TALES OF LOHR: Gary Weiss's "Retail Gangster
Also: FACTORY ROLL CALL Looks at International Velvet!
Growing up outside America’s “News” (York, Jersey, and England), I never had the chance as a child to shop at Crazy Eddie, the discount retail electronics chain that once boasted over forty stores throughout the eastern seaboard. But our family’s basic cable package included New York’s WOR-TV, and it was through this outlet that I was introduced to Crazy Eddie’s rambunctious, high-volume commercials, with hyper-amped pitchman Jerry Carroll blasting to the rafters about how “we are not undersold, we will not be undersold, we cannot be undersold, AND WE MEAN IT!” before tying things up with Eddie’s catchphrase: “His prices are INSAAAAAANE!”
These ubiquitous ads, over 7,500 of them in total, helped permanently implant Crazy Eddie in the consciousness of ‘70s and ‘80s New York retail consumers. They also served as a vibrant distraction for the shady dealings going on behind the scenes, as company head Eddie Antar and his accomplices, both willing and unsuspecting, built their brand through massive fraud of every type the sleaziest con artist could imagine. I was wholly unaware of the checkered history and spectacular, ruinous collapse of Crazy Eddie, until, from a display table at a Barnes & Noble at 82nd and Broadway, I was given the hard sell by the eye-catching cover of Gary Weiss’s Retail Gangster: The Insane, Real-Life Story of Crazy Eddie (Hachette Books, $29.00).
Unlike many white-collar scams that start out with above-board intentions, Crazy Eddie was bolstered by criminal activities almost from day one. The business sprouted from roots deep in New York’s Syrian Jewish diaspora, a tight-knit, rather hidebound collective heavily engaged in the retail and direct-sales markets. Eddie Antar’s own background was marked by secrets and unspoken truths; his father, Sam E., never revealed the secret family, including his firstborn son, he’d had before marrying Eddie’s mother. Eddie himself never progressed very far in school, drawn instead to the fast-paced world of 42nd Street “clip joints,” where he learned the art of fleecing suckers, cooking books, and never getting for something what you can get by larceny.
Setting himself up in the discount electronics trade, Eddie, as was the custom in the “S-Y” community, surrounded himself with relatives who soon enough found themselves wholly beholden to him for their livelihoods. As Crazy Eddie started to take off and the franchise grew by leaps and bounds, the Antars were driven to resort to every possible means of swindle and financial bait-and-switch, from moving outside merchandise to flood-damaged stores for the purpose of elevating insurance claims, to stockpiling undated checks from vendors for later endorsement as sudden influxes of much needed revenue. This grifting grease kept the wheels humming beautifully for years, until Eddie’s cousin Sammy, the eventual CFO of Crazy Eddie, helped mastermind the multi-layered scam behind the company’s launch as a publicly traded concern. The standard-practice machinations of securities policing, hastened by a series of outside takeover bids, almost inevitably led to the exposure of Crazy Eddie’s mammoth fraudulence; Eddie’s flight from prosecution and eventual Israeli arrest; and the back-to-the-wall babyface turn of Sammy Antar, who became a government witness and helped incarcerate his bowed but unrepentant cousin, a man later described by prosecutor Michael Chertoff, a future U.S. homeland security secretary, as a “Darth Vader of capitalism.”
Weiss’s extensive background as an investigator and journalist covering corporate malfeasance serves this story well. While some of the intricacies of the criminal maneuvers eluded my understanding (such as the workings of the stacked-up aliases used by Eddie to obtain Israeli citizenship following his flight from justice), I can chalk that up to my own admittedly sketchy comprehension of the intricacies of finance and economics. Weiss nevertheless nails the details of the most vitally important aspects of the Crazy Eddie scheme. He proves particularly adept at breaking down Sammy’s machinations for manipulating the company’s stock prices, artificially boosting investor confidence while setting up Crazy Eddie for a predictable-to-anyone-paying-attention fall.
