When I was a kid in the 70s and 80s, I saw the Crazy Eddie's commercials all the time. My parents bought our first microwave there-it sparked and exploded after 2 months. When they and their commercials disappeared, I figured that it was just the slings and arrows of business, other guys sold better stuff and were more over with the public. I had no idea the extent of the scandal. Bravo-excellent job!
My family purchased most of our stereo equipment at Crazy Eddie’s back in the 70s. The words you used are more than appropriate. They didn’t screw over the customers. They just had a place that was too good to be true. Insaaaaaaane!
I remember these guys when I was a kid. Their adds were quite the spectacle. I always get a kick when they do parodies of the commercials because Crazy Eddie's legacy will never die.
Growing up in Long Island, my brothers and I used to see their ads all the time... Along with these gems: - Ronco/Popiel: ua-cam.com/video/XQZtlvDiJ4s/v-deo.html (Scramble an egg while it's still inside it's shell!) - Carvel Ice Cream: ua-cam.com/video/rS6ki8D7zQA/v-deo.html (Complete with that guy's gravelly voice) - NY tourism: ua-cam.com/video/0gsyQeV2aR8/v-deo.html (Why were these shown IN NY so much?) - The Wiz: ua-cam.com/video/pb540QTFzkg/v-deo.html (Remind you of another advertising campaign?) - The Money Store: ua-cam.com/video/t7ys64r0M10/v-deo.html (Phil Rizzuto - these played a LOT!) - Empire Carpet: ua-cam.com/video/s73v79TyASI/v-deo.html (Complete with Andrews Sisters soundalike jingle - probably appealed to the Silent Generation)
And Crazy Eddie has since been a textbook case study in university accounting programs all across the country. That's where I first heard of Crazy Eddie and all of his fraud.
I'd heard references to it ("We won't be undersoooold!" etc.) but I had no idea what it was until much later in life. Now when people talk about it, they only want to talk about the fraud, and with good reason!
I worked at the East Brunswick store on and off between high school and college for about 3 years. It was a crazy place like no other and when I look back there were definitely things that made no sense, but I was a teenager and naive about personal and especially corporate greed. You always felt like you were part of something that was so unique and strange that something has to be going on but you would never be able to put your finger on it. I will say that I saw a lot people working hard doing what we thought was an honest days work, and their was a real camaraderie amongst us who lingered. Conversely, the higher up you got in management, they tended to be hardcore a$$holes, almost sadistic. When it all hit the fan I was getting ready to graduate college already and had moved on for jobs that paid better but watching the place die was like losing a family friend. I will always have fond memories of those comrades...Sue, Rhoda, Terry, Frank, Mike, Brian, Sumit, Joe, Monica and so many others whose names have faded from memory.
I can't help to wonder if Crazy Eddie's had a "Code of Ethics" policy that employees had to observe. What was the company culture like? Anything about "giving back to the community", as is now common?
@@CartoonMitchell Code of Ethics? Giving back to the community? No and no! First of all, in order to be hired (and I just remembered this) one had to pass a polygraph test which was given in New York City and focused on your history of stealing and criminal record. I don't even know if that's fully legal now that I think about it considering I was a minor at the time. So there was a focused effort at the outset to screen out anyone they thought might "take" from them. As far as community relations, I cannot overstate enough the contempt towards customers that was present in that place. Of course it was a 2 way street because of the haggling atmosphere...you'd have people coming in demanding to pay no sales tax, or to pay below cost or they insisted on employee pricing because they claimed to be related to someone who worked there. As far as giving back to the community, the closest thing was employing local off-duty cops (some of the most corrupt in NJ history) as security guards at the front door. So again, it was all manifestations of modern corporate greed.
As a CPA with an MBA, I believe the best way to become a financial crook is to take the route the Antar's took, get somebody on the "inside" to learn what the auditors look for and how they do the looking. It's like taking lock picking courses to become a burglar.
Pretty much. It's like how the best cheaters in speedrunning are also the best speedrunners and most active members of the community. No one knows how to make a fake speedrun look legit than a speedrunner.
@@ashblossomandjoyoussprung.9917Huh, hadn't considered that, but makes sense. Any YT documentaries (like this one on Crazy Eddie) you would recommend featuring a speedrunner who was found to be cheating?
As an MBA student 15 years ago I was lucky enough to have Sam Antar come and speak to our b-school one evening. It was one of the best experiences of my school time. It was so interesting to here Sam describe the literal "craziness" of what they did, and the tricks they would use to evade detection such as stacking TVs in such a way that they knew the "suits" wouldn't climb a ladder to see how many TVs were actually in the area or having attractive female employees wine & dine auditors. I am not sure if Sam is still alive, but I found it incredible that 20 years after the fraud was committed he needs to travel with an armed body guard.
That cop with the mullet at 11:30, is the most 1989 thing I've ever seen. He's the perfect cool guy detective on a CBS primetime cop drama in the late 80s.
The crazy Eddie commercial snapped me back to my childhood so fast...every time it came on my father would call him a thief and a lunatic lol they'll always be nostalgic for me and probably anyone else who is 45+ and grew up in NY/NJ/CT
I actually lived only a few hundred feet away from one of Crazy Eddie's New Jersey locations, and back then you absolutely could not get away from their ads. The chain was still operating when my family moved away, and nowadays I just have to stand amazed at just how shady everything it did was.
I grew up in Jersey in the 70s and 80s and know what you mean. Every time I watched something on a New York-based station, there would be at least one Crazy Eddie commercial in the mix. I didn't know until now the scale of their fraud.
It sounds like an easy pitch: it's "The Big Short" meets "Better Call Saul." I can easily see David Cross and Jason Mantzoukas having their career redefining dramatic turns playing the Antar cousins.
I worked at a Crazy Eddie's for a couple of years out of high school in the mid 80's in CT. I have to say that as employees, we had no idea what was happening deep within the company. It all came apart after I'd long moved on. I must say though that, it was actually a fun place to work. Everyone was cool. The bosses were great. I always did find it weird that it was the only store that I'd ever seen in which you could walk in and negotiate the price on the expensive items no matter what the price tag was. There was a secret figure inserted into a larger set of digits that gave the sales person the bottom/lowest price to work off of. The sales team would see what the customer wanted, call stock to see if the item was available, then negotiate. The amazing thing was, if you worked there, you were somewhat considered lucky and cool. I'm sure that it was probably due to the zany commercials that were always on TV and radio.
I recall a class I had in high school where the teacher went over what the guys at electronic stores could negotiate, that they had one price they could get down to without consulting their boss, and another price that their boss couldn't go below either. I don't know how true it was, but from that it seemed like it was common in the electronics industry for customers to haggle prices, which makes sense given how expensive electronics used to be. Now most people buy electronics online and don't have any opportunity to haggle, and get lower prices than local stores would publish anyway.
I worked in East Brunswick store. The price inside the digits was called "c-line" if i recall. That was the lowest you could go as a salesman and I think the employee price on stuff too.
Was that the MR and the K number? I bought a lot of electronics and home computers at the Crazy Eddie in Westbury in the 1980s. I was able to negotiate for a lot of “Insane” prices.
@@doubledrats235 Really not sure, I was a stockroom guy and that was sales stuff. I knew about the number that started and ended with 9's...the number between the 9's was the "cost" (C-line) and the lowest sales staff were permitted to go.
A warehouse I worked at got in trouble for inflating inventory. The management was telling the company they had 5x of what was there. At one point, the company said they need to ship it out for sale. Finally the managers had to say the inventory wasn't really there. they were eventually fired and replaced.
I'm one of those New Yorkers who grew up seeing those Crazy Eddie ads all the time. And also when I was a little guy, I thought that wild man in the commercials was actually Eddie himself. Years later I found out about the fraud and was a little saddened by it all. It was like finding out Santa Claus wasn't real! I guess Crazy Eddie's prices really were insane.
Most fraudsters go crazy with power and just try to grab every cent they can. Eddies' strategy of selling products for cheaper (on account of not paying taxes) and increasing business was a brilliant use of the stolen funds.
Think about what you're saying and how embarrassing it actually is, though. Are you really going to stand by that? 😂. It's just way too obvious that you think that because you forgot (somehow) that you never hear about the vast majority of fraudsters, because the vast majority of fraudsters never get caught, because the vast majority of fraudsters aren't stupid enough to go crazy with power. Good gosh. Welcome to UA-cam? 36 upvotes. Sheesh. If you're that short-sighed in your worldviews, then I fear for your levels of gullibility (you're very likely to be taken advantage of by a fraudster if you think they're so easy to identify).
