Crazy Eddie’s Accountant Cousin Crusades Against Fraud He Calls Rampant

STANFORD, Calif. -- More than two decades after the downfall of Crazy Eddie’s CE empire, fraud controls remain sorely lacking across U.S. business, Eddie Antar’s accountant cousin said. Even with publicly held companies, auditors and the SEC are vastly outgunned by crooks, said Sam Antar, who was Crazy Eddie’s chief financial officer. “Half the mom-and-pops” in New York would go out of business if they lost the benefits of cash-skimming, he said at a Stanford University appearance sponsored by a corporate-governance center.

Short-sellers -- investors who bet in favor of share-price declines -- are vilified as traitors instead of honored as filling some of the investigative gap, Sam Antar said Monday night. Sam Antar said he had felt the sting when he looked into Overstock.com’s books and publicized research that he said prompted the SEC to make the company restate results. “That’s why the criminal element today is having a field day,” he said: The system “frowns upon a whistleblower.” Neither the SEC nor Overstock responded to a request for comment.

Crazy Eddie’s was known as a pioneering chain that dominated the specialty CE business in the New York-New Jersey-Connecticut region in the 1970s and ‘80s. It posed as the customers’ friend by breaking what was called fair-trade retail price-fixing by manufacturers, Antar said. But he said the company was actually a complex of family frauds centering first on skimming and then, starting as it prepared to go public in 1984, manipulated profits. When the operation fell apart as personal feuds coincided with slumping sales in the late ‘80s, Antar cooperated with government investigators -- but only, he acknowledged, because his back was against the wall.

Eddie, the kingpin, is “still alive,” Sam Antar said in answer to a question. “But he’s living a lonely life.” He said Eddie was captured in Israel holding information about his secret bank accounts scattered around the world, and $75 million, the great majority of the loot, was recovered while the boss went to prison. Sam Antar said he himself won his gamble of collaborating with the authorities without having secured a plea bargain. He pleaded guilty to three felony charges but stayed out of prison, and his family finances came out clear of any legal judgments, he said.

Sam Antar gives to-catch-a-thief-style seminars. He boasted at the university of having taught audiences at the SEC, FBI, IRS, Secret Service and the Department of Defense about white-collar crime and how to stop it. His website, WhiteCollarCrime.com, lists dozens more customers: federal and state agencies, professional organizations, businesses and universities.