Retail Gangster Read online

  Copyright © 2022 by Gary Weiss

  Cover design by Sara Wood

  Cover images: Pennants © Mikhail Novozilov / GettyImages; Crazy Eddie Store © New York Daily News Archive / EyeEm / GettyImages

  Cover copyright © 2022 by Hachette Book Group, Inc.

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  First Edition: August 2022

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  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Weiss, Gary (Gary R.), author.

  Title: Retail gangster : the insane, real-life story of Crazy Eddie / Gary Weiss.

  Description: First edition. | New York : Hachette Books, [2022] | Includes bibliographical references and index.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2022019041 | ISBN 9780306924552 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780306924569 (ebook)

  Subjects: LCSH: Antar, Eddie, 1947-2016. | Crazy Eddie (Firm) | Businesspeople—United States—Biography. | Household electronics industry—Corrupt practices—United States. | Chain stores—Corrupt practices—United States. | Fraud—United States.

  Classification: LCC HD9971.5.E542 W45 2022 | DDC 338.092 [B]—dc23/eng/20220427

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022019041

  ISBNs: 9780306924552 (hardcover); 9780306924569 (ebook)

  E3-20220715-JV-NF-ORI

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  The Family

  Prologue

  PART ONE: Nehkdi Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  PART TWO: “They’ve become famous” Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  PART THREE: “Rip their eyes out” Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  PART FOUR: “There were no files” Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Epilogue

  Photos

  Acknowledgments

  Discover More

  Notes

  Also by Gary Weiss

  Praise for Retail Gangster

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  PROLOGUE

  EARLY IN JANUARY 1987, THREE MEN OF MODEST STATURE, WEARING TAILORED suits and long black overcoats, arrived at a five-story town house on East Sixty-Seventh Street in Manhattan. This was the heart of the Gold Coast, which stretched a mile up Fifth Avenue from Fifty-Ninth Street and east for two blocks, a neighborhood (if one could call it that) unique in the city for its ostentatious embrace of unapologetic greed and the good fortune that comes from careful selection of parents. No. 15 was designed in 1904 by Ernest Flagg, a noted architect of the period, as the residence of a well-born man of leisure and occasional biplane pilot named Cortlandt Field Bishop. It was derivative in appearance, with faux Parisian balconies and other frills that were fashionable at the time. Many of the residences in this area had been converted into consulates and private clubs over the years. This one was now the Regency Whist Club. Wealthy men played an obscure card game here, and occasionally they invited for lunch people they wanted to impress.

  Sam E. Antar thought that setting aside a town house for playing cards was an absurd waste of prime real estate. But that was none of his business. The people who lived on this street felt that they had to flaunt their wealth. The Antars did not. Sam had an apartment in a middle-class section of Brooklyn. He and his two colleagues were born there, which could be heard when they spoke. They were products of the working class. They didn’t call it that. They didn’t call it anything. But they wouldn’t have minded if other people described them that way, and neither would they have cared if anyone told them that they had achieved the American Dream. It was a cliché, it was trite, it was shunned, it was mocked—but for them, it was true.

  They were separated by one generation from the Bahsita, the crowded and disease-ridden Jewish quarter of Aleppo, Syria. Their parents and grandparents had run shabby stores in dreary neighborhoods. They overcame obstacles that would have humbled less dogged men. And now they were on the Gold Coast, about to meet one of the most eminent men in their business. He wanted to meet them.

  It was nothing personal; it was a tribute to their company. From the moment its first television commercials aired in 1976, with a revved-up disc jockey named Jerry Carroll screaming, “HIS PRICES ARE INSANE!” Crazy Eddie had been a phenomenal success. It was more than a chain of thirty-two stores, stretching from Philadelphia to New England, that sold stereos, records, VCRs, clock radios, and television sets. It was more than a Wall Street superstar. It embodied the indomitable, sometimes malevolent spirit of New York City.

  These men didn’t much care. Only the numbers mattered to them. They were hard, cynical men. But it was true—it was provable fact—that Crazy Eddie was as much a symbol of the city as the Brooklyn Bridge and the World Trade Center. Everyone knew Crazy Eddie. Not its reclusive founder, Sam’s cousin Eddie Antar, but the Jerry Carroll character and the stores, with their garish yellow signs and “crazy man” trademark, which was plastered on newspaper ads and stock certificates and on T-shirts, mugs, hats, and other memorabilia eagerly snapped up by Crazy Eddie fans. Imagine that—fans of a store!

  Eddie and his team had tapped into something. They hadn’t planned it, but they had done it. In 1985 a survey found that the Carroll character was better known to New Yorkers than the publicity hound Mayor Ed Koch. A year later, the stores had 99 percent name recognition, higher than Ronald Reagan. Its patrons ranged from ordinary people to celebrities to junkies—a popular brand of smack was called “Crazy Eddie.”