Honestly I’m not sure if the start of it was a desire to grab money, but rather being able to sell electronics to families in Brooklyn who couldn’t afford it otherwise. But then, if you sell at prices people can afford, and everyone is working for low wages (relative to their rent), and you have to pay people, even if it is at those low wages, how to make profit? Then again, my feeling is, this is why we need to lower business taxes, because if Crazy Eddie could sell at good enough prices to drag people from Jersey out to Brooklyn (with the gas and tolls and all), just by skimming taxes, it means that the government is hurting everyone. And it’s not that they were paying zero tax, they were just paying less. Lower taxes, let businesses sell at lower prices, make the economy better and everyone is better off.
@@endymallorn Don't forget that Crazy Eddy did all of this DECADES ago, the business tax in NY is already a lot lower than at that time. But we are talking NY here ... hence there are a bazzilion roadblocks in the way of doing business there. Taxes are actually a small issue compared to the insane red tape that is strangling business owners in NY.
Dude literally ripped the government off only to pass those savings onto the customers. He's basically a modern day electronic store version of Robin Hood
This has been my favorite video of yours. I have a background in inventory auditing for retail electronic stores and loved their stories of trying to deceive the auditors.
Eddie has quite a story. Juvenile detention, love triangles, he was stabbed outside of a bar and left for dead ..... His story alone is INNNNNSANE! I grew up in NYC and when they first started advertising on the radio, it was the talk of the town. He somehow got a deal for 20 or 30 second commercials for $4.99
Wait... this was REAL?! I've seen loads of parodies of this on TVs and in movies (usually as used car places) but I always thought that this was just kind of a weird exaggeration of commercials and not based on anything that actually existed. Well today I learned! Thank you!
Very real! I grew up in NY and remember these commercials well. I used to find the "Christmas Sale in August" commercials particularly hilarious! Even back then, we were warned the Crazy Eddie's wasn't all that price wise for merchandise. We were taught that they were infamous for inflating prices, slashing them and resetting them as "marked down". Some stores still do this. Essentially, say an item is worth about $80.00. The store ups it's price to $200. Then they "slash the price" to $90. It's still "reduced", but you're paying more than what the item was really supposed to sell for. It would seem there were regional counterparts across the country selling various items. People who grew up in the LA area from the 60s to the 90s remember Cal Worthington and his wacky commercials for his car sales! Cal is gone now, although the business continues. I'm sure plenty of people will recall such ads from the same era where they grew up.
@@MegaMagicdog We had the Cal Worthington commercials in WA, too. We also had Jack Roberts Appliance, who had similar commercials to the ones shown here. A moustachioed man in a red shirt and blue overalls, he would say "I WON'T BE UNDERSOLD!" and cut things up with a chainsaw.
Crazy Eddie was in CT & NJ as well as NY. I remember the commercials as a kid very well. There is actually a Crazy Bruce liquor store up there, probably a play on the name as well, although they don't use the 'InsaaaaaAaaAane!" catch-phrase. I'd say Brilliant was the best word, the first scam merely set up the second, and nobody was the wiser for a long, long time.
@@michaelmoorrees3585 yep, and they had to totally change public accounting audit standards as a result of that through the Sarbanes Oxley Act of 2002. Most Arthur Andersen principals just moved on to other "Big 4" firms so other than a few key players, most people at AA left relatively unscathed.
Umm...except that most of what he did is now flat out illegal and easily reportable to the government. Enron used a ton of these loopholes and they're now no longer allowed. Auditors can no longer offer consulting services to auditing clients, nor can they have a financial or personal relationship to who they're auditing, just to name a few restrictions.
@@drewo6388 ugh. SOX is the absolutely *worst* accounting law ever. It's cost companies billions of dollars in useless compliance requirements while doing very little to actually reduce fraud. (Case in point: all the big frauds that have happened in the last few years.) Even the Congressional authors of the law admitted it was a bad law shortly after they implemented it. But did they roll it back? That was too much work. Better to just let everyone suffer.
I worked at CE back in High School in 87-88. I worked the stockroom/customer pick up. The video really only scratched the surface on how crazy it was working there. Not just that location on Route 10, it was all of them!
I was a little kid at the time but those commercials were all over the place. I still clearly remember them. I loved when my pops would take me to crazy Eddie's. It was an experience, that's for sure.
WOW, I was a teen living in Brooklyn exactly 2 blocks from the original store. He later expanded to a store on Coney Island Ave. The store was amazing AND crazy. The prices were insane. He made alot of money selling computers. I enjoyed shopping there. It is amazing how they scammed on everything. Excellent video
I used to work for Crazy Eddie's back in the 80s. It was a blast and so much fun, until it wasn't. *The "family" used to come into our store on their way to the Jersey Shore, and would take all the cash out of the register, and write an IOU.* Never knew if they ever paid any of it back, I just worked in stock and sold car stereos... P.S. Oh yea, we all knew what they were doing, and knew the gig was up when the stockholders made us do 3 inventories in 1988 looking for everything that didn't exist...
This scam was the central plot point of "The Accountant" with Ben Affleck figuring out the finances. There's a whole scene where he goes off on "Crazy Eddy and the Panama pump" to explain it. Actually a decent movie.
Great video! Growing up in the Midwest in the 80s we had heard of Crazy Eddie's and seen parodies of their ads. Even before their collapse we always thought they had to be shady in some way. We just sort of got that vibe, so when things went south in the late 80s it all made sense.
I'm in the UK and remember Crazy Eddie's advertisements as they made their way over here in film & TV (of note, Short Circuit 2 where Johnny Five parodies one of the ads). I didn't know the full scale of the fraud that brought them down, a great video as always :)
It's almost too funny that this name pops up again; in the early and mid-1990s, I was working ar GE Capital, and taking credit applications for them (along with other MORE legitimate companies), and it seemed all of New York were applying; did a small survey and it seemed that 15 out of 20 applicants were "approved" with an extremely high credit line (>$5000)...did not know if this was fraud, but it started my career in consumer affairs. What fun to see this video!
I was a kid when I lived in New York and remember these commercials clear as day. I never went into the stores but im sure my parents have. I didnt realize they made 7000 ads, but I am glad to see some of them were put up on youtube for Posterity. Sucks they were criminals, but they definitly left their mark, and thats Inssaannneee! I can still hear that in my head to this day. Thank you for doing this one.
Great story. You cannot make up stories like this. Truth is stranger than fiction. Clearly they were very determined, persistent and creative in their schemes. There are a lot of business lessons to learn from in this story. Today, it would be much harder to pull off the same scheme because of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act which requires controls and their testing to mitigate the potential for cooking the books.
Growing up in Brooklyn in the mid to late 80's, my siblings and I were always yelling CRAZY EDDY'S taglines at each other!!! 🙌🏾 We all knew that something was off because, yeah those prices were kind of nuts!
I was a kid of the 80's, living just outside the NYC area. Crazy Eddie commercials were on every TV and radio station and in the local newspaper. People liked imitating the guy on the commercials..... and we'd compare them other situations in our own lives. So-and-so was as crazy as Crazy Eddie.
I always think of the movie "Splash" when Darryl Hannah's character, Madison, watches the Crazy Eddie commercial on the multiple televisions in the store.
Being from NJ this fraud has always fascinated me. If anyone is familiar with the series "Masterminds" from the mid 2000's, they did a great episode on this company/family.
I think you pretty much nailed the entire sad episodic tale of "Crazy Eddie" except in one way - his reach was way more than you assessed or described. I was a young guy living in San Antonio, TX at the time this all happened - and yet, I knew Crazy Eddie because of Cable Television. At the time, there were many stations offered that were not local and had no bearing on your particular area, but still were broadcast because they had some sort of offering of shows or features that was desirable (that's how I got to watch the VERY desirable "Elvira - Mistress of the Dark". I remember WGN from Chicago, and several channels from the upper NE that had many of Crazy Eddie's commercials that would regularly interrupt whatever programming they had. And yes... sadly I was upset watching those commercials because I didn't have a chance to take advantage of those amaaaaaaaazing low prices. Keep up the good work.
In Sweden we had a ripoff of Crazy Eddie called Galne Gunnar, (Literally "Crazy Gunnar") that was owned by H&M. They went out of business in the year 2000.
This answers one of my questions. In the early 2000s, I bought a Denon surround sound receiver online from Crazy Eddie, then located in Florida. The price was insaaaaaaane! I got the receiver, it served me well for many years until I sold it and upgraded. At the time, I had heard of Crazy Eddie even though I lived in Southern CA.
I DID live in NYC in the Crazy Eddie heydays, mid-70s-80s. As a customer, I bought a few high-end items, which all turned out to be repackaged products that were defective for various reasons. Most of their products did not come with the manufacturer's original warranty. Forget about trying to return anything; all sales were final. Ultimately they didn't work correctly. Crazy Eddie's ripped off not only their investors but also their customers.
We lived in the Bronx and My family bought all their electronics there. The store was amazing. Always busy! I feel that the numbers mentioned in this video reported by the government on the amount of money they skimmed is inaccurately low. If u wanted something and wasn't in stock, u could haggle the price down and just wait 2-3 day and go back and pick it up in the store. Crazy Eddie was a legend and ofcourse "TRUELY INSANE!!"
