Retail gangster, p.25
Retail Gangster, page 25
Eddie had been thwarted by the devil that lurked within him. He had provided the phony passport as proof of identity in his quest to sandbag the innocent bank officer, Fisch. Had he succeeded, he would have ruined Fisch’s career. It was an act of pure evil.
“David Jacob Levi Cohen” was but one of several identities that Eddie created after he decided to abscond. Israel was a logical destination. The Antars had no close family in the Jewish state, but they were frequent visitors and had taken nehkdi there for many years. His money went first, then Eddie. In February 1987, Eddie transferred the bulk of his remaining US cash to Israel, wiring $43 million to the Bank Leumi Foreign Resident Tourist Center at 130 Ben Yehuda Street in Tel Aviv. It was no coincidence that Eddie did that after Debbie sicced the Felders on him and the frauds were losing their power to prop up the company.
A year later, Eddie made his overseas financial holdings a convoluted mess that, he hoped, only he could unravel. On February 5, 1988, he transferred $50 million from Bank Leumi in Israel to a numbered account at Bank Leumi in Zurich that he had opened a day earlier. Later that month he transferred $40 million of that money to a bank in Lichtenstein. Then he transferred the remaining $9.8 million to Credit Suisse in Zurich, depositing the money into an account owned by an entity called Conductive Corporation, which was incorporated in Monrovia, Liberia. Then he closed the Bank Leumi Zurich account.
By shuffling around the money, Eddie was trying to conceal its origins while maintaining access to the cash. He had control over the Conductive Corporation account, which was set up in Liberia because of that country’s low rate of taxation and loose rules on incorporating businesses. By 1992 Eddie would open at least twenty accounts, “nearly all of them either numbered or in the name of some Liberian or [Gibraltar] corporation.”
With his money safely scattered across multiple continents, Eddie made his move. Under Israel’s Law of Return, any Jewish person can immigrate and become a citizen. Criminals have exploited this policy over the years, in the hope that Israel would be a refuge not from persecution but from prosecution. Meyer Lansky famously tried to do so in 1970. Like Lansky, Eddie made his move when he was not under indictment but feared danger down the road. Unlike Lansky, Eddie moved to Israel quietly, and his acquisition of Israeli citizenship received no public attention. Lansky was eventually thrown out of Israel, but Eddie was hoping for a better outcome.
Eddie flew to Israel on June 15, 1988, and eleven days later registered as an immigrant, all legally and aboveboard. Debbie II joined him on July 7, 1988, also filing papers to become an immigrant. Five days after immigrating, Eddie took a step to wall off the past. Many immigrants to Israel cast off the names of the Diaspora and substitute Hebrew names. But Eddie did not Hebraize his name; he Scotlandized it. Eddie Antar was officially entered in the records of the Israeli government as “Alexander Stewart”—the “diamond buyer” in Eddie’s tall tale to the Swiss authorities. Deborah Antar became “Debbie Stewart.” He was able to use the “Stewart” name legally in Israel, but he was still listed in Israeli records, and on his Israeli passport, as Eddie Antar. That wouldn’t do much to cover his tracks.
So Eddie went on a passport-buying spree. He acquired six passports in five names. They were in phony names, but were not forgeries. Customs officers could have examined them minutely and they would have passed muster. Like the others, the “David Jacob Levi Cohen” passport was a genuine Brazilian passport, though “Cohen” was an invention. Hayes surmised he “probably paid off someone to get it.”
The FBI had been picking up leads on Eddie for quite a while. Agents learned that when he fled the United States in February 1990, he did so using a genuine US passport that stole the identity of his friend Harry Shalom, host of the Labor Day gathering where Sammy had run into a friendly, reassuring (but paranoid) Eddie Antar. The State Department provided Hayes with a passport photo of “Shalom,” showing Eddie hardly concealing his identity at all, except for glasses in a Superman-as-Clark Kent fashion. “Now we kind of knew where to start,” Hayes recalls.
Eddie had obtained the Shalom passport in April 1989, confirming Sammy’s hectoring during that time that he was ready to flee. His cousin started using that passport during 1989 to travel to places that included Israel. But that alone didn’t prove he had moved to that country. “David” performed that function.
