NPR interviewed Sam Antar, Ed Antar nephew who was involved in the business as CFO and he said that half of the small merchants were skimming sales tax. Sam Antar’s exact words (at 4:40 in the interview):
From 1969 to 1980 our primary fraud was skimming and stealing sales tax. I mean sales tax is a license to steal. You collect the money for the New York state sales tax department. You not only skim off the profits you also skim off that 8% sales tax, which is more than the operating income of most companies. In fact, there is a joke around the New York State Sales Tax Department if you eliminated the sales taxes, half the mom and pops in New York would be out of business
And as usual, the guy would’ve been absolutely rolling in the dough even without the crimes. He had a successful business but couldn’t handle just having more money than the vast majority of humans will ever have - it had to be even more than that. Which turned into needing even more than that, of course.
And then he lost it all AND got to spend years in jail. I guess taking big risks was just his thing. I don’t know why so many people like him can’t be satisfied with what by any measure is enough. In fact he probably would have ended up with more money playing it straight as he might still be in business!
We are in agreement that tax fraud isn’t really victimless, as you say the victim is all the tax payers that need to pay more so the government can reach the same funding levels, and/or all the people that would benefit from whatever government programs are cut because expected funding doesn’t pan out (do to crime).
However with (in 2019) 148 million returns with $1.6 trillion paid in taxes any individual fraud represents a tiny amount of money per tax payer.
So if the next crazy Eddie steals say $100million I don’t see how that ends up being more than $1 for most tax payers.
So most people are actually far more impacted by say someone stealing their kid’s pedal bike, or having someone break a window and steal the car radio (or whatever they find on the back seat).
So I can see how most people would view it as “victimless”, when in fact they are the victim (and to be fair, I’ve had cars broken into twice in my life, and had stronger feelings about those thefts then most tax fraud).
Well you know, once you can afford a new car you dream of affording one more frequently. Once you can get one every year you want a better new car every year. Then you really want to live in a home you own, not one the bank owns. Then you want a vacation home. Then really do you only vacation in only one place? You need like 15 vacation homes, which is nice you can keep some of your new cars in various houses.
I mean, can’t you think of the poor poor rich people that don’t have enough homes to fit all the cars they own?
He stole from his employees, his investors, state and federal authorities— but if I got a car radio 2% cheaper than the competitor, it’s all good! (And by the way, the only reason he could sell so cheaply was because of his illegal accounting.)
Using your metric, no criminal ever really hurt anyone, because you can always find non-victims for any particular criminal.
I really dont see how the “fond memories” of (mainly) his advertisements means the guy who fled to Israel with briefcases of cash is not a con man.
Bro, you really need to look up the word “scam” and look up the accounting scams and insider trading scams that Eddie Antar was convicted of. You seem to have no idea why he went to jail for 8 years. Also, Capone?
I bought many records and Atari cartridges there in my youth. Whoever ordered the vinyl for the store on 6th Ave & 8th St in Manhattan really had good taste (or similar to my own budding post-punk explorations). I still have The Fall and Gang of Four albums with a CE sticker on them.
There’s a reason why we have so many nonsynonymous, nuanced words in English for forms of theft. Kind of like Arctic people have so many words for “snow”. However, if you want to lump them all together and use the word “Scam” for all of them then I’m not going to get on your case.
If I was your Bro you’d be a federal antitrust prosecutor, and we wouldn’t have such a different view of the meaning of these words.
And by the way, the only reason he could sell so cheaply was because of his illegal accounting.
No, it doesn’t work that way. He wasn’t stealing from investors and the IRS so he could sell cheaper to his customers; he was no Robin Hood. Electronics shops like my father’s had to adjust their business models a bit, but could be competitive without theft. We didn’t have fancy cars like he did.
Oh yes, I remember that commercial well. Used to have a Highlands within walking distance of my home, too. (The building’s still there, even though that company’s long gone.)
I’m not quibbling about anything. My first post in the thread was simply there in case anyone thought that Crazy Eddie ran a racket where customers were bilked, which would be a normal implication from the headline because of the word ‘scam’. (We knew merchants in the 70s who did this; my father traveled in ‘interesting’ circles.) I pointed out (as others have since) that whatever felonious activities Antar and his business were involved in, it wasn’t that.
Why leap to this guy’s defence at all though? He was clearly a sleaze, and I don’t buy that it’s down to some incredibly deep seated pedantic passion that nobody should ever use a crime-related word incorrectly.
Carvel had a roughly thirty minute long puppet based (a’la muppets) origin story for cookie puss and some of their other cake designs that they’d show before either factory tours or parties at their main location that I remember pretty decently for such an old memory because I’d see it twice a year for about five years.
Cookie Puss is an alien, Cookie Chick is a rockstar and eventually his girlfriend, Hug Me the bear is a yokel farmhand, and Fudgie the whale is a whale, that swims in a sea of fudge. Yeah they kinda did Fudgie wrong in it but he helped them with needed transport at the end.
And they all had to band together to defeat this Gargamel like bad guy who wanted to take all the fun out of the world.
And now that I’m a grown adult I can’t find it anywhere.
I’ve bugged Carvel PR and they either say they don’t know or outright ignore me.
I’ve even asked Joe and Nick at the found footage fest if they’ve ever come across it and they haven’t.
So my fear is that it’s lost forever.
Which is a bummer because it was quite a trip.