Would LOVE to see you do some episodes on Zany Brainy (A specialty toy store that was super popular in the 90's), Discovery Zone (A popular large playground playplace in the 90's) and Media Play (A really cool media-focused store that sold all formats of media you could think of.)
I worked at the one here in Buffalo, and made a great life long friend ... we may not talk for months but can text anytime and pick up where we left off
I still have a Crazy Eddie tshirt from when I was a kid, even though it was post collapse of the company. But the Antar family went from an immigrant success story to something no immigrant from Syria wanted any connection to. The grandfather Murad Antar was a store owner who came from Aleppo to the US with his young son Sam (different Sam than his nephew who did the cooking of the books, who now works for a firm that investigates fraud), Sam founded the electronics store, which he brought in his son, Eddie, who renamed it Crazy Eddie's. The Antar's were high profile in their community, until the collapse, when everyone distanced from them.
I am from NY and I remember the Crazy Eddie stores. They were awesome. They had everything - stereos, speakers, TVs, CB radios, camcorders, VCRs, car radios, and all the stuff to hook it together. I never actually bought anything there, but it was a blast to browse through the store and window shop. The place was always full of people and buzzing with activity. Many fond memories made there.
In the late 80s, I worked at a competing electronics store in the NY/NJ area called Nobody Beats the Wiz. It was actually owned by relatives on Crazy Eddie. I think their last name was Jemal. I’m sure they were doing the same things as Eddie.
My 1970s college roommate was from the NYC area. Whenever he had a few beers, he would start acting out Crazy Eddie commercials. He also did Jerry's G.E. appliance store commercials. We were at a southern school, so most of us knew nothing about the New York market. It was hilarious!
I grew up with those commercials. It was great. One thing to keep in mind is buying ad time on a NYC area station meant you were broadcasting to New Jersey, Long Island, Connecticut, and even Pennsylvania. Add in that several local NYC stations were carried on cable to other markets at the time.
As a 61 year old who grew up buying electronics in the mid to late '70's and '80's, I remember the Crazy Eddie ads. I avoided them for some reason and instead did my shopping at J & R Music World out of NYC. Never had a problem with them.
J&R was amazing. Back in the day, they would have all kinds of jazz and blues CDs in the back of the store on the second floor you could barely find anywhere.
@@sjenkins1057 I never actually went to a J & R store. In fact, I lived almost 1,000 miles south of there in Columbus, Georgia. But I came to know of J & R through their ads in some of the magazines I bought: Stereo Review or Stereo World, I can't remember the title now + Rolling Stone. In time, I called them for a catalog, got on their mailing list and about every month or so, I'd get their latest catalog of products. My proudest purchase from J & R was my car stereo system. In 1980, I sent off for (literally mailing a personal check to J & R) for a Panasonic CQS-710 AM/FM Tuner with Metal / Chrome & Dolby NR built into the cassette player, a Pioneer Amp with 7 Band Equalizer, a pair of Jensen 6" by 9" coaxials for the rear deck and a pair of Pioneer Super Tweeters for up front. My Dad helped me install it all one weekend and everything worked together effortlessly. My '73 Gran Torino pumped ROCK the way it was meant to be heard. From all the AC/DC, Rush, Nugent, KISS, Molly Hatchet, Van Halen, Rolling Stones and etc cranked through the system, it's a wonder I can still hear. Sadly, I haven't been able to locate any info on the Panasonic CQS-710 radio tuner, probably lost to history.
I grew up in Brooklyn with a Crazy Eddie within reasonable walking distance. I bought a lot of stuff there as a kid in the 80s who loved music. I'm glad you gave some time to this; the scandal is interesting and the Crazy Eddie commercials were an iconic 80's local-chain advertisement with the most over-the-top spokesperson possible.
I remember the original commercials in the late 70s and early 80s. They were everywhere on the airwaves. Salesmen were real slimy. Always “bait and switch”. They also sold “black market items” as OEM.
I did a project on this for Managerial Accounting class and I was absolutely enthralled with the story. Me and my project partner would just laugh the more we learned.
As a kid growing up in NYC in the 80's I disdained Crazy Eddie. Their ads were everywhere on TV and their gimmick got old fast. Even then they had this shady vibe and I was not surprised when fraud was exposed. Seeing their ads off the air was a huge relief!
I grew up in CT, but our cable offered the NYC channels. As a kid I LOVED the Crazy Eddies commercials. One actually did open up in CT and I begged my parents to go because I wasted to meet Crazy Eddie. They took me, and of course I was highly disappointed. Alas.
I grew up in New Jersey and saw these ads all the time as a kid. They cracked me up. Yeah, I knew Eddie Antar got busted for fraud, but I never knew the whole extent of it. Blew my mind.
When you mentioned that the Eddie's judge was found to be biased, that totally made me realize why this story sounded so familiar to me - I actually researched Sam Antar's case for a memo assignment in my first semester of law school. To quote the judge who was recused from Sam's case: "Sam does not come in here with a halo on his head based upon the testimony I heard in this case. I can't close my eyes to it or put blinkers on. Sam is not some innocent bystander. The innocent bystanders laying out there are the public. The public are the innocent bystanders. Not the Antar family. No one in the Antar family was an [**7] innocent bystander. That is what I'm saying." SEC v. Antar (In re Antar), 71 F.3d 97, 100 (3d Cir. 1995). it really puts their fraud into perspective, seeing as how incensed even federal judges were with the family as a whole.
There is one thing you missed. WWOR, channel 9 out of NYC at the time was a cable "Superstation", carried on cable systems nationwide, so the Crazy Eddie ads were getting exposure far outside of the New York City market. I remember being an adolescent and teenager here in Pittsburgh and being familiar with the ads.
WWOR was not a NY station it was out of Secaucus NJ. I'm only splitting hairs because WWOR gave us some programing that Made Crazy Eddie seem legit Richard Bey and Morton Downey Jr. are two that come to mind.
I worked for Eddie early in the 80s. You missed some of the key points and a couple of great stories. Primarily, he did not flee to Israel. They had an extradition agreement with the US. He fled to Syria. The consumer electronics business in New York during the latter part of the 20th century was largely controlled by families of Syrian Jews from Brooklyn - The Wiz was another notable company. So when he fled, he went to Syria. He got CAUGHT in Israel, in a joint FBI/Mossad sting. One of my favorite stories is Eddie opened up a medical school in Grenada. Everyone wondered why, but after a while, it just was one of his crazy ideas. I found out why, quite by accident. He also desperately wanted to sell Apple Computers, but Apple was very particular about the retailers they did business with. I put two and two together when I went down to the stock room to have lunch one day, and sat down on a box for a Mac II. It was addressed to the school in Grenada. He was buying massive numbers of these computers at the discount price Apple sold Macs to colleges and universities. He was getting them cheaper than any of the other competing advertisers. One of the things you could hear echoing through the stores was "Floose (Syrian for money) talks. Cash, no tax." People who knew would get items cheaper and with no tax if they paid in cash. Syrian was used for a number or things. Another phrase you could hear was "Shoof (look at) that abbo (woman's behind). Chances were that the only women who would be offended were the women who worked in the stores. "Shoof" was used in another Eddie shibboleth - "Shoof the hushos" or look out for the thieves. People (who didn't work there) responsible for "shrinkage" were often identified and trailed, usually by the off-duty NYC cops who worked security.
I loved watching the ads as a kid, and I loved going to their stores! I think my dad got a boombox at one of their shops during a Christmas sale. I was sad to see them go-and now I know why they did! When I was a kid, I never paid attention to the news😂
Having worked in car sales for years, I’ve played a few auditors like a violin to make stock that hadn’t arrived or already been sold but not booked yet look like it’s still there 😂
That's not always a bad thing. I used to deal more regularly with a local car dealer as part of my job as a CPA (he's since hired someone to do most of what I did in-house) and there always was an issue of differences between what he counted as inventory at any time and what should have been counted as inventory. Sometimes he'd sell a car and not have the funds yet, tell me the car was sold, but not tell me how much money he had yet to receive. In that case, it would have been better to keep the car in inventory even if it was sold, as otherwise he's be vastly understating his income. Cars not on the lot yet and thus not on his inventory might have already been paid for, which would have likewise affected his income figures. It gets really complicated trying to track everything when you don't actually have direct access to anything, and I knew that we were missing stuff all the time because his income would go all over the place.
I didn't know the guy on the commercials wasn't him. This bummed me out more than the fraud. My first CD player came from there around '86/'87. If I remember right, it was around $100 which was really cheap for the time.
