Former fugitive in ‘great’ train heist dies a free man

Published 12:00 am Friday, December 20, 2013

LONDON — He vowed to live a few more months out of spite. He hung on for four more years in a last great cackle at the establishment that spent decades trying to get him behind bars to atone for one of the most sensational crimes in British history.

Ronnie Biggs, who helped commit the “Great Train Robbery” of 1963, fulfilled a wish by dying a free man after a life greatly spent on the lam in notoriously colorful and conspicuous fashion. Ever the publicity hound, Biggs, 84, could scarcely have timed his passing better — just hours before the BBC was to broadcast a new miniseries about the spectacular heist, which was once dubbed the “crime of the century.”

His death was announced Wednesday on his official Twitter feed. He died sometime during the previous night at a nursing home outside London where he had spent several years battling various illnesses.

Biggs was a household name in Britain for 50 years, a convicted criminal who had broken out of prison, who lived large — and at large — on the sun-drenched beaches of Brazil and who finally gave himself up, in thoroughly British fashion, to a tabloid newspaper in 2001. Acting on a desire to set foot in his native land one last time, Biggs flew back to England amid a media clamor and surrendered to authorities, who immediately locked him up.

In August 2009, the British government relented from its unyielding stance and released Biggs from custody, concluding that — at age 79 and nearly incapacitated in his hospital bed — he no longer posed a threat to society. Frail but unbowed, Biggs joked that he would try to last until Christmas “to spite those who want me dead.”

His death nearly five Christmases later brings to a close a long-running saga that has fascinated and repelled England for half a century, sparking heated debate over the competing demands of justice and mercy, and whether Biggs was an unrepentant felon who was party to a violent crime or merely a lovable rogue who loved to party.

He certainly saw himself as the latter, cultivating an image as a catch-me-if-you-can figure who lived a playboy’s life on the beaches of Rio de Janeiro, merrily thumbing his nose at the authorities across the Atlantic while marketing himself as a tourist attraction to visitors he’d regale with stories — for a fee.

But Biggs also gave ammunition to his critics with statements like one he made in a 1997 interview.

“I don’t regret the fact that I was involved in the train robbery. As a matter of fact, I’m quite pleased with the idea I was involved, because it’s given me a little place in history,” Biggs said.

His role in the robbery was almost an afterthought. The heist’s mastermind, Bruce Reynolds, an antiques dealer who went by the nickname “Napoleon,” invited Biggs to join late in the process of putting together a daring plan to ambush the Glasgow-to-London mail train.

By then, Ronald Arthur Biggs, who was born Aug. 8, 1929, in Surrey, south of London, was a carpenter looking for some easy money. On his 34th birthday, in 1963, Biggs and 14 other masked thieves forced the mail train to stop by turning a track signal to red and swarming aboard under cover of darkness.

They beat the driver senseless with an iron bar; the man never fully recovered from his head injuries. Then they made off with 120 mailbags stuffed with unmarked currency amounting to 2.6 million pounds — well in excess of $65 million today.

The gang divvied up the loot in a farmhouse, which they paid some people to burn down afterward. But the arson did not go off as planned, leaving behind enough evidence for authorities to track them down.

For the British, caught in the grip of imperial decline, the robbery was a national sensation, the “crime of the century.”

Authorities arrested and convicted more than a dozen people, including Biggs, in connection with the heist. But most of the stolen money was never recovered.

Barely 15 months into his 30-year sentence at Wandsworth Prison in London, Biggs managed to escape in July 1965 by scaling a 30-foot wall with a rope ladder. He fled in a furniture van and eventually washed up in Australia, spending much of his share of the stolen cash along the way on plastic surgery to alter his appearance.