He ran the most successful car theft ring in American history.
He’s a mastermind.
He led a major enterprise that enabled him to make millions and millions of dollars.
His tightly controlled organization stole thousands of luxury vehicles.
They do it in a matter of moments.
They are sophisticated.
They know the latest technology on these high-end cars.
The police couldn’t stop him.
He had tremendous discipline.
This is what made him very good.
And we had no idea who he was.
Find out how he did it next on Masterminds.
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New York City has America’s largest concentration of high-end cars.
Manufacturers of these luxury vehicles have equipped them with an array of sophisticated security features.
These features include motion detectors that sound off when the car is moved.
They also include recessed door locks designed to foil prying tools.
An electronic engine immobilizer prevents the car from being started without the proper key.
And if thieves do manage to steal the vehicle, a global positioning device concealed in one of 25 secret locations allows police to track it.
But in 1999, a massive wave of car thefts hits New York.
We were losing cars at an unprecedented rate.
In fact, we lost 48 high-end vehicles in the span of 6 to 8 weeks.
The thieves are so efficient, cars are gone in a matter of seconds.
They do so quickly, and they do so quietly, and they get away with it.
They knew what anti-theft devices they had to defeat.
They had a plan.
They were stealing the cars out of our driveways, out of our commuter lots, out of our malls, and we’ve got to put an end to it.
Even more frustrating for police, the stolen cars weren’t resurfacing.
Generally, what you’ll see is when a vehicle is stolen for parts, it will show up out in the street.
We call it the bones.
All the high-end parts that were off the vehicle would be used for resale.
What we discovered is they weren’t showing up.
The cars were simply disappearing.
Which was kind of odd.
And leaves us as an auto crime investigator to believe the cars were being exported.
Now, the question was, where were they going?
We learned that a number of the owners of these vehicles had E-ZPass in their vehicles.
E-ZPass is used as a form of payment when going through a toll.
By studying the computerized records of the victim’s last toll payment, a pattern emerged.
The vehicles were going across the Triborough Bridge.
And there’s two locations they could have been going to.
Either Kennedy Airport or Brooklyn to be shipped out.
Police ruled out the airport as an export venue because of the volume of vehicles.
But they found nothing in their search of the Brooklyn shipyards.
And the investigation hit a dead end.
I knew early on that with the theft of these luxury vehicles that there was probably a very sophisticated professional car theft organization that was in operation and working in New York City.
The mastermind police were looking for was a former intelligence officer in the Chinese army named Min Jin Yang.
He stole and exported thousands of high-end vehicles and made himself over $40 million.
The question is, how did he do it?
Former Chinese army intelligence officer Min Jin Yang’s career as America’s greatest car thief starts 5,000 miles from the US.
Discharged from the army in the late 1980s, he moves to Shanghai.
There is a huge demand for luxury vehicles among the privileged class in Shanghai.
But the cars are not sold in communist China.
Seeing an opportunity to use the skills he honed investigating Asian smugglers, Yang approaches the Chinese underworld with a business proposition.
He was able to convince people in China that he could bring them vehicles door-to-door in 6 weeks.
If you think about it, that is about the time it takes to order a new car.
Yang strikes his deal, a 60/40 profit split.
The buyers give him a half million dollar advance to set up his operation in the city where the cars are, New York.
You could steal a car in New York that’s worth $60,000 and sell it in Asia for $120,000.
He knew that if he came to New York that he could get the type of vehicles that these people wanted.
It was a good shopping ground.
Slipping into the country using false documents, Yang adopts the name Kenny and poses as a struggling immigrant.
This was all part of his scheme.
He would blend in.
He didn’t want to stick out.
He drove an older Nissan Altima that was leaking oil.
It was not flashy.
Yang begins to execute his master car theft plan.
He brings over a trusted associate from Shanghai, Poi Chau, to run the shipping operation.
Chau’s first task is to secure a warehouse where they can process the cars.
It was important to find a warehouse as quickly as possible.
But the warehouse had to be just right.
It had to be away from a police station.
It had to be on the quiet side.
