Retail Gangster Read online

  A story was told in the family about the time Murad was carrying thousands of dollars in cash on him and believed that somebody was following him. So he left it in a store run by a fellow Syrian. He said, “Do me a favor, can I just leave this bag here?” The man had the bag for more than a month and a half, two months. He finally called up Murad, who said, “Oh, I forgot the money.” People leave their checkbooks absentmindedly, and Murad did the same with his cash. That was the message of the story, that and the fact that, at times, the Antar family elder did very well financially.

  Nehkdi and aversion to paying taxes were a leftover habit from Ottoman Syria, where few services were provided to the populace by the Turkish rulers except conscription and taxation. Murad and his wife Tera left Syria for America in 1920. It was a good time to get out.

  The largest Syrian Jewish community was not in the fabled city of Damascus but the less celebrated, but equally ancient, walled city of Aleppo. It was the commercial hub of northern Syria, a way station on the Silk Road to China, and had been home to a sizable Jewish community since biblical times. Most Jewish residents were employed in the souks or ran tiny mercantile businesses and lived in the cramped Bahsita, the Jewish quarter. But wherever they lived, they were subjected to discrimination. Christians and Jews were dhimmis, second-class citizens, “tolerated but not equal.” A special tax, the jizya, was imposed on the Jewish and Christian minorities. But Muslim Syrians were not exempt from the Ottoman obsession with taking their money.

  The pashas—provincial governors—bought their titles and demanded tribute from their subjects like Mafia dons. Pashas “were sent to ‘squeeze’ the inhabitants of the town, and they were ‘squeezed’ themselves in return,” a nineteenth-century British consul remarked. Jewish communal life under the Ottomans was changing at the dawn of the twentieth century—for the worse. Jewish people had avoided conscription, and the forced assimilation that came with it, by paying a special tax, but that was ended by the Young Turks in the early twentieth century. Then came World War I and still more violence and hardship. A good segment of Jewish Syrians flocked to New York, where they were a tiny minority in a great sea of Jewish refugees fleeing oppression in Eastern Europe.

  The center of Syrian Jewish life in early-twentieth-century New York was a dreadful street on the Lower East Side that was “quite unfit for human habitation,” according to a New York Times editorial published after conditions had improved somewhat. The noise alone made life on this street difficult to bear, but its inhabitants—the poorest of the poor—had little choice. Allen Street was barely thirty feet from curb to curb (twenty-four feet, according to one account), yet the city rammed through the Second Avenue Elevated train line in 1880. That civic improvement gave “the street of perpetual shadow” an ambience “more of a tunnel than a street.” Opium dens abounded, and Allen Street had the highest concentration of brothels in the city. One writer observed that “there beneath the roar [of the elevated trains] an open market in human flesh is conducted. In front of every house there stand women of every age and they call to passerby to buy their flesh.”

  Murad and Tera arrived in New York Harbor on June 20, 1920, on the SS France. They traveled second class, as was far more common for immigrants than is now assumed. Doing so meant one disembarked in Manhattan and, unlike third class, avoided the nasty uniformed inspectors at Ellis Island. Murad was listed on the manifest as seventeen and a “teacher.” Actually, he was a twenty-year-old merchant, an occupation shared by the bulk of Syrian Jewish immigrants in Syria and in their new home. Syrians avoided the dismal, low-paying garment-assembly plants that abounded in the city and were the principal employers of Jewish “greenhorns.” Instead, they usually went into business for themselves. If they had some capital, they opened modest stores. If they didn’t, they became peddlers, selling tablecloths, handkerchiefs, and other dry goods from pushcarts and handcarts. A rabbi who worked with Syrian immigrants observed that “though there are many poor in the community, it is on the whole comparatively prosperous.”

