Page 196 - Once a copper 10 03 2020

they had left McVitie's corpse, the twins were livid and desperately phoned
Foreman, who was then running a pub in Southwark, to see if he could
dispose of the body. With dawn breaking, Foreman found the car, broke into
it and drove the body to Newhaven where, with the help of a trawlerman,
the body was bound with chicken wire and dumped in the English Channel.

This event started turning many people against the Krays, and some were
prepared to testify to Scotland Yard as to what had happened, fearing that
what happened to McVitie could easily happen to them.

Arrest and trial

Inspector Leonard "Nipper" Read of Scotland Yard was
promoted to the Murder Squad and his first assignment
was to bring down the Kray twins. It was not his first
involvement with them. During the first half of 1964,
Read had been investigating their activities, but
publicity and official denials of Ron's relationship with
Boothby made the evidence that he collected useless.
Read went after the twins with renewed activity in 1967,
but frequently came up against the East End "wall of
silence" which discouraged anyone from providing
information to the police.
Figure 90 Nipper Read - Who
nicked the Krays Nevertheless, by the end of 1967 Read had built up
enough evidence against the Krays. Witness
statements incriminated them, as did other evidence, but none made a
convincing case on any one charge.

Early in 1968, the Krays employed Alan Bruce Cooper who sent Paul Elvey to
Glasgow to buy explosives for a car bomb. Elvey was the radio engineer who
put Radio Sutch on the air in 1964, later renamed Radio City. After police
detained him in Scotland, he confessed to being involved in three murder
attempts. The evidence was weakened by Cooper, who claimed that he
was an agent for the US Treasury Department investigating links between the
American Mafia and the Kray gang. The botched murders were his attempt
to put the blame on the Krays. Cooper was being employed as a source by
one of Read's superior officers, and Read tried using him as a trap for the
Krays, but they avoided him.

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