Ronnie's Rio Adventure

At 6:50 PM on Wednesday, the 7^th of August 1963, as it had done every night for 125 years, the Glasgow to London mail train set off on its journey from Scotland to the Capital. The second car behind the engine, where registered mail was sorted and valuables were carried, contained 2.6 million pounds in used bank notes. They’d be worth over forty million in today’s money and were being returned to the Bank of England for destruction. Shortly after 3 AM the driver, Jack Mills, responded to a red signal light and brought his train to a stop. But Mills had been fooled; what he’d seen was a ruse. A gang of robbers from London had covered a green light and connected a six-volt battery to power a red one. They quickly dominated the men in the locomotive and the mail car. Then they uncoupled the engine and the first two cars from the train. Mills was forced to drive them one and one half miles to the designated unloading spot: Bridego Bridge.

There, the thieves removed 120 sacks containing two-and-a-half tons of money, brought it back to their safe house and divvied it up. Within forty-eight hours a flying squad from Scotland Yard had been formed and was busy chasing the criminals. Their first break came when a suspicious vehicle was reported at Leatherslade Farm about 30 miles from the scene of the crime.

Inside the abandoned farmhouse they discovered a few of the stolen banknotes, a number of empty post office sacks, and a ketchup bottle upon which there were fingerprints belonging to a petty criminal named Ronald Biggs.

Biggs was arrested a few weeks later. He was subsequently tried, sentenced to thirty years, and incarcerated in Wandsworth Prison. That was supposed to have been the end of the story – but it wasn’t. Fifteen months later Biggs escaped, underwent plastic surgery to disguise his face and disappeared. Four years later, it turned out that the place he’d disappeared to was Australia. He was spotted, but managed to evade his pursuers and disappeared for a second time. Scotland Yard didn’t give up. They kept searching and finally caught up with him again in 1974. By that time, Biggs was in Rio de Janeiro. They gleefully pounced, only to discover that his Brazilian girlfriend, Raimunda de Castro, was pregnant.

And guess what? Before the law enforcement people could get their act together, the baby was born.

As the father of a Brazilian child, Brazilian law proscribed Biggs’ extradition. And, since he’d committed no crime in Brazil, there were no grounds upon which to arrest him.

The cops, both British and Brazilian, gnashed their teeth, but there wasn’t a thing they could do about it. But it wasn’t all sunlight and roses for the former fugitive. The money the gang had stolen had, in turn, been stolen from them, and Biggs was broke. To support himself and his little family, he hit on the idea of turning his home into an “invitation only” barbecue restaurant where the price of the meal included a free “I had lunch with Ronald Biggs” T-shirt and where, for an extra charge, you could have yourself photographed arm in arm with the host. 

The restaurant endeavor led to invitations to perform with various punk rock groups...

...and participation in a series of advertising campaigns. This one, done late in life, was for a lingerie manufacturer.

Finally, in 2001, requiring the kind of medical care he could no longer afford in Brazil, but could get for free in an English prison, Biggs voluntarily returned to the U.K. to serve the remaining 28 years of his sentence. 

He was released from a Norwich prison for elderly inmates (on compassionate grounds) on the 6^th of August, 2009, two days before his eightieth birthday.

Ya gotta wonder how Ronnie is dealing with the climate after thirty-odd years in the tropics.

Leighton - Monday