used to greet visitors hanging upside down from gravity boots. He was eccentric. He was magnetic. Eddie Antar ran the business with members of his family,

including his younger cousin, Sammy Antar, who said he started working for the company when he was 14. If there's a question that I don't want to answer because it's a personal question or something like that, you know, I'll just say it. Okay, okay. Just don't be shy. Don't worry about it. Sammy Antar worked for Crazy Eddie for over 15 years.

His last title was Chief Financial Officer. Tell me about your relationship to Crazy Eddie. Crazy Eddie Antar was my first cousin and my mentor. What was your relationship to him growing up? Well, you ever see Happy Days with the Fonz? Yeah. Well, he was like the Fonz. He was the cool guy.

He was the tough guy. He used to work out with weights. He was like a very big figure in the community and in the neighborhood. Did you see him becoming successful when you were a teenager and think, you know, that's something I'd like to be when I grow up. I'd like to have the same type of power and finesse and ability to make things happen. Yes. But we were expected to work within the family business.

So my whole life was based upon capitalism, entrepreneurship, making money. And that was the way that I was taught. As Sammy put it, it wasn't about right and wrong. I'm Phoebe Judge. This is Criminal. Eddie Antar's first experience selling electronics was on the streets around Times Square. As a teenager in the 1960s, he made money scamming tourists. Sammy Antar told Gary Weiss that Eddie could sell a $25 camera for $250. That was where Eddie learned the art of being a super salesman, to really sell, the hard sell. And when he reached the age of 21, Eddie was set up in business by his father on a place called King's Highway.

Not Times Square, King's Highway. That's a place in Brooklyn. That's where your clientele were all very, very tough customers. They weren't tourists. The store was called Sights and Sounds. He wanted to sell Sony. He wanted to sell Bose. He wanted to sell the top quality products.

And he wanted to sell them at a discount. That was his only possible competitive advantage. But back in those days, the fair trade laws, they would basically determine the retail prices in the stores. In effect, in most states, they outlawed discounting. The fair trade law that governed New York State allowed manufacturers, not the retailers, to set the minimum prices for their products.

This ended up raising the prices of goods, like electronics, across the city. Gary Weiss says Eddie got around the law by buying electronics from a place in the Bronx called Corner Distributors. It was an authorized dealer with brands like Sony, but its main business was not in electronics. It was a front for an illegal gambling operation.

So Eddie could get the name brand authorized equipment, and then he could resell it for whatever price he wanted. Eddie had a whole spiel to give his, that he taught his salesmen on how to sell products. He used, it was more than just hard sell. It was what today would be called consumer fraud. I guess in those days it was called consumer fraud as well. One of the many techniques that he had,

if you came in for a Sony product, for instance, he would try to switch you to a lower-priced product. Now, it might seem actually like he's doing you a favor and he doesn't want you to spend for Sony. But he actually made more money. He actually had a higher profit margin on the lower-priced product. So he engaged in bait-and-switch. The name-brand equipment was just supposed to lure you in. Here's Sammy Antar.

90% of the customers that walked into a Crazy Eddie store did not walk out with the product that they initially intended to purchase. It was a three-way system. We call it like the three musketeers. Sammy says a customer would have to go through three salespeople before they were allowed to buy the thing they came for. If something was out of stock, the crazy Eddie salesman would do something called lunching. They'd say to you, look, the guy's going out to lunch.

It was like a code. Anyone working at the store knew what they had to do when they heard the word lunch. They'd take this display model, they'd bring it out to the back, they'd repackage it using, you know, all the great, you know, the wonderful tape and whatever they did, a wonderful, they'd be repackaging it and bring it out, you'd say, hey, here's the final Sony that we have in the back. And actually, they had taken the display model that might have been poured over by 400 customers, and they tried to sell it to you as new.