It had to be in a place that was not going to attract attention.
After weeks of searching, Chau finds the perfect location.
Yang instructs him to lease the warehouse.
They created a dummy corporation called MSK Group.
The purpose of having a dummy corporation was that if in fact there was an investigation of MSK Group, it would not come back to Kenny Yang.
He tried to separate himself so that if in fact the walls came down, he would be protected.
Yang then recruits more trusted Chinese associates.
Those individuals were brought in by a Chinese organization out of Vancouver.
They worked in the warehouse.
They camouflage the operation as a food company by loading in dry goods near the doors.
Then they outfit the building with a surveillance system.
Yang is now ready for the next step, finding the best car thieves in New York.
He didn’t get his hands that dirty.
But at the same time he knew who to hire on the street to steal these vehicles.
Yang talent scouts an accomplished New York car thief known only as Dean.
He met Dean at an auction for salvaged vehicles.
Developed a relationship with him.
And then it was Dean who actually procured the professional car thieves.
He just wanted me to deal with the car thieves, then I deal with him.
That’s how it all started.
Dean knew a lot of individuals that would steal cars.
One of his closest confidants was an individual by the name of Mario Lopez.
It was basically a four-part group.
One part of the group was Dean passing along the orders to Mario Lopez.
Mario then organized the theft of the vehicles.
And the last part of the group was Asian dominated shipping vehicles out.
Yang has created an organization that leaves him unknown to all but his closest lieutenants.
With every piece now in place, he gives the order for the thefts to begin.
They would target high-end shopping malls, residential streets, commuter parking lots.
Mario was capable of stealing a car at any time, at any place, and he did.
Once the right car is found, Mario and his gang go to work.
You open the door, it will shut down the computer.
So, you would have to break the glass, go in through the window.
Lopez is a specialist at using computers to bypass security systems.
He re-programs the car’s engine immobilizer.
This allows him to start the vehicle with a stolen generic dealer key.
Ken’s crew was very knowledgeable in the theft of high-end vehicles.
And they did it very quick.
The whole operation of stealing a car would only take maybe 1 or 2 minutes.
With all of the anti-theft features now disabled, Lopez hands the car off.
Mario stole numerous cars and kept on passing them off to backup drivers.
After they stole the car, they would bring it to a good neighborhood where those types of cars wouldn’t stick out.
Yang instructs the thieves to electronically scan the car to determine if it is equipped with a global positioning device.
The device basically sends out a signal and lets the police know the location of the vehicles.
The global positioning device is removed and discarded.
But in case it’s already been activated, the thieves leave the car.
What Ken mandated was that all these vehicles had to be cooled down a couple of days.
Once that vehicle sat there for 2 days, they knew the police weren’t looking for it.
Yang then orders Dean to have the car brought to the warehouse.
This stage is also under his careful control.
The delivery took place around rush hour.
He wanted the cars to be part of the commute.
Dean is instructed to have the drivers leave the cars a few blocks from the building.
He doesn’t want the car thieves to know where the warehouse is at.
That’s the main reason of parking the cars a couple blocks away.
So, only Dean and Mario would bring cars into the warehouse.
But Yang has designed one final test to make sure the police haven’t followed the vehicles.
He has Dean continuously circle the block in the stolen car.
They square the block.
If somebody is following you, it becomes very obvious if they keep on making the same right turn or left turn that you’re making.
A second scout car circles a wider area, also on the alert for police.
They had video cameras outside the warehouse.
They had monitors in the interior of the warehouse that they could look at.
They could monitor the traffic.
He would have his guys bring the car into the warehouse when he feels that it’s safe.
From his vantage point on the street, Yang instructs Chau to open the warehouse loading bay.
When the case were opened, the vehicles were brought into the warehouse and the gate was closed.
Now the warehouse team takes over.
If the thieves did any damage to the vehicle, that would be fixed at the warehouse.
They would actually repair the locks and cut keys.
That vehicle, when it was shipped, was in showroom condition.
The next step is to load the vehicles into land-sea containers that Yang has had delivered to the warehouse.
