RETAIL GANGSTER: The Insane Real Life Story of Mad Eddie
Gary Weiss
336 pages. Hachette Books. $29.
The most famous TV ad of the Year of Orwell, 1984, was carefully themed around the named novel of the year. Apple Macintosh desktop computerThe most notorious is crazy eddya chain of discount electronics stores in the New York metropolitan area.
Actor Jerry Carroll, dressed in a variety of outfits or wearing nothing but a gray turtleneck and dark blazer, gesticulates wildly and is often mistaken for the mysterious Eddie, rattling sales pitches, Guaranteed with vibrating bug eyes at the end. ! “
people hated Journalist Gary Weiss recalls these commercials in “Retail Gangster.” It’s a compact and captivating account of Crazy Eddie’s artificially inflated rise and slow-motion collapse. But they did well — the company went public under the ominous stock symbol CRZY — and also hit a punchline in popular culture.
Daryl Hannah’s Mermaid Character Saw crazy eddie ad While learning English with “Splash”. Dan Aykroyd spoofed Crazy Ernie on ‘Saturday Night Live’. And the spot itself masquerades as everything from “Saturday Night Fever” to “Casablanca” to Santa Claus, attacking this city that never sleeps on the cheap hours of late-night shows, graffiti and grays the same as his papaya It has become a component of its identity.
Ironically, “Retail Gangster” is a tender requiem for a pre-streaming era when people tended to listen to the same things: movies in theaters, TV shows, Casey Kasem’s “American Top 40.”Also punchy for a grisier, perhaps more colorful New York that lifted itself out of his mid-1970s economic and existential abyss with Pinstripe (Yankee, Stockbroker). “I am the heart” An iconography designed by Milton Glazer and, apparently, the stereo-obsessed baby boomers of rock’n’roll.
But the heart of this flexible book is the deep family drama and entertaining money investigation behind Crazy Eddie, who aggressively takes down competitors like Circuit City and The Wiz with his surprisingly shady business practices. Undertaking this complex story that at first seems like a tiny potato, Weiss is the life of a brave consort determined to eventually break through a large box of tangled cords and wires in a basement and painstakingly straighten them out. It’s something like
The real Eddie, surname Antar, was born in 1947 to Sam M. Antar, a window trimmer whose economy revolved around suitcases of cash known as “nehkdi,” and his second wife, Born Rosie Tawil, the daughter of a dry goods salesman. They were part of Brooklyn’s Syrian-Jewish community and were nicknamed SY. They generally despised the Eastern European Jewish fellow they called his J-Dubs. Eddie was short but muscular and good-looking, and was called Kelso, after a racehorse. He dropped out of high school (where he met his first wife, his J-Dub Debbie Rosen) and worked as a young uncle’s apprentice at his joint near 42nd Street in Manhattan. , joined his father and cousin Ronnie’s television and electronics company. Kings Highway. The rest is a hack story.
From the beginning of his career, Weiss displayed elegant distrust, and Anther skimmed, cheated, stole, and pulled switchers. I instructed it to be repackaged. Sales tax remained unpaid on a regular basis. The warranty claim was fabricated. An unlikely international project unfolding in Panama and St. Lucia. Even the Crazy Eddie logo in the mass print ads of the time, a man with spiky hair and a bow tie, was lifted from cartoonist Robert Crumb (although his long nose also suggests Pinocchio). Once Tar materialized, the female subordinates were instructed to cuddle up to them. “They didn’t want to believe we were scammers,” says her Sammy, another of her Antar cousins.
Through a wealth of interviews and court documents, Antar has been portrayed not only as a con artist and office bully, but as Debbie, the mother of five daughters (one of whom is a Died of cancer at age 18) “a big hot slice of bupkis” when they divorced. He remarried a woman named Debbie, and he bore him a son.As the court marshal approached, his most valuable inventory was not air conditioners or VCRs, but security listening devices and paper shredders.Israel He spent time in the same prison where Adolf Eichmann was executed after abusing the law of return and forging his family’s passports to flee to Israel. After he was extradited, Antar served almost seven years in a U.S. federal prison and made various comeback attempts, including creating a website, before he died in 2016 at the age of 68.
Weiss, the author of previous books on Wall Street, the Mafia, and Ayn Rand, is here on a sure footing, trudging through faded file boxes of legal material, but occasionally jumping into ominous zoological tropes. only. One page we are reading says: I was just hungry. In another, certain employees were “innocent as lambs.” Yet another article stated that “Crazy Eddy appeared to be a wounded blue jay, squawking loudly in the grass while a red-tailed hawk circled over his head.” Somebody please call the National Park Service!
The big cloud over “Retail Gangster” is, of course, the Internet. His Apple commercial for Marching Automaton turned out to be both prescient and generic. Carol, the face and tireless voice in Crazy Eddie’s TV ads, passed away without notice in 2020. What Crazy Eddie used to sell went out of fashion years before that . And with all the bugs, so was that warm, funny, busy touch.
