Crazy Eddie - Part II

00:00This is World's Greatest Con. I'm Brian Brushwood.

00:07When were you betrayed?

00:10Doesn't have to be the worst time, although I want you to pick a time that hurt a lot.

00:17Like a sticky thorn, a barb inside your brain.

00:21Remember your cheeks flushing?

00:23Remember your eyes squinting?

00:25Remember your teeth clenching?

00:27You're conjuring a ghost from the past right now.

00:31Your brain chemistry is altering itself.

00:36Your brain is releasing cortisol, the stress hormone that's going to activate your amygdala, your so-called lizard brain.

00:43Betrayal isn't just a memory of what occurred.

00:49Every time you access that betrayal, you get hit again and again and again.

00:57Reliving these experiences is unpleasant to say the least.

01:01We reflexively try to avoid it.

01:04Even worse, when we're dancing on that razor's edge of an ultimate betrayal, our brains tend to double down on bad decisions.

01:11Economists call it the sunk cost fallacy.

01:14It's too painful to admit that you got suckered into a multi-level marketing scheme, so what do you do?

01:21You recruit two more friends.

01:22We see this over and over and over, from cults to crypto pump and dump schemes.

01:31But when I asked you to access a betrayal, you weren't thinking about money.

01:36You were thinking about a person, a lover, a best friend, a parent.

01:44These are the most common and the most painful.

01:49Especially when we're young.

01:50For the first time, we could see this vision of the future, only to have it be revealed as what it always was. A fraud.

01:58When we last left Eddie Antar, his self-destruction hadn't stopped the success of Crazy Eddie's Discount Electronics.

02:07The operation continued to expand.

02:09Eddie continued to skim money.

02:11But Eddie wanted more.

02:13So he turned to his younger cousin Sammy.

02:17Sammy, who idolized Eddie.

02:19Sammy's plan was to take the company public, pull an IPO.

02:23And that's exactly what they did.

02:26Together they generated tens of millions of dollars in shareholder value, making some people very, very rich.

02:33But this path required Sammy to lie, cheat, and steal.

02:39And it led to one of those ultimate betrayals.

02:44We're talking federal prosecutions and an international manhunt.

02:50What started as a clear, shimmering vision of the future for Sammy grew, unfolded, and emerged.

02:58Only to reveal itself as what just might be...

03:04The world's greatest con.

03:09The World's Greatest Con.

03:26For the first time since the trial, Sam and Eddie, face-to-face in the same room.

03:29You brought us up to be crooks, Eddie.

03:31Everything I became, came from you, Eddie.

03:33Now I don't blame myself, but everything I became, I learned from you.

03:37You didn't just learn from me.

03:38We learned, like you learned, we learned the culture.

03:41So it's not that I taught you, you knew the culture.

03:44So do not sit there and, by the way, do not raise your voice to me.

03:50I will do whatever I damn well please, Eddie.

03:52I fought for you like crazy.

03:54Doing it for myself, I fought.

03:56I stayed there and I took the heat. You ran.

03:59You ran like a coward.

04:00I'm not a coward, Sam.

04:02Yes, you left me out there hanging with a friend. I didn't leave.

04:05You're not even a friend, you're just a thug.

04:07Just like me, two-bit thug.

04:09Can you forgive, can you forgive Eddie? No.

04:11That's from a CNBC documentary in 2007.

04:16Over two decades after the saga of Crazy Eddie's had ended.

04:21And you could still hear the pain in Sammy's voice.

04:25To understand where that pain comes from, we have to go back to 1979.

04:30Three Antar men sit down to talk Crazy Eddie.

04:34There's the titular Eddie, of course.

04:36His father, Sam M.

04:38And then the youngest of the trio, Eddie's cousin, Sammy.

04:42Literally Sam, middle initial E, Antar.

04:45But everyone just calls him Sammy.

04:48Sammy's fresh out of college.

04:49He's got four years of learning, the ins and outs of accounting under his belt.

04:54And now's his chance to pitch his big idea.