These guys were very skilled.
They used a couple of ramps to essentially load these cars into containers.
Knowing the exact size of each stolen car, Kenny designs the perfect system for packing them.
They would build a frame around it out of 2 by 4s.
And actually drive another vehicle underneath it.
These cars were not moving around.
And they didn’t want to damage them on those days.
After gauging the exact weight of the packed container, Yang forges convincing manifests for the shipment.
It would list as food product.
The weight of the product would match the weight of what they were shipping.
Once the container left the warehouse, it was trucked over to New Jersey.
In New Jersey, the container was put on a train.
It was railed across the United States to California.
Then it was put on a ship.
The vessel heads for the East China Sea.
It is met by another ship.
The containers are covertly transferred.
Then delivered to China, along with new manifests that detail their real contents.
With military precision, Yang lands thousands of luxury vehicles.
But a simple traffic accident will soon threaten to bring his multi-million-dollar operation to a screeching halt.
For the past 5 years, Ken Yang has made millions smuggling stolen cars to China.
But the demand for these vehicles is outstripping his ability to steal them.
To boost the supply, he has Dean order Mario Lopez to start hitting car dealerships.
Mario would go in.
He would scout the dealership.
He would take a test drive.
He would spot where the car salesman would go to get the key out of the lock box.
Several nights later, Mario returns to the dealership.
Mario would break in.
He would go right to the box because now he knew where it was.
He would take the keys.
Mario’s steel crew is waiting.
In minutes, seven new luxury cars are driven off the lot.
From the time the alarm went off, they would have 3 minutes later, and everybody was gone.
But one of the stolen cars gets into an accident after exiting the Triborough Bridge.
When police arrive on the scene, they discover the vehicle is stolen.
The driver is arrested and turns on his fellow thieves.
And based on this accident, that led us to Dean.
An investigation of Dean eventually directs police to Ken Yang’s warehouse.
We understood there was an export operation in a warehouse in Brooklyn.
And we set up on that warehouse.
We did surveillances of that warehouse.
Unbeknownst to us, they were doing counter surveillance in the area.
Yang soon discovers the police are on to him.
But he’s prepared.
His operation is designed to fold quickly.
Ken had tremendous discipline.
This is what made him very good.
He felt that we were on to him.
He just disappeared.
When police make their move, they find the warehouse abandoned.
The warehouse basically was emptied, and he was gone.
And we had no idea who he was, where he went to, or anything.
Everything goes quiet.
But police put a tap on Dean’s phone.
What we would hear on the phone would be people would always be asking Dean, “When are the Asians coming back? When are the Asians coming back?”
Hoping to take down the whole organization, the police hold off on arresting Dean.
On the one hand, we wanted to build a case against as many professional car thieves as we could.
On the other hand, we wanted to learn where the vehicles were going ultimately.
6 months later, Yang resurfaces.
Basically, Ken comes back to New York.
He makes a phone call to Dean.
It’s a very cryptic phone call.
I’m back.
I have an order for 260.
Fearing he’s being tapped, he orders the gang to keep changing their phones.
These are individuals who are very sophisticated.
They were involved in disposing of cell phones.
So even though we were up on 14 wires at one point, we had to constantly change and amend the wires.
This requires court approval.
We had to keep up with their disposing of their cell phones.
We knew who they called.
So, we waited for them to call their parents or a girlfriend from the next phone.
That would give us the number of the phone they were currently using.
Then we would get a wiretap on that phone.
He thought that by changing cell phones, by not using his address, that he could hide his identity.
His cronies constantly made mistakes by alluding to where they would have lunch.
Police send an Asian undercover officer to Yang’s business lunches.
For the first time, they get a look at the mastermind.
We could listen into the conversations.
It gave us a window into the world of Kenny Yang and his group.
And so, when we learned that they were looking at this warehouse, we sprung into action.
Kenny was setting up to fulfill another order.
We were setting up to catch him.
We knew that we did not want police presence in the area if we could help it.
So, instead, what we did is we mounted cameras.
We mounted cameras on telephone poles.