  And now all they had built might go up in smoke.

  The three men were here because Crazy Eddie was “in play.” That was a phrase used by the press to denote a company likely to be taken over in the near future. It was an emotion as much as it was a description. If said often enough by the right people or the right media, you were in play. Then it had the effect of a For Sal
e sign planted on a lawn—except that the companies so designated had no voice in the matter. It was happening all over the country. Corporate raiders were buying up companies and squeezing them for every last nickel. They snapped up steel mills, airlines, retail chains, and manufacturers, treating them as if they were derelict houses that needed gut renovation. The people who worked for them were the guts that were renovated.

  Crazy Eddie was vulnerable. It was a widely known brand, and it could be bought on the cheap. Its once-soaring stock price had ebbed in recent months, and reports of high-level turmoil encouraged potential acquirers. Sam’s widely admired cousin had quit as chief executive officer for unspecified “personal reasons” just a few days before. Reports of Eddie’s poor health were circulating in the press. In his absence, the company was run by the newly appointed members of an “Office of the President”: Sam, the chief financial officer; Eddie’s brother Mitchell, in charge of operations; and Isaac “Ike” Kairey, an old friend of Eddie’s, who oversaw the stores. The triumvirate was an unusual arrangement, underlying the executive suite malaise that was said to beset this otherwise pristine and, experts agreed, outstanding company.

  Over the years, Crazy Eddie had been blessed with extraordinary profit growth. The result was that its shares soared nearly 1,100 percent in the two years after they began trading in September 1984. Eddie Antar and his team had an almost magical ability to make the cash registers ring even during difficult times. Yet because of the takeover mania that was sweeping the country, its 2,250 employees might be fired in droves unless a corporate savior, a “white knight,” bought the company but kept it intact.

  Not long after Eddie quit, a very wealthy man named Milton Petrie let it be known that he might fill that role. Oppenheimer & Co., Crazy Eddie’s Wall Street bankers, promptly arranged for a luncheon meeting at the Regency Whist Club. This was an ancient and arcane card game, a precursor to contract bridge, a game of skill requiring a prodigious memory. One had to remember the cards that had been dealt. Milton Petrie hadn’t forgotten any of the hands he had been dealt in his life. Few had been certain winners.

  Petrie had worked his way to the Gold Coast and had far more in common with the Antars than he did with Cortlandt Field Bishop. He was an old-school merchant, and like the Antars he was from an immigrant background. His father was born in Russia, settled in Salt Lake City, and opened a pawnshop in the 1890s. He gave it the grand name Utah Collateral Bank. It failed. No worries. This was America, the land of opportunity, so Jacob Petrovitzky changed course. He moved the family to Indianapolis, left storekeeping behind, and became a cop. His son changed his name but retained the doughtiness. Starting with a hosiery shop in Cleveland, Milton Petrie overcame a rocky start in Horatio Alger fashion, went bankrupt in his early years, but eventually established a highly profitable chain of discount women’s clothing stores. He bought more and more chains and became a retailing magnate, but not feared and hated like Sam Walton. His stores were an integral part of their communities, not big-box alien implants.

  Petrie was a sharp investor in his later years, buying up Toys “R” Us stock when it sold in the pennies. He was now eighty-four years old, an elder statesman of retailing, a billionaire who lived like one in a grand building around the corner on Fifth Avenue. Laurance Rockefeller was a neighbor.

  Sam was impressed by Petrie’s background but not intimidated by it. What made him intimidating was that he wasn’t intimidating. He was, by all accounts, gentle and generous. He helped ordinary people down on their luck, total strangers he read about in the papers. When a police detective was slain by the mob, he established a trust fund for the cop’s four daughters. His will was constantly expanding and, in time, would grow to 120 pages, setting up trust funds and gifts, ranging from $5,000 to $15 million, for 383 people. Petrie did good for the sake of doing good. That gave Sam a weird, unfamiliar feeling.

  The three Office of the President members were escorted into an elevator, taken to an upper floor, and ushered into a formal dining room. The old man was taller than expected, towering over the men as he cordially greeted them. His handshake was firm as he peered at each of them with sharp hazel eyes beneath furry brows, but he was stooped and Sam noticed that he looked his age. A butler waited on them.

  “So, how is your sick brother?” Petrie asked Mitchell. There was a look in his eye when he said that. Did he doubt that Eddie was really sick? That possibility crossed Sam’s mind.

  After some small talk about conditions in the industry, Petrie casually asked, “Do you want to do a takeover? How would you feel if I took over your company and kept you guys around?” It was what they wanted to hear, but Sam was uncertain. What was Petrie really thinking? Sam now realized why they were at the Regency Whist Club and not his office. They were in a high-stakes card game, and they couldn’t see the hand they were playing. But Sam had the odd sensation that Petrie could see every one of their cards.

