Leonard ‘Nipper’ Read
Sharp-eyed Murder Squad detective who through his painstaking inquiries brought the murderous Kray twins finally to justice
LEONARD READ, who has died aged 95, known universally as “Nipper”, earned his place in the pantheon of celebrated detectives as the officer who led the 1960s investigation into the gangland activities of the notorious Kray twins; Ronnie Kray predicted that if anyone arrested him it would be Read, “the cunning little bastard”.
Nipper Read was an unlikely nemesis. A loner in a culture of beery, fraternal bonhomie, he rejected the romanticisation of the Krays, regarding them as “wicked, unscrupulous, murdering villains”. In the opinion of their biographer John Pearson, Read – sharp-eyed and compact (he had to take stretching exercises to pass for the police) – would have made an ideal detective for a television series.
On his promotion to detective chief superintendent in 1967, Read was both surprised and delighted to be posted to the Murder Squad at the Yard. But he was dismayed when the Assistant Commissioner (Crime), Peter Brodie, ordered him to investigate the murder a year previously of George Cornell in the Blind Beggar public house in the Mile End Road, and the disappearance of Jack “The Hat” Mcvitie and Frank “Mad Axeman” Mitchell.
Both Brodie and Read knew that one or other of the Kray twins was responsible, but it was Read’s task to find the proof. “Mr Read,” Brodie announced, “you’re going to get the Krays.”
As a detective inspector, Read had arrested the Krays in 1964 but, after the jury at their first trial had failed to agree, the jury at the second had found them not guilty on charges of demanding protection money from the owner of the Hideaway Club in Soho.
Read had been angered by a photograph published in the Daily Express following the Krays’ acquittal party at the Hideaway which purported to show him, drink in hand, toasting Ronnie Kray. Read claimed the picture actually showed a lookalike actor, and extracted an apology from the Express crime reporter Percy Hoskins.
An immediate Yard inquiry cleared Read of any improper contact with the Krays. Nevertheless, the incident resulted in a directive from Scotland Yard that henceforth detectives were not to frequent the haunts of known criminals.
Read did not relish tackling the Krays again, particularly as he feared that certain officers at the Yard would leak details of his investigation to the newspapers and to the Krays themselves; earlier in 1967, during the so-called “Torture Trial” involving the rival Richardson gang, there had been rumours of a spy at Scotland Yard.
Given the threats of violence the Krays would undoubtedly have made against potential witnesses, any foreknowledge would almost certainly have thwarted Read’s inquiry.
As a result, Read set up his office at Tintagel House, a nondescript police building on the other side of the river from Scotland Yard, under the guise of investigating allegations of serious corruption within the Metropolitan Police. Read knew of the murder of George Cornell, and of the disappearance of both Mcvitie and Mitchell. One evening in the Astor Club, a gangland den off Berkeley Square, Cornell had called Ronnie Kray a “fat poof ”, a remark to which Kray had taken exception.
It was common knowledge that, months later, Kray had walked into the Blind Beggar and shot Cornell dead at point-blank range. But detectives were met with a wall of silence; even the renowned thief-taker Tommy Butler of the Flying Squad had failed to penetrate it.
As for Mitchell, a giant of a man, he had simply walked away from a working party on Dartmoor – the prison officers being too frightened to challenge him – and had been spirited to London by colleagues of the Krays.
Mcvitie disappeared in October 1967 after being taken to the flat of a blonde called Carol Skinner where, it was subsequently learnt, he had been murdered. Neither man was seen again, nor were their bodies ever found.
Read knew that it was pointless to seek witnesses to any of these crimes until the Krays were arrested, locked up and refused bail. Instead, he set about seeking the assistance of those members of “The Firm” – as it was known throughout London – who had distanced themselves from the Krays’ activities.
He compiled a list of 32 such former associates in a small black notebook (he called it his “delightful index”) and began interviewing each of them. Finally, he succeeded in obtaining a statement from one Leslie Payne, a Kray consigliere and financial wizard who had created fortunes for the twins by setting up complex long-firm frauds on their behalf. His statement ran to 146 pages and took three weeks to compile.
Payne’s information led Read to an accountant called Freddy Gore, who in turn provided further details of the Krays’ criminal activities involving widespread and international fraud.
The inquiry now began to open up, and witnesses – some reluctantly – began to come forward. But in many cases they were prepared to sign written statements only after the Krays had been arrested.
Further confirmation came Read’s way with the arrest in Glasgow of a man found in possession of gelignite with which he proposed to carry out a murder at the twins’ behest.
After almost a year of what had been a demanding, and at times frustrating, inquiry, Read had amassed sufficient evidence to justify his arresting the Krays and other major conspirators, and at 7am on the morning of May 9 1968 he led an armed raid on the East End flat where Reggie was in bed with a girl and Ronnie with his latest fair-haired boy. Nipper Read had the handcuffs on the twins before they had properly woken up.
But such was the menace the Krays exerted that some witnesses remained in fear of their lives. In particular, the barmaid at the Blind Beggar pub who had witnessed Cornell’s murder was convinced that she, too, would be murdered to prevent her testifying.
The slog of the inquiry now began. Kenneth Barraclough, the magistrate before whom the Krays and other members of “The Firm” appeared, let it be known that he expected committal proceedings to begin in a month’s time.
Furthermore, not all the Krays’ associates had been arrested, and Read had to provide a substantial police guard for witnesses. One of his chief inspectors was given the task of arresting other members of the gang, and very soon those who had not fled abroad were also in custody.
