members of the Antar family that were now aligned
against Eddie took over the company in November of 1987.
About nine days after they took, the first thing they did the first day, they took over
the company at three o'clock, I got my pink slip at six
o'clock. I was out... on my backside. After sixteen years, my whole life, was was, I was
devastated. My whole entire life was working for that
one company from the age of, from the age of fourteen to the age of thirty, that was
my entire life, I was thirty years old at the time.
They took an inventory nine days later, they came up with the financials. They found about
a forty to fifty million dollar gap between what the
balance sheet was, and where it should be. And then the investigation really took steam.
Knowing his fraud had been discovered, Eddie Antar fled the country. He eluded the authorities
for nearly two years under a variety of assumed
identities, living off the funds he had stashed in international accounts. Eddie moved from
country to country with fake passports, always one
step ahead of the authorities. But in Switzerland, twenty eight months after his company crashed,
he made the mistake which ended the chase. When bank officials in Bern refused to let
him at the thirty-two million he had in an account there, Antar angrily sought help from
the local
police. What Antar didn't know was that the U.S. Justice department had frozen his account.
Upon learning from bank officials that the irate man
in the police station demanding access to his funds was actually a fugitive, the Police
promptly arrested Eddie Antar. He was then returned to
the U.S and sentenced to eighty-two months in prison.
I never spent a day in jail, ok. And you know I've been lucky not to have spent a day in
jail. And you know something, I should have spent a day
in jail. Not even a day, I should have spent years in jail for what I did. Chief Financial
Officers that have done much less than me have spent
much longer time in jail, have spent tens of years in jail. I was lucky.