04:57Crazy Eddie's began as a joint venture between Eddie and his dad.

05:01But it was the son's recklessness that made the business what it was.

05:06Eddie fought fair trade laws, and he won.

05:09Eddie created an iconic New York City brand.

05:12With thousands of advertisements burned into the collective consciousness of the city that never sleeps.

05:19And Eddie expanded from one location to dozens.

05:23Sure, there were plenty of insurance scans, fake accounting, outright tax fraud along the way. And a divorce.

05:32And a lot of cocaine.

05:34And a strained relationship between Eddie and his father.

05:38And the one time Eddie got stabbed and wouldn't tell anyone why.

05:42But at this meeting, they all heard the future for the very first time. Young Sammy's plan?

05:50Crazy Eddie's should go public. This.

05:53This is the idea that ruins everything.

05:59The dark seed that would blossom into regrets that last for decades.

06:05But let's go back to 1979.

06:08Sammy's been hanging around ever since the earliest days of Sight and Sound.

06:13He was getting paid peanuts as a stock boy when at just 14 he got the chance to work with Eddie.

06:20Now to Sammy, there was something special about Eddie.

06:23Something about the way he carried himself.

06:26The way he looked at the world.

06:28He was that cooler, older cousin that Sammy just couldn't wait to become.

06:32And on Eddie's end, he saw something special in Sammy too.

06:37Unlike Eddie, Sammy didn't drop out of school at age 15.

06:41Sammy got excellent grades. Sammy liked learning.

06:44And to Sammy, the concept of going to college was genuinely exciting.

06:49Only a few of the Antar clan had ever made that transition to higher learning.

06:54And now Sammy would be one of them.

06:57And it would be Eddie who was paying his way.

07:00Eddie had a sense that somewhere down the road, Sammy's interest in Wall Street could help him.

07:06So he volunteered to pay for Sammy's tuition out of his own pocket.

07:10Now this wouldn't be a loan or a handout.

07:13This was a deal.

07:14I'm going to help you get into college.

07:17And you are going to help me with Crazy Eddie's financials. Sammy didn't hesitate.

07:23In 1975, he began attending business classes at Baruch College.

07:27All in an effort to eventually become Crazy Eddie's exclusive certified public accountant. CPA for short.

07:34And now that he's out of school, he can't get on the job soon enough.

07:40Because the Antars have serious money problems.

07:43Not with making the money, but hiding it.

07:46And I mean physically hiding the cash.

07:49When you walk into Crazy Eddie's, you got a pocket full of the cash.

07:54You buy a television, cash goes in the till.

07:57At the end of the day, the cash that would otherwise be sucked away to pay taxes, insurance, employee benefits. That gets separated.

08:04And it gets taken home by Eddie.

08:06In the old days, Eddie would just throw a few rolls of hundreds into a crawl space.

08:12Or maybe stuff them in a couch cushion.

08:14But since Crazy Eddie's is now a retail phenomenon, he's running out of places to hide it.

08:19Literally running out of room.

08:21The Antar family only has so many attics and mattresses.

08:25And if there's no room to hide the cash, and he doesn't want to pay taxes on it.

08:30The only other option is depositing the money in secret accounts held all the way in Israel.

08:35But the only way to do that without a trace is to physically pack hundreds of thousands of dollars into bags and fly to Israel. Sammy though.

08:43Sammy's got a vision.

08:45And he has to sell the family elders on it.

08:49Crazy Eddie's skimmed cash is a problem, yes.

08:52But what if that problem was an asset?

08:55What if the key was to launder that money back into the business?

08:59Now what would be the point of doing that?

09:01The reason is to make Crazy Eddie's the hottest stock on Wall Street. Here's Sammy.

09:0780 to 84 we gradually reduce the skimming.

09:11Let's say hypothetically you're making 10 million dollars a year, you're skimming 5.

09:15Everybody thinks you're making 5.

09:17Our reported profits, because of the gradual reduction in skimming, went from 1.

