EXCLUSIVE: New York Attorney General Letitia James, who became President Donald Trump's nemesis after accusing him of mortgage fraud, is now battling the very same allegations, and her chief tormentor is a legendary scam artist who says he knows a crook when he sees one.
Sam Antar, who kept the books for his cousin, "Crazy Eddie" Antar, while he built a New York-area consumer electronics empire, helped his late relative skim cash and inflate the value of their company before leaving investors high and dry in the late 1980s. He says he knows every trick in the fraud book and smells a rat in James' real estate filings.
"I don't know how the wheels of justice will turn and, to be frank, I don't care as long as I'm right," said Antar, who has made his findings public. "If they fail to convict her, it's their humiliation and their embarrassment."
Antar pleaded guilty to multiple felonies, cooperating with prosecutors to help convict his cousin, whose chain's ads featured a maniacal pitchman pledging, "Our prices are insane!" While Eddie Antar fled to Israel, was extradited back to the U.S. and served time before dying in 2016, Sam Antar reinvented himself as a fraud expert for government agencies and law firms. He runs a website where he posts about his various investigations.
An undated Crazy Eddie Store in Coney Island (Anthony Pescatore/NY Daily News Archive via Getty Images)
In an exclusive interview with Fox News Digital, Antar said he worked alone and was the first to unearth documentation of James’ alleged mortgage fraud and posted it to his White Collar Fraud website weeks ago.
He said the strength of his findings, backed by his renowned reputation in the field of uncovering white-collar fraud for the government, eventually led to the Federal Housing Finance Agency (FHFA) picking up the case and sending a criminal referral to the Justice Department.
"It's not the Trump administration at war with Tish James, it's me bringing her to accountability and justice," Antar told Fox News Digital. "I'm not the Trump administration. I was investigating Tish James because that is what I do."
"I took all kinds of risks doing it, from retaliation, to libel, to reputational risk. But I stand by everything."
New York State Attorney General Letitia James is being accused of mortgage fraud. (Lev Radin/Pacific Press/LightRocket via Getty Images)
Antar said his findings were all uncovered independently by him and that he is not working for the government by looking into James. Fox News Digital asked the FHFA and the White House to corroborate his claims but did not receive a response.
"Everything that I've done is thoroughly documented," said Antar, who said he's a Democrat. "This is not bullying. This is not the Trump administration at war. Trump has his own agenda. I don't care. I am not Donald Trump. All I did was, I did my forensic accounting and I thoroughly documented everything that I did."
Antar’s investigations uncovered documents stretching back as far as 1983, which he said indicate James may have been misrepresenting her financial situation for decades in order to nail sweetheart loans from lenders.
The FHFA accuses James of falsifying records to meet certain lending requirements and score favorable loan terms.
James, 66, denies the allegations and claims Trump is behind the move, calling it a "revenge tour" for the $454 million civil fraud lawsuit she successfully spearheaded against him last year. Trump and the Trump Organization are currently appealing.
In Trump's civil fraud case, the then-presidential candidate was accused of financial misrepresentation and providing false statements about his real estate, the same types of crimes James is being accused of by the FHFA.
Antar told Fox News Digital that he started digging into James’ records months ago after he looked into the costs of her private flight travel as attorney general.
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