Robert Emmet Brennan (born 1944) is an American businessman and former accountant who built the infamous penny stock brokerage firm, First Jersey Securities. The firm specialized in promoting penny stocks to unsuspecting investors, many of them elderly, who lost their entire investments when the stocks inevitably crashed.
First Jersey
As a result of this penny stock scheme, Brennan became a target of the Securities and Exchange Commission. First Jersey itself went bankrupt in 1987 and Brennan was found guilty of securities fraud in 1994. He was ordered to pay $75 million to settle the fraud claims.
Brennan declared bankruptcy in 1995 but committed another fraud when he did not declare all of his assets to the court. Brennan withheld from the bankruptcy court that he held $500,000 in casino chips that he had purchased (and later cashed out of after his bankruptcy) and $4 million in municipal bonds he kept in his basement. He then directed an associate to liquidate the bonds overseas and invest them in stocks, which netted him $16 million in ill-gotten gains.
Brennan was also a Certified Public Accountant but his license was revoked as a result of his criminal conviction.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_E._Brennan
Video preservation by DDVF.com for educational purposes. Original airdate was Feb 1983.
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