Word: brennan
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...young Associated Press reporter in Chicago, the whole business had an odd smell-or rather, lack of smell. It was during the blazing summer of 1933, and Ray Brennan, then 25 and covering one of his first big stories, was facing Swindler Jake ("The Barber") Factor, who claimed before reporters and the police that he had been kidnaped, held for twelve days in a basement and just released. Factor said he was still wearing the same clothes in which he had been kidnaped-but his shirt and suit were clean and only slightly wrinkled. And there was another strange thing...
Ever since. Reporter Brennan has wondered if Factor was really kidnaped, or if his story was a hoax, aimed at taking the pressure off him elsewhere (Factor was wanted at the time in England on a swindling charge). Brennan also wondered-along with a lot of other newsmen and a good many Chicago cops-if Illinois Gangster Roger Touhy, convicted of kidnaping and sentenced to 99 years in prison after being identified by Factor as one of his abductors, had not, in fact, been framed...
Throughout his career as a hard-digging reporter, tough, growling Ray Brennan nursed his doubts about the Touhy conviction. Somehow the case kept crossing his path. In 1950, for example, having left the A.P. and gone to the Chicago Sun-Times, Brennan got hold of the secret transcripts of the testimony before the Kefauver crime-investigating Senate committee made by the then Democratic candidate for Cook County sheriff. (Brennan was indicted for impersonating a federal employee, but the charges against him were dropped.) The testimony, as printed in the Sun-Times, showing that from gambling the candidate had become...
From time to time Brennan visited Touhy at Illinois' Stateville Prison, became even more convinced of his innocence in the kidnaping. Last fortnight, his sentence commuted to 75 years, Roger Touhy was ordered released on parole. Timed for publication at the same time as Touhy's release was a book co-authored by Touhy and Ray Brennan,* avowing Touhy's innocence. It charges that the prosecution used a witness who was not in Chicago at the time of the kidnaping to convict Touhy, and gives details of how Factor changed his testimony against Touhy during the trial...
...also told of conversations with Cambridge Chief of Police Daniel J. Brennan, who agreed to assist in any way in uncovering a possible fraud, including stationing a police officer around the clock at the Election Commission office...