Retail gangster, p.28
Retail Gangster, page 28
Beginning since before the IPO in 1984, “did you and others agree on various schemes to falsify the books and records of Crazy Eddie so as to make the company’s financial performance appear stronger than it actually was?”
“Yes, your honor,” Eddie replied.
On it went, Eddie admitting his guilt to one offense after the other. Everything the government had charged, everything Sammy had described on the witness stand and in his marathon meetings with prosecutors and hundreds of phone calls to Paul Hayes. Everything. No blame shifting, no excuses, no lies. The appeals court decision had been a blow to the prosecution, and it was unjust, but it had accomplished something that the jury verdict had not achieved: it forced Eddie Antar to tell the truth.
EPILOGUE
LATE IN DECEMBER 2006, A MAN WITH A VAGUELY FAMILIAR NAME TRIED without success to leave a comment on a blog I was keeping at the time. He was stymied by a technical glitch, but his thoughts were interesting so I used them in full as a blog post. He had written an open letter to a controversial CEO I’d mentioned in a book on Wall Street fraud. Patrick Byrne of Overstock.com was a stock market conspiracy theorist. He had many enemies who had done all sorts of bad things. They had destroyed fine companies and rigged the financial markets in diabolical ways. Worst of all, they had criticized him. Journalists, myself included, were high on his list. He dispatched an employee to stalk, defame, and harass the “miscreants.” In the course of what he called his “jihad,” Byrne smeared an innocent Canadian businessman as an al-Qaeda financier, but even the resulting record libel verdict, and condemnation by the judge, could not curb his zeal.
Byrne had uncovered the news media’s dirty little secret: intimidation works. That first became evident in 2005, when he accused a female reporter of “giving Goldman [Sachs] traders blowjobs” and continued attacking her online. There was no outcry, no action by his board or press groups, no consequences—except that she stopped covering him. “If the purpose of this was to silence us, it worked,” wrote Bloomberg columnist Joe Nocera. In 2006, Nocera warned in the New York Times that Byrne was “using the courts, the Internet, his taunting e-mails—and even his conspiracy theory—as part of a thinly disguised effort to squelch any and all criticism of Overstock.”
Despite all that, here was someone willing to confront Byrne. Addressing the CEO in his open letter, the blog commenter wrote, “As an ex-felon and admitted fraudster, I really have to admire you and the way you handle yourself. Being that I feel a special bond with you because you remind me of my youth. I hope you can take some of my advice as a person who has ‘been there, done that.’” It went on in that vein and was signed “Sam E. Antar (former Crazy Eddie CFO & ex-felon).”
It had been thirteen years since Sammy testified against Eddie in Newark, and since then he had worked to turn his life around. The open letter was one of the ways he did that. Sammy was drawing Byrne’s fire, and doing so quite cheerfully. The result was predictable. Sammy was now part of the conspiracy. The attacks went on for years. Byrne and his operatives made Jack Arsenault seem like a pussycat. When Sammy split from Robin, she was contacted for dirt without success. It couldn’t have been more vicious, but he kept on slugging, criticizing Overstock’s accounting methods in detailed blog posts.
For Sammy, fighting a corporate bully was his way of engaging in teshuvah, repentance. He had confessed his sins, forsaken them, and he was seeking to pay back society for the wrongs he had committed at Crazy Eddie. A few months later, Sammy faced off against the man who had brought him to this point in his life. It was the real-life version of what is known in drama as an “obligatory scene”—the confrontation between a story’s protagonist and antagonist. Meeting in a Manhattan hotel suite booked for the occasion, Sammy confronted Eddie while CNBC cameras recorded their encounter.
Their face-off lasted hours, but only brief excerpts were aired on June 27, 2007. One exchange that made the cut showed Sammy leaning to within inches of a somber, wan Eddie, gesturing with a pointed finger and shouting, “You brought us up to be crooks, Eddie. Everything I became came from you.” Eddie looked helplessly at the interviewer, journalist Herb Greenberg, making a gesture of exasperation as if Sammy was a lunatic.
Eddie turned to Sammy but did not look him in the eye. “You didn’t just learn from me,” he said softly. “You learned—we learned the culture. So it’s not that I taught you. You knew the culture.”