We mounted cameras on buildings.
Police even managed to put a locating device into one of the containers to find out where the cars are going.
We worked with the New York State Police.
We worked with the New York City Police Department.
We worked with local police.
This was an effort that was years in the making.
So, we had all of our bases covered.
For the first time, police have Kenny Yang clearly in their sights.
But unaware of their surveillance, Yang continues to ramp up operations with an ingenious scheme that targets parking garages.
Most parking garages in Manhattan, you leave the keys with the car.
This way they can move the vehicle around if another car has to get out.
Now, parking garage attendants in Manhattan don’t make a lot of money.
Mario Lopez had formed an alliance with a parking garage attendant.
A deal was hatched for Mario Lopez to steal a number of cars from that garage.
They would pay him $500 for the most high-end cars that he had in his garage.
So, the time was arranged.
After getting the keys to these vehicles from the parking attendant, they duct taped him.
They left him in the garage.
They then drove away with seven cars.
After somebody came down, saw this poor parking garage attendant tied up, they called the police.
In fact, by the time the police arrived at the parking garage, the cars were already at the warehouse.
By asking for more and more cars to be delivered, they made some mistakes.
They got sloppy.
They got greedy.
They wanted the cars to come into the warehouse.
And they didn’t allow the cars to cool off.
One of the stolen cars in the warehouse has a GPS system that alerts police.
The responding officer walks straight into the surveillance operation.
We were watching on camera.
We were watching what was taking place.
There was nothing we could do to stop it.
We knew this police officer was going to walk in the door.
The workers that were in the facility take off.
So, at this point we realized we had to act, and we had to act fast.
We set up on Kenny’s house.
We had a car on each corner, and one car down the block.
An oriental gentleman leaves the house.
We ID him as Kenny.
At that point a decision was made to stop him.
Kenny Yang is arrested and charged with multiple counts of car theft.
But for police, there was one sour note.
Because of the takedown coming prematurely, we never really were able to determine where the cars were being sold.
At his trial, Yang pleads guilty to enterprise corruption and is sentenced to 10 years in prison.
His downfall was that we were smarter than he was.
We’ve sent a message to car thieves in this county and the surrounding area that we have intelligence.
We know what you’re doing.
We have the ability to bring you down.
We are more sophisticated than you are.
Kenny Yang is obviously a very intelligent person.
He gave a lot of time and energy and a lot of thought into his operation.
He led a major enterprise for many years that flew below the radar.
It went undetected by law enforcement.
It enabled him and his partners in crime to make millions and millions of dollars.
That’s why he’s a mastermind.
Authorities estimate Kenny Yang made $40 million during his 10-year car theft operation.
None of it was ever recovered.
Hold on to your goodies, please.
He was the mastermind behind the biggest retail fraud in US history.
He was very, very sharp.
He was very, very shrewd.
And used techniques investigators had never seen before.
He had more fires and floods than the Bible.
He had genius tricks in order to defraud investors.
He was such a larger than life Brooklyn Fonz that he fooled Wall Street into thinking that they were fooling him.
And vanished with hundreds of millions of dollars.
Find out how he did it next on Masterminds.
Wall Street, the epicenter of high finance.
The place where private businesses raise millions to expand their operations.
In 1984, investment firms fought to take a chain of electronic stores called Crazy Eddie public.
It was one of the hottest IPOs in Wall Street history.
And the stock went up like a rocket.
The stock went public at $8 a share.
Split adjusted, it went to an equivalent of $80 a share.
Investors scrambled for a piece of the company that had revolutionized the electronics business.
Crazy Eddie was the father of the retail electronics chains.
They didn’t exist prior to Crazy Eddie stores.
Instead of selling home electronics in stuffy department stores, Crazy Eddie used the capital it raised to offer discounted merchandise in a party atmosphere.
Hold on to your beanies.
Crazy Eddie’s coming to Princeton, New Jersey.
And created the most relentless ad campaign New York had ever seen.
It’s Crazy Eddie’s greatest TV and video sale ever.
Between this visionary promotion and the great deals in the stores, Crazy Eddie became a household name.
