Growing up in Manhattan in the eighties, I loved the TV commercials for the electronics chain “Crazy Eddie.” What kid wouldn’t? The pitchman, an unholy mashup of Pee-wee Herman and Donald Trump, would squeeze as many words as humanly possible into his allotted thirty seconds, waving his arms and screaming about amazing deals on VCRs, televisions, or electric fans. Often, he’d stand in front of stacks of electronics that looked like the junk-yard set of “Cats.” Or he’d be dressed up as Santa Claus (for a “Christmas in August” sale), getting pummelled by fake snow. But there was one constant: the closing tag line, “His prices are ins-a-a-a-ane!,” with the last word drawn out over several syllables.
He was easy to imitate, whether you were a child or Dan Aykroyd on “Saturday Night Live”; he seemed the very soul of bargain-basement desperation. Over the course of two decades and some seventy-five hundred radio and TV ads, he became a local legend of sorts, on par with Dr. Zizmor (the dermatologist who advertised on the subway) or Leona Helmsley (who became her own TV mascot for the Helmsley Palace Hotel, pronouncing, “It’s the only Palace in the world where the Queen stands guard”). Although the man in the commercials always spoke of Crazy Eddie in the third person, many New Yorkers assumed that they were one and the same—disassociation perhaps being a symptom of Eddie’s unspecified psychosis.
In fact, the TV guy was Jerry Carroll, a radio personality who was hired as the face and voice of Crazy Eddie in 1972, and who became so recognized around town that he had to stop wearing his signature outfit (turtlenecks and blazers) in public. The real Eddie was Eddie Antar, who grew a single store in Brooklyn into a retail empire, and then was brought down in a blizzard of fraud charges and antics worthy of “American Hustle.” Antar died last Saturday, at the age of sixty-eight. While the TV version of Crazy Eddie was an exhibitionist, Antar was an enigmatic figure who never gave interviews and at various times disappeared completely. While his sales pitch brilliantly suggested that customers were putting one over on him—with prices that low, he’d have to be insane—in reality he was inflating sales and inventory numbers, skimming money off the top, and swindling investors.
But let’s back up, because Antar’s life story was, indeed, insane. The grandson of Syrian Jewish immigrants from Aleppo, he grew up in Flatbush and quit high school out of boredom. In 1969, he opened his first stereo shop, Sights and Sounds, on Kings Highway, but soon rebranded it Crazy Eddie. Capitalizing on the rise of VCRs and other consumer electronics, he expanded throughout the New York metropolitan area, eventually dominating the market by selling large quantities at thin profits. At its height, the company had forty-three stores in the Northeast and boasted annual sales of more than three hundred and fifty million dollars. By the mid-eighties, Antar, like Donald Trump, had forged a reputation for dealmaking. He had his quirks: distributors who came to his office in Brooklyn would get their ears licked by his German shepherd, Sugar, and he was said to be so superstitious that he once wore a “lucky” sweater for two years straight.
The company went public in 1984, at eight dollars a share, and then things fell apart spectacularly. Federal prosecutors investigated him for manipulating stocks. His first wife, claiming she had been defrauded in their divorce case, served him papers while he was at a bar mitzvah at the Waldorf Astoria. That exacerbated a family feud that split the Antar family into rival camps, including his many relatives who had high positions in the company. He vanished for five months in 1987, during which the company’s profits fell ninety per cent. Meanwhile, the S.E.C. found that Antar had been flying to Israel with cash strapped to his body. He also funnelled money through Panama, fooling analysts into thinking that the company was booming when in fact it was suffering huge losses. He obtained Israeli citizenship under the name Alexander Stewart, a phony U.S. passport under the name Harry Page Shalom, and a Swiss bank account under the name David Jacob Levi Cohen.
The chain went bankrupt in 1989 and closed its stores. The next year, as investigations and lawsuits piled up, Antar fled the country. After two years as a fugitive, he was found outside Tel Aviv and extradited to the United States, all while claiming to suffer from an undisclosed illness. He’d been hiding assets in dummy companies everywhere from Liberia to Gibraltar, and had bank accounts in Luxembourg, Israel, and Canada. At the trial, his cousin Sam E. Antar (who had been Crazy Eddie’s chief financial officer) testified against him in a plea deal. Eddie pleaded guilty to one count of racketeering conspiracy after numerous other convictions were overturned on appeal, and spent almost seven years in prison; his brother Mitchell also served time. His attempt to revive Crazy Eddie as an online retailer, in 2001, was short-lived.
Still, in this age of Duane Reades and Chase banks on every corner, I’m wistful for Crazy Eddie—back then, at least, chain stores were weird. If Antar shared anything with his TV counterpart, it was chutzpah. Both were New York characters: the shady wheeler-dealer and the motor-mouthed attention hog. This election cycle, we’ve been reminded to be wary of hucksters: what’s charming on a local level can be downright scary in ascendance. But you have to credit Antar for an advertising campaign that stuck. If Crazy Eddie inspires nostalgia, it’s not only for his bellowing alter ego but also for the products he peddled: those bulky, box-shaped contraptions we filled our lives and homes with in the eighties, now vanished into a long-forgotten abyss. It was junk, and Antar sold it like junk. But he did so with panache.
