INTERVIEW: ‘Retail Gangster’ tells behind-the-scenes story of Crazy Eddie’s rise and fall
Image courtesy of Hachette Books / Provided by official site.
For Northeast residents of a certain generation, the name Crazy Eddie brings back a rush of memories of prices that can’t be beat, electronics that fly off the shelves and an in-your-face ad man screaming at the television about all the craziness of this retail giant. Many will remember yellow Crazy Eddie T-shirts with their ripped-off R. Crumb character prominently displayed in the center. Still others will remember the insanity of how this chain of stores — selling everything from telephones to computers to car stereos — fell apart so soon after it rose to the top of the retail world.
Author Gary Weiss has connected the dots and put together the definitive history of Crazy Eddie in his new book, Retail Gangster: The Insane, Real-Life Story of Crazy Eddie, which details the rise and fall of Eddie Antar, who, after more than 250 pages, comes off as a man who climbed the corporate ladder thanks to fraud and deception.
For Weiss, his introduction to the Crazy Eddie story didn’t come from his own personal shopping back in the 1980s. In fact, he never stepped foot in any of the dozens of stores that cropped up in the New York, New Jersey and Connecticut area. Still, he knew of the retail world that Eddie came from.
“I wasn’t a customer of Crazy Eddie,” Weiss said in a recent phone interview. “My father was an electrical engineer, and he actually was a major consumer of electronic products. He was a ham radio operator. … He’d go down to the old electronics district. It was actually on Cortlandt Street before the World Trade Center, and then we’d buy stuff on [what] I refer to as Gray Market Gulch in the book. It was down on Canal Street.”
His fascination with Crazy Eddie came later when he got to know Eddie’s cousin, Sam E. Antar, or Sammy as he was known in the family. Sammy opened up to Weiss, eventually becoming one of his main sources for Retail Gangster. Other sources of information came from select interviews (including Paul Hayes, “the FBI agent in charge of the Crazy Eddie investigation,” as the acknowledgments state) and tons of paperwork about the financial shenanigans that occurred at the publicly traded company. As the book jacket contends, Eddie’s empire was built upon “lies, fraud, and money laundering.”
“I was convinced this would be a great book years ago,” Weiss said. “I wrote another book while I was considering doing this book. I did a book that came out in 2012 on Ayn Rand and how her philosophy is permeating the common public discourse, and … I sort of put aside the whole possibility of doing a Crazy Eddie project to do that book. And then I returned to it. The thing about it was, you see, and the thing that was sort of taunting about this Crazy Eddie [story], the whole subject matter, is how wild [it was]. It’s like a big cyclops of a book, multiple tentacles, multiple plots, multiple subplots, massive amounts of paper, public records. It was this big behemoth, and it was daunting. But one thing led to another, and then just before the pandemic, I finally got a book contract going. And then the pandemic hit, and the rest is history. In fact, I researched the book while the pandemic was going on, which wasn’t easy.”
For the consuming public, perhaps the most memorable facet of the Crazy Eddie story were the ubiquitous and by-all-accounts annoying TV commercials, which featured DJ Jerry Carroll, hands bouncing around wildly and words being machine-gun-fired at the audience like the Micro Machines Man. As Retail Gangster details, these commercials worked wonders and placed Crazy Eddie at the top of the retail market in the greater New York City area, with new stores being opened on a regular basis.
“It was a major force, this big hydrogen bomb of marketing and glitz,” Weiss said. “It was such a cultural force at the time this was going on, it was hard to ignore. It was a parody. If you never stepped foot in the stores, which I did not, you had to know Crazy Eddie. … It had a total of 43 stores at its peak. That’s an enormous chain considering that they only sold electronics. That’s a pretty big chain. This isn’t McDonald’s, who sells hamburgers. It’s electronics. Forty-three stores were spread all over the Northeast, from Philadelphia way up to Massachusetts. It was hard to avoid. The way they comported themselves, the way they marketed themselves was really unforgettable, and I think over time I began to realize that … Eddie was sort of emblematic of an era. He was a fraud, yes, but he was also a genius at marketing. He was a genius at selling.”
Beyond the memorable advertising, Weiss said, there were the many ways the company would cook the books and defraud customers, insurance companies and shareholders (Crazy Eddie eventually went public). One of the earliest examples of this fraud involves an insurance scheme that featured “spiking the claim” — essentially adding unsold products to an insurance claim after a theft or flood at the store.
“It was one of the ways he made money,” the author said. “It speaks to many aspects of his personality. It shows that he would spike the claim, but yet he never went overboard. He never actually set fire to any of his stores or staged a phony burglary. There was an actual event. There was an actual flood. There was an actual fire or burglary, and he would then spike whatever claim he had put in there. It’s kind of interesting though, and I didn’t even attempt to address why this was, [but] why didn’t he go — considering all the criminality, he committed securities fraud, tax fraud — why didn’t he go the extra yard in his insurance fraud? Why did he just spike the claim? Why didn’t he phony it up from the beginning? I don’t have an answer to that. One can only speculate. It’s interesting.”
Beyond the nefarious deeds of Eddie, who died a few years ago, Weiss also spends time trying to understand the culture of the 1970s and 1980s in New York City, a culture that’s often overly-romanticized by nostalgia buffs. He also features Eddie’s family members, including his former wife, siblings, cousins, uncles and parents (his children are largely out of the spotlight in this tome). He describes the experience of Eddie’s grandparents being Syrian immigrants, disembarking in June 1920 in New York Harbor, and what new opportunities (and challenges) awaited them in Brooklyn.
“I think anytime you’re writing a book of this kind you really need to know the background and where they’re from,” Weiss said. “As you look through Eddie Antar’s background, you see that he came from a family of immigrants. Both his grandparents were immigrants from Syria, and I could kind of relate to that myself. My grandparents were immigrants.”
He added: “There was a strong family element to Eddie going into business — a perfectly legitimate, very benign family element coming into play — and then what happened, after Eddie took over, Eddie kind of twisted this tradition and bent it to his will. It became one of the aspects of his fraud.”
By John Soltes / Publisher / John@HollywoodSoapbox.com
Retail Gangster: The Insane, Real-Life Story of Crazy Eddie by Gary Weiss is now available from Hachette Books. Click here for more information.
