Jim Brown - The Golden Boy of Crime: The Almost Certainly True Story of Norman Red Ryan

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The Golden Boy of Crime

Copyright 2019 by Jim Brown.

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FIRST EDITION

EPub Edition: MAY 2019 EPub ISBN: 978-1-4434-5011-9

Version 04192019

Print ISBN: 978-1-4434-5009-6

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For Sharon

Contents

The most formidable weapon against errors

of every kind is reason.

T HOMAS P AINE

Library and Archives Canada

There is very little in my younger days to indicate that I would later follow the bent of a bank robber.

R ED R YAN

July 8, 1895

N orman John Ryan is born in a house on Esther Street in the Queen and Spadina neighbourhood of Toronto. His mother, Elizabeth, is attended at the birth by a Dr. Wakeham.

Duck on the rock, hop scotch and nibs formed my early play days, just the same as that of all my boy friends. I was nicknamed Red and Chicken and took part in all of the games. I used to like to play with the girls, as well as the boys, and was often called Sissy for this. I had great success in all of the games I played, and there were none around our corner who could beat me in a hundred yard race.

R ED R YAN

October 18, 1907

Ryan, aged twelve, is convicted of stealing Dr. Wakehams bicycle.

When I was about twelve years old, one day in the fall of the year, I went with some other boys to an Exhibition. I had 75 cents, I remember, and had spent little of it, when I was attracted by a game which consisted of tossing baseballs into a frame of little square holes, all bearing numbers. We all tried this game as there was a good assortment of prizes which consisted of alarm clocks, jack knives, revolvers, and other articles. I was successful in throwing 4 balls all into number 1 recesses and immediately came into possession of a .22 calibre revolver. Naturally I was the envy of all my boyfriends and was looked upon thereafter as their leader.

R ED R YAN

19081912

Assorted theft and attempted theft convictions, including one for stealing chickens. Also repeated disorderly conduct charges. A friend from those days remembered Ryan as a malicious little bastard. A friend.

The following spring I remember mounting a large cherry tree in a neighbours yard with George. And we were getting our fill of cherries when the lady of the house came out and called to us to come down. You had better get into the house, old lady, said George, or we will shoot your head off. Quite proud of being so distinguished, I fired a shot in the air and the rapidity with which that door was shut just made me swell with pride. I believe that this was the first actual feeling that I had of the power of a weapon.

R ED R YAN

December 3, 1912

Ryan makes the front page of the newspapers when hes caught robbing a confectionery. Hes convicted on three charges of burglary, theft and shopbreaking, and sentenced to three years in Kingston Penitentiary.

December 13, 1912

The attention Ryan received from the confectionery robbery results in police charging him with an earlier crime, shooting a farmers horse and blasting a couple of bullets near the farmers head after the farmer refused to transport Ryans broken-down, stolen motorcycle into Toronto on his market cart. Hes convicted of shooting with intent and sentenced to three-and-a-half years at Kingston Pen, to be served concurrently with the other sentence. When his train pulls out of Toronto for Kingston, he is seen weeping like a child.

In later years, Ryan would blame the encounter with the farmer for his life of crime, saying he was enraged when the farmer ran him down, and fired his shots in anger. In fact, it was an out-of-control Ryan who had rear-ended the farmers rig. At other times, and in other interviews, Ryan would blame his choice of career on (1) his treatment at St. Johns reformatory, where he was sent at age fourteen, (2) his time in Kingston and (3) his adventurous disposition and vain desire for leadership.

In any event, Ryans apprentice years were over.

Even up to this time I did not know that there was anything in my nature except mischieviousness. But events were soon to follow, which marked me in the eyes of my more gentle friends to be shunned and talked about. From these events I was filled with shame and would avoid meeting those who I knew talked about me. I think at this time if I had been treated with more generosity I would not have been so sensitive, but who knows.

R ED R YAN

September 1914June 1915

As Ryan wrote in the Toronto Star years later, in one of several crime-does-not-pay pieces the paper published under his name, when he got out of Kingston after serving twenty-one months of his first stretch, he was bad. He almost immediately took up armed robbery, first hitting the payroll office of a Toronto piano factory, making off with $1,500, and then robbing the Dominion Express Company at the point of the revolver, according to the Toronto Globe. The take there was a more modest $100. He and his accomplice also stole $2 and a watch from a man on the street.

Its an interesting, if ultimately pointless, exercise to consider the question of just when Red Ryan turned bad. Unlike most of the other famous gangsters of the early decades of the twentieth century, he didnt grow up dirt poor, the bank didnt foreclose on the farm, his father didnt abandon the family when Ryan was a boy and he didnt have to steal to support his mother and siblings. By all accounts, the Ryan family was a respectable, working-class bunch. His parents both came from Irish stock. Reds father was a sheet-metal worker, and Red was the fourth of seven children. He was a red-haired, blue-eyed charmer with a record that stretched back to his pre-teens.

Reds brother Frank apparently made some money running booze across the U.S. border during prohibition, but other than that, no family members had any trouble with the law. Ryans biographer Peter McSherry claims Ryans father, John, was a violent man who favoured older son Frank and regularly tried to slap younger son Norman into shape, but he wasnt the only disobedient boy being slapped around by a parent back in those days. If Red was jealous of the attention aimed at his brother, and if engaging in violent crime was the best he could come up with as a way to turn some of that spotlight on himself, maybe he was just naturally bad. Certainly there is no moment in his life, at least no moment that Ive been able to discover, when, confronted by a choice, Ryan made the right one. So if not born bad, I think its safe to say he was born with a severely limited imagination.