Last Sunday, I sent an email to one of our inductees. Fifteen minutes later, the phone rang. I spent the next hour talking with the former chief financial officer of the Crazy Eddie fraud about immorality and “walls of false integrity.”
Sam Antar says he hasn’t changed. “I’m the same person that I was in 1985,” he told me. “The only thing that’s changed is that I’ve made a choice not to commit crime.” Back then, Sam helped build the crooked foundation of the Antar family’s business. Today, he runs a website devoted to white collar fraud and travels around the country giving lectures with “chilling straight talk about the mind, motivations, manipulations, and techniques of a fraudster.”
As for the chilling straight talk of our conversation, Sam said that he, his cousin, Eddie, and the rest of the Antar clan never gave a second thought to the victims of their crime. Their conversations were “cold-blooded,” focused solely on how to increase their profits and hold the fraud together.
It’s hard for me to understand such cruel self-interest, but I may not be alone in this. According to Sam, it’s a mistake to “humanize a crook” by trying to understand his actions. “We’re inhuman,” he tells me. “We have no humanity as it relates to morality.” Every single move that a con artist makes is designed to conceal his true intentions behind a “wall of false integrity” and bolster his victim’s comfort level.
So what about those of us who struggle to fathom how a person could set aside morals for a buck? What does Sam Antar make of us? “Enablers.”
And white collar criminals are very good at picking up enablers. They love moral people.
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Stay tuned – there’s more to come from Sam Antar in the coming weeks. It turns out he’s not only an inductee to the Con Artist Hall of Infamy….he’s a fan!