The Brazilian “David Cohen” passport showed entry and exit stamps from Ben Gurion Airport in Israel. Israeli police ran a computer check and were nauseated to find that this nonexistent person had registered as an immigrant on May 13, 1990. When “Cohen” became a citizen, he gave his address as 3 Kohavit Street in Yavne, a town thirty miles south of Tel Aviv. Israeli police put the house under surveillance, and, sure enough, Eddie was living there. He hadn’t moved, a mistake he would soon regret.
Unlike Lansky, who lived a law-abiding life in Israel, Eddie infuriated his hosts by exploiting the Law of Return to register an alias as a citizen. If Eddie Antar could become a citizen of Israel using a fictitious identity, a terrorist or spy could do the same thing. Discovery of his ruse was deeply embarrassing. “Providing false documentation to the Israeli government was not smart. The Israelis were extremely cooperative once they knew that he filed false documents with them,” Hayes recalled.
Israel was happy to get rid of Eddie, but US officials needed to take one more step before their quarry could be arrested overseas. An Interpol Red Notice would have to be issued so the Israelis could collar him, and contempt of court was not sufficient to warrant nabbing someone in a different country. He would have to be charged with a more weighty crime than dissing a judge. The US Attorney in Newark, now Michael Chertoff, set the wheels in motion for that as soon as Eddie was located in Israel. On June 11, 1992, a federal grand jury in Newark handed up an eighteen-count indictment charging Eddie with conspiracy to commit securities fraud, filing false and misleading annual reports and false warranty claims, and obstruction of justice. Allen and Mitchell Antar were named in the indictment, as was Sammy’s assistant Eddie Gindi. The charges were sealed, to be made public only after Eddie was in custody.
The job of apprehending Eddie in Israel was assigned to a six-foot, five-inch colossus of a man by the name of Yossef “Yossi” Zamory, a chief superintendent in the Israeli police. Eddie’s carelessness had made locating him easy. But capturing him would require care. Raiding the house where he was harbored was not advisable, lest Eddie destroy evidence while Israeli cops were breaking through the heavily fortified doors. The entrance to his hideout had “big bolts like a battleship.” He needed to be grabbed outside.
Kohavit Street was a narrow, quiet, residential street of upscale single-family houses. Unfamiliar vehicles would be quickly spotted, but police somehow were able to watch the house for days without being noticed. Eddie and a companion were driving away from the house the morning of June 24, 1992, when they were stopped by Israeli cops. In future years, word would spread that Eddie was a victim of his libido and was arrested by a female police officer dressed in a tight skirt posing as a motorist in distress. Eddie supposedly stopped to offer assistance and flirted with the woman, only to be placed under arrest. That rather humiliating tidbit, if true, was omitted from the account of Eddie’s apprehension that Zamory would later give to an American court.
The beefy Israeli took Eddie back to the house, where his shell-shocked prisoner let him into his messy, sparsely furnished room. Israeli cops seized booty that included credit cards under phony names, “lists of holding companies in Liberia, the Cayman Islands and Gibraltar, identification and passports in four names, a lease on a London flat in the name of David Cohen and travel records for stops at the Eden Roc in Miami, Quatre Saisons in Montreal, Hotel du Rhone in Geneva and Hyatt Regency in Jerusalem.” With his passports, millions in cash, and multiple overseas accounts, Eddie was well prepared to go on the run. And sure enough, he was on the verge of absconding yet again.
By the time of his arrest, Eddie had decided to get out of Israel. It’s not clear whether he got wind of the surveillance, was tipped off to the sealed indictment, or had simply realized that he had been in one place for too long. Something had made him pack his bags. They were in his tiny room, filled with the phony passports and bank papers the Israelis had found, ready to be taken to Lord knows where.
Visiting his client in an Israeli jail a few days after the arrest, Jack Arsenault found a bitter Eddie who correctly blamed himself for his predicament. “He was on the move again. He was leaving Israel. You know, he had been in and out of Israel. My impression was he had traveled a lot, and he was actually leaving Israel when he was arrested. And therefore he had on him false passports. He had all of his bank account information for accounts all over the world. It was a pot of gold for the government. He was very, very angry at himself.”