09:217 million to 5. 3 million. It tripled.

09:23Sam the Elder looks at Eddie.

09:26Eddie looks at Sam. They love it.

09:28Sam calls it young Sammy's golden idea.

09:31Eddie knew that sending Sammy to college would be a good investment, but there was no way he saw this coming.

09:39In young Sammy's own words, he was quote, a dorky idiot.

09:42But he knew what he was talking about.

09:45Sammy's describing a series of moves that will actually take Crazy Eddie from a 2-bit embezzlement depot to a legitimate multi-million dollar empire. Dot, dot, dot.

09:59All so the Antares can then defraud public investors for millions by liquidating their stock at inflated prices.

10:09To the eyes of Wall Street, these moves won't look like a company cleaning up its act.

10:16They'll look like a company experiencing explosive growth.

10:19Meanwhile, to the Antares, this plan is pure genius.

10:23It's a classic shell game.

10:25They're going to make the charts look like the company's performing better than ever while solving their cash problem at the same time.

10:33It's going to take time though.

10:35Eddie has to slowly introduce all that new cash into his annual earnings. Impress Wall Street.

10:41But it's going to take nearly half a decade to get there.

10:45So to start, Sammy and Eddie, they clean up just enough of the books to pass the initial scrutiny of investors and auditors.

10:52They inflate inventory numbers.

10:53They manipulate profit margins.

10:55They make sure Crazy Eddie looks like a fast-growing profitable enterprise, not some scam house.

11:02They hire lawyers to represent the brand.

11:05They hire accountants to act as in-house auditors.

11:08That way they guarantee nobody's going to be held responsible for Eddie's own ways.

11:13Heck, they'll even give their employees a W-2 of all things.

11:17For a minute, Crazy Eddie really is a reputable above-board business.

11:22For a minute, anyway.

11:23While Eddie and Sam the Elder pump the brakes on the skimming, Sammy secures an internship, not only to finish out his CPA license, but in his own words, to serve a secret second purpose.

11:36To teach Sammy how to manipulate the auditors in a post-IPO world.

11:41This was, as you can guess, totally illegal.

11:44Which is why Crazy Eddie paid Sammy under the table for his, I'm using near quotes, advice.

11:51Over the next four years, business goes as usual.

11:55Sammy would moonlight at Crazy Eddie, helping his cousin manage their profits effectively.

12:00Back in 1979, the company had skimmed nearly $3 million per year.

12:04But by 1984, they'd weaned down to almost nothing.

12:08Meanwhile, Crazy Eddie's profits were skyrocketing. Blasting from $1.

12:127 million in 1980 to $8 million in 1984.

12:17That, of course, is in official dollars only.

12:21In reality, profits were rising, largely thanks to all of Eddie's new stores.

12:28But they were actually closer to $4.

12:317 million in 1980.

12:32Nice leap, but a lot less impressive when you look at it over the first half of the decade.

12:38Eh, it came with the territory.

12:39So did paying employees by check.

12:41Once Eddie learned that the IRS needed to know his employees' income in order for the IPO to launch, that meant everybody in the Crazy Eddie business all had to pay their required taxes.

12:56Eddie made it up to his workers, delivering just enough in raises to cover whatever they'd need to give the government.

13:02To Eddie, this was all worth it.

13:05The Antars were going to make millions overnight once the company went public.

13:08Skimming, that only saved hundreds of thousands of dollars every year.

13:12By 1983, the wheels are in motion.

13:15If anything, Eddie's even more excited after four years of work.

13:19All that illegitimate money is being pulled out of crawl spaces and mattresses so it can be dumped back into the actual stores.

13:28And to would-be investors, it looks like one of the most successful retailer upstarts of the last 15 years is about to hit Wall Street.

13:36To Sammy's bosses at Penn and Horowitz, all they saw was employees suddenly getting 2,000% raises.

13:44That kind of thing raises an eyebrow.

13:46According to Sammy, the Antars just said, oh, these employees had been underpaid. You're right.

