Jon Turteltaub Has Been Hired to Direct INSANE – The Story of 'Crazy' Eddie Antar, the Electronics King
Director Jon Turteltaub, who we all know from Cool Runnings, While You Were Sleeping, National Treasure, and The Meg, has been hired to take on the task of directing the movie Insane, about the real life story of “Crazy” Eddie Antar, the Electronics King. Deadline reports the following rundown of the story of Crazy Eddie:
Antar opened his first store in Brooklyn, grew quickly to 43 stores, and then briefly became a Wall Street sensation when he took the company public. Those were fueled by groundbreaking ads delivered with used car salesman subtlety, and frenzied enough to obscure trouble in the back room. The trouble was, Antar had been skimming money and falsifying inventory to inflate stock value. United States Attorney Michael Chertoff, who prosecuted the case, would call Eddie Antar the “Darth Vader of capitalism.”
Losing control of his company in a hostile takeover, Antar went on the lam after the new owners uncovered his financial shenanigans and the SEC charged him with stock fraud. He fled to Israel — where he’d deposited millions of dollars — only to be extradited three years later. His brazen manner became his undoing: told in Switzerland that his account had been frozen, an outraged Antar went to the cops nearby, who soon figured out what was happening and put him in cuffs. Antar ultimately served a prison term that ended in 1999 and was ordered to pay $150 million in fines. Crazy Eddie was sold and the buyers were unable to recover from the fraud they would painfully uncover, and the whole thing went bankrupt.
The most interesting part of the whole thing is that Eddie’s cousin, Sam E. Antar, who was Eddie’s CFO, was complicit in the whole scheme, and went on to become a forensic consultant, uncovering fraudulent scams like the one he was involved in, just like Frank Abignale Jr. from Catch Me If You Can. Antar will serve as executive producer of Insane, and the movie will be told from his perspective.
This is one of those stories that you might not believe if it weren’t true. It will be really interesting to see it on the big screen. Who do you think would be the best guy to play “Crazy” Eddie Antar?
via: Deadline