The fifty-two-page indictment was unsealed when Eddie was behind bars. He was held at Ayalon Prison, a fortresslike maximum-security penitentiary with a morose history. It was where Adolf Eichmann was executed in 1962, and the Ukrainian Nazi camp guard John Demjanjuk had been confined there in 1986. The prison was in Ramla, a working-class town not far from Yavne, but access to the facility was so restricted that Eddie’s niece Rori thought it was on the West Bank when she traveled there with other family members to visit her uncle. Security was tight. At the prison she was strip-searched. She found Eddie to be gaunt—“scary,” she says—but he acted like his old self when he saw her. “How ya doing, kid?” She at least had come to see him. His own daughters had not.
While his Israeli lawyers wrangled over extradition, which Arsenault vowed to “fight tooth and nail,” US prosecutors turned the screws. On August 10, 1992, a federal grand jury in Newark handed up a superseding indictment, adding another charge under RICO. Two weeks after that, the Ministry of Justice approved the US extradition request. Eddie’s lawyers appealed. The case was now in the hands of an Israeli court, and during its deliberations Eddie would be kept under lock and key.
It was almost unheard-of to release a prisoner awaiting extradition—especially one who was found with multiple passports, millions of dollars in overseas accounts, and his bags literally packed when captured. If Eddie could get out of prison, he could—and probably would—find his way out of Israel, so obviously he wasn’t going to be sprung. The no-nonsense, security-obsessed Israelis would never do that.
Or would they?
Eddie had a plan. Fakery was his modus operandi, his “franchise,” to use a latter-day business term. If anyone could con his way out of an Israeli prison, it was Eddie Antar.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
EDDIE HAD A RELAPSE. THE ILLNESS THAT PLAGUED HIM WHEN HE QUIT AS CEO was back with a vengeance. The man was sick. Very sick. He told anyone who would listen that Ayalon Prison was such an awful place that it was killing him and that the cause of humanity required that he be released.
Within days of his capture, articles began appearing in the American and Israeli press reporting that Eddie’s health had suddenly and sharply deteriorated while he was in the hands of a cruel Israeli prison system. Seasoned foreign correspondents, accustomed to reporting on serious political issues and violent conflict, found themselves filing dispatches on Eddie’s elaborate malingering and histrionics. Israeli authorities were neither amused nor fooled. A month after his capture, the New York Post reported that Eddie was viewed as such a flight risk that his bathroom breaks went on the police radio when he was taken to the hospital with a supposed kidney ailment. The newspaper reported that he was shackled to his hospital bed.
Debbie II flew to Israel to be near her husband and began appearing in press reports. When Eddie made a court appearance in August 1992, “looking weak and sickly,” he “had to be supported by police and his wife, Debbie. ‘They’re treating my husband as if he were a bloodthirsty criminal,’ she said.”
Actually, Eddie was being treated like a captured fugitive and flight risk, which he was. Israeli prisons were not Club Fed, and his lawyer, Arsenault, realized that when he visited his client shortly after his arrest. He was in a cell that “had a dirt floor. It wasn’t heated. It obviously wasn’t air-conditioned; it was a pretty dire holding cell.” Arsenault complained about Eddie’s treatment, and “Yossi kind of basically looked at me and said, ‘Jack, it is in our interests that he waive extradition quickly. So this is our way of trying to convince him that it’s better for him to waive extradition and go back.’”
Eddie was not convinced. He went on the offensive. Eddie had avoided the press at Crazy Eddie, but now he broke his silence. The result was a series of articles that described in heartbreaking detail how he was being killed by his hellish confinement. None of the coverage mentioned Eddie’s “serious illness” when he quit as CEO in January 1987, and that his malady had mysteriously vanished by the time he commenced a buyout bid in May. That anomaly wasn’t buried in some obscure newsletter, but was mentioned in New York Times coverage of Eddie’s buyout bid. Yet apparently he was never asked about it.