  The two communities, Syrian (they called themselves “S-Y”) and Eastern European (known unaffectionately among the Syrians as “J-Dubs”), went on divergent paths in America. “Eastern European Jews showed almost from the beginning of their arrival in this country a passion for education that was unique in American history,” observed Nathan Glazer and Daniel Patrick Moynihan in their 1970 book Beyond the Melting Pot. “My son the doctor” became a cliché, but not among the Syrians. “The Syrian immigrants, unlike their Eastern European counterparts, did not leap to the educational opportunities which the Ashkenazeem [immigrants from Eastern Europe] sought for their children,” observed a Syrian Jewish writer, Joseph A. D. Sutton. Their reluctance stemmed from the assimilation that came with education. Syrian immigrants “wished to avoid as much as possible the acculturation and assimilation of their children, ‘Americanization,’ that had affected almost all other ethnic and religious immigrant groups.” They largely succeeded, and one result was that S-Ys retained a strong Jewish identity and a vibrant religious life into the twenty-first century. That has long been a source of great pride within the community.

  Another by-product of the resistance to assimilation was occupational. Though Syrian Jewish youth began pursuing professional careers as the years passed, Sutton noted in 1979 that “as a rule many follow enterprises similar to those of their fathers.” That meant joining the family business, which was usually retail, or starting one themselves. “By conforming to their fathers’ mores they could look to comfortable and remunerative places in the parents’ businesses, and eventually to becoming their successors,” he wrote. “Why, then, abandon the traditional mode of life of the Syrian community with its many rewards and satisfactions?”

  Why indeed. So it was unremarkable that all of the Antars’ six children went to work in stores in their teens, and that only Eddy finished high school. Though assimilation was anathema, American values were embraced. Military service was not feared as it was in Syria, and S-Y lads eagerly joined up after the attack on Pearl Harbor. Sam M. and Eddy both served in the Army in Europe during World War II, with Eddy seeing fierce combat with the engineers during the final bloody months of the conflict. Another son, Norman, served during the Korean War.

  After the war, Sam M. married Rose Tawil, the daughter of an S-Y dry-goods salesman. Sam turned twenty-five in May 1946, ready to take his place in the community. The couple settled in Brooklyn near their parents, and began to raise a family. Their first offspring was due at the end of 1947. Many prospective parents agonized about naming the baby, but the process was simplified for Syrian Jewish people. The firstborn son was named after the father’s father. The secondborn son was named after the mother’s father, and similar rules applied to girls. This resulted in duplicative names, so S-Ys used spelling variations to avoid confusion.1

  The community’s naming conventions were more than usually important for Sam M. Antar—because he didn’t follow them. A boy was born to Sam M. and Rose on December 18, 1947. He should have been named Mark, which was how Murad was usually Anglicized. Instead, Sam M. and Rose named their newborn baby boy Eddie, which was Ezra Anglicized.

  This departure from tradition raised eyebrows, but Sam and Murad had a ready explanation. Murad’s long-dead brother Ezra had appeared to Murad in a dream. Ezra had died young in the late 1930s, leaving an infant son, Solomon. The boy had barely known his father. Ezra, deceased but fearful, was concerned that Solomon might not follow custom when he grew up and had kids. What a shame it would be if no child were ever named after him! Ezra pleaded with his brother. If Sam M.’s first child was a boy, could he please name the baby after Ezra? Murad woke up in a cold sweat. Of course he would comply with this small, understandable request from the Great Beyond.

  The “dream story” was a beautiful, sentimental tale, and it was also a lie. Sam M. had a secret. Few in the family knew that he couldn’t name his baby Mark because he already had a son—his true firstb
orn son—and had given him that name. Sam M. had already been married and divorced. And his first wife was an affront not just to Murad and Tera, but to the entire Syrian Jewish community—not because of anything she had done, but because of who she was.

  Public records sketch out an intriguing if incomplete account of Sam M. Antar’s secret family. It’s a story that has its roots in the Levant and the quest for a better life in America, very much like Murad and Tera’s voyage from Aleppo.

  Early in 1942 Sam was employed at a linen shop in Akron, Ohio, probably owned by Murad or a family friend. An hour’s drive away in Youngstown, a young woman named Matile Aeube had recently broken with her husband, with whom she’d had three children. She was from Zahlé, a Greek Catholic town in Lebanon’s Bekaa Valley, and had immigrated with her new Syrian American husband in February 1930. Matile was young. Very young. The ship’s manifest gives her age as seventeen, but public records establish that Matile was fourteen when she arrived in New York Harbor on the SS Byron, and apparently was a child of thirteen when she married Joseph Davis back in Lebanon.

