Returning to the INSAAANE: A New Biography of Crazy Eddie Antar "Retail Gangster," Pride of the SYs
David Shasha
Book Review: Crazy Eddie’s Life Was Insane!
By: Alexandra Jacobs
Gary Weiss, Retail Gangster: The Insane, Real-Life Story of Crazy Eddie, Hachette Books, 2022
The most famous TV ad in the Orwellian year of 1984, carefully themed to the novel named for this year, was for the Apple Macintosh desktop computer. The most infamous were those for Crazy Eddie, a chain of discount electronics stores in the New York metropolitan area.
Gesticulating wildly in a variety of costumes or just a gray turtleneck and a dark blazer, the actor Jerry Carroll, often mistaken for the mysterious Eddie, would rattle off a sales pitch ending with the vibrating, bug-eyed assurance: “His prices are INSANE!”
People hated those commercials, the journalist Gary Weiss reminds us in “Retail Gangster,” a compact and appealing account of Crazy Eddie’s artificially inflated rise and slow-mo collapse. But they worked — the company went public, with the inauspicious stock symbol CRZY — and also worked their way into punch lines of popular culture.
Daryl Hannah’s mermaid character watched a Crazy Eddie ad while learning English in “Splash.” Dan Aykroyd did a Crazy Ernie spoof on “Saturday Night Live.” And the spots themselves spoofed everything from “Saturday Night Fever” to “Casablanca” and Santa Claus, barraging the city that never sleeps in the cheap wee hours of overnight programming, becoming as much a component of its identity then as graffiti and Gray’s Papaya.
Subcutaneously, “Retail Gangster” is a tender requiem for a time, pre-streaming, when people tended to be tuned into the same things: movies in theaters, programs on television, Casey Kasem’s “American Top 40.” Also for a grittier, perhaps more colorful New York, which had hoisted itself out of the financial and existential abyss of the mid-1970s with pinstripes (Yankee, stockbroker), the punchy “I heart” iconography designed by Milton Glaser and — apparently — rock ’n’ roll-mad baby boomers buying stereo equipment.
But the meat of this limber book is its investigation into the deep family drama and funny money behind Crazy Eddie, which aggressively undercut competitors like Circuit City and The Wiz with some astonishingly shady business practices. Taking on this complicated if at first small potatoes-seeming story, Weiss is like that valorous spouse who decides to finally paw through the big box of tangled cords and wires in the basement and painstakingly straighten them out.
The real Eddie, last name Antar, was born in 1947 to Sam M. Antar, a window trimmer whose finances revolved around suitcases of cash known as “nehkdi,” and his second wife, Rosie Tawil, the daughter of a dry-goods salesman. They were part of a Syrian Jewish community in Brooklyn, nicknamed S-Y, that generally looked down on their Eastern European Jewish peers, whom they referred to as J-Dubs. Eddie was short but muscled and good-looking, nicknamed Kelso, after the racehorse. He dropped out of high school (where he met his first wife, Debbie Rosen, a J-Dub) and apprenticed for a young uncle at clip joints near 42nd Street in Manhattan before joining his father and cousin Ronnie in a TV and appliance enterprise on Kings Highway. And the rest is huckstory.
From the beginning of his career, Weiss shows with elegant incredulity, Antar skimmed, scammed, stole and pulled switcheroos: instructing employees to clean off display models or returned goods, for example, and rebox them as brand-new. Sales tax was routinely left unpaid. Warranty claims were fabricated. Improbable international schemes played out in Panama and St. Lucia. Even the Crazy Eddie logo for then-copious print advertisements, of a spike-haired guy in a bow tie, was lifted from the cartoonist Robert Crumb (though his long nose also suggests Pinocchio). When auditors materialized, female underlings were instructed to cozy up to them. “They did not want to believe we were crooks,” says another Antar cousin, Sammy, who would come to testify extensively against the company and who is Weiss’s No. 1 source.
