Eddie Antar: The Criminal Antics of Crazy Eddie | 211
Scamfluencers
Audible
4.1 • 7.7K Ratings
🗓️ 27 April 2026
⏱️ 57 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Eddie Antar was the king of the deal, the man whose ads screamed at you from your TV set promising prices so low they were practically insane. He turned Crazy Eddie into a retail phenomenon, making himself and his family incredibly wealthy by hawking stereos, TVs and electronics at seemingly unbeatable prices. The brand's wildly memorable commercials became some of the most iconic ads in TV history. But behind the blaring deals and larger-than-life persona was a tangled web of fraud – including tax evasion, insurance scams, and bitter family betrayals. Even though his empire eventually came crashing down, somehow Eddie never stopped being a New York City icon.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Audible subscribers can listen to all our episodes of scam influencers ad-free right now. |
| 0:05.3 | Join Audible today by downloading the Audible app. |
| 0:13.7 | Sarah, are there any ads from your childhood that are like still indelible in the hippocampus for you even now at your extremely old age? |
| 0:24.3 | Yes, of course. I mean, anyone who grew up in Canada in the 90s and early 2000s will remember the PSAs from concerned children's advertisers. |
| 0:35.9 | They warned against everything from playing around train tracks to eating random berries that you find, |
| 0:44.2 | to acne, to drug addiction. |
| 0:47.4 | Those raised me, okay? |
| 0:49.4 | Yeah, uh, formative memories, just watching ads as children. |
| 0:54.2 | Yes. Who would have ads as children. Yes. |
| 0:54.7 | Who would have thought? |
| 0:55.5 | Yes. |
| 0:56.4 | Yes. |
| 0:57.3 | Well, Sarah, today's story might remind you of some of those ads that you may have caught on television in the early 90s, a relic of the 80s, and of a kind of retail culture and scam culture that we will just never have again. |
| 1:13.9 | It's April of 1992, and inside a police station in Bern, Switzerland, |
| 1:19.4 | officers are trying to reason with a very agitated man. |
| 1:23.0 | He's stocky, sweaty, and shaky, with a dark beard and a receding hairline. |
| 1:28.1 | He looks like someone who has been under a lot of stress for a very long time. |
| 1:32.3 | The man tells the police his name is David Cohen. |
| 1:35.4 | He says he's a gemstone dealer from Brazil and he's been locked out of his Swiss bank account, |
| 1:40.0 | which has $32 million in it. |
| 1:43.0 | David tells the cops that he doesn't know why he can't access his money, |
| 1:46.1 | but he needs this problem fixed and fast. |
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