Eddie would then upsell customers on accessories and offer them worthless extended warranty contracts. According to state law, Eddie also charged sales tax on all merchandise. But he wouldn't report all his sales, so he ended up with extra cash. Courtesy of who? Courtesy of the New York State sales tax department. Now, that also gave us room to discount. Where other competitors were law-abiding, we weren't, so we had the edge. So Crazy Eddie was a discounter that gave the best prices,

but it was subsidized by income tax evasion. My first year, I got a $1,500 bonus at 14 years old in 1971. What is that worth today? You know, that's the kind of money that I was making for Eddie. Sights and Sounds was renamed Crazy Eddie in 1973. The next year, it opened a second location on Long Island. The two stores did so well that a year later, a Crazy Eddie opened in Manhattan. It was on 6th Avenue in Greenwich Village. He knew that he had to expand. He needed the Manhattan crowd.

He needed the baby boomers, you know, who thrived on music, you know. This was the Woodstock generation. This was the generation where music was sort of gave voice to a certain attitude. And so you had to, like, you needed great equipment to listen to these people. So no matter how anti-establishment you were back in those days, no matter how much of a rebel you were, well, gosh, you needed to spend out the money. You had to pay the capitalist money to give you, you know,

the products that you needed so that you could lock yourself in your room and blast all that music. At the retail level, Crazy Eddie knew how to exploit that market better than anyone else. Crazy Eddie released its first television commercial with the disc jockey Jerry Carroll in 1976. At the time, Gary Weiss says, you could buy overnight commercial slots for as little as

$10. The company's director of advertising told him that Crazy Eddie's strategy was repetition. Quote, drumming it in. It's a Crazy Eddie blowout blitz! Crazy Eddie's not playing with a full deck because he's practically giving away TVs, VCRs, Michael A. Lovin' stereo rack systems, video camcorders, anything and everything, and home entertainment, and lots of home appliances, too. Remember, we are not undersold so we will not be under. In the late 70s, Crazy Eddie released a commercial

where Jerry Carroll appeared on a dance floor. He was dressed like John Travolta in Saturday Night Fever, which had just come out. When you're feeling ready, dance back to Crazy Eddie. He's the man who's got the most hysteria sound. He was all your selection, you know, the Crazy Eddie commercials had become so popular and so well-known that you read that James Brown wanted to be spokesperson. Yeah, James Brown. Yeah, the godfather of soul. Can you read that James Brown wanted to be spokesperson. Yeah, James Brown, the godfather of soul. Can you imagine that?

He was huge in the 60s. But no, they actually turned him down. They stuck with Jerry Carroll. They stuck with the Screamer commercials. The commercials made Jerry Carroll a sort of celebrity. When a new Crazy Eddie store opened in New Jersey in 1978, around 20,000 people stood in line for a chance to meet him and get a free T-shirt.

And then it just started multiplying stores. A store here, a store there, a store here, a store there. As the chain expanded, they kept evading taxes. But that wasn't all they were doing. At the time, you know, temperatures, winters got really cold in New York or in the New York State metropolitan area. Now, most retailers to avoid floods, keep the water running at a little level so that the water doesn't freeze inside the pipes and cause the pipes to burst from the water pressure. Well, we didn't do that

because we wanted, there was merchandise that we couldn't return to manufacturers. It was damaged merchandise. So the best way to take care of that was to make sure that it was underwater in a flood. So anytime there was a rainstorm, we would take the merchandise, we'd move the unsellable merchandise

from various stores and make sure that that store had a flood. They submitted insurance claims for the damaged merchandise. Now, after we were paid for these goods by the insurance company, we put the merchandise inside and saved it for the next flood. That was called flood goods. So rain was a good thing. Yes, rain was a good thing. Storms were even better. We didn't believe in setting fires because that

was too dangerous. We were, you know, a kind of gentler kind of crooks, so to speak, in that regard. We'll be right back. recommend Wondery's Ghost Story, a seven-part series that follows journalist Tristan Redman as he tries to get to the bottom of a ghostly presence in his childhood home. His investigation takes him on a journey involving homicide detectives, ghost hunters, and even psychic mediums, and leads him to a dark secret

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and that would be me. I used to read the Wall Street Journal and Barron's and the Wall Street Transcript regularly. I mean, I was fascinated by Wall Street and numbers and statistics and baseball, even baseball statistics. So Eddie saw, you know, that in me. And for me, accounting was a natural. At Baruch, Sammy told Gary Weiss he attended lectures by the professor Abraham J. Briloff.