Through copious interviews and court documents, Antar emerges not just as a crook and office bully but as a serial cheater and wife beater who attempted to give Debbie, mother of his five daughters (one of whom died of cancer at 18) “a big hot slice of bupkis” when they divorced; he remarried a woman also named Debbie, who bore him a son. As the court marshals closed in, his most valuable inventory became not air-conditioners and VCRs but security listening devices and paper shredders. After fleeing to Israel by exploiting that country’s Law of Return and falsifying his family’s passports, he did time there in the same jail where Adolf Eichmann was executed. Once he was extradited, Antar served almost seven years in U.S. federal prison and went on to attempt various comebacks, including — how anticlimactic this sounds!— a website, before dying at 68 in 2016.
An author of previous books on Wall Street, the Mafia and Ayn Rand, Weiss is sure-footed here, stepping around fading file boxes of legal material, with only occasional flights into infelicitous zoological metaphor. On one page we’re reading that “even after a feeding, the fraud rattlesnake did not feel sated. It only grew hungrier”; on another, that certain employees were “as innocent as baby lambs”; and on still another that “Crazy Eddie was like a wounded blue jay, squawking loudly in the grass while the red-tailed hawks circled overhead.” Someone alert the National Park Service!
The big cloud hanging over “Retail Gangster” is, of course, the internet. Apple’s commercial of marching automatons turned out to be the prescient and prevailing one. Carroll, the face and tireless voice of Crazy Eddie’s TV ads, died in 2020, unheralded. The stuff Crazy Eddie was selling had gone obsolete years before that, and so too — with all the bugs — its warm, funny, hustling touch.
From The New York Times, August 9, 2022
Eddie Antar, Retailer and Felon Who Created Crazy Eddie Stores, Dies at 68
By: Niraj Chokshi
Eddie Antar, the Brooklyn-born man who created the chain of Crazy Eddie electronics stores only to watch it collapse when an underlying fraud was exposed, died on Saturday. He was 68.
His death was confirmed by the Bloomfield-Cooper Jewish Chapels in Ocean Township, N.J., which did not say where he died or the cause.
Mr. Antar, who was born on Dec. 18, 1947, grew his business from a single Brooklyn store, founded in 1969, into the largest consumer electronics chain in the New York metropolitan area, fueled in large part by the spread of the VCR. At its peak, the chain had 43 stores, with locations as far north as Boston and as far south as Philadelphia.
As it expanded, Crazy Eddie also became famous for a memorable series of commercials starring an exuberant, fast-talking man many falsely believed to be Mr. Antar himself.
The real star, a radio disc jockey named Jerry Carroll, performed in more than 7,500 radio and television commercials that ran for nearly 14 years, starting in 1975. The commercials always ended in the same way, with a signature touting of Crazy Eddie’s “in-s-a-a-a-a-ne” prices. The comedian Dan Aykroyd lampooned the advertisements on “Saturday Night Live.”
In 1984, Mr. Antar took the business public at $8 a share. Within two years, its stock price would hit $79 per share. At its peak, Crazy Eddie reported annual sales of more than $350 million.
But that success was illusory. In 1987, dissident stockholders staged a takeover of the company. Within two weeks of the acquisition, they said they had discovered that $45 million in merchandise was missing. At the same time, federal prosecutors were building a case against Mr. Antar, charging that he had defrauded shareholders through stock manipulation.
In the end, the authorities accused him and two brothers of skimming cash and inflating the value of the company. Even before going public, Mr. Antar would fly to Israel with cash strapped to his body as part of the skimming scheme, they said.
In 1990, Mr. Antar fled the country. He was found and arrested in Israel two years later, then extradited to the United States.
Sam E. Antar, a cousin of Eddie’s, was the company’s chief financial officer. He pleaded guilty to fraud and testified against Eddie, describing how the company inflated inventory and sales figures. He later became a consultant to government agencies investigating accounting fraud.
In a plea bargain, Eddie Antar pleaded guilty to one charge of racketeering conspiracy and served nearly seven years in federal prison. His brother, Mitchell, pleaded guilty to a count of conspiracy and a count of making false statements and also served time in prison.
In 2001, Mr. Antar joined with some former associates to remake Crazy Eddie as an internet company, but the effort ultimately fell apart.
Despite its demise, the Crazy Eddie chain became an enduring symbol for bargain-basement retail. “Futurama,” the animated series about a New York City pizza deliveryman living a thousand years in the future, for example, features a car-dealing robot named “Malfunctioning Eddie” known for “insane” prices.