You did your homework. I was working there during the 80's at the Westbury Location. Much of the destruction came when Eddie "cheated" on his wife and split up the family. Eddie liked to party too much. His Magnificent Christmas parties would find him wasted and mooning everyone. All that shifting around the inventory to inflate his stock was possible because he knew exactly which stores would be audited and when. So we had to move around the merchandise, or stay late and unload a truck that brought merchandise from a sister store. What's really messed up is that he tried screwing his loyal workers by offering us first grabs at the stock shares when he was going public. I'm glad I never purchased any. What a screwball. I remember going to the Crazy Eddie Awards event. All the stores were nominated for something or another: The funniest store, The most sales, etc etc. The whole experience was "INSANE"!
I remember seeing this crazy guy on TV back in the late 1970's when I was stationed at the Brooklyn Navy Yard~! I am glad that you showed that the guy in the Crazy Eddie's TV ads was a actor & not guilty of any crimes. He did a fantastic job in making the commercials. Citizens go to prison for not paying taxes, but politician receive - a get out free jail card... Shalom
"It's Sweltering!" I remember the Crazy Eddie commercials during the Summer, and yes, NYC & surrounds are unpleasantly too hot & humid for 3-4 weeks, aka, the "Dog Days of Summer."
I'm from the Midwest but heard about Crazy Eddie somehow. My fraud radar was triggered, but I thought they were ripping off customers with cheap knockoffs sold as the brand name, or returns sold as new, or in some other way. I never heard about the financial fraud. Props to the financial guy for keeping this under wraps for so long.
While the big media empires gravitated to Hollywood, there’s still NY presence. And maybe there was a tv news show that covered the success and I interesting commercials of Crazy Eddie. Even Saturday Night Live (based in NYC) made fun of the commercials. Pop culture. I haven’t been to the west coast but even before the internet I knew about In N Out and the donut shop with the 🍩 on the roof. And the Capitol Records tower. Lots of stuff. Etc.
All the stuff from Crazy Eddie’s was legit, to the customer. I had a TV that worked until after the digital changeover from them bought in the ‘90s. Honestly, if every fraudster in the world had the kind of decency and respect for the customer that Crazy Eddie and the Antar family did, I’d say we should be changing the law.
A lot of cable systems well outside the New York tri-state area carried Secaucus, New Jersey based WOR-TV as a cable super station like WGN and WTBS. Back in the eighties the New York/New Jersey centric local and regional commercials were broadcast well outside their local and regional markets, so people nowhere near New York saw the Crazy Eddie ads carried on WOR. That's where I saw them when I was living in Virginia.
I remember crazy Eddie’s off of Route 80 around the Willowbrook mall in northern New Jersey. My father used to go in there all the time to look at stereo components he never bought anything. I also remember that they had toys in there too because they had G.I. Joe, the movie action figures But candy that place where it was was always scary to me as a child you knew something was off about it.
I grew up in southern Connecticut and saw the ads all the time. I bought my first CD player at one of their stores. I moved out of the area before the whole thing went down and was unaware of the rest of the story.
Oh, Boy. We finally got cable TV in my Upstate NY home around 1981. Crazy Eddie commercials were just the most entertaining thing on there. "His prices are insaaaaaane".
Love your channel man, your scripts are so tight without being stuffy. You do a great job of getting into details and financials when necessary while also focusing on the more digestible narrative. Keep it up :).
I hadn’t heard of this chain but It’s funny because there was a local furniture store near me called “Crazy Bernie’s”, and they appear to have had very similar advertising practices. Crazy Bernie himself was arrested for falsely reporting earnings and receiving tons of taxpayer money they shouldn’t have been. Sounds like someone was inspired in multiple ways.
Oh I more then remembered this I was serving papers and had to go to the court house when I was younger. What a circus. One of the scenes in Goodfellas had crazy eddies in the background cause they filmed in 89 and it came out 90.
Does anyone remember the Morrie’s Wigs commercial from Goodfellas ? I always thought it was hilarious and evocative of Crazy Eddies. I grew up in the NYC area so the Goodfellas spoof was spot on for campy local commercials of the day.
At the time, they said we would be the "Toys R Us" of consumer electronics. Best buy and Circuit City didn't exist as national chains. As a salesmen I could negotiate prices, and that was unheard of. I used to go down to Edison, NJ every month for a manager's meeting, Kelso (Crazy Eddie), would often be on a stationary bike, in a grey sweatsuit. pumping away, sweating, and screaming at us. Managers would get calls in the middle of the night to move inventory to another store, to keep one step ahead of the auditors. Also, at meetings, Eddie, often, would give a heads-up on the stock "pump and dump". If only I had paid more attention, I could have retied at 25. It was only "Crazy" because I was in my 20"s and didn't know better.
My dad used to take me to the store on Coney Island Ave in Brooklyn. For years, that is where we bought all the electronics, audio equipment, telephones, televisions, and computers. It was a great store for me as a kid to see all the cool gadgets. I have fond memories of mulling around the store, and the ads were always entertaining. I left NYC before the collapse of Crazy Eddie's. The memories are fun.
You should make more videos on the financial fraud of celebrities. SO MANY celebrities have convictions for fraud. It would be super interesting and popular!
Thanks for explaining the Crazy Eddie's story. I was always fascinated by their fraud. Now I understand how they did it. I remember seeing the Saturday Night Live skits on TV.
One of the last stores to open was kn South Jersey. It was only open for a few months before the scandal broke. I remember going in for a car stereo and the sales manager telling me I could get a way better deal if I paid cash. I think the employees were skimming the business at this point.
If they'd only defrauded the customers instead of the government or investors, they'd still be in business today.
Sad but true
If only defrauding the government wasn’t illegal. Instead the government can legally defraud the people
Or in the senate.
Why do you care why they are no longer in business?
Well tbf if you scam customers and it becomes known you'll lose business and investors
When I was a kid in the 70s and 80s, I saw the Crazy Eddie's commercials all the time. My parents bought our first microwave there-it sparked and exploded after 2 months. When they and their commercials disappeared, I figured that it was just the slings and arrows of business, other guys sold better stuff and were more over with the public. I had no idea the extent of the scandal. Bravo-excellent job!
My family purchased most of our stereo equipment at Crazy Eddie’s back in the 70s. The words you used are more than appropriate. They didn’t screw over the customers. They just had a place that was too good to be true. Insaaaaaaane!
I grew up in New Jersey in the 1970's... "Crazy Eddie...He's INSAAAAAANE!" was a touchstone of my childhood.
He really was insane!
I remember these guys when I was a kid. Their adds were quite the spectacle. I always get a kick when they do parodies of the commercials because Crazy Eddie's legacy will never die.
Nice.
Haha! Christmas in July, remember?
Taxes should be illegal
Growing up in Long Island, my brothers and I used to see their ads all the time... Along with these gems:
- Ronco/Popiel: ua-cam.com/video/XQZtlvDiJ4s/v-deo.html (Scramble an egg while it's still inside it's shell!)
- Carvel Ice Cream: ua-cam.com/video/rS6ki8D7zQA/v-deo.html (Complete with that guy's gravelly voice)
- NY tourism: ua-cam.com/video/0gsyQeV2aR8/v-deo.html (Why were these shown IN NY so much?)
- The Wiz: ua-cam.com/video/pb540QTFzkg/v-deo.html (Remind you of another advertising campaign?)
- The Money Store: ua-cam.com/video/t7ys64r0M10/v-deo.html (Phil Rizzuto - these played a LOT!)
- Empire Carpet: ua-cam.com/video/s73v79TyASI/v-deo.html (Complete with Andrews Sisters soundalike jingle - probably appealed to the Silent Generation)
Jerry Carroll of what was then WPIX radio (now the WFAN repeater) was that person. Crazy Eddie was INSANE!
As a used record collector (and dealer), I still see plenty of old Crazy Eddie price tags on records that still have their shrink wrap.
Those price tags may be worth more than the records given the history. 😂
And Crazy Eddie has since been a textbook case study in university accounting programs all across the country. That's where I first heard of Crazy Eddie and all of his fraud.
So they use him as an example while teaching you to not get caught by using better fraud techniques?
@@zeruty yep, that's correct!
I learned about him from the Ben Affleck film The Accountant
To clarify I learned about him in a fraud detection class and we actually went over his spread sheets to see what was suspicious.
I'd heard references to it ("We won't be undersoooold!" etc.) but I had no idea what it was until much later in life. Now when people talk about it, they only want to talk about the fraud, and with good reason!
I worked at the East Brunswick store on and off between high school and college for about 3 years. It was a crazy place like no other and when I look back there were definitely things that made no sense, but I was a teenager and naive about personal and especially corporate greed. You always felt like you were part of something that was so unique and strange that something has to be going on but you would never be able to put your finger on it. I will say that I saw a lot people working hard doing what we thought was an honest days work, and their was a real camaraderie amongst us who lingered. Conversely, the higher up you got in management, they tended to be hardcore a$$holes, almost sadistic. When it all hit the fan I was getting ready to graduate college already and had moved on for jobs that paid better but watching the place die was like losing a family friend. I will always have fond memories of those comrades...Sue, Rhoda, Terry, Frank, Mike, Brian, Sumit, Joe, Monica and so many others whose names have faded from memory.