Weiss also brings passion and clarity to the squabbles and scars that marked the intertwined business and personal relations of the Antar family. A fractious brood even in prosperous times, the clan was largely defined by patriarch Sam E.’s resentment of his son’s usurpation of the Antar crown; Sammy’s encroaching guilt over the virulent reach of the fraud his financial concepts helped spearhead; and the sheer explosive volatility of Eddie himself. An unconventional corporate mogul, Eddie’s eccentricities, such as his ratty lucky sweater and slobbery office dog Sugar, are eventually overshadowed in the reader’s mind by the man’s more overtly unpleasant characteristics: his philandering and alcoholic excesses, his psychological and eventual physical torture of first wife Debbie (known around the company as “Debbie I,” since the woman he ultimately unloads her for is also named Debbie), and the casual, almost instinctual way he seems to turn every professional relationship into a gateway for more theft. Weiss quotes from many sources throughout Retail Gangster attesting to Eddie’s unique charisma and undeniably effective zest for capitalism, but I for one had to take these sources at their word, as the book offers little if any proof of this likability.
Weiss also, somewhat frustratingly but perhaps wisely, sidesteps the natural impulse to nail down the “why” behind Eddie’s larcenous ways. There is the suggestion that this sort of not-entirely-above-board approach to business dealings is a baked-in feature of the Syrian immigrant culture from which the Antars emerged, but Weiss doesn’t make too much of this premise, perhaps in an effort to avoid the book falling prey to accusations of painting Jewish businesspeople as inherently duplicitous. Indeed, Weiss makes it clear that the reason so many of the Antars wound up so deep in the fraudulent muck was not out of genetic predisposition, but rather out of simple family loyalty: This was the way Eddie wanted it, so this was the way it was going to be.
Retail Gangster is a rich look at one of the more colorful chapters in the annals of white-collar crime, and a thought-provoking reminder of the darkness that can sometimes lurk within the warm glow of nostalgia. Thousands of people throughout the northeastern U.S. carry fond memories of Crazy Eddie’s seductive store signage, too-good-to-be-true bargain prices, and hilariously histrionic advertising. But buried within all that clamor and kitsch is mass-scale thievery, broken family ties, shattered fortunes, and ruined lives. It’s a classic American rags-to-riches-and-back-to-rags story, delivered by Gary Weiss with the deftness of a snake-oil sales pitch and the energy of a Jerry Carroll Christmas-sale promo.
FACTORY ROLL CALL
SUSAN BOTTOMLY, aka INTERNATIONAL VELVET (1950 - )
A native of Boston, Susan Bottomly is the daughter of John Bottomly, one of the prosecutors who worked the trial of the Boston Strangler. Signed to the Ford Modeling Agency at the age of 16, within a year, she had graced the cover of Mademoiselle. Reports differ as to how Bottomly first encountered Andy Warhol. Some say she was introduced to the artist by his principal assistant, Gerard Malanga (with whom she was briefly romantically involved); others claim she met Warhol herself at a Boston party they both attended. However they initially connected, Bottomly became part of the Factory scene as soon as she moved to New York in 1966 to pursue acting ambitions.
Warhol christened the young model “International Velvet,” and would feature her in a number of his mid-’60s films. Bottomly appears in The Chelsea Girls, The Bob Dylan Story, Paraphernalia, the unreleased Since and Superboy, several segments of ****, and in a strikingly composed Screen Test. She is also among the coterie of Warhol superstars to add color to a party sequence in John Schlesinger’s Midnight Cowboy (1969). Warhol was enamored of Bottomly’s beauty, and was given to watching in rapt fascination as she went through her makeup-and-hair routine, which he likened to “watching a beautiful statue painting itself.”
Bottomly eventually broke up with Malanga and began seeing model and illustrator David Croland, with whom she likewise parted company in 1968. Following her time at the Factory, Bottomly appeared in a small role in the Buck Henry-scripted adaptation of the Terry Southern-Mason Hoffenberg novel Candy. Throughout the 1970s, Bottomly was a regular on the European modeling scene, appearing in the pages of the Italian and French editions of Vogue. Later, in 1994, she wrote and starred in Michel Haddi’s avant-garde documentary short International Velvet Superstar, inspired by her stint at the Factory.
Now retired, Susan Bottomly lives quietly in Hawaii. When her Screen Test was featured in the 2009 compilation film 13 Most Beautiful: Songs for Andy Warhol’s Screen Tests, Dean & Britta scored the piece with the melancholy, unambiguously titled “International Velvet Theme.”
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