Get anything and everything in TV and video.
Get it now during the sale.
They were the electronic store.
That was where you went to get your great deal.
Crazy Eddie had better name recognition than Coca-Cola.
The chain crushed the competition.
Its market dominance became unstoppable.
Go get the best price you can find and then come to Crazy Eddie’s and we’ll beat it.
Crazy Eddie expanded at a phenomenal rate.
What began as a single outlet in Brooklyn had by 1987 grown into a vast empire of 39 superstores that employed more than 2,000 people.
At the zenith, the company was the largest electronics retailer in the tri-state area.
The insatiable appetite for Crazy Eddie’s deals drove the stock price ever higher.
Its eventual market capitalization at its peak was over $600 million.
But what nobody knew was the Crazy Eddie empire was a massive fraud.
Crazy Eddie brought this company public to defraud the public.
There’s no doubt in my mind at all.
The company’s founder, Eddie Antar, had done a lot more than just cook the books.
He employed an amazing array of techniques never seen before.
He lined his pockets with over $200 million in cash.
The question is, how did he do it?
Eddie Antar is the mastermind behind the Crazy Eddie empire and the greatest retail fraud in American history.
Antar was born into a tight-knit family of merchants from low-rent Brooklyn.
Eddie learned literally on his father’s knee to be a swindler.
His father and some of their other family members routinely would take home cash from his discount retailing business.
They would basically divvy it up among themselves.
Eddie’s dreams are bigger.
By his early teens, he’s hawking cheap consumer goods obtained through shady connections.
He’s barely 20 when he marries his high school sweetheart, Debbie Rosen.
He opens his first Crazy Eddie store.
Eddie had the ambition, the drive, the vision of making the big time.
Eddie didn’t want to be a neighborhood guy.
He wanted to be world-famous.
Eddie was a great salesman.
But better than that, he was very, very sharp.
He was very, very shrewd.
He was pretty much considered the early master of the bait-and-switch.
He’d get a customer in and try to buy a $99 piece of merchandise.
And he’d sell them for $4.99.
He said, “People want hope and dreams. We’ll sell them hope and dreams.”
Right from the start, he skims money.
There was a culture that said, “The taxman does not deserve to have any of our money.”
Eddie would skim off all of the cash sales of the business so they wouldn’t have to report those as taxable income.
Eddie then hires trusted family members.
He pays them off the books to further avoid taxes and scrutiny.
Crazy Eddie thrives.
But manufacturers start withholding stock because Eddie sells below their list price.
Faced with empty shelves, he fights back.
Eddie said, “I don’t care if I have to get the goods out of Canada or Europe or Africa.”
He survives by sidestepping manufacturers.
He obtains merchandise through family connections to the underground market.
He broke their hold on the price fixing.
That was his claim that he was the champion of the New York electronics consumer.
Eddie also uses these underground connections for cornering the market on the next big thing.
He knew the Walkman was a winner.
He had shiploads of Walkmans on the water by the time other people were looking to buy them.
You couldn’t buy them in quantity.
Eddie now opens two new stores.
He hires close relatives as managers.
This allows skimming to continue.
He reaps hundreds of thousands of dollars.
But to Eddie, this is small change.
He sets about to increase his take by millions.
If you’re a retailer, the biggest single asset you usually have is inventory.
If you can falsely claim inventory that you don’t have, that boosts your assets.
Eddie bought used and damaged merchandise and sold it as new.
That used television is now in a heat sealed plastic bag.
It looks fine.
Eddie also commits extensive insurance fraud.
Eddie had more fires and floods than the Bible.
He convinces insurance adjusters that stacks of empty boxes contain damaged merchandise.
He collects hundreds of thousands of dollars on phony claims.
But with his business expanding, Antar knows he risks becoming the target of surprise visits from financial auditors.
Now, when the auditor wanted to go out and see the inventory, what do we do?
Our account sheets show us that our inventory is at a certain location.
We have a problem.
His solution is to plant a spy inside the company that audits Crazy Eddie.