13:53They've been sacrificing, working at low wages in order to be part of the big IPO.

13:59Like all of Eddie's excuses up to this point, they bought it. September 13, 1984. The plan worked.

14:08Crazy Eddie launches on the New York Stock Exchange at $8 a share.

14:24But with the on-paper profits of the last four years creating the false impression of a retail juggernaut, it doesn't take long for the stock price to explode.

14:35Their stock ticker symbol? CRZY.

14:37Yeah, there have been doubters.

14:39A particularly stinging piece from Barron's Magazine dove deep into the Antar clan, calling out their habit of using Crazy Eddie's revenue stream to bail out associated family businesses.

14:52But Barron's didn't catch on.

14:54on to any of the real fraud.

14:57So the launch goes off without a hitch.

15:00Years of slowing down their skimming operations had made Crazy Eddie look healthier than ever.

15:04Eddie had done it.

15:06Sammy had done it.

15:07Everyone in the Antar family who had a piece of the business could soon cash out with stock worth millions.

15:14But with that privilege comes attention. Federal attention.

15:17Back when Crazy Eddie was a private business, Eddie didn't have to show his books to nobody.

15:27But now as a public business, auditors would be snipping around the books at all times of the year.

15:33They needed a plan.

15:34Luckily, Sammy has one. Works like this.

15:37Sammy knew that the currency he had to manage wasn't the cash. It was time.

15:43He knew that each year the auditors are supposed to spend eight weeks digging through the Crazy Eddie books.

15:51They'd be looking for irregularities or outright fraud, something that could result in lawsuits from the investors.

15:57And if Sammy could keep their eyes on anything but the books, he could hide an awful lot.

16:04Sammy rule number one, look for a firm that isn't going to send their best.

16:10These are annual audits that have to be done on practically every publicly traded business.

16:15And for the accountants, it's tedious work.

16:18The kind of stuff experienced accountants hate.

16:20So Sammy knew that the auditors they'd get assigned would be 20 somethings, men barely out of college.

16:29And Sammy himself is a 20 something year old man barely out of college.

16:34He's pretty sure he knows how to keep them distracted.

16:37And so we begin step two.

16:39Bring these men everything 1980s New York City has to offer.

16:42Expensive dinners, flirtatious women who just so happen to be on the Crazy Eddie payroll. Done. The perfect distraction.

16:50Late nights spent in the city that never sleeps.

16:53Hey man, whatever happens on the Crazy Eddie account stays on the Crazy Eddie account.

16:59Party after party after party, the distractions just keep adding up.

17:03Sammy the whole time.

17:05Whoa, you guys are pros.

17:07How long is a routine audit really going to take?

17:11And now suddenly it's week six and the auditors are just a quarter of the way through.

17:17That means the most inexperienced accountants that the entire firm now have to do nearly an entire audit in just two weeks.

17:24So yeah, they have to rush.

17:26They have to complete the books just for the sake of saying they completed them on time.

17:33And by God, it works again.

17:34For three years, this perfect combination of sex, booze, distractions, you name it, it keeps the auditors off the scent.

17:44Through this all, Eddie continues to drag his wife Debbie along, always convincing her that her fortune is going to show up any minute.

17:58No matter how many lies he threw at her, tax problems, bad investment, slow court cases, she continued to hold out hope.

18:06And she had every reason to suspect this guy was lying because he is Crazy Eddie after all.

18:13With stock prices now at $21 per share, Eddie sells.

18:18He sells his shares like there's no tomorrow. He pockets millions.

18:23I mean, that means he's got plenty of money to make his ex-wife happy, right? Wrong. Debbie gets nothing.

18:31How far will Eddie go to keep that money away from her?

18:35He tricks Debbie's mom into signing a stack of documents buried in there as a little piece of paper that unlocks $8 million worth of stocks meant for their children.

18:48And Eddie's not alone.

18:50The Antar family, knowing the real financials, they're liquidating their positions constantly.