I can't help to wonder if Crazy Eddie's had a "Code of Ethics" policy that employees had to observe.
What was the company culture like? Anything about "giving back to the community", as is now common?
@@CartoonMitchell Code of Ethics? Giving back to the community? No and no! First of all, in order to be hired (and I just remembered this) one had to pass a polygraph test which was given in New York City and focused on your history of stealing and criminal record. I don't even know if that's fully legal now that I think about it considering I was a minor at the time. So there was a focused effort at the outset to screen out anyone they thought might "take" from them. As far as community relations, I cannot overstate enough the contempt towards customers that was present in that place. Of course it was a 2 way street because of the haggling atmosphere...you'd have people coming in demanding to pay no sales tax, or to pay below cost or they insisted on employee pricing because they claimed to be related to someone who worked there. As far as giving back to the community, the closest thing was employing local off-duty cops (some of the most corrupt in NJ history) as security guards at the front door. So again, it was all manifestations of modern corporate greed.
As a CPA with an MBA, I believe the best way to become a financial crook is to take the route the Antar's took, get somebody on the "inside" to learn what the auditors look for and how they do the looking. It's like taking lock picking courses to become a burglar.
It's like becoming a detective to be a burglar
Actually, it's like learning how to build locks and safes to become a lock picker.
Pretty much. It's like how the best cheaters in speedrunning are also the best speedrunners and most active members of the community. No one knows how to make a fake speedrun look legit than a speedrunner.
Just as you don’t send an angel to catch a thief!
@@ashblossomandjoyoussprung.9917Huh, hadn't considered that, but makes sense. Any YT documentaries (like this one on Crazy Eddie) you would recommend featuring a speedrunner who was found to be cheating?
As an MBA student 15 years ago I was lucky enough to have Sam Antar come and speak to our b-school one evening. It was one of the best experiences of my school time. It was so interesting to here Sam describe the literal "craziness" of what they did, and the tricks they would use to evade detection such as stacking TVs in such a way that they knew the "suits" wouldn't climb a ladder to see how many TVs were actually in the area or having attractive female employees wine & dine auditors. I am not sure if Sam is still alive, but I found it incredible that 20 years after the fraud was committed he needs to travel with an armed body guard.
I bet he was light years ahead of the professor. Like some ivy consultant giving Sam Walton retail advice
In all fairness, using pretty women to influence powerful men has been a tactic going back to antiquity. I guess the Antars were into the classics.
@@daveincognitoseriously, just read the Book of Judith lol a pretty face is deadly
@@nap871 Lightyears in what way? Sam Antar is a criminal. He is lightyears behind. Youre not a genius for being willing to break the law.
That cop with the mullet at 11:30, is the most 1989 thing I've ever seen. He's the perfect cool guy detective on a CBS primetime cop drama in the late 80s.
The good ol' days
Perfect disguise. You dismiss the guy with his hair and his T-shirt until he flashes a badge in your face.
It's a chick.
The crazy Eddie commercial snapped me back to my childhood so fast...every time it came on my father would call him a thief and a lunatic lol they'll always be nostalgic for me and probably anyone else who is 45+ and grew up in NY/NJ/CT
I grew up in North Carolina, and I knew who he was.
I actually lived only a few hundred feet away from one of Crazy Eddie's New Jersey locations, and back then you absolutely could not get away from their ads. The chain was still operating when my family moved away, and nowadays I just have to stand amazed at just how shady everything it did was.
I grew up in Jersey in the 70s and 80s and know what you mean. Every time I watched something on a New York-based station, there would be at least one Crazy Eddie commercial in the mix. I didn't know until now the scale of their fraud.
Everyone that lived in Jersey lived within a couple hundred feet of a Crazy Eddie's at one point 🤣
I grew up in New Jersey and I remember the Crazy Eddie ads. Ahh the memories.
Incredible. I'm surprised the story of this business hasn't been turned into a miniseries on HBO yet.
The guys who did "McMillions" were making one a few years ago but it's gone quiet unfortunately
@@medes5597 shame, I would so watch it
It sounds like an easy pitch: it's "The Big Short" meets "Better Call Saul." I can easily see David Cross and Jason Mantzoukas having their career redefining dramatic turns playing the Antar cousins.
Im sure it's coming haha
Probably because they’re from the same tribe as the one in Hollywood 😏
I'm an accounting major and in my fraud class we watched a whole movie on this company's wrongdoings. Cool content, thanks
We did the same thing at NYU.
I worked at a Crazy Eddie's for a couple of years out of high school in the mid 80's in CT. I have to say that as employees, we had no idea what was happening deep within the company. It all came apart after I'd long moved on. I must say though that, it was actually a fun place to work. Everyone was cool. The bosses were great. I always did find it weird that it was the only store that I'd ever seen in which you could walk in and negotiate the price on the expensive items no matter what the price tag was. There was a secret figure inserted into a larger set of digits that gave the sales person the bottom/lowest price to work off of. The sales team would see what the customer wanted, call stock to see if the item was available, then negotiate. The amazing thing was, if you worked there, you were somewhat considered lucky and cool. I'm sure that it was probably due to the zany commercials that were always on TV and radio.
Ultimately he got caught cheating on his wife. Funny how the downfall began after that!
I recall a class I had in high school where the teacher went over what the guys at electronic stores could negotiate, that they had one price they could get down to without consulting their boss, and another price that their boss couldn't go below either. I don't know how true it was, but from that it seemed like it was common in the electronics industry for customers to haggle prices, which makes sense given how expensive electronics used to be. Now most people buy electronics online and don't have any opportunity to haggle, and get lower prices than local stores would publish anyway.
I worked in East Brunswick store. The price inside the digits was called "c-line" if i recall. That was the lowest you could go as a salesman and I think the employee price on stuff too.
Was that the MR and the K number? I bought a lot of electronics and home computers at the Crazy Eddie in Westbury in the 1980s. I was able to negotiate for a lot of “Insane” prices.
@@doubledrats235 Really not sure, I was a stockroom guy and that was sales stuff. I knew about the number that started and ended with 9's...the number between the 9's was the "cost" (C-line) and the lowest sales staff were permitted to go.
The commercials were iconic. I remember their annual Christmas Sale in August. My family shopped at one of their NJ locations in the early 80s.
I think it was called “Christmas in July” (especially since that’s more in the middle of the year & more insane)
A warehouse I worked at got in trouble for inflating inventory. The management was telling the company they had 5x of what was there. At one point, the company said they need to ship it out for sale. Finally the managers had to say the inventory wasn't really there. they were eventually fired and replaced.
I'm one of those New Yorkers who grew up seeing those Crazy Eddie ads all the time. And also when I was a little guy, I thought that wild man in the commercials was actually Eddie himself. Years later I found out about the fraud and was a little saddened by it all. It was like finding out Santa Claus wasn't real! I guess Crazy Eddie's prices really were insane.
Jerry Carroll said the prices were insane, but Crazy Eddie was insane!
Most fraudsters go crazy with power and just try to grab every cent they can. Eddies' strategy of selling products for cheaper (on account of not paying taxes) and increasing business was a brilliant use of the stolen funds.
Think about what you're saying and how embarrassing it actually is, though. Are you really going to stand by that? 😂. It's just way too obvious that you think that because you forgot (somehow) that you never hear about the vast majority of fraudsters, because the vast majority of fraudsters never get caught, because the vast majority of fraudsters aren't stupid enough to go crazy with power. Good gosh. Welcome to UA-cam? 36 upvotes. Sheesh. If you're that short-sighed in your worldviews, then I fear for your levels of gullibility (you're very likely to be taken advantage of by a fraudster if you think they're so easy to identify).
Honestly I’m not sure if the start of it was a desire to grab money, but rather being able to sell electronics to families in Brooklyn who couldn’t afford it otherwise. But then, if you sell at prices people can afford, and everyone is working for low wages (relative to their rent), and you have to pay people, even if it is at those low wages, how to make profit?
Then again, my feeling is, this is why we need to lower business taxes, because if Crazy Eddie could sell at good enough prices to drag people from Jersey out to Brooklyn (with the gas and tolls and all), just by skimming taxes, it means that the government is hurting everyone. And it’s not that they were paying zero tax, they were just paying less. Lower taxes, let businesses sell at lower prices, make the economy better and everyone is better off.
@@endymallorn Don't forget that Crazy Eddy did all of this DECADES ago, the business tax in NY is already a lot lower than at that time. But we are talking NY here ... hence there are a bazzilion roadblocks in the way of doing business there. Taxes are actually a small issue compared to the insane red tape that is strangling business owners in NY.