He sends his cousin Sam to accounting school for an all-expenses-paid education.
That brought great loyalty to Eddie.
When Eddie would say jump, I would say how high.
So Sammy went off to college.
He got an accounting degree.
He went to work for the CPA firm that actually audited Crazy Eddie’s.
He learned how audits were conducted.
He would know where the holes were.
With Sam placed on the inside, Eddie’s confidence grows.
By 1978, Eddie and his family are skimming $1 for every five they bring in.
They are reaping millions.
The skimming was handled as just like a division within the company.
It became institutionalized within the company.
But Eddie is running out of places to hide his cash.
There’s millions in safe deposit boxes.
There’s millions in the bedrooms.
There’s millions in the houses.
There’s millions in the ceilings.
He solves that problem by taking monthly trips to Tel Aviv.
He deposits his money in numerous secret bank accounts.
I’ve seen deposit slips of a million dollars at a time.
I’ve seen bank balances totaling over six million dollars.
As his illegal profits skyrocket, Eddie employs his wife and family as couriers.
They transport over 11 million dollars to his Tel Aviv accounts.
While they do the dirty work, Eddie dreams of greater glory.
He’s looking to be a star.
And he’s not a star yet.
Donald Trump is bigger than him.
So, how do you make it?
You go public.
He saw taking the company public as his brass ring.
You can do much better with phony income in a public company than you can in a private company because other people are buying your stock.
But before Antar can approach Wall Street, his company must first undergo a thorough financial audit.
He calls on his spy, Sam.
Sam arranges for an inexperienced auditor to be assigned the job.
The naive rookie is greeted at the front of the store.
At the back, Antar staff piles up masses of inventory shipped over from other stores.
Antar shows the auditor an example of the merchandise he has come to tally.
Then a helpful employee is sent up to count the stacks.
She would call down 70 large screen TVs.
If you looked at that row as the auditor from the ground, you could count 70 boxes.
You could see how many there were across and how many there were down.
But the entire stack is little more than a facade.
The auditor dutifully records the inflated numbers he is given.
Antar goes further when he distracts the auditor.
He alters his inventory tallies right on the count sheets.
He would take every one and make it a four or a seven.
Then he would give them back their altered papers.
Where they had written down 10, it was now either 40 or 70.
Even better, the files give Eddie crucial information about the next stores the auditor plans to visit.
He also learns the sample counts he intends to take.
So that night they had these poor guys loading up the truck again.
They drove to store B.
They just kept a step ahead of the auditors in doing that.
The auditor paints a portrait of a thriving company.
Eddie Antar is now ready to strike.
Armed with 13 apparently successful stores, he sits down to seal the deal with Wall Street.
Here were the investment professionals, the Wall Street sharks.
They thought they were cleaning up these dumb Brooklyn street guys.
And the supposedly dumb Brooklyn street guys are playing them.
He was such a larger than life Brooklyn Fonz that he fooled the crooks on Wall Street into thinking that they were fooling him.
With the money he rakes in going public, Antar opens 26 new stores in under 3 years.
He quietly cashes out $40 million worth of his own shares.
At the annual Crazy Eddie Shareholder Meeting, he is greeted like a rock star.
Eddie came and did the Rocky, you know, hands over his head.
The crowd started chanting, “Eddie! Eddie! Eddie!”
At that moment, Eddie Antar was as happy as he ever was in his entire life.
But what Eddie doesn’t realize is the magnitude of his success threatens to bring his vast empire crashing down.
Hold on to your beanies.
Crazy Eddie’s coming to Princeton, New Jersey with his greatest electronics party ever.
Crazy Eddie’s coming to 2138 in the Cherry Hill Shopping Center.
Crazy Eddie’s coming to 150 Broadway, corner of Liberty Street, Manhattan.
Be there!
Crazy Eddie Antar, the darling of Wall Street, is using the 39 stores in his three-state empire to line his pockets with millions.
Crazy Eddie’s, thank you.
Insane!
But now, he’s got a problem.
You have to feed the beast more each year.
It’s one thing to tell the auditors on the ground there’s 70 TVs.
