High Quality Content by WIKIPEDIA articles! Robert Emmet Brennan (born 1944) was an American businessman who built the infamous penny stock brokerage firm, First Jersey Securities. The firm specialized in promoting "Pump and dump" penny stocks to unsuspecting investors, many of them elderly, who lost their entire investments when the stocks inevitably crashed. As a result of this penny stock scheme, Brennan became a target of the United States Securities and Exchange Commission. First Jersey itself went bankrupt in 1987 and Brennan was found guilty of securities fraud in 1994. The US Government ordered him to pay $75 million to settle the fraud claims.