  The Davises moved to Youngstown and proceeded to have children. The first, a daughter, came when Matile was fifteen. A son and another daughter followed. Joseph struggled to support the family, working first in a candy shop and then as an elevator operator in a downtown office building. The latter job was paying a paltry $1,200 a year in 1940. Marriages survived in less bleak circumstances back then, but this one did not. They divorced sometime after the Census taker came by in April 1940. Then Matile somehow, somewhere, met Sam M., and by the end of 1941 she was pregnant. They were married in Albuquerque on February 25, 1942, and settled in Los Angeles, where Matile had dreams of becoming a dancer. She came without her three children, who remained in Youngstown with her ex-husband.

  It’s easy to imagine the horror felt by Murad and Tera at their eldest son marrying a Christian Arab woman who was six years older, divorced, already had three kids, and was three months pregnant with his child. The Syrian Jewish community was adamantly opposed to intermarriage even when the non-Jewish spouse converted. In 1935 a Syrian beth din rabbinical court in Brooklyn expressed outrage at Jewish-Gentile unions and forbade all marriage-related conversions, which it described as “absolutely invalid and worthless.” Any such person, their spouse, and their offspring were not to be accepted in the community. This was not a small matter for a young Syrian Jewish man, especially if he intended to follow traditional career paths as Sam M. surely did.

  Sam M. entered the Army on June 24, 1942. Whether he was drafted—or joined the Army with his wife seven months pregnant—is not clear from the available records. What is clear is that their son, Mark Daniel Antar, was born on August 18, 1942, and that their marriage quickly crumbled after Sam’s discharge in July 1945. He and Matia, as she was now known, got a quickie Reno divorce in November, and she married a bit-part actor named Pete Kooy before the ink was dry on their divorce papers.

  Thanks to Matia’s quick remarriage, the skeletons rattling in Sam M.’s closet gave him no trouble in future years. His firstborn son was never acknowledged or mentioned. It was as if he was a puppy Sam brought to the pound before moving back east. Neither Matia nor Pete succeeded in Hollywood, and both died in obscurity—Pete in 1963, according to public records, and Matia in 1993, according to an online family tree that could not be verified. Defense Department records indicate that Danny Mark Kooy, birth date August 18, 1943—same day and month as Mark Daniel Antar but off by a year—served in the Army during the Vietnam War and died on December 16, 2011. He was buried at Riverside National Cemetery. That is either the child Sam M. abandoned in California or one hell of a coincidence.

  Rumors of Sam M. marrying an “Arab dancer” and having a son spread through the Antars decades later, but it’s not known if Eddie ever learned the truth, and no word of Eddie’s half brother ever became public when Eddie’s name was splattered all over the Eastern Seaboard. If S-Y naming conventions had been followed, Eddie would have been named Abraham after Rose’s father. The commercials would have screamed, “CRAZY ABIE! HIS PRICES ARE INSANE!” Or perhaps, if Sam M. had treated him like a firstborn, Mark Antar might have become active in the family business. With Eddie no longer the eldest son, there may have been no Crazy Eddie.

  It does seem fitting that Eddie Antar’s birth was preceded and then surrounded by secrets and lies, because that was the trajectory of his life from the beginning to the bitter end.

  Murad used to say, “An Aleppine can sell even a dried camel skin.” His grandson would have updated that to “An Antar can sell $30 binoculars for $300.” Eddie was schooled in the art of ripping off customers at tourist traps in Midtown Manhattan when he was a teenager—a very young teenager. He wanted to work, not sit in school and learn things that were of no value in the life tradition had set out for him. So he dropped out of Brooklyn’s Abraham Lincoln High School, thereby committing one of his first acts of small-scale, winked-at, unpunished lawbreaking.

  Many years later, Eddie testified that he dropped out in the ninth grade, and he told a newspaper interviewer that he was fifteen when he was “officially” out of school. If so—Eddie was not exactly known for veracity—that made him a truant. New York State law required that children stay in school until they were sixteen. Like a lot of laws that Eddie would cheerfully disregard in the years to come, the compulsory attendance statutes were enforced, at best, unevenly. Eddie claimed that he fought “battles” with his parents over his school attendance. That’s possible—parents were theoretically held responsible when their kids were truants—but it’s not likely that Sam M. and Rose would have fought very hard. S-Y kids were expected to work. Eddie was a daddy’s boy, a willing adherent to S-Y conventions—when it suited him.

