Ronnie Biggs: Last of the gentleman crooks

By MATHEW DEARNALEY and AGENCIES

His was a bit part in Britain's crime of the 20th century, but Great Train Robber Ronnie Biggs achieved the greatest notoriety as the one who got away - and kept on slithering from under the law's long arm.

Until last night, that is, when the 71-year-old fugitive who helped hijack more than £2.6 million - $124 million in today's money - surrendered to police on home soil after being collected from Brazil by journalists of the Sun newspaper.

It was 3.30 am on a warm August night in 1963 at an isolated rail crossing in rural Buckinghamshire when a gang of 15 men wired up fake stop-signs to rob a "travelling post office," the Glasgow-to-London Royal Mail train.

Ronald Arthur Biggs, a carpenter and small-time crook, had been hired by his friend Bruce Reynolds after asking for a loan.

It was Reynolds, mastermind of the robbery, who accompanied Sun journalists on a private charter plane to Brazil to bring Biggs back to face justice in Britain.

During the most audacious heist in British history, Biggs sat in a Land-Rover at the foot of a railway embankment, looking after a retired engine driver who had been brought along to move the train if its driver refused orders.

The gang's haul of £2,631,784 had been removed from circulation for shredding at the Royal Mint, and some argued that it would have been a victimless crime had the legitimate train driver not been coshed in the heat of the action.

But the attack ruined the life of Jack Mills, who was bashed over the head with an axe handle after resisting the invasion of his cab and who never fully recovered.

He died of cancer six years later, at 64.

Many believe it was Buster Edwards who coshed Mr Mills, but the train robber turned flower-seller, on whose life a film starring singer Phil Collins was based, died in 1994 without confessing.

Biggs' share of the loot was £147,000, but he and most of the others were quickly rounded up in an operation led by Detective Chief Superintendent Jack Slipper.

They were jailed for 30 years in 1964.

The bold, military-style robbery, Mr Mills' death and the length of the sentences may have changed the face of British crime. Some critics claimed the sentences were so severe they persuaded robbers to start using guns, since leaving unharmed witnesses could mean as much jail time as ensuring their silence by killing them.

Adding to the legend were two spectacular jailbreaks, first by train robber Charles Frederick Wilson in August 1964, and the other by Biggs the following July.

Wilson was recaptured in 1968 and released 11 years later, only to be shot outside his Spanish home in 1990, aged 57, in a probable drug killing.

Biggs was snatched from Wandsworth Prison, making nonsense of tough security precautions, after a bright red removal van converted into a tailormade escape machine was parked against the jail's 8m wall.

The van had a sliding panel in the roof, through which a platform appeared. It lifted up two men who flung rope ladders over the wall to Biggs and three other escapers in an exercise yard below.

Biggs was smuggled in a grain ship to Belgium, then was driven to Paris for plastic surgery which shortened his nose and rearranged other facial features.

He then moved to Australia, where he was joined by his first wife, Charmian, and their three sons

In 1970, he fled to Brazil after Scotland Yard received a tip on his whereabouts.

An international hunt included vigorous efforts by New Zealand police, who searched ships, pubs and noted criminal haunts. Biggs told former Herald columnist Peter Calder in a phone interview in 1994 that he came ashore here for a few hours from a Greek liner on his escape from Australia, but only to have a beer in a waterfront bar.

He later scotched a claim in a book by Auckland lawyer Kevin Ryan that he hid out in an upmarket Ponsonby bordello, a suggestion attributed by the author to the colourful madam, the late Flora McKenzie.

Biggs lay low in Brazil until 1974, when he was again arrested by his old adversary, Slipper of the Yard, whom he greeted with the words: "Good grief, what are you doing here, Jack?"

He escaped extradition by revealing he had a pregnant Brazilian girlfriend, Raimunda de Costa, a striptease dancer who gave birth to his son Michael.

Mr Slipper, who retired long ago, said at the weekend that he and Biggs came from similar working-class backgrounds but chose different paths in life and he had no desire to meet his former quarry.

Biggs' wife, Charmian, left in Melbourne, Australia, proved most understanding of his new relationship and visited him in Rio de Janeiro but divorced him in 1976.

It was Michael who helped him off the hook again in 1981, when Biggs was kidnapped by mercenaries and spirited by yacht to the Bermudas after being disabled by knockout gas in a Rio restaurant and bundled into a van in a canvas bag labelled "live snake."

