Beautifully engraved RARE SPECIMEN stock certificate from Crazy Eddie, Inc. This historic document was printed by the United States Banknote Corporation and has an ornate side border with a vignette of the company logo. This item has the printed signatures of the Company's President ( Eddie Antar ).
Certificate Vignette
Crazy Eddie was an electronics chain which was primarily located in the Northeastern United States. It was started in 1970's in Brooklyn, New York by businessman Eddie Antar. In television and radio commercials, actor Jerry Carroll portrayed the hyperactive Crazy Eddie proclaiming "Crazy Eddie will beat any price you find" and "Crazy Eddie His Prices Are Insaaane!". In 1989 the Crazy Eddie chain suffered a major scandal when Eddie Antar and his family were accused and eventually convicted of skimming money and cooking the books and inflating inventory. Antar fled to Israel where he lived until 1994 when he was extradited back to the United States.
Eddie Antar, the founder of the Crazy Eddie electronics retail chain known for its hugely popular TV commercials in the 1970s and 1980s, and later brought down by a massive fraud scheme, died in 2016 at the age of 68.
The Bloomfield-Cooper Jewish Chapels in New Jersey confirmed Antar's death to CNNMoney on Sunday. A cause of death was not disclosed.
Antar co-founded Crazy Eddie in the early 1970s with his father and another family member as a single store on Kings Highway in Brooklyn, New York. The family business grew into a chain with dozens of locations selling electronics goods at cut-rate prices.
For nearly two decades, the Crazy Eddie chain blanketed the New York area with TV and radio commercials.
"Crazy Eddie's prices are insane!" was the instantly recognizable tagline.
But by the end of the 1980s, the stores were bankrupt and Antar ended up serving more than six years in prison after it was discovered that Crazy Eddie routinely understated its income to avoid taxes and then committed securities fraud after going public.
Eddie Antar's cousin, Sam E. Antar, was also convicted in the fraud and served six months of house arrest. He served as Crazy Eddie's chief financial officer. Today Sam Antar works as a forensic accountantfor law firms, corporations, hedge funds and others.
He also described the Crazy Eddie fraud in detail on his WhiteCollarFraud.com , calling it an "18-year crime spree conducted in the light of day." He attributed the downfall of the company to "internal rivalries, jealousies, and infighting among family members."
Herb Greenberg, the managing partner with Pacific Square Research, said in a tweet Sunday that Eddie Antar's death marked "the end of an era."
About Specimens Specimen Certificates are actual certificates that have never been issued. They were usually kept by the printers in their permanent archives as their only example of a particular certificate. Sometimes you will see a hand stamp on the certificate that says "Do not remove from file". Specimens were also used to show prospective clients different types of certificate designs that were available. Specimen certificates are usually much scarcer than issued certificates. In fact, many times they are the only way to get a certificate for a particular company because the issued certificates were redeemed and destroyed. In a few instances, Specimen certificates were made for a company but were never used because a different design was chosen by the company. These certificates are normally stamped "Specimen" or they have small holes spelling the word specimen. Most of the time they don't have a serial number, or they have a serial number of 00000. This is an exciting sector of the hobby that has grown in popularity over the past several years.
