On September 13, 1984, as stocks wavered through a bear market, a regional electronics chain held a hyped initial public offering.
If it seems odd that a purveyor of VCRs and stereos could make investors swoon, remember that this was the 1980s, and people were getting pumped about cellular phones that were roughly the size of microwaves. And know that this electronics company was Crazy Eddie, a brand that, in so many ways, was breaking the usual rules.
The previous fiscal year, Crazy Eddie’s annual revenues were ~$134m, or ~$372m today. More impressively, the 13-store New York City-area chain led the electronics industry in sales per square foot and profit margins.
Crazy Eddie was also a cultural sensation, rising to fame with absurd commercials that Dan Akroyd parodied on Saturday Night Live. In the 1984 movie Splash, Darryl Hannah’s character watched a Crazy Eddie ad when she first discovered TV.
That first day, investors purchased nearly 2m shares of Crazy Eddie for $8 apiece, under the ticker CRZY. By the end of the year, the stock would climb 25%, far outpacing a flat market and boosting Crazy Eddie’s plans for greater expansion.
There was just one major problem.
Crazy Eddie had been lying about its numbers since its inception — and the higher the stock soared the further founder Eddie Antar went to maintain the illusion.
“It was Goodfellas,” one attorney later told the Philadelphia Inquirer, “except they operated with briefcases instead of guns.”
The insaaaaane rise of Crazy Eddie
Eddie Antar was a 22-year-old high school dropout when he opened his first store in 1969, near the Sheepshead Bay neighborhood of Brooklyn.
He was the classic outer-borough tough guy: almost bald with a scraggly goatee, allergic to wearing anything but sweats, crude yet charming at the same time.
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Eddie Antar (AP, via New York Times; 1993)
Antar believed people would flock to stores that sold items like speakers, VCRs, and televisions under the same roof — and he was right.
Industry-wide, sales of electronics jumped from $8.5B in the late 1960s to $35B by the mid-1980s.
By 1979, Antar had 8 stores and shared the success with his family, which was part of a tightknit Syrian Jewish community in Brooklyn. His father, Sam M. Antar, uncle Eddy Antar, and brothers Mitchell and Allen Antar all held key positions.
Meanwhile, Eddie Antar made sure everyone in New York City knew his business by flooding TV and radio with catchy ads shaped by advertising director Larry Weiss.
Weiss was well-connected in the radio and music industries and hired radio DJ Jerry Carroll to be Crazy Eddie’s spokesperson. (Other candidates for the job included the Godfather of Soul, James Brown.)
Taking inspiration from the humor of Mad magazine, Weiss developed commercials that played off music trends and the cultural zeitgeist. Most commercials featured Carroll