Crazy Eddie was a regional electronics chain so famous that Queen held a press conference there and Dan Aykroyd parodied its commercials on Saturday Night Live. The story begins in 1969 on Kings Highway in Brooklyn, where Eddie Antar, his father Sam M. Antar, and his cousin Ronnie Gindi opened a shop called Sight and Sound that was nearly bankrupt within 18 months. Antar bought out his cousin, took control from his father, and in 1971 renamed the store after his own exaggerated sales persona. Radio disc jockey Jerry Carroll then screamed that the prices were insane across more than 7,500 television and radio spots.

The noise worked as a distraction. Management skimmed cash from the registers, paid employees off the books, and moved millions to accounts in Israel. Then, to prepare for a September 1984 IPO, the family stole less each year so reported profits appeared to soar. The stock opened at $8 and passed $75 by early 1986. This episode follows the fraud from fake debit memos and phantom inventory to a hostile takeover, bankruptcy, and Antar’s flight abroad under an assumed name.

• Reducing the skim made flat sales look like rocketing profit growth, a kind of reverse embezzlement aimed at Wall Street’s appetite for acceleration.
• Cousin Sam E. Antar worked at Penn and Horowitz, the outside firm auditing Crazy Eddie, before becoming chief financial officer in 1986.
• Staff shipped the same boxes of merchandise from store to store ahead of auditors so the same TVs were counted twice.
• After Elias Zinn and Victor Palmieri took over the company, a physical count revealed an $80 million inventory shortfall, and the chain was liquidated by October 1989.
• Antar fled in February 1990, was arrested by Israeli police in 1992, pleaded guilty in 1996, and received an eight-year sentence.