That was Eddie. Someone else was always to blame, in this case “the culture.” He did not elaborate, but Sammy understood him to mean the culture that their grandparents’ generation had brought over from Aleppo. But the Syrian Jewish culture was a culture of endurance, of survival in a harsh environment, not a culture of crime in America. Except for the obligatory recitation at his sentencing, Eddie never acknowledged that he had committed crimes, let alone repented. He never offered a word of remorse, not even once. That’s because he felt no remorse. Neither did his father.
Eddie and Sam M. reconciled after Eddie’s downfall. Sam M. had won their long rivalry by default. He was no longer jealous of his humbled offspring. He was head of the family again. Now well into his seventies, he carried out his responsibilities as family elder by writing to the people he felt had wronged Eddie. This was the son he had worked so hard to undermine, whose marriage he had tried to wreck, who had humiliated him and forced him out of the company.
One letter he wrote in 1997 to his brother Eddy, who had testified for the government at the trial under a grant of immunity, went as follows:
DEAR BROTHER, HOW? WHY? WHERE? WHO? I AM STILL BEWILDERED. PERHAPS YOU HAD NEVER SEEN OR HEARD OF THE ENCLOSED DOCUMENT. IT MAY HELP PUT 2 + 2 TOGETHER.
YOU & YOUR SON DID A MASTERFUL JOB SAVING SOLOMON’S ASS MEANWHILE DESTROYING YOUR OWN FLESH & BLOOD.
THANK YOU & MAY GOD FORGIVE YOU
Sam M.
The “enclosed document” was Judge Hurowitz’s decision in the divorce case, in which Eddy had played no role whatsoever. It did not even mention Sammy, and nothing in the ruling “saved Solomon’s ass.” Sam M. wrote letters to his nephew that made even less sense. Decades later, Sammy learned that in 2001 Sam M. hired a psychiatrist, Isaac Herschkopf, to create a psychological assessment of his nephew based on his demeanor at a public speaking engagement that Sam M. had on tape. The report was not made public and was apparently prepared for Sam M.’s private enjoyment.1
Unlike Eddie, who was forced to admit guilt in court, Sam M. never confessed to anything or atoned for anything—not for abandoning his firstborn son, Mark Daniel Antar, and not for committing fraud at Crazy Eddie. He was never criminally prosecuted, but he, Allen, and Ben Kuszer lost the SEC civil case on July 16, 1998.
In a harshly worded decision that sided with the SEC on all its claims, Ackerman began with the same flair that he had employed when he dumped on the mob and corrupt politicians: “There is perhaps no more insidious drain on the overall welfare of society than greed unchecked.” His ruling recounted the Crazy Eddie frauds in meticulous detail and dwelled at length on the mendacity and inconsistencies that had riddled Sam M.’s sworn testimony. He was happy to lie, and happy to admit that he lied. “I lied, I lied, I lied, I lied, I lied, I lied, but then I rescinded the lies and told them the truth,” he testified on one occasion. On another: “If I lied in the past, when I talk about it—you talk about my son, I maybe like to cover things up. You know what I mean?”
Sam M., Allen, and Ben were just one theater of operations in the SEC’s worldwide quest to recoup for investors the fruits of the Crazy Eddie fraud. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, the SEC brought court cases in Switzerland, Israel, Canada, Liechtenstein, and Great Britain, pursuing funds that Eddie had secreted in various accounts. The SEC even sued Debbie I and her four surviving daughters, seeking the proceeds from Eddie’s sale of the $8 million in stock he had gifted to the girls—money he had transferred to the Cayman Islands in 1985. The SEC did not accuse Debbie or her daughters of wrongdoing; it just wanted to grab that cash as a product of insider trading by Eddie. In the divorce case, Debbie had testified it was all done behind her back, with Eddie getting her mom’s signature on account documents. One of her lawyers even called it a “preparatory effort” by Eddie to rob his own daughters. When she was sued by the SEC, Debbie said that her previous account was not the “whole story” and claimed that she, not Eddie, had chosen to sell the shares. Politan was not persuaded and ruled against her in 1993. Shortly before the ruling, the SEC cut a deal with Debbie and settled for about half, $3.9 million.
