Ronnie Biggs: rich man, poor man

The Weekend Australian Magazine

9 October 1999

Regrets, says the Great Train Robber, I’ve had a few. Ronnie Biggs opens up
in his Rio hide-out.  

Ronnie Biggs appears in the doorway of his Rio de Janeiro redoubt, the proud set of his features instantly recognisable. "Take a seat in the bedroom. It's cooler in there," he says in a soft, almost courtly manner. Despite three decades in this fast-paced Latin American paradise, the voice is pure EastEnders.

Dressed in a checked pyjama shirt unbuttoned to the chest, over boxer shorts in a clashing plaid, Biggs ushers me to a bedroom with bottle green shutters closed and places me in a chair while he sits on the edge of an unmade double bed. He's a tall man, and looks uncomfortable perched there. As if to explain the cluttered state of the place, he offers: "I've been sadly without a lady in my life since the death of Ulla a few years ago." Ulla, he adds, died of a heart attack.

The feet of this great Houdini - he escaped South London's Wandsworth prison after serving only 15 months, survived discovery in Australia, capture by Scotland Yard in Brazil, and a kidnapping attempt or two - are shod in slippers. Casual is not quite the word for it. He's dressed more like a convalescent.
I've wound my way up the switchback streets of the shabbily elegant suburb of Santa Teresa to reach Biggs just a month after his 70th birthday, August 8, which was also the 36th anniversary of the great robbery itself.

Despite the benediction of a giant statue of Christ - arms outstretched atop one of those preposterous granite peaks that ring the becalmed Guanabara Bay and the famed Copacabana and Ipanema beaches - Rio is one of the least pious places on Earth. The city honours a pantheon of its own making: gods of the spirit, and gods of the blood. Think Carnivale. Sweat. Flesh. Driving samba rhythms. Crazy Macumba rites. This city of six million is the perfect retreat for Biggs, alias Michael Haynes, who arrived here in 1970 before Brazil had an extradition treaty with Britain. He scarpered from Melbourne, where he'd settled with wife Charmian and three sons, after a tip-off, as he tells me, from "a Chinese bloke - no names, no pack drill”.

But first things first. Biggs wants to see the lucre. Armed with the finance pages of the local daily, he's keen to see that the Brazilian currency I've brought tallies with the $US500 ($A750) he's nominated as a fee for the interview. The problem, he says, is that his head is spinning after a recent stroke. So he begins to ask questions that sound suspiciously like long division. Being semi-innumerate, I'm not much help, and the whole thing seems to take an age. At last, he settles on a conversion formula, scrapes together the notes on the bed, and looks up with points of light in his eyes I'd not seen earlier.

t's hard to imagine anyone taking much delight in mid-'60s, pre-cappuccino Australia, but Biggs has fond memories of Sydney, Melbourne, and especially laid-back, Menzies-era Adelaide, where "life was a bowl of cherries, almost". But it wasn't to last. He remembers the "poignant moment" he slid out of Sydney Harbour on a boat bound for South America, and "everyone is up on deck singing Waltzing Matilda as we went under the bridge. I thought to myself right there and right then, 'I'll never see this wonderful country again.' I was off on the voyage. I don't suppose I'll get over there now.”

He recalls his last New Year's Eve in Australia a few months earlier, when he was in Melbourne hiding from the police in a friend's house. Alone, unable to contact Charmian and boys Nick, Chris and Farley, he "raised a glass to loved ones and absent friends and listened to the neighbours singing Auld Lang Syne". Of course, these affecting moments are designed to touch, and Biggs, whose main source of income is his story, is a skilled narrator - his stroke seems to have left the yarning compartment of the cerebrum untouched. (Little more than a week later, Biggs was felled by a second minor stroke, this one depriving him temporarily of speech.)

It takes an effort of will to recall that his exile was self-motivated, the result of a hugely ambitious robbery - no petty crime - which saw the train driver bashed. He later died of his injuries. To this day Biggs will say only that the "biggest member" of the gang was responsible.

But his own life has not been without tragedy. Biggs never again saw second-born Nick, who died in a car crash at the age of 10, a year after the wandering train robber arrived in Rio. "A friend was receiving my letters," he recalls. "That weekend, there was a very thick one from Charmian. It said immediately that she had bad news. I was devastated. Literally speechless. I just wanted to give myself up. I went to the British embassy and just sat outside wanting to turn myself in." Charmian is still in Melbourne; some ineffable bond has endured. Biggs has a tilt at describing it: "If you love somebody totally, it's forever. Our devotion. It was wonderful.”

