The Crazy Eddie electronics chain, at its peak, numbered a respectable 43 stores from Philadelphia to Boston, but in the mid-1980s the discount retailer enjoyed an astonishing 99% name recognition among New Yorkers, higher even than the sitting president, Ronald Reagan. Anyone who resided in the region at the time knows why: the ubiquitous and incessant Crazy Eddie commercials, which featured a DJ named Jerry Carroll gesturing wildly and screaming, “His prices are insane!”

The Crazy Eddie empire was, from the start, built on lies and deception, with the fraud becoming so brazen that the company finally collapsed on itself.

The villain at the center of the drama is Eddie Antar, born in 1947, whose grandparents came to the United States from Syria and settled in south Brooklyn. Many of the Antars were in cash-based businesses, stashing their earnings in ceilings and mattresses to avoid paying taxes.

How they kept prices low included buying inventory below cost from an illegal supplier, selling merchandise at or below cost but pocketing the sales tax, pricing stereo components cheaply while overcharging for accessories, and passing off floor models and returned equipment as new product.

With a cousin as the accountant they took the company public in 1984.

The Antars had unwittingly backed themselves into a corner; as Mr. Weiss explains, “more and more fraud was required just to keep afloat.” Fearing what was to come, Eddie began dumping stock and moving money out of the country. The denouement is unsurprising: shareholder class-action lawsuits, an SEC investigation, a criminal probe. The Antars, shredding every document in sight and lying under oath, began to turn on one another. Newspaper ads toward the end cheerfully promoted “Crazy Eddie’s Family Feud Blowout Blitz,” but the ship was sinking fast. Eddie, who’d been taught from childhood that family came first, left everyone behind and, fake passport in hand, fled to Israel, where he’d socked away millions.

Once extradited to the U.S., Eddie pleaded guilty to racketeering and served close to seven years in federal prison. (He died in 2016.) Sammy the accountant, cooperated with prosecutors and avoided prison time. He is Mr. Weiss’s primary source, and his colorful recollection of events fuels the fast-paced, entertaining narrative. “The due-diligence guys . . . come over, and they’re seeing a bunch of Brooklyn thugs running a business,” begins a typical anecdote. wsj.com

Full article published by The Wall Street Journal