Sam Antar, the former crooked chief financial officer of CrazyEddie, tells me he’s trying to stop his cousin Eddie Antar from selling movie rights to further cash in on his life of crime.
Crazy Eddie ran a namesake electronics retailer in the New York area that became one of the more infamous stock fraud cases of the late 1980s.
“They shouldn’t make a movie out of that,” Antar said.
He gave a heads up to Howard Sirota, an attorney who won a $706 millionclass-action lawsuit judgment in 1996. Unfortunately, CrazyEddie has been unable to pay up, so Sirota Antar wants to go after whatever profits he makes from a film.
Appearently, Crazy Eddie has been talking to Danny DeVito. Click here to read more details in The New York Post.
“I will tell you an ironic-but-true story,” said Antar. “While I originally was negotiating my plea bargain around 1990, a certain lawyer representing the victims threatened me that if I did not cooperate, he would make sure that Danny DeVito, himself, would play me in a future Crazy Eddie movie.”
Given all the enormous frauds uncovered in the market since the 1980s, I can’t imagine Crazy Eddie even ranks any more. Click here if you missed my column on Sam Antar.
Posted by Al Lewison May 20, 2009 Washington /
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It just blows me away that Security and Exchange Commission Chairman Mary Schapiro complains about all the complaints.
“Last year, we had 750,000 tips, and we’ll never be able to follow up on all of them,” she told about 200 business journalists at the Society of American Business Editors and Writers annual meeting in Denver last month.
All the while, she must have known that several SEC staffers were under investigation for suspicious stock trading activity. Two of her own enforcment lawyers were going to lunch every week — and taking frequent breaks in the day — just to banter about their personal stock portfolios.
Yet nobody at the SEC has the time to sift through all those tips? Click here to read more. (PHOTO: Mary Schapiro)
How do you get the auto industry to do what you want? Buy it.
Reuters reported today that the government is poised to acquire General Motors Corp. if it files bankruptcy. Click here to see story.
Meantime, the Obama administration is imposing stricter gas mileage and emissions standards. We’ll see where demanding better cars from bankruptcy car makers goes. Nobody is buying cars now. How does making them more expensive improve sales?
Still, we’ve got to do something about our dependence on foreign oil and all the soot we’re dumping into the air. I talked about the new standards on Tuesday with Fox Business anchor David Asman.
Posted by Al Lewison May 19, 2009 Autopia /
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Hundreds of Chrysler dealers hope to challenge the automaker’s plans to shut them down.
“I think the court will be flooded with objections,” Stephen D. Lerner, a partner at Squire, Sanders & Dempsey LLP, told The Wall Street Journal.
He’s been hired to represent a group called the “Committee of Chrysler Affected Dealers,” and here you can safely substitute the word “affected” for “screwed.” The screwed dealers group has members in 45 states, and got it’s start with help from the National Automobile Dealers Association.
Today on Denver’s 9News I talked about car dealers getting the axe, Obama’s mixed message on deficit spending and the Securities and Exchange Commission investigating two of its own lawyers for insider trading. Continue reading…
The global economy is a complex web of cause and effect.
Layoffs on Wall Street mean fewer people are taking taxi cabs in New York City. Which means less money for taxi drivers.
In the case of cabbie Sadequal Boddruzzaman this could in turn mean less money for software engineers in Bangladesh.
Boddruzzaman, who came to the U.S. from Bangladesh 15 years ago, isn’t just driving a cab for fun. He’s trying to fill some gaps while staking his claim with BuyerXpo.com, an e-commerce site he’s developing.
Click here to read about my conversation with Boddruzzaman, one of the more than 47,000 people who drive a cab in New York City.
I’d hoped that during a recession that people would be nicer to each other, and that customer service representatives, aiming to hold on to their jobs, would try harder to fix our problems.
Apparently this is not always happening. In a survey by Jacada, an Atlanta-based company that helps companies improve customer retention efforts via call centers, 43% said they thought customer service has gotten worse in the recession.
Posted by Al Lewison May 13, 2009 Embattled Execs /
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You’d think after being busted by then-New York Attorney General Eliot Spitzer, Denver-based Janus Capital Group’s top executives would be more careful in their emails.
Emails can go everywhere. And any email one writes may just end up in court, and then in the news.
Spitzer, who forced Janus into a $225 million settlement for improper market-timing trades in 2004, uncovered this damning email that a Janus executive wrote in 2002:
“I have no interest in building a business around market timers, but at the same time I do not want to turn away $10-$20m!”
Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke and other economy wonks can wave their pom-poms all they want, but their incessant cheerleading has not kept home forclosures from rising.
The number of U.S. households faced with foreclosure jumped 32 percent in April, and that’s compared to the horrible April we suffered last year, according to data from RealtyTrac Inc. Click here for more details on that. Oh, and click here for the latest on falling home prices.
Sam Antar, the former crooked chief financial officer of CrazyEddie, tells me he’s trying to stop his cousin Eddie Antar from selling movie rights to further cash in on his life of crime.
You’d think after being busted by then-New York Attorney General Eliot Spitzer, Denver-based Janus Capital Group’s top executives would be more careful in their emails.
