The diminutive detective who brought down the Krays
Leonard “Nipper” Read, who has died aged 95, was behind two of the most sensational criminal inquiries of the 1960s. He was on the team that caught the Great Train Robbers in 1963, and in 1968, he brought down the Kray twins. And yet “Nipper of the Yard”, arguably Britain’s most famous police detective, almost didn’t make it onto the force at all. At just five foot seven inches, he was rejected by Nottingham police, which insisted on recruits being six foot, and he only got into the Met by claiming he was still growing, and promising to do stretching exercises. Methodical, modest and unclubbable, he wasn’t like most coppers; he’d also enjoyed acting at school – all of which made him perfect for undercover work, said Jane Fryer in the Daily Mail. He dressed as a vicar while investigating the Krays; at other times he posed as a decorator, a milkman and a chauffeur.
The Krays and their gang, The Firm, had been building a criminal enterprise since the 1950s. Revelling in wealth and power, the twins had by the 1960s become celebrities, mingling with stars in their West End club, and posing as the defenders of the East End’s poor and elderly. Read, however, saw them as vicious low-lives. He had first arrested the twins in 1964, for extortion, said The Daily Telegraph. Witnesses had been scared to testify; and they were acquitted. So he wasn’t pleased when he was tasked with “getting the Krays” following the murder of George Cornell, of the rival Richardson gang, in 1966, and the disappearance of Jack “The Hat” McVitie, a Firm enforcer, in 1967. It was well known that Ronnie Kray had shot Cornell in the head in The Blind Beggar pub in Whitechapel, for calling him a “fat poof”; and that Reggie had stabbed McVitie to death for reneging on a contract killing. But Read knew that he could be killed if the Krays found out he was after them (in fact, they had ordered at least one hit on him); he also knew they had bent cops on their payroll. So he set up his team in a secret office away from Scotland Yard, at Tintagel House.
As no one was willing to grass up the Krays for murder while they were at large, Read gathered enough evidence to have them arrested for fraud. Meanwhile, he set about quietly gaining the confidence of their associates. (He was, Ronnie Kray said, a “cunning little bastard”.) He was able to persuade the barmaid at The Blind Beggar to give evidence and, in his vicar outfit, visited one of the Krays’ lieutenants to persuade him to talk. The twins were finally arrested in May 1968, and in 1969 they were jailed for life. Ronnie died in Broadmoor in 1995; Reggie was released from jail on health grounds shortly before his death in 2000.
Leonard Read was born in Nottingham in 1925, the son of a leather worker, and brought up in poverty. He shone at school, but money was so tight he had to leave at 14, to take up a job in a factory. Like the Krays, he was a keen boxer, and it was at his club that his slight frame earned him the nickname “Nipper”. He joined the Met in 1946, after wartime service in the Navy. He owed his career partly to his size: his boss thought he was too small to be seen on the beat, so put him on desk work. Rapidly promoted, Read commanded “respect and loyalty”, said The Guardian, but he didn’t fit with Scotland Yard’s beery culture, and moved to the Nottingham Constabulary in 1970. He retired in 1977, and became the national security adviser to the Museums and Galleries Commission. He still loved boxing, and served as vice-president of the World Boxing Council. He never got to “face either of the Krays in the ring”, said The Times, but outside it, he beat them both on points.