  Eddie was a wiry five feet, six inches tall, with an oval face that in later years he obscured with a beard. He had chiseled good looks. He was sure of himself, like the Italian kids who were at the top of the street pecking order. He lifted weights and wore shirts that showed off his muscles. He came of age in the era of fighting gangs, but he never joined one because gangs were for punks who didn’t know where they were going. Eddie knew.

  Despite his size, Eddie had a definite physical presence. To cousin Sammy he was a protector, the guy who would face down the neighborhood bullies. One day when he was about ten, Sammy was in the PS 215 schoolyard near Sam M.’s house when some Italian kids from the neighborhood started picking on him. Then along came Eddie, who just happened to be walking by. He didn’t have to do or say much. He didn’t have to hit anybody. Just being there was enough to make them go away.

  Eddie had more money than other kids in the neighborhood because he earned it. At about the time he was facing down bullies in that schoolyard, he was being schooled in retailing on the Allen Street of the 1960s. Manhattan had deposited its sleaze at the Crossroads of the World—Forty-Second Street and Times Square—the heart of a wretched stretch of Midtown reaching from Sixth Avenue two interminable blocks west to the Port Authority Bus Terminal. Open-all-night skin-flick movie theaters, porno bookstores, penny arcades, and peep shows were in abundance. Hookers and runaways competed for sidewalk space with muggers and nodding-off drug addicts. Tourist-trap “clip joint” gift shops abounded, many owned by S-Ys, stocking grotesquely overpriced cameras and electronic gizmos alongside 007 knives (an easy-opening mugger favorite) and cheap but overpriced souvenirs.

  Later accounts vary concerning the location of the clip joints that gave Eddie his early education. Some say Forty-Second Street, others Times Square, while still others say the vicinity of the Port Authority Bus Terminal. It doesn’t much matter, as all were equally grungy back then, and he may have worked in all those areas. He probably worked for several friends and relatives of Sam M. in those sleazy joints, and one was almost certainly Irving “Zookie” Antar, the youngest of Murad’s offspring. Zookie was in his late twenties, closer in age to Eddie than he was to his eldest brother. A chubby man who wore ho
rn-rimmed glasses, he wasn’t much to look at, but he was fun to be around and he was popular with the younger generation of Antars.

  Unlike Sam M., who grew pedantic and stuffy as he aged, Zookie never took himself too seriously. Eddie just acted like a rebel; Zookie was the real thing. At about the time Eddie was learning the art of price-gouging, Zookie’s personal life took a difficult turn. In 1962, Zookie married a non-Jewish woman of Puerto Rican extraction. Margie Fernandez converted to Judaism, but it didn’t matter. The 1935 edict was still in effect and had been reaffirmed in 1946. So this was a big deal, and marrying Margie affected his ability to earn a living. Yet Zookie was not cast out of the family. It may have helped that Margie was well liked by the family. Change was coming to the S-Y community. Weddings with J-Dubs, once rare, were now becoming more commonplace. So it was not a major issue when Eddie began dating a J-Dub, a classmate from his brief high school career named Debbie Rosen.

  Eddie was a talented apprentice during his clip joint years, pulling down what he later claimed was $1,000 a week in commissions. Even if that was exaggerated—other accounts say $600 or $700—that was still handsome money for a teenager living with his parents. “Eddie used to talk about how he’d saffo the customers,” Sammy recalled. That’s S-Y slang for “ripping off.” Like tricking them into “paying $250 for a $25 camera.” Eddie would say that the camera retailed at $300, and the mark, usually a tourist, would walk away happy. Sure, the sucker would eventually find out he was ripped off, but what could he do about it? He’d be back in Iowa by then. He would never come back to the shop, and if he did, too bad. All sales were final.

  After a few years working the clip joints, Eddie entered a graduate school of retailing. His campus was a street in Brooklyn.