Dude literally ripped the government off only to pass those savings onto the customers. He's basically a modern day electronic store version of Robin Hood
@@klaykid117 but he stockpiled money in offshore accounts... Did we watch the same video?
This has been my favorite video of yours. I have a background in inventory auditing for retail electronic stores and loved their stories of trying to deceive the auditors.
What a WILD story! This might be my favorite video of yours. It’s always cool to hear about such “crazy” stories like this.😊
Eddie has quite a story. Juvenile detention, love triangles, he was stabbed outside of a bar and left for dead ..... His story alone is INNNNNSANE!
I grew up in NYC and when they first started advertising on the radio, it was the talk of the town. He somehow got a deal for 20 or 30 second commercials for $4.99
Wait... this was REAL?!
I've seen loads of parodies of this on TVs and in movies (usually as used car places) but I always thought that this was just kind of a weird exaggeration of commercials and not based on anything that actually existed. Well today I learned! Thank you!
very real!!!
I was born in NJ. I remember the commercials, although I've never seen a store.
It was real, I bought a stereo from them in the 70s.
Very real! I grew up in NY and remember these commercials well. I used to find the "Christmas Sale in August" commercials particularly hilarious!
Even back then, we were warned the Crazy Eddie's wasn't all that price wise for merchandise. We were taught that they were infamous for inflating prices, slashing them and resetting them as "marked down". Some stores still do this. Essentially, say an item is worth about $80.00. The store ups it's price to $200. Then they "slash the price" to $90. It's still "reduced", but you're paying more than what the item was really supposed to sell for.
It would seem there were regional counterparts across the country selling various items. People who grew up in the LA area from the 60s to the 90s remember Cal Worthington and his wacky commercials for his car sales! Cal is gone now, although the business continues. I'm sure plenty of people will recall such ads from the same era where they grew up.
@@MegaMagicdog We had the Cal Worthington commercials in WA, too. We also had Jack Roberts Appliance, who had similar commercials to the ones shown here. A moustachioed man in a red shirt and blue overalls, he would say "I WON'T BE UNDERSOLD!" and cut things up with a chainsaw.
Crazy Eddie was in CT & NJ as well as NY. I remember the commercials as a kid very well.
There is actually a Crazy Bruce liquor store up there, probably a play on the name as well, although they don't use the 'InsaaaaaAaaAane!" catch-phrase.
I'd say Brilliant was the best word, the first scam merely set up the second, and nobody was the wiser for a long, long time.
The takeaway is that accountants are no balm against fraud that people think they are.
Eron did that on a much larger scale ! The large accounting firm of Arthur Andersen bought the farm due to that one.
@@michaelmoorrees3585 yep, and they had to totally change public accounting audit standards as a result of that through the Sarbanes Oxley Act of 2002. Most Arthur Andersen principals just moved on to other "Big 4" firms so other than a few key players, most people at AA left relatively unscathed.
Umm...except that most of what he did is now flat out illegal and easily reportable to the government. Enron used a ton of these loopholes and they're now no longer allowed. Auditors can no longer offer consulting services to auditing clients, nor can they have a financial or personal relationship to who they're auditing, just to name a few restrictions.
@@drewo6388 ugh. SOX is the absolutely *worst* accounting law ever. It's cost companies billions of dollars in useless compliance requirements while doing very little to actually reduce fraud. (Case in point: all the big frauds that have happened in the last few years.) Even the Congressional authors of the law admitted it was a bad law shortly after they implemented it. But did they roll it back? That was too much work. Better to just let everyone suffer.
I worked at CE back in High School in 87-88. I worked the stockroom/customer pick up.
The video really only scratched the surface on how crazy it was working there. Not just that location on Route 10, it was all of them!
I was a little kid at the time but those commercials were all over the place. I still clearly remember them. I loved when my pops would take me to crazy Eddie's. It was an experience, that's for sure.
WOW, I was a teen living in Brooklyn exactly 2 blocks from the original store. He later expanded to a store on Coney Island Ave. The store was amazing AND crazy. The prices were insane. He made alot of money selling computers. I enjoyed shopping there. It is amazing how they scammed on everything. Excellent video
I used to work for Crazy Eddie's back in the 80s. It was a blast and so much fun, until it wasn't. *The "family" used to come into our store on their way to the Jersey Shore, and would take all the cash out of the register, and write an IOU.* Never knew if they ever paid any of it back, I just worked in stock and sold car stereos...
P.S. Oh yea, we all knew what they were doing, and knew the gig was up when the stockholders made us do 3 inventories in 1988 looking for everything that didn't exist...
he should add this in the video
“Money please.”
The Company Man comments section is almost as good as his videos.
I grew up on Long Island and have many memories of these commercials on our tv in the 80’s
If I remember correctly, to add insult to injury, it was even mentioned that they were also fencing merch for the mob. Thanx for the memories! 👍👍👍
In the book "Retail Gangster" this gets talked about. Eddie couldn't get some of the big name Japanese brands so, they bought them from the Mob.
This scam was the central plot point of "The Accountant" with Ben Affleck figuring out the finances. There's a whole scene where he goes off on "Crazy Eddy and the Panama pump" to explain it. Actually a decent movie.
Great video! Growing up in the Midwest in the 80s we had heard of Crazy Eddie's and seen parodies of their ads. Even before their collapse we always thought they had to be shady in some way. We just sort of got that vibe, so when things went south in the late 80s it all made sense.
I'm in the UK and remember Crazy Eddie's advertisements as they made their way over here in film & TV (of note, Short Circuit 2 where Johnny Five parodies one of the ads). I didn't know the full scale of the fraud that brought them down, a great video as always :)
It's almost too funny that this name pops up again; in the early and mid-1990s, I was working ar GE Capital, and taking credit applications for them (along with other MORE legitimate companies), and it seemed all of New York were applying; did a small survey and it seemed that 15 out of 20 applicants were "approved" with an extremely high credit line (>$5000)...did not know if this was fraud, but it started my career in consumer affairs. What fun to see this video!
I was a kid when I lived in New York and remember these commercials clear as day. I never went into the stores but im sure my parents have. I didnt realize they made 7000 ads, but I am glad to see some of them were put up on youtube for Posterity. Sucks they were criminals, but they definitly left their mark, and thats Inssaannneee! I can still hear that in my head to this day. Thank you for doing this one.
Great story. You cannot make up stories like this. Truth is stranger than fiction. Clearly they were very determined, persistent and creative in their schemes. There are a lot of business lessons to learn from in this story. Today, it would be much harder to pull off the same scheme because of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act which requires controls and their testing to mitigate the potential for cooking the books.
Growing up in Brooklyn in the mid to late 80's, my siblings and I were always yelling CRAZY EDDY'S taglines at each other!!! 🙌🏾 We all knew that something was off because, yeah those prices were kind of nuts!
I was a kid of the 80's, living just outside the NYC area. Crazy Eddie commercials were on every TV and radio station and in the local newspaper. People liked imitating the guy on the commercials..... and we'd compare them other situations in our own lives. So-and-so was as crazy as Crazy Eddie.
I always think of the movie "Splash" when Darryl Hannah's character, Madison, watches the Crazy Eddie commercial on the multiple televisions in the store.
Being from NJ this fraud has always fascinated me. If anyone is familiar with the series "Masterminds" from the mid 2000's, they did a great episode on this company/family.
I think you pretty much nailed the entire sad episodic tale of "Crazy Eddie" except in one way - his reach was way more than you assessed or described.
I was a young guy living in San Antonio, TX at the time this all happened - and yet, I knew Crazy Eddie because of Cable Television. At the time, there were many stations offered that were not local and had no bearing on your particular area, but still were broadcast because they had some sort of offering of shows or features that was desirable (that's how I got to watch the VERY desirable "Elvira - Mistress of the Dark". I remember WGN from Chicago, and several channels from the upper NE that had many of Crazy Eddie's commercials that would regularly interrupt whatever programming they had.
And yes... sadly I was upset watching those commercials because I didn't have a chance to take advantage of those amaaaaaaaazing low prices.
Keep up the good work.
In Sweden we had a ripoff of Crazy Eddie called Galne Gunnar, (Literally "Crazy Gunnar") that was owned by H&M. They went out of business in the year 2000.
h&m as in the fast fashion retail company?
Ny of their old commercials on UA-cam?
This answers one of my questions. In the early 2000s, I bought a Denon surround sound receiver online from Crazy Eddie, then located in Florida. The price was insaaaaaaane! I got the receiver, it served me well for many years until I sold it and upgraded. At the time, I had heard of Crazy Eddie even though I lived in Southern CA.
I DID live in NYC in the Crazy Eddie heydays, mid-70s-80s. As a customer, I bought a few high-end items, which all turned out to be repackaged products that were defective for various reasons. Most of their products did not come with the manufacturer's original warranty. Forget about trying to return anything; all sales were final. Ultimately they didn't work correctly. Crazy Eddie's ripped off not only their investors but also their customers.