Finally, in January 1969, 14 defendants appeared at the Old Bailey before Mr Justice Melford Stevenson for a trial that was to last 40 days and result in Reginald and Ronald Kray each receiving life sentences.
Other defendants received sentences ranging from five years to life, and only one was found not guilty. Reginald Kray was released from prison on grounds of sickness and died in 2000. Ronald Kray died in Broadmoor in 1995. Each was afforded a flamboyant East End funeral.
Leonard Ernest Read was born at Nottingham on March 31 1925, the third of four children. His mother died when he was four and he went to live with an uncle and aunt, both strict Roman Catholics, until his father remarried. Although he was offered a place at Nottingham High School, his father, a hand frame knitter, was unable to afford the fees and at 14 Read started work locally.
Both at school and in later life, Read was a promising boxer, and it was at the Grundy Boxing Club that, thanks to his slight build, he acquired the sobriquet of “Nipper”, a nickname used by colleagues and criminals alike for the rest of his life. It was an irony that both the Kray twins and their elder brother, Charles, were also useful fighters, and could have turned professional but for their criminal activities.
Read himself could well have become a champion but it was made clear to him, early in his police career, that he would have to choose between boxing and the CID; he chose the latter. Nevertheless, Read eventually became, successively, chairman and president of the British Boxing Board of Control.
In 1939 Read began work at the Player’s tobacco factory in Nottingham, feeding raw leaf tobacco into a machine that turned it into cigarette tobacco, but in 1943 he was called up for service in the Royal Navy. After qualifying as a mechanic at naval college, he was promoted leading seaman and posted to the Far East.
Demobbed in December 1946 with the rank of petty officer, he applied to join the Metropolitan Police. Despite weighing less than 10 stone and being slightly under the minimum height requirement of 5 ft 8 in, he was accepted, and his police career began in the freezing February of 1947 at Albany Street station, a part of the old “D” Division.
However, Read was destined to undertake street duty for only a few months. One day his superintendent saw the diminutive Read on patrol in Camden High Street. “He’ll have to come off the bloody streets,” he said. “He’ll get the force a bad name.” As a result Read was assigned to plainclothes duty, keeping observation on street bookmakers and brothels.
He proved a natural for this sort of work, and was soon appointed to the CID at Harlesden. Later, he spent seven years at Paddington, the police station made famous as the base of the fictional PC George Dixon in the film The Blue Lamp.
He worked as bag-carrier to Bert Hannam, the dapper, cigar-smoking detective known as “Suits” who arrested the Eastbourne GP Dr John Bodkin Adams in 1957 on suspicion of murdering elderly patients so as to benefit from their wills.
In June 1958 Read was promoted to second-class detective sergeant and returned to St John’s Wood. A year later he was elevated to first-class detective sergeant and had the melancholy experience of being posted to Chelsea to replace DS Ray Purdy, shot dead in 1959 by Gunther Podola – the last man to hang for the murder of a police officer.
Back at Paddington, in August 1963 Read was assigned to the Great Train Robbery, organising the Yard’s control room at Aylesbury and introducing officers from the Buckinghamshire force to the Met’s operating system; later he led the clean-up of Leatherslade Farm, the robbers’ hideout, before it was handed back to its owners.
Read rose steadily through the ranks of the CID until his promotion to detective chief superintendent in 1967. After attending the Senior Command Course at Bramshill Police College, Read had been assured of the next vacancy for commander.
Two others were promoted before him, however, and Read suspected that the Yard hierarchy resented the way the press had lionised him as “the man who nicked the Krays”. Instead he was sent to the old “Y” Division on the outer fringe of the Metropolitan Police district.
Unhappy with his lot, Read took up the post of assistant chief constable of the Nottingham Combined Constabulary in October 1970. It was not a vintage period; Read disliked the restrictive atmosphere of a provincial constabulary after the comparative freedom and excitement of the much larger Metropolitan force.
In March 1972, after less than two years in Nottingham, Read was appointed National Co-ordinator of Regional Crime Squads for England and Wales, and returned to Tintagel House in London where he was based for the next five years.
Read’s tenure ended abruptly when a new Chief Inspector of Constabulary, his nominal boss, somewhat brusquely suggested that he had stayed long enough.
So, at the age of 52, Read decided to leave the police and was offered a job as executive president of one of the casinos in the Bahamas, but the Bahamian government refused him a work permit. It was suggested at the time that the Bahamas was so riddled with corruption that the last person they wanted in their midst was the ex-policeman who had secured the conviction of the Kray twins.
Read’s thoughts turned to setting up a private detective agency with a long-standing friend of his, Alden Mccray, formerly of the FBI, but Mccray died suddenly and the idea was abandoned.
In 1978 Read was appointed National Security Adviser to the Museums and Galleries Commission, a position he held until 1986. It was a post that thoroughly suited him. Responsible for overseeing the security of museums and art galleries nationwide, he also visited those institutions abroad that sought to borrow works of art held in Britain.
He was chairman of the British Boxing Board of Control from 1996 to 2000, and president from 1997 until 2005.
He published two volumes of memoirs, Nipper (1991) and Nipper Read: The Man Who Nicked the Krays (2001), both written with the help of James Morton.
Read was awarded the Queen’s Police Medal for Distinguished Service in 1976.
He married first, in 1951, Marion Millar, with whom he had a daughter. The marriage was dissolved and in 1980 he married Patricia Allen, formerly a detective constable on the Kray inquiry.
Leonard “Nipper” Read, born March 31 1925, died April 7 2020