18:54Altogether, the Antars unload $90 million in stock over the lifetime of the company.

19:01All right, hold on.

19:04I'm no stock man. Stockman.

19:06But even I know that it's not a great sign when any executive is dumping hundreds of thousands of shares, let alone a guy who the company's named after.

19:19At best, this is a warning shot to investors that something bad is happening in the company.

19:25At worst, this is insider trading.

19:27But the crazy Eddie stock continues to rise.

19:30How the hell is Eddie getting away with this?

19:34Both in private and in public, Eddie's lines were identical.

19:38He had the right to diversify his portfolio several times throughout 1985.

19:43He told fellow investors in closed door meetings he had no intention of selling any additional stock, only to renege on that promise weeks later. Nobody noticed.

19:54And the few people who did.

19:57I mean, it did earn a single line in a report from The New York Times.

20:03Those people went ignored.

20:04Eddie is getting no real pushback on selling his stock no matter how bad of a look it presents.

20:12But things are getting tougher.

20:13Analysts love crazy Eddie, but they love it for all the wrong reasons.

20:17This was a chain representing pure, unadulterated growth.

20:22Eddie sold the IPO on delivering returns, but his numbers were fake.

20:26And the only way to keep the stock price up was to keep meeting or really beating analyst expectations.

20:35And that is about to become a huge problem because after four years of laundering their skimmed money, they finally started to run out.

20:47In March of 1986, the elder Sam Antar is now 64 years old.

20:55At this time, he finally feels some sense of peace over the loss of his battle for crazy Eddie.

21:09He's still the fourth largest shareholder in the company, but he's mostly cashed out in the two years since the IPO launch.

21:17And despite his grievances with Eddie, his own fate, his own fortune, thanks to those remaining shares, are still inextricably intertwined with that company staying healthy and, well, alive.

21:27The problem is that crazy Eddie stock is stalling and Wall Street analysts expect sales growth.

21:38Eddie's got to boost their profits yet again, but they're just about out of all the easily accessible skimmed money.

21:47No more loose cash to pump back into the stores.

21:52Crazy Eddie needs to show an extra $2.

21:552 million in revenues in order to meet analysts expectations.

22:01For the third time, the crazy Eddie enterprise has a major problem.

22:07And for the third time, our golden boy Sammy hatches a brilliant solution, something he calls the Panama Pump.

22:15See, Eddie has the money.

22:18It's just not in America.

22:21He squirreled it away years ago in Israel.

22:25Sammy wires the money from Israel to the famously opaque Panama.

22:29He then dispatches family members to Panama to withdraw the money in bank drafts, has them put the cash in a suitcase and fly to the tri-state area.

22:39That smuggled cash shows up in the crazy Eddie's accounts as fake sales.

22:42Then the elder even helps out, delivering half a million dollars of the total 2. 2 needed.

22:49And it comes from his, not Eddie's bank account.

22:52And just like that, yet again, they escape financial turmoil, at least for now.

22:57But things are getting closer and closer to real danger.

23:02If Sammy hadn't come up with the Panama Pump, the fraud would have been discovered by the end of the fiscal year.

23:11Eddie's lucky that the auditors are so distracted because the whole Panama Pump scheme is not exactly, what's the word? Clever.

23:18Yeah, it's not clever.

23:19Crazy Eddie's average sales ticket comes out to around $300 per customer.

23:23But the Panama Pump payments came in lump sums of tens of thousands of dollars, completely inconsistent with usual sales. Bill? It works. 2.

23:342 million dollars slipped back into the company? Check.

23:37Investors pleased with the totally engineered fake profits? Check.

23:42Stock prices to the moon? Check.

23:45Eddie and Sam alone pocket another 3.

23:482 million dollars in stock shares, while crazy Eddie's valuation shoots up by 40 million dollars.

23:56Eddie gets away with it. Again. Again. Again.

23:59I hope Eddie savored this win because this is going to be the last time he gets away with it.

24:17Eddie had broken through in the 1970s by defying fair trade laws.

