An interesting NY Times article on the tightly knit Syrian Jewish community in Brooklyn. Among their number, Eddie Antar aka Crazy Eddie – the name familiar to me from trips to LI when his stores were advertised everywhere
For many years, the most famous SY in the world was Eddie Antar, known professionally as Crazy Eddie. In the ’70s, he revolutionized the home electronics business and created an empire.
Nobody did retail theater better than Crazy Eddie. His souk-smart salesmen — many of them relatives and friends from the enclave — choreographed the shopping experience, waltzing the zboon (SY slang for “customer”) in well-rehearsed steps toward the be’aah, the sale. His ads (“His prices are insane!”) were commercial performance art. And when he was caught defrauding his investors for almost $100 million dollars and subsequently fled to Israel, Eddie provided an international drama that ended in extradition and prison.
The Crazy Eddie case became a cause célèbre, shattering longstanding community rules of silence and decorum. Eddie’s J-Dub wife, Debbie, caught him in flagrante delicto with his mistress, who also happened to be a J-Dub named Debbie, on the last day of December 1983 — a confrontation remembered among old-timers as the New Year’s Eve massacre. The massacre was a real bean-spiller, and it was followed by the testimony of Eddie’s first cousin (and partner and C.F.O.) Sam E. Antar on how the illegal schemes had been carried out. This gave the United States Attorney prosecuting the case, Michael Chertoff (now the secretary of the Department of Homeland Security), more than enough to work with. Eddie went away for six years.
The souk smart phrase above reminds me of 2 Danish guys I knew in Fort Lauderdale back in 1994/5. They both worked at Florida Swap Shop selling electronic goods. They were clean cut, nordic, young fellows and I remember them reporting that their Israeli boss had remarked:
‘If I looked like you, or you could sell like me, now that would be a winning combination!’.
An interesting blog post from Sam Antar – Eddie’s cousin and former CFO of Crazy Eddie’s. Something to read before going shopping on Tottenham Court Road – or 5th Ave.
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