Favorite Media Interviews and Mentions
EXCLUSIVE: Entertainment One has set Jon Turteltaub to direct Insane, a film based on “Crazy” Eddie Antar, the late consumer electronics king who wound up serving six years in prison for perpetrating one of the greatest securities frauds in history. eOne will finance the project. 21 scribe Peter Steinfeld wrote the script. The project was set by eOne late last year, with an exclusive rights deal has been made with Crazy Eddie’s cousin and co-conspirator Sam E. Antar. Greg Berlanti, Sarah Schechter, Peter Steinfeld, DeShawn Schneider, Mandy Stein will produce with Sam E. Antar serving as an Associate Producer.
Turteltaub’s credits include most recently the sleeper hit The Meg, Last Vegas, National Treasure, Phenomenon, While You Were Sleeping and Cool Runnings.
If you lived in NYC a few decades ago, you probably have heard of Crazy Eddie, an electronics retailer that was famous for its outlandish ads on TV. What most people didn’t know until after it went public, is that the company was built on financial fraud. In this week’s episode of the Odd Lots podcast, we speak with its former CFO Sam Antar about the company’s shenanigans, and how it all came undone.
Now, risky is running a business that evades taxes. Taking that business public is on another level. It invites greater scrutiny from authorities, and once outsiders would own the company, the Antars would have less control. I asked if the Antars discussed these risks that fateful night in 1979 and Sam explained why they did not:
We’d been a criminal enterprise since 1969, and I’d been part of that criminal enterprise since 1971. In 1979, I had no reason to think that after years of success, I was not going to succeed. Of course I was going to succeed. I am going to take steps and build on prior successes. It gave me the self-confidence to commit crime. Incrementally it gets bigger and bigger. It helped to get to higher and bigger levels.