Briloff was known as an accounting critic. His writing exposed the ways companies could create fraudulent profits in their books. Baruch now awards ethics prizes in his name. But Briloff made a different impression on Sammy. You realize, first of all, you have to learn how to do things right before you learn how to do things wrong. So it was kind of like I started to learn, and I started to pick up weaknesses.

I started to pick up things. Like I learned that audits of public companies by external accounting firms are really not meant to catch fraud. They're really meant to take a sampling of the information that they get and make sure that there's no unintentional errors in the numbers. It's not looking for intentional errors in the numbers. As Sammy learned more about accounting, the Antar started talking about an idea they had for the future of Crazy Eddie.

Around 1979, there was two directions we can go. We could either be a private company, you know, garden variety, income tax evaders and file false insurance claims, or go in the other direction, Wall Street. The idea was to take Crazy Eddie public. Selling shares of the company to outside investors could be a quick way for the Antares to make a lot of

money. Or as Sammy put it, we could unload our stock at inflated prices on unsuspecting victims. It's much more profitable to screw investors, to steal from investors, than it is to steal from the IRS and evade taxes.

So far, Eddie had been under-reporting Crazy Eddie's profits. He'd pay less in taxes and store the extra cash at his house or send it out of the country. Here's Gary Weiss. And Sammy said, look, you know, you're taking all this money out of the business because you don't want to pay taxes on it. Okay, that's understandable.

But you're shooting yourself in the foot. You're cutting into your profits, and you want your profits to grow. The higher the company's profits, the higher its stock price. Sammy had a plan for how to increase profits. He told Eddie to stop skimming money, but to do it gradually, so it would look like business was steadily growing.

It caused the profit numbers to be grossly inflated. It was one year the profits were actually up 2%. But because of this manipulation, because of the way he was reducing the skim systematically, he changed a 2% increase to a 35% increase. It was a wonderful idea. It was, of course, it was a felony. It was securities fraud, but nobody thought about that.

And then tell, explain to me what you needed to do to convince Wall Street that they should buy into Crazy Eddie. Wall Street, they're not too bright on Wall Street. They look at numbers and see that the numbers are going up, and that's what they care about. Crazy Eddie had a good reputation. It was well known. Its commercials were even made fun of on Saturday Night Live. Hi, I'm Crazy Edelman, the discount psychiatrist, and my prices are absolutely insane! Hey, what do you see here? I see prices so low that it's practically criminal. It's enough of a steal to satisfy a kleptomaniac. You know, in those days, we're talking the 1980s. This is before Enron. This was before the big scandals of the early 2000s and so forth. And so, you know,

if a CEO is doing well, the CEO was trusted. The company was trusted. Did anyone ever show any suspicion? No. No. I wouldn't say any credible suspicion. I mean, you were still pretty young as you were doing all of this. Did you ever think to yourself, I'm a little over my head here. You know, I think I have an idea that's going to make us a lot of money,

but maybe I'm taking on too much. No. Never entered my mind. Remember, no criminal in prison today expected to end up there. Yes, we take calculated risks. We take steps to avoid those risks coming to fruition. But at the end of the day, no criminal expects to end up in prison. In September 1984, Crazy Eddie had its initial public offering, its IPO. Its symbol on the New York Stock Exchange was CRZY.

The shares sold out. What was the day of the IPO like? Oh, it was exciting. It was exhilarating. It was a moment for me personally as a moment of triumph, and the family was very proud of me. Do you remember what your cousin said to you? Remember what Crazy Eddie said to you? We're going to go places.

You're coming with us. The usual nonsense. You know, usual pep talk nonsense. But he said you had done a good job. Yes. So now that the company is public, what do you have to do to maintain this whole scheme that you've got going on? Well, remember, we started off as garden variety income tax evaders and understated our income.

From 1979, we were still garden variety income tax evaders, but we're understating our income by less money each year. So by the time we got to 1984 and came out with our numbers, those are reasonably legitimate numbers. Probably the most honest numbers that we reported were in 1984. So we could have stopped the fraud at that point and had the perfect crime. But the Antares didn't stop. We'll be right back. you just need a different approach according to noom losing weight has less to do with discipline and more to do with psychology noom is the weight loss management program that focuses on the science

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through distinctive design and immersive experiences, from medieval falconry to volcanic wine tasting. Autograph Collection is part of the Marriott Bonvoy portfolio of over 30 hotel brands around the world. Find the unforgettable at autographcollection.com. In 1985, someone from Sony told the New York Times, The rules in the New York market are simple. If you want to be visible, you've got to be in Crazy Eddie's.

