Favorite Media Interviews and Mentions
Antar is part of what Thomas describes as an “underground whistle-blower support network”—a loose fraternity of lawyers, accountants, and ex-law-enforcement types. The network sounds reminiscent of his father’s phone book: in any business, there is a premium on always knowing just the right person to call. When Thomas needed help with forensic accounting, Antar could comb through the public filings of a company and uncover subtle anomalies. He has initiated several cases with Thomas simply by scrutinizing a company’s books. In one instance, he received a substantial award. “The money didn’t make a difference in my life style,” he told me. “All I give a shit about is I have the latest iPhone.”
Today I want to mention another cost of distraction, however. Crime.
If you grew up anywhere near New York City in the 1970s and 80s, you know who Crazy Eddie is (His prices are INNNNNSAAAAAANE!). The ubiquitous electronics store with the never-ending TV ads succeeded for one reason: Crazy Eddie was a cheater. He eventually was convicted of tax fraud and went to jail. His cousin, Sam Antar, former company chief financial officer and also convicted of fraud, later became a forensic accountant. He also gives a mighty fine speech about how white-collar criminals commit crimes. They create diversions. “The distraction is more important than the lie,” he says over and over. He’s right.
You’ve seen it on TV, if you haven’t seen it yourself in person — pickpockets often bump into their victims to cause a distraction, then use that moment to steal a wallet or purse. That’s the simple version. Antar, speaking on the Bloomberg Odd Lots podcast a couple of years ago, explains how such distractions can work at scale. I won’t steal his material, it’s well worth the 10-minute watch on YouTube. But Eddie’s real talent wasn’t lying about sales taxes. It was distracting the auditors when they came every year.
“Crazy Eddie had this mentality: nothing should go to the government,” Sam Antar said explaining the company’s actions at that time. The more money Antar accumulated, the more often he went on vacations in Europe and South America and also bought real estate and cars in coastal American cities. And he always had about $200,000 under his bed, just in case.
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.
Weiss, who previously wrote two books that critically examine the ethics and morality of Wall Street, in Born to Steal, and Wall Street Versus America, was contacted by Sam Antar on his blog, after Antar read one of his books.
“Sam was very interested in a character he read about in Wall Street Versus America (Patrick Byrne, a conspiracy theorist and the former CEO of Overstock.com)—he saw traits in him that he had when he was a crook,” says Weiss, adding that Sam wrote a sarcastic open letter about it on his blog.
Weiss got to know Sam, who it turned out wanted his story told. Weiss was happy to oblige.
As the company grew, Eddie realized that he needed an accountant: He funded his cousin Sammy Antar’s education, and once Sammy learned some basic finance, the young man realized how small-time the company’s corruption was. Years of skimming cash and cheating on taxes had artificially made Crazy Eddie seem less profitable than it was. Sammy suggested a new tactic: taking the company public, inflating its profits to elevate the stock price. Crazy Eddie’s 1984 IPO was successful—and based on fraud.
Other key sources included Sam E. Antar, Eddie’s CPA cousin who cooked the Antar family books and eventually became the chief informant for the FBI and the Department of Justice in the case. Sam received probation in exchange for testifying against Eddie, and has since become an in-demand lecturer on white-collar crime.
While Eddie is portrayed as an irredeemable, sociopathic genius in the book, Sam gets a redemption arc. His testimony was tied to the government’s eventually recovering $120 million in stolen cash and illegal stock profits.
“I think Sam was a bad guy with good information when he first became an informant,” Weiss said. “Now I think he’s a good person with good information.”
Weiss “did excellent research and carefully cited all of his sources,” Sam E. Antar said.
August 27, 2022: Forbes – The Rise And Fall Of Crazy Eddie: A Tale Of Epic Fraud, By Simon Constable
Weiss’s book mentions something Sam Antar told me — the crooked but exceptionally charming CFO, won over the firm’s auditors with outward displays of helpfulness and so put off the inevitable detection of the fraud. (If you ever do meet Sam Antar, you will likely find him charming and excellent company. I know I did. I’d happy have lunch with him again.)
Weiss has long specialized in stories of business malfeasance, and the Crazy Eddie story is one of the most colorful in recent history. He said he was first interested in the project when Sam E. Antar, Eddie’s cousin, colleague and ultimately a key witness against him, became a commenter on Weiss’s blog in the early 2000s. Weiss had been working on the book, off and on, since 2008.
“It’s such a huge story. I mean, it’s got so many tentacles,” Weiss told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. “It’s a family story, it’s a business story, it’s a retailing story, it’s a fraud story. And it’s also a story of New York in the 1970s and ’80s…. It took a while for me to sort of bring it all together in a coherent narrative.”