Crazy Eddie
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Crazy Eddie was an electronics chain which was primarily located in the Northeastern United States. It was started in the 1970s in Brooklyn, New York, by businessman Eddie Antar.
The chain became famous for its television and radio commercials in which actor Jerry Carroll delivered his lines rapid-fire, proclaiming in a loud voice that "Crazy Eddie will beat any price you find", and always ending his sales pitch with "Crazy Eddie - His Prices Are In-saaane!". The hyperactive TV spokesman became so identified with the company that many viewers assumed that he was the owner of the company, notwithstanding that Crazy Eddie was always referred to in the third person.
In 1989 the Crazy Eddie chain suffered a major scandal when Eddie Antar and his family were accused and eventually convicted of "cooking the books" in order to skim money and inflate inventory. Antar was found to have sold used electronics as new, committed insurance fraud, faked inventory, and skimming most of the cash payments to avoid taxes. Antar took the company public and the stock was soon worth hundreds of millions. Antar began to sell his stock and the stock price begins to collapse. The firm is bought in a hostile takeover by another firm, but the buyers were quick to find that some $80 million in inventory did not exist. Antar fled to Israel using the name David Cohen where he lived until 1994 when he was extradited back to the United States. He is sentenced to eight years in jail, ordered to pay over $150 million in fines and also owed more than a billion dollars from civil suits.
In 1999, several of Eddie Antar's nephews revived the Crazy Eddie electronics chain primarily as an online Internet venue. In 2004 Crazy Eddie went out of business again.
Trivia
- In the science-fiction novel The Mote in God's Eye and its sequel The Gripping Hand, the alien Motie species is locked in a permanent cycle of population explosion followed by total war followed by population crash. Any Motie who comes to believe that these 'Cycles' can be broken is called Crazy Eddie and regarded as insane.
- Its website CrazyEddie.com is offline and the whois record indicates that domain is no longer registered to the former Rahway, New Jersey based electronics chain but now to another company in Houston, Texas, presumably they are cybersquatting on the name since Crazy Eddie's demise.
- The popular television show Futurama features a robotic spoof of Crazy Eddie entitled Malfunctioning Eddie.