The SEC is sometimes chided for laxity and even for bumbling, but when it came to Sam M. it resembled Inspector Javert a great deal more than Inspector Clouseau. The agency pursued Eddie’s father to the end of his days, at one point threatening him and Rose with criminal contempt for transferring funds to avoid seizure. He died at eighty-three on August 8, 2004, the last buck squeezed out of him—at least as far as the SEC could determine. During the litigation, Richard Wallace, the SEC lawyer, thought it might be useful to explore the space above a ceiling where Sam M. had stored nehkdi. A court order was obtained. A camera panned around. An examination of the resulting video showed an odd-looking bundle in the corner. It turned out to be a package of cash, about $100,000, that Sam M. had tucked way, forgotten, just as Murad had neglected to retrieve cash he had left with a stranger so many years before.
By the time the SEC called off its hunt for Antar cash in 2012, about $120 million had been recovered. Some of it was still being found as late as 2009, when the SEC found $158,841.37 in a dormant Israeli bank account in the name of “Caliver Enterprises SA.” The “beneficial owner and sole signatory” was Eddie’s good friend “David Cohen.” It would be no surprise at all if other Antar nehkdi were still out there somewhere, in safe-deposit boxes, overseas bank accounts, or even ceilings, gathering dust mites to this day.
After his plea deal, Eddie gave no more spiteful interviews to the press. When Ackerman sentenced him to eighty-two months imprisonment and two years of supervised release in February 1997, he said nothing publicly. He settled into prison routine and worked as a cook. While incarcerated, Eddie finally saw one of his life goals achieved. He had always wanted a son, and in October 1995 he got his wish. Deborah Ehrlich Antar gave birth to a boy they named after Sam M. as tradition required. The blessed event seemed a bit odd because conjugal visits were not allowed. Debbie was mum when asked about it by a reporter, but in vitro fertilization was Eddie’s apparent path to fatherhood.
Mitchell was released in September 1998 after serving a year and a half in prison, and Eddie followed on March 15, 1999. He emerged into a different world than the one he left when he was apprehended on a street in Yavne in 1992. The Internet was beginning its inexorable process of draining the life out of consumer electronics chains. In 1998 some members of the Antar family planned to revive Crazy Eddie as brick-and-mortar stores. Jerry Carroll was brought into the venture, with Harry Spero handling the advertising. That did not take off, so another approach was tried in 2001, this time an Internet business. Eddie, in prison during the earlier venture, was hired as “director of marketing and strategic relations.” Jerry taped commercials on a “shoestring budget,” and Larry Weiss was creative director. It received a smattering of publicity, mostly favorable. A nonfamily member was CEO.
Larry by then had left advertising and was running an interactive pay-per-call telephone company. He hadn’t forgotten how Eddie had ripped him off, but he thought he’d give it a shot and work for the new Crazy Eddie—though just part-time, not investing a penny, and retaining his telephone business. “It was moving to see him. When he went off to jail, everyone loved him. I did too. I don’t know why,” he says with a laugh. During the years Eddie was in jail, Larry would occasionally consider visiting him, but then he would remember how he had been treated and get annoyed “because I couldn’t believe what he did.” Actually seeing him in the flesh, “I melted. We hugged.” Prison had not changed him much. His old boss was thinner, but “he was still Eddie.”
“It’s a great operation that’s going to rise to the top,” Eddie was quoted as saying at the time. It did not. The online venture failed. Investors didn’t want to go anywhere near Eddie, and the website was taken down by 2004.
Apart from his role in the two abortive Crazy Eddie revivals, Jerry Carroll faded from public view after the chain collapsed. Serving as Eddie’s spokesman had never been a full-time job; he did radio and voiceover work, started a small ad agency, and tried his hand at acting, appearing in “three or four TV pilots that never took off.” In 2000 he offered his services as a disc jockey specializing in “EuroDance—today’s discotheque,” creating a website that mentioned Crazy Eddie only in passing. The shyness that Harry Spero observed at store openings never abated, and any doubts on that score were resolved when Jerry died on September 3, 2020, felled by a longstanding heart ailment. He was a few weeks short of his seventy-sixth birthday.
In compliance with his wishes, Jerry was cremated and his ashes were given to his widow, Andrea, who kept them in their Manhattan apartment. There was no funeral, no death notice, no media coverage. Some of his friends didn’t learn of his passing until months later. Some never did. The man who had screamed his way into the public’s consciousness had left the earth in silence.