  As the men and their host ate their specially ordered kosher meals, Sam’s anxiety grew. A petrifying thought crossed his mind. That look in his eye. Perhaps he imagined it. Perhaps not. Could Petrie have known that Sam had planted those illness rumors in the press? If he knew that, could he have known all the other things they were hiding? That this loud company with the goofy public image was toppling over, bloated, burdened by years of fraud? That Eddie stole from everyone in sight? Even the “crazy man” trademark was swag, an almost exact copy of a Robert Crumb character. The financial statements that Petrie had carefully studied could have been set to music by Dave Frishberg. They were a blizzard of lies.

  If Petrie took over Crazy Eddie, there were only two possibilities: he would either uncover the frauds and they would go to prison, or this very decent old man would become their next victim. It was then that Sam identified the unfamiliar emotion that had overcome him—shame.

  PART ONE

  NEHKDI

  CHAPTER ONE

  AS FAR BACK AS HE CAN REMEMBER, SAM E. ANTAR RECALLS WATCHING cash pile up on his uncle’s kitchen table. After every trip out of town, his uncle would place the stiff-sided valise onto the table, snap open the brass latches, and out would come the cash.

  Uncle Sam—Sam M. Antar—was pretty much head of the family by the mid-1960s, when his nephew started hanging around. Sammy, as he was known in the family, was a slightly built, bookish kid. His father, Sam M.’s younger brother Eddy, wasn’t around much. Most days he was two hours away in downtown Bridgeport, the fading Connecticut city where he had a children’s clothing store. Sam M. and his sons—Eddie, Allen, and Mitchell—became a kind of surrogate family. They lived not far away, in an attached house on East Third Street in Gravesend, a tranquil Italian-Jewish neighborhood in southern Brooklyn. Sam M. was gone a lot as well, but unlike Eddy he was not tied to a store in a dismal city. Sam M. would be traveling through the country, doing business, cutting deals, and would return not beaten down by demanding customers but “like Marco Polo,” with tales of the great and the peculiar that he encountered on the road. Then he would unload the cash.

  Sam M. was the eldest son of Murad Antar, the family patriarch. Becoming the head of the family was a birthright, and the cash piling on his kitchen table in Gravesend brought him to that status while he was in his forties. Murad was revered as part of the generation that had come to America from Syria decades earlier. He had done well for decades, but by the mid-1960s his financial fortunes were on the wane. By the late 1970s he owned a sprawling house on Ocean Parkway, not far from Sam M., but not much else. Unlike Murad, a quiet and reserved man, Sam M. was outgoing and bombastic. He was a window trimmer—a designer of store window displays—and that gave him insights into retailing opportunities everywhere he went. He started buying into stores in the 1950s, and by the 1960s Sam M. had a string of part-owned stores from Brooklyn to Jersey City to Nogales, Arizona, selling everything from shoes to toasters to transistor radios.

  The window-trimming business and the stores were lucrative, or so he used to say
. He claimed to net $10,000 to $20,000 from each of his window displays, good money at the time, though there’s no way to know for sure, and Sam M. had a tendency to embellish. Many years later, a federal judge would conclude that he had “obtained a rather clear sense of [Sam M.] as hardworking, ambitious, and highly intelligent. I also found him to be a skillful and inveterate liar.” Still, the cash was real enough. He may have lied about how much was in the piles, and if so, what of it? He was accountable to no one, not his family, and certainly not the Internal Revenue Service.

  Sam M. would swiftly and expertly sort the bills into denominations, count them, and put them in stacks. Two rubber bands meant fifty to a bundle. Most of the stacks had two rubber bands. A single rubber band meant fewer than fifty bills, and the number would be written in ballpoint pen on the top bill of the stack. He would climb a stepladder in the bedroom closet, lift a loose ceiling panel, and carefully place the cash in the space above it. Or he would put the cash in a file drawer or carefully layer the bills inside a radiator cabinet, snug against the pipes. Some of it went to the bank, and some went to his wife Rose to run the house. But most of the cash went into the ceiling, the bed, or whatever other hiding places were available.

  This was the nehkdi, as it was known among Syrians, and it offered a number of benefits. The principal one was, of course, that it was not shared with the government. Employees would get paper bags of cash, off the books, sparing everyone involved the nuisance of paying payroll taxes. Since their wages were tax free, without withholdings, employees would take home more money—quite a bit more—than they’d have gotten from employers who paid the same salaries but had a more fastidious approach to the tax laws. Having all that cash around was no big deal. Sammy later recalled: “It wasn’t something explained. Our dads didn’t sit us down and say, ‘This is nehkdi.’ We just saw and copied, as kids always do. It was part of our early childhood development: reading, writing, and skimming.”