I always had that gut feeling. Chose not to shop there. Now, if I only had the money I spent at Lafayette...!
We lived in the Bronx and My family bought all their electronics there. The store was amazing. Always busy! I feel that the numbers mentioned in this video reported by the government on the amount of money they skimmed is inaccurately low. If u wanted something and wasn't in stock, u could haggle the price down and just wait 2-3 day and go back and pick it up in the store. Crazy Eddie was a legend and ofcourse "TRUELY INSANE!!"
Would LOVE to see you do some episodes on Zany Brainy (A specialty toy store that was super popular in the 90's), Discovery Zone (A popular large playground playplace in the 90's) and Media Play (A really cool media-focused store that sold all formats of media you could think of.)
He talked about Zany Brainy in his Five Below video.
I thought no one else knew about Discovery Zone!
I worked at the one here in Buffalo, and made a great life long friend ...
we may not talk for months but can text anytime and pick up where we left off
worked at discovery zone
my media play comment is long but stay with it
company man
Their marketing campaign was very memorable. I grew up in northeast PA and never actually saw a store but their commercials were on all the time.
I still have a Crazy Eddie tshirt from when I was a kid, even though it was post collapse of the company.
But the Antar family went from an immigrant success story to something no immigrant from Syria wanted any connection to. The grandfather Murad Antar was a store owner who came from Aleppo to the US with his young son Sam (different Sam than his nephew who did the cooking of the books, who now works for a firm that investigates fraud), Sam founded the electronics store, which he brought in his son, Eddie, who renamed it Crazy Eddie's. The Antar's were high profile in their community, until the collapse, when everyone distanced from them.
I am from NY and I remember the Crazy Eddie stores. They were awesome. They had everything - stereos, speakers, TVs, CB radios, camcorders, VCRs, car radios, and all the stuff to hook it together. I never actually bought anything there, but it was a blast to browse through the store and window shop. The place was always full of people and buzzing with activity. Many fond memories made there.
In the late 80s, I worked at a competing electronics store in the NY/NJ area called Nobody Beats the Wiz. It was actually owned by relatives on Crazy Eddie. I think their last name was Jemal. I’m sure they were doing the same things as Eddie.
My 1970s college roommate was from the NYC area. Whenever he had a few beers, he would start acting out Crazy Eddie commercials. He also did Jerry's G.E. appliance store commercials. We were at a southern school, so most of us knew nothing about the New York market. It was hilarious!
I grew up with those commercials. It was great. One thing to keep in mind is buying ad time on a NYC area station meant you were broadcasting to New Jersey, Long Island, Connecticut, and even Pennsylvania. Add in that several local NYC stations were carried on cable to other markets at the time.
As a 61 year old who grew up buying electronics in the mid to late '70's and '80's, I remember the Crazy Eddie ads. I avoided them for some reason and instead did my shopping at J & R Music World out of NYC. Never had a problem with them.
J&R was amazing. Back in the day, they would have all kinds of jazz and blues CDs in the back of the store on the second floor you could barely find anywhere.
@@sjenkins1057 I never actually went to a J & R store. In fact, I lived almost 1,000 miles south of there in Columbus, Georgia. But I came to know of J & R through their ads in some of the magazines I bought: Stereo Review or Stereo World, I can't remember the title now + Rolling Stone. In time, I called them for a catalog, got on their mailing list and about every month or so, I'd get their latest catalog of products. My proudest purchase from J & R was my car stereo system. In 1980, I sent off for (literally mailing a personal check to J & R) for a Panasonic CQS-710 AM/FM Tuner with Metal / Chrome & Dolby NR built into the cassette player, a Pioneer Amp with 7 Band Equalizer, a pair of Jensen 6" by 9" coaxials for the rear deck and a pair of Pioneer Super Tweeters for up front. My Dad helped me install it all one weekend and everything worked together effortlessly. My '73 Gran Torino pumped ROCK the way it was meant to be heard. From all the AC/DC, Rush, Nugent, KISS, Molly Hatchet, Van Halen, Rolling Stones and etc cranked through the system, it's a wonder I can still hear. Sadly, I haven't been able to locate any info on the Panasonic CQS-710 radio tuner, probably lost to history.
I only ever heard about Crazy Eddies from the Beastie Boys, but I would've loved this place too haha. Really appreciate that honesty, Company Man!
I remember the commercials when I was growing up in NJ. It was and still is hard to forget them.
Me too, I was in grade school living in Ridgewood NJ. Mid 1970s in Ridgewood, a great time to be a kid.
By far my favorite corporate fraud story. Probably because their comercials were everywhere throughout my teenage years.
I grew up in Syosset,NY, and the Crazy Eddie store was always the place to go for electronics in the 80's.
I grew up in Brooklyn with a Crazy Eddie within reasonable walking distance. I bought a lot of stuff there as a kid in the 80s who loved music. I'm glad you gave some time to this; the scandal is interesting and the Crazy Eddie commercials were an iconic 80's local-chain advertisement with the most over-the-top spokesperson possible.
fucillo Chevrolet in the early 2000s had the same vibe
I remember the original commercials in the late 70s and early 80s. They were everywhere on the airwaves. Salesmen were real slimy. Always “bait and switch”. They also sold “black market items” as OEM.
I did a project on this for Managerial Accounting class and I was absolutely enthralled with the story. Me and my project partner would just laugh the more we learned.
Nice job, Company Man. Their business practices were INSANE!!!
As a kid growing up in NYC in the 80's I disdained Crazy Eddie. Their ads were everywhere on TV and their gimmick got old fast. Even then they had this shady vibe and I was not surprised when fraud was exposed. Seeing their ads off the air was a huge relief!
I remember those ads as a kid… my dad wasn’t surprised when it all went belly up…
Creative accounting 😂 The Santa commercial killed me! Was there a TV interview where the family confronted each other 🤣
They were the first store I remember touting "Christmas in July!"
I bought some great stereo equipment and got several cash rebates when competitors advertised lower prices! Best victimization EVER!
I grew up in CT, but our cable offered the NYC channels. As a kid I LOVED the Crazy Eddies commercials. One actually did open up in CT and I begged my parents to go because I wasted to meet Crazy Eddie. They took me, and of course I was highly disappointed. Alas.
I grew up in New Jersey and saw these ads all the time as a kid. They cracked me up. Yeah, I knew Eddie Antar got busted for fraud, but I never knew the whole extent of it. Blew my mind.
When you mentioned that the Eddie's judge was found to be biased, that totally made me realize why this story sounded so familiar to me - I actually researched Sam Antar's case for a memo assignment in my first semester of law school.
To quote the judge who was recused from Sam's case: "Sam does not come in here with a halo on his head based upon the testimony I heard in this case. I can't close my eyes to it or put blinkers on. Sam is not some innocent bystander. The innocent bystanders laying out there are the public. The public are the innocent bystanders. Not the Antar family. No one in the Antar family was an [**7] innocent bystander. That is what I'm saying." SEC v. Antar (In re Antar), 71 F.3d 97, 100 (3d Cir. 1995).
it really puts their fraud into perspective, seeing as how incensed even federal judges were with the family as a whole.
Actually judge sounds spot on and I'm a lawyer
There is one thing you missed. WWOR, channel 9 out of NYC at the time was a cable "Superstation", carried on cable systems nationwide, so the Crazy Eddie ads were getting exposure far outside of the New York City market. I remember being an adolescent and teenager here in Pittsburgh and being familiar with the ads.
WWOR was not a NY station it was out of Secaucus NJ. I'm only splitting hairs because WWOR gave us some programing that Made Crazy Eddie seem legit
Richard Bey and Morton Downey Jr. are two that come to mind.
@@raycreveling1583 True, but there is no doubt they were just as much a part of the NYC market as say, WABC, or WCBS.
I worked for Eddie early in the 80s. You missed some of the key points and a couple of great stories.
Primarily, he did not flee to Israel. They had an extradition agreement with the US. He fled to Syria. The consumer electronics business in New York during the latter part of the 20th century was largely controlled by families of Syrian Jews from Brooklyn - The Wiz was another notable company. So when he fled, he went to Syria. He got CAUGHT in Israel, in a joint FBI/Mossad sting.
One of my favorite stories is Eddie opened up a medical school in Grenada. Everyone wondered why, but after a while, it just was one of his crazy ideas. I found out why, quite by accident. He also desperately wanted to sell Apple Computers, but Apple was very particular about the retailers they did business with. I put two and two together when I went down to the stock room to have lunch one day, and sat down on a box for a Mac II. It was addressed to the school in Grenada. He was buying massive numbers of these computers at the discount price Apple sold Macs to colleges and universities. He was getting them cheaper than any of the other competing advertisers.
