Sixty three years after the Great Train Robbery, Duncan Campbell remembers Ronnie Biggs - and other crooks who went AWOL
Ever wanted to disappear? Just slip out of the house one day and start a new life in a new place with a new identity?
How easy is it? A bunch of new books by or about people who have been ‘on the run’, sometimes for decades, are full of tips – and warnings – about how to vanish.
It’s just over 63 years since the Great Train Robbery took place on 8th August 1963.
It led to the arrest of a dozen or so suspects and the jailing of some of them for 30 years. Those long sentences would prompt the robbers still at large to flee and others to escape from prison and disappear.
The mastermind, Bruce Reynolds, fled to Mexico with his wife, Frances, and young son, Nick. The latter, now a musician with the Alabama 3, has produced an audio book, Fugitive! On the Run with Britain’s Most Wanted, which recounts his and others’ experiences of a life in hiding.
As a little boy, Nick thought his father must be a secret agent – which seemed to explain to him why name changes were necessary. Even when the family returned to England, still on the run, he reckoned the large number of detectives who finally came to arrest his dad in Torquay must surely be colleagues and he was puzzled when they took him away.
Ronnie Biggs escaped from Wandsworth Prison in 1965, headed to Paris, had plastic surgery to change his appearance and made it to Australia.
When his cover was blown there, he fled to Brazil in 1970 where he fathered a son, Michael, with his girlfriend, Raimunda, meaning he couldn’t be extradited. He told his tale in The Great Train Robbery, written with Chris Pickard, which has just been republished. Biggs would have stayed there happily for the rest of his life had ill health not intervened.
As he said, ‘If I’m to become a dribbling nuisance, one of Her Majesty’s hostelries might be just the place to spend my twilight years.’ He duly returned in 2001 after suffering strokes and spent the next eight years behind bars before being released and dying in 2013.
In their book, A Million Ways to Stay on the Run, Donal MacIntyre and Karl Howman tell the story of Kenneth Noye, who was acquitted of killing the undercover detective John Fordham. In 1996, Noye was a wanted man for the road-rage murder of Stephen Cameron. He made it out of the country and into France, Morocco, the Ivory Coast and Cuba before the law finally caught up with him in Barbate in southern Spain. He spent the next 21 years behind bars in England.
Tony Sales, author of The Big Con, was a very active fraudster, who was about to go on trial but went on the run instead and created hundreds of new identities. Six years later, when he was finally arrested, he found out that if he had just faced the music at the time he would only have got 18 months’ probation. ‘Criminals rarely get away,’ he writes. ‘Happy endings are few and far between.’
But how do you get a new identity? Back in 1971, Freddie Forsyth’s Day of the Jackal (currently being remade as a film with Eddie Redmayne as the Jackal) explained how to scour a graveyard, spot the grave of a child born at roughly the same time as you and apply for a passport in their name.
How do you do it now? Anthony Beard was jailed for six years at Reading Crown Court in March for providing bogus identities to criminals.
He went to homeless hostels and persuaded people with drug and alcohol problems to lend him their identities for £100. He then renewed their expired passports with a photo of a criminal on the run. The fugitive would pay up to £20,000 for the new identity.
But where to go? Spain was the place when the extradition treaty with Britain lapsed in 1978 because of a dispute between the two countries. Dozens of villains headed for the Costa del Crime. Although the treaty was reinstituted in 1985, it is still a popular place to hide.
Currently the ‘Most Wanted’ list published online by the National Crime Agency shows that all the men they want so badly are in Spain. The previous campaign led to the arrest of 86 offenders, usually after being ratted on by rival criminals. Turkish-occupied Northern Cyprus, which also had no extradition agreement with the UK, and Thailand both became popular hideouts.
Does life on the lam pall? Remember Catch Me If You Can, starring Leonardo DiCaprio, about the real-life conman, Frank Abagnale, who had a handful of different identities and bogus professional qualifications.
He told me that, in the end, it was a relief to be arrested: ‘You don’t want to live your whole life looking over your shoulder. Down deep, we all want to get caught eventually.’
Maybe not quite all. More than 170,000 people go ‘missing’ in the UK every year, according to the charity Missing People. Most return or are traced but there are still those – maybe someone reading this article as they sun themselves on a beach far, far away – who are happy to disappear for ever.
Duncan Campbell was the Guardian’s crime correspondent and LA correspondent.