24:22He told big electronics manufacturers to shove it, and he passed the savings on to you by any means necessary, even if that usually meant not paying taxes.

24:34And now, a decade later, countless upstarts see crazy Eddie as a rival worth taking down.

24:40Eddie Antar is caught in a price war with retailers who are playing the game legit.

24:48He is now stuck between a rock and a hard place, hungry rivals willing to do anything to undercut his prices, and a growing amount of fraud that can't survive a drop in revenue.

24:58Eddie keeps trying to feed the beast.

25:01One quarter in the middle of 1986, he has 3.

25:052 million dollars injected into store accounts through the help of a friend who owns an electronics wholesaler.

25:11The next quarter, his father sells 25,000 of his remaining 400,000 shares to generate nearly a million dollars in fake revenue.

25:19In November, Eddie sells 1.

25:215 million shares of his own stock, dropping his ownership of the company down to just 10%, and profiting him over 20 million dollars more in the process.

25:33Sammy, now the CFO, bails Eddie out of potential lawsuits, once again relying on his wholesaler friend to write undated checks, checks that deliver just enough cash to keep the investors happy.

25:47But as 1986 comes to a close, Sammy's annoyed with Eddie, and it's getting worse.

25:53Sammy issues a memo, written with the help of a friendly lawyer, informing all crazy Eddie management to cease selling stocks.

26:03All that buys Sammy is getting read the riot act by Eddie and Sam the Elder, both at the same time.

26:10Finally, those two have something they agree on. Shut up, nerd!

26:14On and on it goes.

26:16The stock selling, the fraudulent influxes of cash, the ever-growing squeeze of price wars by competition, both big and small.

26:23They can't keep doing this forever.

26:25Even Eddie is starting to realize it.

26:28So just before Christmas, Eddie creates an all-new board of directors, with Sammy at the top.

26:37A week in 1987, Eddie spreads the rumor.

26:41Eddie Antar is seriously ill.

26:43He is stepping down as CEO to deal with his health.

26:47Behind the scenes, Eddie manages the company from his apartment, as if nothing's changed.

26:53While the New York press cries out at the loss of a brilliant leader in the business, Sammy's just trying to tread enough water to stay afloat.

27:02By his estimation, they've processed $35 million in fraud, and the real sales numbers just keep dropping.

27:09A weak Christmas season does nothing to help save the chain.

27:15Even worse, the person in life who truly hates Eddie the most has finally run out of patience.

27:23Debbie Antar is back, and she wants what she's owed.

27:27After nearly a decade of empty promises, Sam the Elder approaches Debbie, tells her it's time.

27:36It's time to take Eddie to court.

27:39She's finally come to the realization that Eddie has no interest in taking care of her.

27:46For her, there'll be no windfall of stock profits.

27:49And now, with the emotional, and as needed, financial backing of Eddie's father, she decides it's time to make him pay.

27:56Eddie, the ungrateful son who had unlearned every lesson that this noble father had ever tried to teach him.

28:06Eddie, the ungrateful husband who'd lied and cheated and stolen from the person he built a family with.

28:14The only friend Eddie has left is Sammy, and that relationship can only withstand so much pressure. It's 1989.

28:21Sammy and Eddie sit in an Italian restaurant in Manhattan, and they're listening to Sam Belsberg.

28:38Why are all of these guys named Sam?

28:42Anyway, Sam Belsberg is droning on and on about Canadian fishing, of all things.

28:47Sammy laughs along, his fork picking its way through spaghetti.

28:51I mean, Sammy likes Belsberg. Eddie likes Belsberg.

28:55They all love Belsberg because Belsberg is the perfect mark for their final scam.

29:03And he better be the perfect mark because without him, everything is about to go very, very bad.

29:11The Antars need to get out of the stock market.

29:16They need to take the company private again.

29:21And with the right unsuspecting billionaire, one that would be willing to let Sammy and Eddie keep control of the company, they could quietly pass off all their mountains of fraud as the result of those new buyers.