Michael, then aged 10, made a television appeal to Britain not to press ahead with extradition from Barbados before a court ruled against such a move, and Biggs arrived back in Brazil a hero.

He had allegedly long exhausted his share of the train loot, but his son, on the strength of that TV appearance, became a top-selling popstar whose earnings helped buy their roomy, terraced apartment on a cobbled street in Rio's green hills.

These were later supplemented by royalties from a recording of Biggs' own, when the rump of the British punk band the Sex Pistols helped him cash in on his notoriety with the single No One is Innocent, which outraged the British establishment.

Of all the rogues and ruffians who took the money and ran to Rio, none embodied the city's irreverence or charmed its residents like Ronnie Biggs. Now, as he faces his first day back in captivity, he has become a symbol of Rio's joie de vivre - the beguiling rascal who tweaked authority's nose and got away with it.

"He is thoroughly carioca," said a neighbour, using the word Rio's residents proudly call themselves.

Biggs left Brazil on Sunday afternoon - ever the huckster, he arranged a deal with the tabloid Sun and Sky TV for exclusive rights to the story of his return. The fee was not announced.

Wearing a beige cowboy hat, Biggs was brought into the airport terminal in a wheelchair and taken into a back room to sign a paper saying he was leaving freely.

He flew out in a 14-seat Dassault jet, chartered by the Sun.

Biggs' reasons for returning to Britain remain a mystery. After 31 years in Brazil, few thought he ever would go home.

Britain wants him to finish serving the 30-year-old sentence interrupted after just 14 months by that brazen jailbreak in 1965.

When Brazil's Supreme Court in 1997 rejected an extradition request on the grounds that the statute of limitations had run out, Biggs seemed a free man.

But at least two strokes left him debilitated and barely able to speak. Until Sunday, he rarely left his home except for twice-a-week physical therapy sessions.

Earlier denied a work permit in Brazil and forced to report to police twice a week, he eventually found his calling just being himself, becoming a household name and tourist attraction.

Foreign journalists were hot for his story and willing to pay handsomely, and Biggs played the part, calling himself "last of the gentleman crooks."

And for $120, later hiked to $144, visitors could enjoy a barbecue at the Biggs home, be regaled by tales of the heist, and buy T-shirts boasting: "I went to Rio and met Ronnie Biggs ... honest."

He seemed to be everywhere. He was a devotee of Rio's Carnival, an ever-present glass of beer in his hand.

As well as recording with the Sex Pistols, he wrote a memoir called Odd Man Out, and even promoted a home alarm system with the slogan: "Call the thief."

His last public appearance was in January, when he promoted Brazilian lingerie draped in a Union Jack and flanked by models in underwear and British police helmets.

His only professed regrets are his estrangement from Charmian and the injuries to Mr Mills. But his remorse is less than wholehearted when he claims the train driver suffered his worst injuries while falling. He forgets that Mr Mills would not have fallen unless he had been hit over the head.

Today, the ivy-covered gate at 470 Monte Alegre St is padlocked. Newspapers are piling up on the patio, and unopened mail fills the letterbox. Biggs is already missed.

"At first he was just my English neighbour, beefy, always joking, loved plants and beer," recalled Renan Cepeda, his neighbour for 11 years.

"It didn't seem he was this big myth until something happened and all the reporters came. Then I perceived his fame."

Cepeda struggled to understand why Biggs was leaving. Maybe he felt he was dying, he was tired of being a fugitive, he missed home, he wanted to leave Mike something by selling the story.

Is all the fuss justified for a fugitive robber?

"There was a big controversy when he came, that Brazil is a country that harbours and protects criminals," Cepeda said.

"Ronnie's conduct in Brazil proves that a guy can regenerate. But he had to prove that over time."

Drinkers in Margate, the southern British resort where where Biggs told the Sun he wants to "enjoy a pint of bitter like a true Englishman," have said they would queue up to buy him a drink.

But a poll of Sun readers found that 52 per cent do not want him to go free. Some are annoyed that he has apparently returned to take advantage of free healthcare and social security towards which he has paid nothing for 36 years.

Said 51-year-old Chris Clouston, of Sussex: "I don't go to work to pay for villains in their old age."