“I’M GOING TO DIE!” screamed the headline on page 3 of the New York Post on September 25, 1992. “Crazy Eddie Antar is wasting away in the notorious Ramle Prison here,” the Post reported, referring to Ayalon. “He thinks he is dying.” After three months in custody, Eddie talked to an enterprising reporter who tracked him to Ichilov Hospital in Tel Aviv, where he had been sent to treat his terrible illnesses. The reporter conceded that Eddie was a “veteran con man,” but said the notion he was “faking excruciating pains seemed absurd after seeing him. His hair was long and neglected, his beard wildly overgrown, and he was bony thin.” The story went on like that, piling on the horrendous details.
Eddie was honest about his objective in granting the interview. “I can’t stay in that jail,” he moaned. When asked about the accusations against him, he grew testy. “Why are you asking me all these complicated questions? Don’t you have any mercy?”
Eddie’s “condition” steadily worsened as his effort to get out of jail continued. The reports of his declining health coming out of Israel were daunting. By early November 1992, the US media grimly reported that his list of ailments included “liver and kidney disorders, a urinary tract blockage and an undisclosed blood disorder.” A “private medical report” commissioned by Eddie’s Israeli lawyers recommended that he be removed to a “supportive environment” and claimed that the prison stay was “endangering his life.” Debbie II weighed in with a graphic depiction of Eddie’s deplorable state. She told the Jerusalem Post that Eddie was a “broken man, hardly recognizing his surroundings, and is deteriorating physically and mentally.” Eddie was at death’s door, according to his spouse. “He has lost the will to live,” she reported. “What do they want, a death certificate? He won’t be of use to anyone dead.”
Faced with Eddie’s legal and press juggernaut, an Israeli court ordered that he be evaluated by a psychiatrist to determine if he was fit to remain locked up during the extradition proceedings. A short time later, Eddie took an overdose of sleeping pills. Israeli police believed Eddie had no intention of killing himself, and that he was trying to con the authorities to cut him loose.
And then, quite abruptly, the curtain came down on Eddie’s sick act.
On December 30, 1992, Arsenault and US prosecutors cut a deal in which Eddie would cease fighting extradition in return for not being charged with crimes he committed after he became an Israeli citizen in 1988. That meant he would not be prosecuted for the fake Harry Shalom passport or anything else related to his flight. But the major charges—the securities fraud and racketeering—would remain. Though “deathly ill” just a short time earlier, Eddie was somehow able to withstand the long TWA flight back to the United States, arriving at Kennedy Airport in New York on January 10, 1993. There were no further reports of physical or mental afflictions while he was in federal custody. No suicide attempts. No blood disorders. Eddie had regained the will to live. Apparently, US prisons were a more “supportive environment” than the ones in Israel.
According to Arsenault, the deciding factor in Eddie throwing in the towel was the failing health of one of his daughters. In the fall of 1992, seventeen-year-old Danielle Antar was diagnosed with terminal cancer. “So I flew over, and I had to unfortunately break that news to him. And his reaction was, he immediately wanted to be extradited back. It was the only reason he agreed to come back.” However, Weissman points out that “the judge who conducted the [Israeli] hearing seemed disposed against him, and I think Eddie’s defense had also found that they weren’t getting the support they had hoped for from the Israeli press.” Rather than circle the wagons around “this fellow Jew in his hour of need,” the feeling “seemed to be more ‘Why should we become a haven for unsavory Jewish criminals who are trying to pervert the original intention of the Law of Return?’”
Eddie was let off easy by the Israeli criminal justice system. He had committed multiple violations of Israeli law, yet he wasn’t prosecuted. He was spared punishment not because of any doubt about his guilt, but because Israel simply wanted to get rid of him. When he was held in Israel, Eddie contended that he was a victim of Israeli politics. National elections took place the day before he was arrested, with Yitzhak Rabin of the Labor Party defeating the incumbent prime minister, Yitzhak Shamir of Likud. Eddie claimed in his New York Post interview that he never would have been arrested if Likud’s Menachem Begin was still prime minister.
It was true that Likud depended upon support from Jewish refugees from Arab countries, and there was speculation during his extradition fight that if Eddie stalled the proceedings long enough, he would eventually be freed once Likud regained power. What such theories ignored was that Eddie had made a mockery of the Law of Return by obtaining citizenship under a fake identity. Even if Likud had remained in power, it doesn’t seem likely the Israelis would have let bygones be bygones.