Sammy Antar says that for a few years after its IPO, Crazy Eddie was actually doing well. But, you know, Eddie and his dad and his family got greedy, and I was more than willing to help. So as numbers started to come in, they wanted to start boosting the numbers, and that's where we started to get in trouble. Sammy kept inflating Crazy Eddie's profits, and the stock price skyrocketed. He says that over the first three years the company was public,

the family made over $90 million from selling their shares. But eventually, the company's real profits slowed. Was there a moment when you realized that this had all gotten too big, that this had gotten out of control? Yes. In 1987, when we start losing money, and I have to understate the losses, I realized then it was going to crash. So I started taking steps not to cook the books. In fact, instead of losing, say, $10 million, I put $15 million in losses. Okay, so this way we can gain some ground on the fraud.

Sammy suddenly had to do the opposite of what he'd done for years. Now he had to overstate Crazy Eddie's losses to try to bring the exaggerated numbers closer to reality. As Gary Weiss put it, it was like letting air out of a balloon, so it didn't pop if you stuck in a pin. The stock price dropped by more than half. But there was someone who still believed in the value of Crazy Eddie, a businessman based in Texas named Elias Zinn. Elias Zinn had also made his money selling discount electronics, but he was very different from Eddie Antar.

Gary Weiss writes that he loved to give interviews to the press. He encouraged the media's nickname for him, Easy. And in 1987, he told the Wall Street Journal, I want to run Crazy Eddie. I think it's a gold mine. The Antares had inadvertently given Elias Zinn an opening to take over their company. The stock price was low because Sammy over-reported losses. The Antars had also sold too many of their own shares. Sammy says they had, quote, milked the company dry. It was the perfect opportunity for someone to buy enough shares to become the majority owner.

But Elias Zinn and his business partners didn't know what they were getting into. And we tried to stop them from taking over the company without telling them, of course, there's a fraud, but we couldn't. Not without admitting to years of fraud. We were caught because we were the victims of our own success. The people that took over Crazy Eddie thought that they were buying the goose that laid the golden egg for a penny. And eventually, they took over the company. They bought enough stock, bought in the Antar's head, and they took over the company and tossed us out. After the takeover, the new chief financial officer of Crazy Eddie went into Sammy Antar's office to look for paperwork about the company's finances. There was nothing there. Filing cabinets were empty. Even the labels had been

taken off empty folders. The new owners set out to check the inventory of every Crazy Eddie store and warehouse. So they come in and they take over the company. Oh my goodness, look at this. The warehouses don't have all the merchandise that they were supposed to have. They were stunned. Gary Weiss says that by their own count, they had found that Crazy Eddie's merchandise was worth $75 million.

But the company had put that number at over $126 million. Older stores are still operating, but now they're operating by people who realize that it's a fraud. The company is suffering. The stock price has collapsed. It comes out in the media that there's probably a fraud going on. Behind the scenes, behind the scenes, Sam E. Antar, the cousin, is under a lot of pressure. He's the CFO. He's the chief financial officer of the company. So he naturally comes under suspicion.

Obviously, there's accounting fraud going on. He's the chief accountant. Sammy was brought to Washington to testify in front of the SEC. He told us, rather than plead the fifth, I thought I could lie. He denied everything. Now, I'm on my own. I was lying under oath and protecting the family and getting others to lie

under oath and had destroyed documents. Eddie, meanwhile, is not smart. Eddie does not support Sammy. Sammy is going into debt to pay off his bills, to pay his lawyers. So Sammy Antar, in the great tradition of corporate crime and organized crime, he becomes an informant.

