Ticket-of-Leave Man

Until last week the pride of Ontario reformers was Norman F. ("Red") Ryan, a hulking, 200-lb. Torontonian with little pig eyes and a disarming smile. Red Ryan's highly publicized criminal career first attracted wide attention in 1921. For armed robbery he was sentenced to seven years in St. Vincent de Paul Penitentiary and given 14 lashes on the bare back with the cat.

Red Ryan served less than a year of that sentence. Evidence was produced connecting him with another bank robbery; he was transferred to Kingston Penitentiary and given 25 years more. Red Ryan served just one year of that sentence. In 1923 with four companions he broke out of jail and into every Canadian paper. Within 15 days he held up a bank in Toronto, fled to the U. S.

For a year the blazing red thatch of Norman Ryan kept cropping up in a series of holdups and bank robberies throughout Indiana, Michigan and Minnesota. In 1924 he was trapped in the Minneapolis Post Office, extradited to Canada, sentenced to life imprisonment and 30 lashes. The flogging was later canceled.

For eleven years Red Ryan was Kingston Penitentiary's model prisoner. Loudly and publicly he turned to the Catholic Church, became a favorite of kindly Chaplain W. T. Kingsley. An established custom at Kingston were Convict Ryan's burning addresses to young inmates on "Crime Doesn't Pay." Prison reform societies hailed him, Premier Richard Bedford Bennett went to see him, emerged deeply moved. Last July the Ministry of Justice awarded Red Ryan a "ticket-of-leave," a privileged form of parole in which a convict reports only occasionally to the authorities.

Sentimental Canadians promptly deluged Ryan the Prodigal with offers of jobs. After due thought he accepted two: one as an automobile salesman in a Toronto suburb which gave him the use of a car, time off for long, mysterious automobile trips; the other from Toronto's Hotel Nealon to sit about the lobby of an evening, be pointed out as "Canada's Dillinger" (reformed), and greet visiting firemen. Red Ryan's lectures, incorporated in a book called The Futility of Crime, were ready for the presses last week. Ryan the Prodigal never neglected to pay weekly visits to his old friend Chaplain Kingsley at Kingston. On one of these a friend asked him if he had been dyeing his hair, it seemed so much darker. Red Ryan flew into a towering rage. Only a few weeks ago an anonymous letter announced that Ryan the Prodigal was "robbing banks and running around with women." The good priest showed this to his friend, understood him to say that the letter was the work of "a hateful witch."

One evening last week some 25 people were crowded into the provincial liquor store of Sarnia, Ont., just across the St. Clair River from Port Huron, Mich. Into the shop stepped two holdup men, one small and wizened, the other masked with a black silk handkerchief. Both waved revolvers, made the customers line up face to the wall while the larger bandit climbed the wire partition to the cashier's drawer, scooped up the cash, climbed back again, ordering all the customers to file into the liquor room. What happened next was best described by one Jack Cosley, who had been buying two bottles of wine for his dinner:

"While I was going through this door I had a view of the top of the exit stairway, and I saw a policeman's head. He was sort of peeking around the edge of the partition and then ducked away.

" 'Oh oh!' I said to myself, 'Something is going to be happening here.' I saw nothing more of any policemen until there was a shot fired and as soon as that shot was fired I dropped behind the wooden part of the counter. I was in a holdup one time in Detroit when a man was cut in half with a tommy-gun and at that time the police told me the only thing to do at a time like that is drop to the floor and stay there.

"The shots were coming so fast and the whole thing was over so quickly I couldn't have counted the shots if I had wanted to."

When the smoke cleared away both bandits were dying; Constable Jack Lewis lay dead on the floor. Behind the mask of the bigger bandit was the face of Ontario's model prisoner, Red Ryan. He had systematically engaged in robberies ever since his parole. A stolen car was parked nearby.

"I feel the letdown very keenly," said pious Richard Bedford Bennett.

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