There's always been a strong folkloric appeal to Biggs's tale, to the cleverly orchestrated heist of a government train that netted more than £2.6 million in 1963 (only a small proportion was ever recovered). His cut was £147,000 - something like $A6 million-plus in today's figures. A third of it went on his escape and the safe passage to Australia for Charmian and the kids, more still on the exile to Rio. Biggs remains proud of his part in what he calls the "crime of the century". And in an age that confers hipdom on the crim and the hit man (Pulp Fiction; Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels), or at the very least normalises the criminal underworld (Analyse This), a life spent eluding the law seems more heroic than ever.

But it depends on the line you take through that life. An odyssey that appears heroic from one perspective seems rather harrowing from another. Biggs, for example, is a man with a talent for domesticity (loves women, children, likes to cook), yet his escape from Australia severed him from Charmian and the family. Charmian later re-invented herself as a magazine editor after going to university, and worked for a time at the Wheat Board. She has changed her name; children Chris and Farley are believed to be in Melbourne, too.

Biggs's other son, Mike, whose biological existence guaranteed he would remain out of Scotland Yard's reach, still lives part of the time with him. Biggs was left to bring up Mike by himself after Mike's Brazilian mother, Raimunda - variously described as a dancer and a stripper - shot through a year after the birth. "She wanted to continue to work as a dancer in Paris, and didn't see a future in that with me.”

Though "really broke and living in the countryside", he liked being left holding the baby. In photos of that time, father and son seem deeply bound; in fact, Biggs doubled as father and mother to the child, who would call out for his mamae (mum) whenever he fell or hurt himself. The great train robber, dutifully, would be there by his side. The two still get along. "Mike's a great kid," Biggs tells me.

As Biggs unwinds his tale, I find myself bearing in on the loss of his family in Melbourne, the permanent loss of the second child a year later, and the way this would saw through the psyche of anyone remotely functional. Perhaps it's gnawing guilt that makes him, several times in our chat, stress that it was Charmian's call for him to leave Australia. "She insisted I go on the run," he says. "She felt I was doing it for her and the kids.” 

Having him father a child with a Brazilian dancer was doubtless not part of Charmian's plan and he concedes that, when his wife visited just after his capture in 1974, she wasn't exactly happy about it. "But she offered to grant me a divorce so I could remarry.”

In rather obvious ways, Biggs has been a lucky man. And yet, he says: "My number one regret is being parted from my wife and kids." As if to underscore the darker notes of his life, which are absent from the Biggs myth and masked by his laddish persona, he relates something the organiser of the Great Train Robbery, Bruce Reynolds, said recently: "It's all very well people thinking he's sipping pina coladas up there in Rio, but he's done his time like the rest of us." Biggs adds: "There were times when I was really, really broke.”

Money, the getting of it, the losing of it, is naturally a big theme in Biggs's life, but in rather unpredictable ways. In his own mythology, money is some sort of malign god who sports cruelly with hapless Ronnie. Rather improbably, he is forever the victim. "You wouldn't believe the number of times I've been ripped off," he said on the phone when he first mentioned the interview fee. Later, an acquaintance in Rio, who at one time played darts with Biggs, tells me: "He never really enjoyed his money." And so it seems. Being outside the law, he was also outside its protection. He flourishes a front page of The Times from 1979, the year of his collaboration with the Sex Pistols. It predicted, in tones of middle-class outrage, that he'd receive £30,000 from the recording of No One is Innocent. It went on to sell seven million copies. Biggs says he received $US1000.

While I spot two bottles of Veuve Clicquot in the fridge - hoardings, he says, for New Year's Eve - the apartment that Biggs shares with Mike is not exactly salubrious. A modest plunge pool burbles away out on the slate-clad back deck, beside a canopy of bougainvillea and a giant TV dish. A few sets of bathers are drying on the line. Biggs' basement-level apartment, reached by a set of steep, uncovered steps, is in a 60-year-old block, in a suburb built from a memory of old Lisbon. Chez Biggs, too, is well stored with memory. I counted several Union Jacks in different guises, a poster of the Queen smoking a joint, even a "Ned Kelly Drinks Here" poster beside a dartboard mushed up with use.

To make too much of the hardships of exile, however, would be to cut against the grain of Biggs's personality, his immense charm, good cheer and plain chutzpah. He likes to laugh, and laughs often. Blessed with an essentially genial nature, he also has a keen sense of life's ironies, and perhaps couldn't have survived his rollercoaster ride without it. One of his favourite stories bears this out. Bruce Reynolds, dubbed "Prince of Thieves" by the British press for orchestrating the robbery, drove him home with his cash afterwards. "We had a cup of tea," Biggs says. "When he departed, I shook his hand and said: `I'll see you again.' But I didn't actually see him again until seven years ago. I was standing out there waiting for him to come down those stairs, and my opening words were: `Well, Bruce, got any more good ideas?' "

The way Ronnie tells it, he's only felt the slow burn of true hatred once: towards John Miller, a former Scots Guardsman who twice attempted to kidnap him in Brazil. "It made me very angry for the first time in my life. I wanted to kill somebody; I really wanted to kill this Miller. It was a thing I'd never experienced before. I thought, if I get a chance, I'll kill the man."