Why did you decide to inform on Crazy Eddie to the FBI? Well, first of all, I'm no hero. The reason why I decided to turn on Eddie was not because I had this moral awakening. I didn't see, you know, I didn't find God. I didn't find morality. I didn't all of a sudden become an ethical person. I didn't all of a sudden start feeling sorry for my victims. It was simply an issue where Eddie was going to

hang me out to dry. And I didn't want to go to prison for 20 years with a wife and three young children at the time. So it wasn't a moral decision. It was because I wanted to save my own ass. Do you remember the first time that you talked to Eddie, knowing that you were an informant? Was it hard to do? Was it hard to be playing both sides? No, it was actually fun at the time. Because it was kind of like, you know, there was so much, I was so upset with the position that this thing put me into, that it was actually something I wanted to do. Sammy says it seemed like Eddie knew something was going on.

He remembers that once, Eddie made him change into a bathing suit when they met at a friend's house. Eddie wanted to make sure he wasn't wearing a wire. Sammy told the FBI everything he could remember. There was an FBI guy, his name was Paul Hayes, very, very, you know, like a Lieutenant Columbo. He asked questions, but he understood human psychology and motivation. And after a while, Paul Hayes became my new father figure other than Eddie.

So I did things not only to save my ass, but to please Paul, to make Paul Hayes proud of me, so to speak. And that started the process of feeling guilty. It didn't happen all at once. I didn't one day wake up. But once I was exposed to different people with a different set of values, right, I started to start feeling empathy. The process of empathy took a while.

It didn't happen right away. In October 1989, as Sammy continued to work with the government, Crazy Eddie declared bankruptcy. Any remaining Crazy Eddie stores were ordered closed. Eddie Antar was charged with what the SEC called, quote, massive financial fraud. But the trial wouldn't begin until 1993, because Eddie Antar fled the country to Israel. It took almost three years for the government to get him back to the United States. What was it like when you finally had to face Eddie in court? Nothing. It was, um, I just looked right through him.

In other words, I looked at him, but I looked through him. Were you angry at him? I mean, were you angry? Yes, I was very upset, of course, because he could have guarded me in a different way. He could have exercised real leadership and taken responsibility because he, and of course, I'm not going to exclude these, other members of his family made all the money. But they didn't. They left me out to hang. Were you angry at him for not, when you were 14 years old, saying to you, hey, this is

the way I'm doing it. Don't do this with your life. Don't scam people. Yes, I said to him, you brought us up to be crooks. Sammy Antar pleaded guilty to conspiracy to commit securities fraud, conspiracy to commit mail and wire fraud, and obstruction of justice. He didn't serve any jail time. Eddie Antar served nearly seven years.

Sometime after he was released in 2001, Eddie Antar leased an office and warehouse space in New Jersey. It was over 6,000 square feet. He used it to reopen Crazy Eddie as an internet distributor of electronics. He hired Jerry Carroll to tape a new set of commercials. People aren't going to worry about buying from Crazy Eddie, he told the New York Times, because they remember the great service they got in the stores over the years. Crazy Eddie always meant great service above everything.

It didn't work. In September of 2016, Eddie Antar died at the age of 68. A Wall Street Journal reporter wrote, I experienced a whiff of something resembling nostalgia at the news of Mr. Antar's passing. He evoked a less slick and knowing era in the life of the city. And in The New Yorker, someone wrote, In this age of Dwayne Reeds and Chase Banks on every corner,

I'm wistful for Crazy Eddie. Gary Weiss' book is Retail Gangster, the insane, real-life story of Crazy Eddie. We'll have the link on the website. Criminal is created by Lauren Spohr and me. Nadia Wilson is our senior producer. Katie Bishop is our supervising producer. Our producers are Susanna Robertson, Jackie Sajico,

Libby Foster, Lily Clark, Lena Sillison, and Megan Kinane. Our technical director is Rob Byers. Engineering by Russ Henry. Julian Alexander makes original illustrations for each episode of Criminal. You can see them at thisiscriminal.com.

We're on Facebook and Twitter at Criminal Show and Instagram at criminal underscore podcast. And we're also on YouTube, where you can go back and take a listen to some of our favorite past episodes. That's at youtube.com slash criminal podcast. Criminal is recorded in the studios of North Carolina Public Radio, WUNC. We're part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. Discover more great shows at podcast.voxmedia.com. I'm Phoebe Judge. This is Criminal. The number one selling product of its kind with over 20 years of research and innovation, Botox Cosmetic, Adabotulinum Toxin A,

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