Ronnie Biggs: The Bungling Train Robber Who Became a Punk Folk Hero

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Ronald Arthur Biggs had one job in the Great Train Robbery of August 1963: bring a driver who could move the hijacked mail train. The retired railwayman he recruited had only driven shunting engines and could not work the diesel locomotive. The gang beat the real driver, Jack Mills, with an iron bar and forced him to do it, while Biggs waited in a vehicle. He still collected a full share of about 147,000 pounds. Police found his fingerprints on a ketchup bottle at Leatherslade Farm, and in 1964 he was sentenced to 30 years.

He served 15 months before going over the wall of Wandsworth Prison on a rope ladder. Plastic surgery in Paris, years of hiding in Australia, and a flight to Rio de Janeiro followed, and the fortune vanished along the way. This episode follows the strange celebrity he built in Brazil, selling barbecues and coffee mugs to tourists, and it counts the cost paid by others: the wife and sons he abandoned in Melbourne, and a train driver who never recovered.

The robbery fell on Biggs's 34th birthday. He had joined to raise a house deposit after meeting the driver on a carpentry job.
In 1974 Scotland Yard detective Jack Slipper tracked him to Rio, but Brazilian law barred deporting the father of a Brazilian child, and his girlfriend was pregnant.
His vocal on the Sex Pistols track No One Is Innocent reached number seven on the UK Singles Chart in 1978.
British ex-soldiers kidnapped him in 1981, but their boat broke down off Barbados, which sent him back to Brazil.
He flew home in 2001 on a jet paid for by The Sun, went straight to Belmarsh, was freed on compassionate grounds in 2009, and died on December 18, 2013.

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