The rise and fall of 'Crazy Eddie': An exclusive look at a book that peels back the layers

Note: Before a 33-year career in journalism, reporter William Westhoven spent seven years working for Crazy Eddie, finishing as a store manager in 1987. He previously broke the news of Eddie Antar's death in 2016 and later authored a first-person memoir of his experience there.

Three decades after it collapsed under the immense weight of a historic securities fraud, the true-life legend of consumer-electronics king "Crazy Eddie" Antar is still embedded in the popular culture of the New York region.

The astonishing elements of a brazen, multilevel grift, intertwined with a complex family drama, are now collected in a new book, "Retail Gangster: The Insane Real-Life Story of Crazy Eddie," by longtime investigative financial journalist Gary Weiss, published by Hachette on Tuesday.

"It's created a certain amount of buzz," Weiss said in an interview on Friday with the USA TODAY Network.

Not everyone remembers the details about a secretive family business that cooked the books from its beginnings on Kings Highway in Brooklyn, growing to 43 high-volume stores before cashing in by taking the company public and selling off millions of inflated stock shares. They may or may not remember Eddie's flight from justice after he was charged with federal crimes and his eventual capture in Israel.

But baby boomers and Gen Xers can't help but recall the arm-waving huckster who hollered in thousands of Crazy Eddie TV ads that "His prices are in-saane!" and guaranteed the lowest prices on all the must-have gadgets transforming life in Ronald Reagan America: VCRs and video cameras, boomboxes, Sony Walkmans, the first generation of video games, cordless phones and more.

With sources from inside the company, law enforcement contacts and thousands of pages of court transcripts, Weiss digs into the weeds of how the Crazy Eddie operation functioned. Skirting fair-trade laws that fixed prices on name-brand goods, he also skimmed cash from unreported sales and the sales tax that went along with them.

"How could he afford to charge so little?" Weiss wrote. "It was simple. All he had to do was cheat the government."

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More ill-gotten gains were generated by elaborate inventory scams, bogus warranty claims and insurance fraud.

"When pipes burst or sewage backed up, Eddie would take products that he couldn’t sell and move them into the storethat was flooded," Weiss wrote. "When the roofs leaked, Eddie was sure to run up a hose to maximize the water flow."

Taking the company public was his big mistake, Weiss said.

"It didn't occur to him that somebody could come in and buy the company out from under you. And then you're screwed," Weiss wrote. "That's what ultimately put him in jail for seven years."

The book also chronicles a pattern of malevolent behavior by Eddie, not only to family members and underlings, but to his wife, who demanded a divorce after learning of his mistress.

Even after the IPO, Eddie was reluctant to turn off the illegal gravy pouring into their coffers. When a warehouse manager asked if the inventory fraud should cease, Eddie told him, "Rip their eyes out," according to Weiss.

The real Crazy Eddie

Some customers and TV viewers were also unaware that the wild man seen in the TV ads was not the real Crazy Eddie, who avoided personal publicity after being stabbed outside a New York nightclub in 1977.

"Crazy Eddie was supposed to be a fun store, a cool store, a place you could bring the kids," Weiss wrote. "Crazy but in a nice way, not in a 'founder gets stabbed' way."

"Dr. Jerry" Carroll, a popular New York DJ in the late 1970s, was recruited for the TV spots because the company liked how he read its radio ads. He was retained and grew to iconic pitchman status even after the Godfather of Soul, James Brown, openly lobbied for the job.

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The rest is retail history. "Retail Gangster," of course, covers the relentless, fabled advertising campaign directed by Larry Weiss (no relation to the author), another key source in the book.

"In 1985 a survey found that the Carroll character was better known to New Yorkers than the publicity-hound Mayor Ed Koch," Gary Weiss wrote. "A year later, the stores had 99 percent name recognition, higher than Ronald Reagan. Its patrons ranged from ordinary people to celebrities to junkies — a popular brand of smack was called 'Crazy Eddie.'"

One of the big reveals in the book is that the ubiquitous Carroll's death went largely unreported in 2020. Weiss confirmed with his widow that Carroll, who was in fact quite shy, died due to a longstanding heart ailment.

"I almost tumbled out of my chair when I heard that," Weiss said. "I was shocked because I looked and I looked and I looked. There was nothing."

Carroll still appears in GIF form when users search for Crazy Eddie on social media platforms including Facebook, and his histrionics are copied by TV pitchmen to this day.

Along the way, "Retail Gangster" intersects with a variety of legal eagles and famous New Yorkers of the era, from disgraced former Miss America Bess Myerson and celebrity divorce attorney Raoul Felder to Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito, then a U.S. attorney for New Jersey. Prosecutor Michael Chertoff, who later served as the U.S. secretary of homeland security, referred to Eddie as "the Darth Vader of capitalism."

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.

Other family members, including Eddie's brother, Allen, refused to speak to Weiss and publicly condemned the book "before it was even written," according to the author.

This article originally appeared on Morristown Daily Record: Crazy Eddie book details story of consumer-electronics king