29:33The Antars are innocent.

29:35The darlings of the financial world, they would never lie to their investors.

29:39It was those evil, evil Canadians you should be checking out.

29:43Eddie needs a sale to go off without a hitch, because by God, this is only one of his many, many problems.

29:52His ex-wife Sueing him over the divorce agreement and there's this looming SEC investigation On top of that two employees approached Sam the elder They said that they had taken enough data on their way out the door after getting canned by Eddie that they could sink the entire ship Sam takes these two out to dinner telling them he had no idea about Eddie's actions He was setting Eddie up his own son as the fall guy.

30:19I Might have let Eddie's antics make him a few millions, but he wasn't about to let Eddie drag him off to prison Quietly Sam the elder arranged for these two men to meet with the SEC They have intimate knowledge not just about crazy Eddie's dirty tricks, but specifically the skimming from the early days Sam doesn't like that part.

30:44So he warns them.

30:45Hey guys, don't mention the skimming That's not the real crime and besides it'll make them look like small potatoes I mean in reality if these two revealed too much Sam himself could go down right alongside Eddie But all of this all of this could be fixed right now right here at this Italian restaurant If Bells bird buys the company takes it private Then it will be much more complicated to prosecute this mess that way Eddie could focus on beating his ex-wife in court And Sure enough a deal is struck an announcement is made public Bells bird buys crazy Eddie cue the confetti play some music.

31:24Let's have a party except for the first time the media looks at Eddie Antar and Sees him exactly for the man he is Those questions Wait a minute, why is Eddie suddenly back as CEO?

31:42I I thought he was dying That's odd.

31:47Why was Eddie's return almost perfectly timed with this billionaire swooping in to buy the company? I'm sorry.

31:56Is anybody else seeing this? Hold on. Most importantly.

31:59Why is Bells bird the only suitor?

32:02Shouldn't there be a competition a bidding war?

32:05I mean, this is crazy Eddie after all a brand that is ubiquitous in the tri-state area Better known than coca-cola even they're supremely well positioned in the red-hot world of personal electronics.

32:17I Mean think about this moment in 1989 the Gameboy launches Combine that with personal computing the rise of compact disc players for stereos and the Discman Wireless phones VHS camcorders and whatever else those crazy nerds keep inventing and other people can't stop buying If crazy Eddie is such a winner of a distressed asset there should at least be some interest from more than one buyer right Elias Zinn thought exactly that as An investor Zinn had the cash to speculate and so he announces he intends to buy crazy Eddie and to make it clear that he's not messing around He offers one full dollar per share over Bells birds offer In other words Zinn wants to pull a hostile takeover and he does exactly that Sam the elder even helps he cashes out all of his remaining shares to support Zinn's takeover This totally undermines Eddie's ability to control anything at the company Smelling a chance to cash out the stockholders follow suit going for the best offer available This buyout is what sends the entire house of cards tumbling down Eddie has no power at the company So he can't engineer the books to make all of his past fraud look like the sins of the new buyer within two weeks of ownership Zinn takes physical inventory of crazy Eddie's stores and warehouses and What he finds is staggering more than 40 million dollars worth of missing inventory They complained to the SEC all of a sudden those two ex-employees.

34:14They look very credible Eddie publicly complains that Zinn botched the handover Nobody is buying Meanwhile, Debbie in the middle of the divorce lawsuit tells the feds about Eddie's overseas bank accounts You know the ones that were in Debbie's name Sammy meanwhile is still fiercely loyal to Eddie, but even he sees the writing on the wall Frantically searching he thinks he may have found a way out for them Sammy finds out about the two ex-employees and that they've been hiding the early skimming Hey Eddie, what if we threw these guys under the bus, maybe we could undercut them sell them out to the investigators But no Eddie cuts ties with Sammy Good luck on your own kid.

35:07Someone's gonna have to take the blame on this who better than the CFO Hey, by the way, grab yourself a CD player on the way out. Just kidding.