Another participant in the post-collapse Crazy Eddie revival had a different encounter with fate. Sam A. Antar, son of Allen, was a driving force behind the 1998 effort to bring back the stores. The 2000 crime anthology Frankensteins of Fraud portrayed him sympathetically, noting his “decidedly sweeter disposition than his uncle” and his “lively, curious eyes, without Eddie’s grudges and hurt.” The Crazy Eddie chapter of the book ended on a hopeful note thanks to new leadership in the form of Sam A.
In January 2013, Sam A. pleaded guilty to investment fraud. He was sentenced to twenty-one months in prison. Six years later he was named in criminal and civil charges alleging another scam, this one targeting the Syrian Jewish community. The SEC alleged that Sam A., now forty-four, “told investors that he would use their funds to buy shares in emerging companies whose stock had not yet begun to trade publicly,” but kept their money instead. A criminal complaint lodged by the New Jersey Attorney General put investor losses at $794,000. Both the criminal and the SEC cases were still working their way through the courts in early 2022.
Another member of the new generation of Antars received public attention, but for all the right reasons. In November 2017, Eddie’s son, Samuel Alex Antar, and his mom were featured in an ABC News segment on a snack business that gave employment to young people with autism. It was an engaging, uplifting story. Though delving into Sam’s background in some detail, his famous father was not mentioned. By then the Antars were no longer in the media spotlight. When Debbie II and Eddie divorced in 2009 it received no attention, and neither did her 2010 remarriage.
Several of the people who crossed Eddie’s path were in trouble with the law in later years, but only one served a prison term anywhere near as long as Eddie’s.
It wasn’t Sam Cohen. The agreeable immigrant head of Zazy pleaded guilty in 1997 to tax evasion unrelated to Crazy Eddie and was sentenced to eighteen months in prison. It wasn’t Vinnie Badalamenti, the stockroom boy who went on to success in the Bonanno crime family. It wasn’t Sam A. or other family members. It wasn’t any of the working stiffs Eddie taught to inflate inventories, deceive customers, and hose down merchandise in store basements.
It wasn’t Dick Lewis. His reassuring, fatherly integrity lured customers to Newmark & Lewis when it competed with Crazy Eddie. His catchy jingle told the truth. Dick Lewis was watching. He was watching out—for himself. In 1993, Lewis was rounded up with more than a hundred other businessmen, home owners, and insurance adjusters in a crackdown on insurance fraud by federal prosecutors in Brooklyn. No one at Crazy Eddie was implicated, and neither was “Donald,” the hose-wielding insurance adjuster, or his firm. No one from the chain was ever charged with spiking claims—or stealing sales tax, that other old standby that happened to be a felony. But Dick Lewis was not so fortunate. He pleaded guilty to one count of mail fraud for exaggerating fire damage to one of his stores. He was fined $20,000 and sentenced to five years’ probation.
Lewis got off easy, but that can’t be said for an Ivy Leaguer who had limitless prospects for the future when his life intersected with Crazy Eddie.
After the IPO, the young Oppenheimer banker Todd Berman lived up to his early promise. He went on to another prestigious investment bank. He partnered with financier Eli Jacobs to buy the Baltimore Orioles, becoming the team’s vice chairman. He founded a private equity firm. He had political connections and was happy to flaunt them, luring George Stephanopoulos and Evan Bayh to the board of his firm. He was a member of the Foreign Policy Association and the Council on Foreign Relations. He “founded a nonpartisan political action group that meets with political leaders.” When the Buffalo Sabres was in distress, he pitched in to help his hometown hockey team. Berman financed a bid to rescue it from the clutches of the indicted corporate villain John Rigas, who would go to prison for looting Adelphia Communications. The bid failed but the Sabres stayed in Buffalo. Berman was a hometown hero, a white knight.
Then he was taken into custody.
On December 6, 2004, Berman pleaded guilty in federal court to stealing $3.6 million from his private equity firm. He didn’t need the money. He wasn’t a drug addict. He wasn’t in hock to hoodlums like the branch manager in Paul Hayes’s early banking career. Could it have been what Eddie called “the culture”? Perhaps the culture of greed that had spawned John Rigas? Like the Adelphia CEO, Berman stole because he wanted to live well. The loot had financed lavish vacations in Colorado ski resorts and places like Antigua and Puerto Vallarta. In the end his motive didn’t matter very much. He went through the ritual of admitting guilt, just as Eddie had done, and was sentenced to five years in a federal penitentiary.