Biggs was born in the London borough of Lambeth on August 8, 1929, to a working-class family. He was the youngest of five children. His mother died when he was in his teens; shortly afterwards, aged 15, he made his first appearance in court - for stealing pencils. He came before the magistrates another two times that year, for pilfering. His first prison sentence came in 1949. He was just 19. The next 14 years saw him in and out of court, in and out of jail. Ironically, though, it was a plea to Reynolds (Biggs was working as a carpenter) for a loan of £500 that cut him in on the robbery of the mail train between Glasgow and London, and sealed his fate.

Biggs, though, was never the brains or the strong man. The cop who finally caught up with him in Brazil, chief superintendent Jack Slipper of the Flying Squad, recently declared him a mere "tea boy, second class", and no villain. It didn't deter Slipper from hunting Biggs down to a Rio hotel and arresting him in 1974. Biggs takes up the story: "Just a few hours before, Raimunda had told me she thought she might be pregnant. At the time I thought it was a problem I could well do without. But after my arrest, in a cell with four or five other guys in Brasilia, a taxi driver, I think it was, told me the one way to get out of my problems was to have a Brazilian child. When I told him about Raimunda's condition, he just kept saying, `Chi Belezza! ' [What a beauty!]"

With the set-piece part of the interview over, Biggs asks me if I'd like to stay for a bite. Spinning around from my seat in the darkened room I notice several photos of Charmian - at least one from the '60s - and the boys.

Biggs dresses in polo and slacks and natty brown shoes, freshly polished, and seems a new man. His Brazilian housemaid, Rosa, is reheating leftovers in an ancient microwave, and there's more than enough to go around. But first he has to calm a giant mastiff named Blitz (after Blitzkrieg, because he "strikes like lightning"). The dog rises on his hind legs and reaches up to his master, whimpering for a smooch. "He's lov-erly," says Biggs in that winning cockney lilt, rubbing the dog's ample neck. "He's smashin'."

Mike walks in, all extroverted energy, sounding more East London than his father - though he was brought up almost entirely in Brazil. He's pleased to see the spread on the table - a Brazilian bean and salted pork dish teamed with mash (an English addition). "Dad," he says, patting Biggs softly on the arm, "you've got to eat."

When Biggs takes two cans of Brazilian beer from the fridge he casts an apologetic glance at Mike. "I'll just have the one," he says. He tosses me the other.

Conversation drifts into discussions about hairlines; Mike, whose dark hair is thinly thatched on top, points out that Ron's snowy hairline hasn't changed for years. I notice the latter's eyes locked hard on me, on the last traces of a hairline. "But the way you've got it [totally shorn] suits you," he says rather paternally.

A few weeks later, back in Sydney, I realised what had fuelled this curious conversation - Ronnie had got himself a make-over with Advanced Hair Studios, with the ads shown in Australia, New Zealand and Britain.

Mike, settling into a chair on the far side of the kitchen table, tells me he runs a few music rehearsal studios in town, lives part of the time in the country, and that he and his partner are expecting their first child. I’ve heard tell in a Rio bar that he petitioned the Queen to pardon his Dad. Did he? I ask. "I was just a kid," he says. "She wouldn't have even read it. The Home Office or something wrote back to say it wasn't her responsibility." His mouth locks into a grimace. "Yeah, she's just the bloody Queen."

With lunch at an end Mike, who has obviously taken his genes from Raimunda - he's shorter than Ronnie, without his Byronic profile - announces that he'd just stopped by. Has to run. "Dad," he says, reaching into his pocket. "Do you need some money for the weekend?" Biggs shoots me a conspiratorial look: "No thanks, son. I've just had a …transfusion."

A few minutes later he's following me up the stairs. He takes the climb slowly, stops on the third from the top, takes a deep breath. "The doctor tells me I've got to take it easy," he says. Age, these days, is the only thing in hot pursuit of Ronnie Biggs; the only thing likely to haul him in with a tap on the shoulder and a, "You're nicked, Ronnie."

My last memory is of the great adventurer in exile, squeezed into a miniature Brazilian taxi, fanging off down the street with a visiting Brit, off to do "some business" in town. *