Founded by Eddie Antar, Crazy Eddie was a chain of consumer electronic stores in the Northeast. After going public in the 1980s, the stock became nearly a 10-bagger before investigators found it to be a fraud.
Ricky Mulvey talked with Gary Weiss, author of Retail Gangster: The Insane, Real-Life Story of Crazy Eddie, about topics including:
- Why investors bought into Eddie Antar’s hype.
- How criminals save money on sales tax.
- The eventual downfall of Crazy Eddie.
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This video was recorded on Oct. 23, 2022.
Gary Weiss: It’s a little bit like a Ponzi scheme. If you begin by committing fraud, you got to continue committing fraud, and that’s exactly what he had to do. So, how do you commit fraud? One of the ways you commit fraud, one of the easiest ways to boost your earnings is just to inflate your inventory. It’s not known to most laypeople. It certainly wasn’t known to the people in the warehouses in Crazy Eddie. But if you want to increase your inventories, if you inflate your inventories, you’re inflating profits.
Chris Hill: I’m Chris Hill and that’s author Gary Weiss. Before Theranos and before Enron, there was Crazy Eddie, a chain of consumer electronics stores throughout the Northeast founded by Eddie Antar. The business went public in 1984, and within two…
