Bruce Richard Reynolds (7 September 1931 – 28 February 2013) was an English criminal who masterminded the 1963 Great Train Robbery. At the time it was Britain's largest robbery, netting £2,631,684, equivalent to £73.7 million in 2024. Reynolds spent five years on the run before being sentenced to 25 years' imprisonment in 1969. He was released in 1978. He also wrote three books and performed with the band Alabama 3, for whom his son, Nick, plays.

Bruce Richard Reynolds was born at Charing Cross Hospital, in Charing Cross, central London, the only child of Thomas Richard and Dorothy Margaret (née Keen). He was initially brought up in Putney. His mother, a nurse, died in 1935 when he was aged four. His father, a trade-union activist at the Ford Dagenham assembly plant, married again, and the family moved to Gants Hill. Reynolds found it difficult to live with his father and stepmother, choosing often to stay with one or other of his grandmothers. During the London Blitz of the Second World War he was evacuated to Suffolk and then to Warwickshire.

On leaving school at 14½, Reynolds failed the eyesight test to join the Royal Navy, and decided he wanted to become a foreign correspondent, so he applied in person for a job at Northcliffe House. Employed first as a messenger boy, he then worked in the accounts department of the Daily Mail. By the age of 17 he had become bored with the routine and was working in the Bland/Sutton Institute of Pathology at Middlesex Hospital, before joining Claud Butler as a bicycle messenger and a member of their semi-professional racing team, where he first met criminals and began a life of crime.

After undertaking some petty crime and spending time in HMP Wormwood Scrubs and Borstal for theft (from which he escaped and was eventually caught and sent to Reading Prison), he spent six weeks of the required two years doing National Service in the British Army, before absconding to return to petty crime. Sentenced to three years' imprisonment in 1952 for breaking and entering, he was sent to the juvenile wing of Wandsworth Prison. He then embarked on jewellery thefts from large country houses.

In 1957 Reynolds was arrested, together with Terry Hogan, for assault and robbery of £500 from a bookmaker returning from White City Greyhounds. The police stated their belief that the intent of the cosh attack was grievous bodily harm and not robbery. Hogan was sentenced to 2½ years and Reynolds to 3½ years imprisonment. After spending time in HMP Wandsworth and HMP Durham, on release in 1960 he then became an antiques dealer and thief.

He joined a gang with a future close friend Harry Booth and his future brother-in-law John Daly. Later on, he worked with Jimmy White and met Buster Edwards at Charlie Richardson's club. Richardson in turn introduced him to Gordon Goody. Reynolds gained the nickname Napoleon. In 1962, his gang stole £62,000 in a security van robbery at Heathrow Airport. They then attempted to rob a Royal Mail train at Swindon, which netted only £700. But Reynolds, now looking for his career-criminal defining moment, started planning his next train robbery over a period of three months.

Reynolds organised a gang of 15 men to undertake the 1963 Great Train Robbery (which he later referred to as his "Sistine Chapel ceiling"). After the robbery, Reynolds contacted underworld boss Joey Pyle, who fixed up several places for Reynolds to hide – his brother's house in Cobham, Pyle's own place in Clapham South until the end of August 1963, then a flat in Croydon above a dry-cleaners that Pyle jointly managed. He subsequently spent six months in a mews house in South Kensington waiting for a false passport. He then travelled via Elstree Airfield to Ostend, and was driven to Brussels Airport, before flying to Mexico City via Toronto. Assuming the name Keith Clement Miller, he was joined by his wife, Frances, who changed her name to Angela, and their son, Nick.

I was beginning to see the thief as an artist ... Nothing could match the tension, excitement and sense of fulfillment.