Everyone thinks the Commercials are so bad it’s good, but they have no idea.
Edit: I replied to the wrong Carvel comment and don’t know how to fix it but I also don’t know if it matters that much either.
So you quoted a single sentence from the first paragraph of my post, and reply:
However the 3rd paragraph of my very same post says:
So no, I disagree with your assertion that I think it is all good, or your later assertion that:
That isn’t my metric.
My metric is someone can be guilty of some crimes and not others.
Someone I have told not to every come into my property who does come into my property and kicks all my plants and yells and screams but does not key my car has not keyed my car. They also haven’t assaulted me, they haven’t killed any of my pets.
The statement “they didn’t kill your dog” is true. They still committed one or more crimes and still have accrued some civil damage.
So crazy Eddie is guilty of tax fraud and defrauding investors, and likely all the other things you said. That doesn’t mean they defrauded customers. Which isn’t a defense of any charge (except the one of ripping off customers). It doesn’t mean he should still be in business.
I’m not really sure how I could have been clearer about that.
I find crazy Eddie’s non-customer fraud interesting because I am convinced that is part of how he could do that for so long. I don’t find it any more of a defense then a car thief having been caught saying “well I didn’t set the car on fire did I?”.
I also find crazy Eddie interesting because it is a thing in encountered in life, not just read about (although I was young enough that I didn’t buy anything, that would have been my parents)
Scam can mean many different things. And you have one very, very narrow definition which you are applying inappropriately like it is your religion.
No, the average Crazy Eddie consumer was not getting bilked-- unless he was a NJ taxpayer, or a stockholder in CRZY stock, or a principal in the Crazy Eddie company, or a citizen of the United States. Yes, I admit, there were so many people who were not a victim of Crazy Eddie’s scam. Also: Crazy Eddie did not commit rape or murder! (He gets credit for that, too, right? Any illegal thing he didn’t do, that’s a mitigating circumstance?)
Unless, as above, that customer happened to be, a NJ taxpayer, or a stockholder in CRZY stock, or a principal in the Crazy Eddie company, or a citizen of the United States.
Also, by your ethics, Bernie Madoff didn’t scam the people at the top of his pyramid scheme, right? The people who actually made a profit on Madoff’s pyramid scheme were not scammed. So, there’s that to consider.
The argument is YES, OK he scammed some people. But he didn’t scam these other people. Please. Drop it. Your ethics are bankrupt.
They were not scamed in their capacity as a customer. This may be a narrow distinction, but I believe it to be a real one.
Sure? I mean, yeah, some people “invested” with Madoff and didn’t get scammed, but he still scammed a ton of people for significant sums of money, and ruined people’s lives. He deserved jail time for the damage he did. He didn’t deserve additional jail time for the damage he did not do. I believe this tends to be taken into account when courts sum up a dollar amount of damage they actually did, and hearing statements from people who were hurt by the crimes.
Yes, my argument is exactly he scammed some people and not others. You seem to be taking that argument to a place I am not. All of the people mentioned did significant damage to others, committed significant crimes, and the fact that the didn’t do some other stuff doesn’t mean their sentences should be in any way reduced.
Just that much like a thief that breaks my car window, rips the stereo out of the dash and damages the dashboard doing it, and vanishes into the night should not be charged with also damaging the engine of my car, or pouring sugar in the gas tank, or steeling stereos of nearby cars when they in fact did none of those other things…
Crazy Eddie is guilty of tax fraud, and a number of other crimes, and I believe punishing him for all those crimes he is guilty of is fair and just.
I don’t think it would be fair or just to also convict him of selling stereos and delivering boxes of rocks.
Crazy Eddie is a criminal. He is guilty of some criminal activity. He is not guilty of all criminal activity.
I don’t see how only holding people accountable for their crimes while not holding them accountable for things they did not do constitutes a bankrupt code of ethics.
I wasn’t talking just about the Inuit. Even the Scottish have hundreds of words for snow. (And, FWIW, the article you link doesn’t say what you suggest it does.)
It does. The myth came about because of one guy who, in a haze of white privilege, wrote about all these words they have for snow. However it was only because he was looking at the conglomeration of many different dialects and tribal languages who have different words for the same things, just like any set of regional languages. His “50 words for snow” were like saying “snow” and “neige” are different words. His assumptions and trivializations of all these disparate cultures were quickly latched on to by the general public who love a “just so” story like that about “exotic” cultures, and “50 words for snow” became a meme. All of the above is racist.
By the way, English has lots of words for snow too. Snow, slush, sleet, ice, hail, dry pack, wet pack, etc.
Well then I admire your devotion to the precise definitions of crime words.
Behind many myths is a grain of truth. However, the latest studies show that Boas was, actually, correct.
In any event, I never mentioned any one group of people, that was in your head. I don’t know much about them, haven’t lived in Canada or Alaska (I have lived in Scotland and Norway).
Thank you.
My biggest issue with this story (and other stories I’ve read about the store) is the focus on the soap-opera aspects of the thing, the inter-family relationships, then disguising it as an important crime story because of the tax and securities fraud, which was relatively penny-ante for the Reagan era. I’m also not crazy about the fact that all these stories make a big deal about the fact that the family is Jewish, feeding some really terrible antisemitic tropes. Antar is American. You never see stories like this which say, “oh by the way, the perp was Presbyterian.”