The crimes aside, Mr. Antar had his admirers. On Sunday, several people posted comments to a Facebook page for former Crazy Eddie employees acknowledging his flaws, while remembering him fondly.
Larry Weiss, who helped create the chain’s iconic commercials but left years before its collapse, remembered Mr. Antar as a complex man.
“He was a character. He was very charming, charismatic, very powerful, very decisive. He was an incredible leader,” Mr. Weiss said in an interview. “Really everyone in the company idolized him. He was a very cool guy. And then there was the dark side that got him into trouble.”
Mr. Antar is survived by four daughters, Simone, Nicole, Noelle and Gabrielle; a son, Sammy; two brothers, Mitchell and Allen; and a sister, Ellen Kuszer.
From The New York Times, September 11, 2016, re-posted to SHU 760, October 26, 2016
The Passing of “Crazy” Eddie Antar and the Syrian Jewish Problematic
The Brooklyn Syrian Jews are very punctilious when it comes to praising their community.
We recently read an article written by Sarina Roffé in Community magazine that provides a whitewashed version of Syrian Jewish history:
http://www.communitym.com/article.asp?article_id=104222
The article makes no mention of the lone rabbinic intellectual in the community, the venerable Hakham Matloub Abadi, who was the subject of a special SHU tribute newsletter:
The self-congratulatory Community magazine article elides and distorts the many complexities of a community whose recent history is far from salutary.
It is this whitewashed history that is being presented to the community in the documentary films produced under the supervision of Real Estate mogul Joseph Sitt:
I have reviewed the current situation in the Brooklyn Syrian community and its overwhelming greed and corruption in the following entry in my ongoing “Idiot Sephardim” series:
What we see presented in the Roffé article is the cult of Isaac Shalom and its promotion of his hand-picked rabbis Jacob Kassin and the Lubavitcher loyalist Abraham Hecht.
We will recall the participation of the Kassin family in the so-called “Jersey Sting” political corruption conspiracy:
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/24/nyregion/24jersey.html?pagewanted=all
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Bid_Rig
Abraham Hecht became notorious for his statements condemning Israeli PM Yitzhak Rabin to death under what has been called Din Rodef:
These were the men that Shalom chose to lead the Brooklyn Syrian Jewish community as he so callously and brutally eliminated the traditional rabbinate led by Matloub Abadi.
The benighted Shalom vision brought the Syrian Jews Ashkenazi Orthodoxy in all its complexity and dysfunction, supplanting the classical Sephardic tradition and the enlightened values of Jewish Humanism.
The Brooklyn Syrian Jewish community now suffers from an internal schism between Modern Orthodoxy and Haredi Orthodoxy.
I have presented this schism in my discussions of the work of Rabbi Eli Mansour and his attempt to turn the Brooklyn Syrian community into an outpost of the Lakewood Yeshiva:
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/davidshasha/rkEMy3MVtQQ
Contrary to what we read in Roffé’s article, the community has not retained its cultural heritage and ethical values, but has a watered-down version of “Bourekas and Haminados” ephemera that has now been combined with a slavish devotion to Ashkenazi Orthodox Judaism.
The classical Sephardic Jewish heritage is completely absent from all its educational and religious institutions.
There are currently profound divisions in the community between the Lakewood faction and the Yeshiva University faction.
But more than this is the financial corruption exemplified by figures like the late Eddie Antar.
It was not at all surprising to learn of the death of Eddie Antar from the usual news outlets and not from community announcements:
The Brooklyn Syrian Jews once held “Crazy Eddie” in great esteem – until he was convicted of business fraud.
Sadly, Antar’s debased business practices were the usual thing in the community, but he had great ambition and was extremely sloppy when it came to hiding his crimes. By taking his company public he exposed the dark, seamy underbelly of the SY business world to the general society.
Many Syrian Jews would probably like to forget that he ever lived.
The story of Eddie Antar is a cautionary tale which represents the great fall from grace of a once-venerable community that has now descended into the muck and mire.
Rather than being honest with itself and acknowledging its many faults, the community continues to promote itself as a shining beacon of tradition and unity when in reality the cruelty and corruption of its members has created a hornet’s-nest of brutality and dysfunction.
David Shasha
From SHU 760, October 26, 2016