But he can’t tell them there’s 7,000.
They weren’t making money.
They were losing it.
This has a cumulative effect.
If you lose money in 1 year, then you essentially have to double down every year.
The fraud has to get bigger and bigger and bigger and bigger.
The stress starts wreaking havoc in his family life.
Antar fights with his wife, Debbie.
He takes up with a mistress, also called Debbie.
It was like trading in your car.
Besides the same name, they looked very similar.
Except that Debbie 2 was the younger, sleeker version.
On New Year’s Eve, 1984, Antar’s wife catches him 𝒸𝒽𝑒𝒶𝓉𝒾𝓃𝑔 with Debbie 2.
She is led right up to his car by Antar’s sister.
The incident causes a rift in the Antar clan.
That eventually led to the downfall of the family.
You have to make the mafia comparison.
They are united in their joint effort to make as much money as they can.
If they turn on one another, the game’s over.
With his family life in tatters, Eddie’s business problems now worsen.
The gap between what they were taking in and what they were called on to report by virtue of the fraud they had committed was becoming just unbridgeable.
The discovery of this kind of fraud was inevitable.
And Sam knew it and feared it.
Eddie acts quickly.
He cashes out another $30 million of stock before the price crashes.
And people said, “That doesn’t sound very encouraging. The founder, the namesake of the company is reducing his position.”
So, people started looking.
They found discrepancies.
When they found discrepancies, they started talking to the SEC.
New faces and new hands came in there and new eyes.
It was no longer this tight inner knit circle that he could control.
But there were people there that he could not control.
It wouldn’t take long for it to unravel.
A business rival soon moves in and buys Crazy Eddie in a hostile takeover bid.
But Antar has the last laugh.
The new owner quickly discovers the inventory fraud.
A staggering $80 million worth of non-existent merchandise.
It was basically a hollowed-out shell by that time.
It had largely been looted by Eddie.
Before police can arrest Eddie on a racketeering charge, he flees to Israel.
He is armed with six passports and access to his stolen millions.
Sam is left holding the bag.
And I said, “Fine, if I’m on my own, I’m on my own.”
And I decided to come clean.
With the knowledge gained from Sam, authorities launch an international manhunt for Antar.
His new life on the run is not working out the way he had hoped.
You have to think of how big his need was to be noticed.
He needed to be admired.
He needed to get attention.
All of which is completely inconsistent with going underground.
There’s no flashy sports cars.
There’s no flashy women.
He couldn’t live that way.
Authorities get their break 2 years later.
Eddie, needing money, comes to Geneva.
He attempts to withdraw funds from one of his secret accounts.
To his surprise, he learns that the account has been frozen.
I think there was about $40 million in that account.
Eddie evidently was not happy that it was frozen.
Eddie’s attempts to recover the money fail.
He leaves empty-handed.
But the Swiss contact American law enforcement.
They trace his steps back to Israel.
He was caught when he left the apartment and he started driving.
They had a female police officer who was wearing a micro mini dress and no underwear.
She bent over the hood of the car exposing herself.
They knew Eddie couldn’t resist.
He stopped.
He got out.
He patted her on the ass.
He said, “That’s a great ass.”
And she said, “You’re under arrest.”
And handcuffed him.
Jailed in Israel, Eddie Antar loses his fight to avoid extradition.
He is sent back to America to face justice.
Eventually, Antar admits to 17 counts of fraud.
He owes $150 million in fines and restitution.
He faces close to $1 billion in civil lawsuits.
He goes to prison for 8 years.
We hurt investors.
We hurt creditors.
We hurt consumers that might have lost their refunds.
We hurt the people that work for us that lost their jobs.
There are countless other people who got hurt directly or indirectly from the frauds that we committed.
You have to think of it as the Sephardic Jewish good fellows.
They were a pack of thieves.
The whole family was a pack of thieves.
And there’s no honor among thieves.
Eddie could have been an extremely successful businessman.
He could have gone on to even bigger things.
Eddie was like a force of nature.
But like a tornado, when it was over, there was nothing but wreckage left.