One of the things you could hear echoing through the stores was "Floose (Syrian for money) talks. Cash, no tax." People who knew would get items cheaper and with no tax if they paid in cash. Syrian was used for a number or things. Another phrase you could hear was "Shoof (look at) that abbo (woman's behind). Chances were that the only women who would be offended were the women who worked in the stores. "Shoof" was used in another Eddie shibboleth - "Shoof the hushos" or look out for the thieves. People (who didn't work there) responsible for "shrinkage" were often identified and trailed, usually by the off-duty NYC cops who worked security.
If Apple did not want to do business with them, then that should have been the first red flag that something improper was going on.
That was a nice anecdote!
I loved watching the ads as a kid, and I loved going to their stores! I think my dad got a boombox at one of their shops during a Christmas sale. I was sad to see them go-and now I know why they did! When I was a kid, I never paid attention to the news😂
Having worked in car sales for years, I’ve played a few auditors like a violin to make stock that hadn’t arrived or already been sold but not booked yet look like it’s still there 😂
Feds reading this comment:
🤨
"This post right here officer"
Congrats on being another random dirt bag. But hey, that's why the term "used car salesman" exists, I supppose
That's not always a bad thing. I used to deal more regularly with a local car dealer as part of my job as a CPA (he's since hired someone to do most of what I did in-house) and there always was an issue of differences between what he counted as inventory at any time and what should have been counted as inventory. Sometimes he'd sell a car and not have the funds yet, tell me the car was sold, but not tell me how much money he had yet to receive. In that case, it would have been better to keep the car in inventory even if it was sold, as otherwise he's be vastly understating his income. Cars not on the lot yet and thus not on his inventory might have already been paid for, which would have likewise affected his income figures. It gets really complicated trying to track everything when you don't actually have direct access to anything, and I knew that we were missing stuff all the time because his income would go all over the place.
I remember this guy. They used to run the commercials on WPIX Channel 11 out of New York.
I didn't know the guy on the commercials wasn't him. This bummed me out more than the fraud. My first CD player came from there around '86/'87. If I remember right, it was around $100 which was really cheap for the time.
Honestly I’m relieved to know he wasn’t. Seems like a fun guy, though I’m sure his reputation got hurt by the scandal.
You did your homework. I was working there during the 80's at the Westbury Location. Much of the destruction came when Eddie "cheated" on his wife and split up the family. Eddie liked to party too much. His Magnificent Christmas parties would find him wasted and mooning everyone. All that shifting around the inventory to inflate his stock was possible because he knew exactly which stores would be audited and when. So we had to move around the merchandise, or stay late and unload a truck that brought merchandise from a sister store. What's really messed up is that he tried screwing his loyal workers by offering us first grabs at the stock shares when he was going public. I'm glad I never purchased any. What a screwball. I remember going to the Crazy Eddie Awards event. All the stores were nominated for something or another: The funniest store, The most sales, etc etc. The whole experience was "INSANE"!
I remember seeing this crazy guy on TV back in the late 1970's when I was stationed at the Brooklyn Navy Yard~! I am glad that you showed that the guy in the Crazy Eddie's TV ads was a actor & not guilty of any crimes. He did a fantastic job in making the commercials.
Citizens go to prison for not paying taxes, but politician receive - a get out free jail card... Shalom
I'm honestly surprised he was extradited out of Israel
Actually I am not. Shalom
"It's Sweltering!" I remember the Crazy Eddie commercials during the Summer, and yes, NYC & surrounds are unpleasantly too hot & humid for 3-4 weeks, aka, the "Dog Days of Summer."
I'm from the Midwest but heard about Crazy Eddie somehow. My fraud radar was triggered, but I thought they were ripping off customers with cheap knockoffs sold as the brand name, or returns sold as new, or in some other way. I never heard about the financial fraud. Props to the financial guy for keeping this under wraps for so long.
While the big media empires gravitated to Hollywood, there’s still NY presence. And maybe there was a tv news show that covered the success and I interesting commercials of Crazy Eddie.
Even Saturday Night Live (based in NYC) made fun of the commercials.
Pop culture. I haven’t been to the west coast but even before the internet I knew about In N Out and the donut shop with the 🍩 on the roof. And the Capitol Records tower. Lots of stuff. Etc.
@@nickpalance3622 I'm sure you are correct, I meant I don't remember a specific exposure to the chain because it was so long ago. 😉
@@nickpalance3622 Yeah, I know about them from a dozen pop culture references, and also discussion amongst the Gen-Xers on Fark.
All the stuff from Crazy Eddie’s was legit, to the customer. I had a TV that worked until after the digital changeover from them bought in the ‘90s. Honestly, if every fraudster in the world had the kind of decency and respect for the customer that Crazy Eddie and the Antar family did, I’d say we should be changing the law.
A lot of cable systems well outside the New York tri-state area carried Secaucus, New Jersey based WOR-TV as a cable super station like WGN and WTBS. Back in the eighties the New York/New Jersey centric local and regional commercials were broadcast well outside their local and regional markets, so people nowhere near New York saw the Crazy Eddie ads carried on WOR. That's where I saw them when I was living in Virginia.
I remember crazy Eddie’s off of Route 80 around the Willowbrook mall in northern New Jersey. My father used to go in there all the time to look at stereo components he never bought anything. I also remember that they had toys in there too because they had G.I. Joe, the movie action figures But candy that place where it was was always scary to me as a child you knew something was off about it.
I grew up in southern Connecticut and saw the ads all the time. I bought my first CD player at one of their stores. I moved out of the area before the whole thing went down and was unaware of the rest of the story.
Crazy Eddie is a classic Accounting class case study. Thanks for this, my class didn't cover everything in this video and I learned a few new things.
All of the words you used fit perfectly. But Crazy is the best description. My favorite part was sending a family member to college to learn to cheat.
Oh, Boy. We finally got cable TV in my Upstate NY home around 1981. Crazy Eddie commercials were just the most entertaining thing on there. "His prices are insaaaaaane".
A tv was telling me about his crazy emporium carnival of deals
Turned out to be a junkyard but I at least found my toaster again
Love your channel man, your scripts are so tight without being stuffy. You do a great job of getting into details and financials when necessary while also focusing on the more digestible narrative. Keep it up :).
I hadn’t heard of this chain but It’s funny because there was a local furniture store near me called “Crazy Bernie’s”, and they appear to have had very similar advertising practices. Crazy Bernie himself was arrested for falsely reporting earnings and receiving tons of taxpayer money they shouldn’t have been. Sounds like someone was inspired in multiple ways.
And later he ran as a left-wing candidate for President.
Oh I more then remembered this I was serving papers and had to go to the court house when I was younger. What a circus. One of the scenes in Goodfellas had crazy eddies in the background cause they filmed in 89 and it came out 90.
Just hearing about this place.
I can speculate as to why…
Does anyone remember the Morrie’s Wigs commercial from Goodfellas ? I always thought it was hilarious and evocative of Crazy Eddies. I grew up in the NYC area so the Goodfellas spoof was spot on for campy local commercials of the day.
At the time, they said we would be the "Toys R Us" of consumer electronics. Best buy and Circuit City didn't exist as national chains. As a salesmen I could negotiate prices, and that was unheard of. I used to go down to Edison, NJ every month for a manager's meeting, Kelso (Crazy Eddie), would often be on a stationary bike, in a grey sweatsuit. pumping away, sweating, and screaming at us. Managers would get calls in the middle of the night to move inventory to another store, to keep one step ahead of the auditors. Also, at meetings, Eddie, often, would give a heads-up on the stock "pump and dump". If only I had paid more attention, I could have retied at 25. It was only "Crazy" because I was in my 20"s and didn't know better.
My dad used to take me to the store on Coney Island Ave in Brooklyn. For years, that is where we bought all the electronics, audio equipment, telephones, televisions, and computers. It was a great store for me as a kid to see all the cool gadgets. I have fond memories of mulling around the store, and the ads were always entertaining. I left NYC before the collapse of Crazy Eddie's. The memories are fun.
You should make more videos on the financial fraud of celebrities. SO MANY celebrities have convictions for fraud. It would be super interesting and popular!
I don't feel like that fits with Company Man's theme. It's not Fraud Man.
@@llamawalrushybrid😂😂😂😂
Thanks for explaining the Crazy Eddie's story. I was always fascinated by their fraud. Now I understand how they did it. I remember seeing the Saturday Night Live skits on TV.
One of the last stores to open was kn South Jersey. It was only open for a few months before the scandal broke. I remember going in for a car stereo and the sales manager telling me I could get a way better deal if I paid cash. I think the employees were skimming the business at this point.
I lived in MASS in the early 1980s and this guy's ads were everywhere -- "His prices are insane!"
The Company Man has outdone himself with Crazy Eddie’s. Countless people are gonna go down the Crazy Eddie’s rabbit hole…
Ayoo pause
And to think I thought Crazy Eddie was just a commercial from the movie UHF regarding used cars. Didn't realize that they were spoofing this place.