Nipper Read

Book excerpt: Just after 7pm on the evening of Tuesday 4 March 1969, at the Old Bailey, the jurors filed back into Court 1 to give their verdict on Ronald Kray. The word 'guilty' brought to a triumphant conclusion the months of painstaking work put in by Read and his team in their efforts to bring the infamous Kray brothers to justice. Leonard Read tells his own story, that of the small Nottingham lad, nicknamed Nipper, who went to join the Metropolitan Police because of their less stringent height requirements - and who rose through the ranks to become part of the team solving the Great Train Robbery. In 1964 Read was invited to put together a team to 'have a go' at the Kray gang - the seemingly untouchable East End criminals whose reign of terror involved blackmail, protection rackets and finally murder. In an enthralling recreation of the operation, Read and Morton cover the case from the first time Nipper saw Ronald Kray in a pub in the Whitechapel Road - where he turned up flanked by minders - to the brothers' eventual arrest in May 1968 and the nailbiting suspense of their sensational trial.