JERUSALEM -- Israeli police Wednesday arrested Eddie Antar, the fugitive U.S. entrepreneur who founded the cut-rate 'Crazy Eddie' chain of hi-fi stores and secretly fled to Israel with millions of dollars when the company went bankrupt.
Antar was arrested in Petah Tikvah near Tel Aviv, where he was living under the name of David Cohen, police spokesman Tamar Paul-Cohen said.
Paul-Cohen said Antar would appear in court Thursday where a judge will consider a request by police in New Jersey to extradite him to the United States, where he faces an array of theft and tax evasion charges.
'We have him in custody and the judge will decide whether to send him back to America,' she said.
Antar was caught when Israeli police traced his transfer of money from the United States through a Swiss bank.
Antar, a former New York resident, disappeared in 1990, escaping a $63 million default judgment in a securities fraud suit brought by the Securities and Exchange Commission.
The SEC charged that he faked records at Crazy Eddie Inc., boosting the company's earnings at a time when it was actually sliding into bankruptcy. Antar resigned as Crazy Eddie chairman before the firm filed for Chapter 11 reorganization. It has since been liquidated.
The judgment represented the SEC's estimate of Antar's profits from the sale of his Crazy Eddie stock. U.S. District Judge Nicholas Politan, sitting in Newark, N.J., appointed a trustee to locate Antar's assets in the United States.
After Antar's disappearance, rumors placed him in Israel, South America and Brooklyn.
Antar used commercials with a deranged-looking actor trumpeting 'his prices are insane,' to build the chain from a single store in Brooklyn's Coney Island. His lawyers claimed after the SEC suit was filed that he left the company in good shape and that any fraud was the work of executives who succeeded him, many of them his relatives.
The SEC recently moved to freeze the assets of his father, Sam Antar, charging that he had been funneling money to his son.
