Biography

Leif Gustav Willy Persson (born 12 March 1945), is a Swedish criminologist and writer, best known for his detective stories and appearances in television and newspapers.

In 1977, while working at the Swedish National Police Board, Persson was the whistleblower who worked with journalist Peter Bratt in the so-called Geijer Scandal when he confirmed a classified memo sent by then National Police Commissioner Carl Persson to Prime Minister Olof Palme about the alleged ties of the Minister of Justice, Lennart Geijer, to a prostitution ring in Stockholm. Following this affair he was fired from the National Police Board. The string of events almost drove Persson to suicide, but he soon returned as lecturer at Stockholm University. The prostitution ring affair inspired him to write his first novel, Grisfesten. He returned to the National Police Board as a professor in 1992.

Persson was a professor in criminology at the Swedish National Police Board from 1992 to 2012. He is well known in Sweden for his crime fiction novels and for his regular appearances as an expert commentator on notable crime cases on television and in newspapers.

In 1990, Persson together with Jan Guillou and Pär Lorentzon appeared in a SVT program Grabbarna på Fagerhult, indulging in hunting, fishing, and other traditionally male leisure activities. As the 1990s went on, Leif GW Persson emerged as one of Sweden's most acclaimed media personalities, and his popularity continued to grow through the 2000s.

Often referred to simply as "GW", he frequently appears on television, radio, and in other media as a commentator on crime and criminology. Among other things, he is a noted expert on the unsolved 1986 assassination of Swedish prime minister Olof Palme, and has been harshly critical of police and prosecutors. He also holds forth on other issues, including politics, literature, and wine, etc, and is well known for his great interest in hunting. He takes an irreverent attitude to authorities, regularly dismissing officials as incompetent or lazy. Persson's disheveled appearance, biting wit, and characteristic manner of speech, replete with mumbling and grunting, has made him a cult figure often lovingly parodied in the media. His extraordinary media stardom has in recent years been the theme of several journalistic investigations; at one point, Swedish public radio asked "How much Leif GW Persson can Sweden handle?".

Persson, who is overweight and has at times been very obese, has also struggled with his food intake. In the early 2000s, he was forced to abandon a habit of "food orgies" – regular bouts of extremely lavish, high-end gourmet dining and drinking – with his friend, the media mogul Jan Stenbeck, after his physician warned that his heart could not take another year of it. According to Persson, it was Stenbeck's refusal to cut back on the gourmandizing that led to his death in 2002.