35:18They're not there Sammy is stuck on On the one hand his uncle is trying to frame him on the other his coolest cousin had just kicked him out of his life And so left with no other option Sammy finally flips Eddie lost He lost the company that bore his name He lost his fortune and once Sammy starts singing for the SEC.

35:51He lost his closest confidant He lost any remnants of a relationship with his family And he officially lost his divorce lawsuit when a final ruling came from the state Supreme Court in September of 1989 after piecing together a web of lies the SEC Officially charges Eddie Antar with securities fraud and insider trading by January 1990 a federal judge ordered Eddie to return over 50 million dollars.

36:28He had smuggled out of the country Eddie Doesn't show up to explain where the money went instead.

36:36He goes into hiding which sets the stage for an inevitable pursuit a Issued and although Eddie surrenders to the US Marshals, he slips through the cracks once again He's released and ordered to appear in court, but predictably he vanishes His assets are frozen and Eddie makes a bold escape fleeing to Israel under the alias David Jacob Levi Cohen There he builds a new life in Yavna Meanwhile back in New York Sammy cuts a deal with federal prosecutors in exchange for immunity Sammy avoids prison gets off with house arrest community service and fines And he's got no home to come back to not here in the USA.

37:25He's got no family No money.

37:27All he's got is the prospects of prison It is new life in Israel doesn't last long June 1992 US Marshals had tracked him down.

37:37They arrested Eddie on federal racketeering conspiracy charges he gets extradited to the US in January of 93 and There Eddie finally faces the consequences.

37:49He's been evading for so long crazy Eddie Antar continues to be held without bail tonight Facing trial in June for skimming millions of dollars from his chain of electronic stores and ripping off Shareholders by falsely driving up stock the trial begins that summer By July 20th Eddie is found guilty of 17 counts of fraud Only to have the case overturned on appeal slippery that Eddie But by May of 1996 Eddie's final escape act came to an end Finally caught dead to rights.

38:23He pleads guilty to federal fraud charges and in 1997 he's sentenced to eight years in prison The fines are massive over a hundred fifty million dollars And that on top of the 1 billion dollars in civil judgments They try to recover as much money as they can to make the defrauded stockholders whole But those efforts are officially ended in 2012 Eddie may have spent years running, but the consequences of his actions couldn't be beat The crazy Eddie brand had a few shots at a comeback once by Eddie's Grandchildren and once with Eddie himself both times they rehired Jerry Carroll, but it never quite worked Because Eddie wasn't really a businessman crazy Eddie wasn't really a business man On September 10th 2016 in New Jersey Eddie Antar died He left behind four daughters and a son Meanwhile Sammy's gone legit he lectures about white-collar crime using his own experience as a cornerstone To this day he blogs about deception in the business world To explain the mind of a criminal he takes audiences down the path He and his cousin walked from the small-time hustles to defeating the fair trade laws To the crawl spaces packed with skimmed cash the iconic commercials the wild parties the fraudulent books the international banks the fleecing of investors and yes, the ultimate betrayal from his own blood and Every time Sammy tells his story.

40:15He's telling what just might be The world's greatest con This episode of world's greatest con was written by Will Sattelberg and me Brian Brushwood your humble host The show was executive produced by Justin Robert Young production and research by dog and pony show audio in Austin, Texas Credit goes to retail gangster the insane real-life story of crazy Eddie by Gary Weiss and the blog white-collar fraud by Sam e Antar which along with contemporary news articles Retrospectives and archive video made for the bulk of our research

41:32com All right Statistically speaking we know there's a lot of New York people who probably have epic tales of crazy Eddie's Did you ever go there?

41:39Did you ever meet crazy Eddie hit us up with your best stories or better yet?

41:45Make sure to send us your suggestions for the next episode of world's greatest con Hope you guys have a fantastic Thanksgiving week This is kind of becoming a bit of a tradition, isn't it?

41:56Have a great time hug your family for me, and we'll see you next time Diamond Club hopes you have enjoyed this bro Dog and pony show audio