Roy James never had any need to become a criminal. He was a talented racing driver with the famous Brabham team and his future looked bright. Yet Roy liked to cock a snook at authority. Ergo his role in the ‘Train Robbery’. He was sentenced to 30 years in 1964.
After his release in 1976, he tried to resurrect his racing career, but crashed the second time out. He then turned his hand to gold smuggling with Charlie Wilson and was subsequently cleared of a £2.5 million V.A.T. fraud in 1984.
Shortly afterwards, Roy married Anthea, 30 years his junior and a bank manager’s daughter, who worked in Roy’s Hatton Garden jewelers shop. By 1994 they were separated and arguing bitterly over their two children, who Roy had custody of. The two main bones of contention were Anthea’s drink problem and a dispute over the divorce settlement.
One weekend, Anthea had an access visit with her daughters. Later, she returned them to Roy’s house, accompanied by her father. Soon a particularly acrimonious argument broke out. Roy snapped. He fetched a handgun from the house and shot Anthea’s father three times in the shoulder. He then beat Anthea with the gun.
At his trail he blamed the pressure of the ‘Train Robbery’ and its aftermath for his mental condition, claiming that it had ruined his life. The trial judge accepted that he was suffering from a depressive mental illness and sentenced him to a comparatively merciful six years imprisonment.
Whilst in prison he constantly complained that he felt ill. The prison authorities, as is their wont, accused him of malingering. Eventually they allowed him to go to an outside hospital for tests. The hospital kept him in, saying that he had a serious heart condition that required immediate surgery. They operated the same day and saved his life.
Over the following months his health went from strength to strength and he was eventually released with no obvious ill effects. However, Roy felt a deep sense of gratitude to the two German doctors who had saved his life. So when they informed him that they were conducting a series of tests that would benefit future heart patients and needed ten human guinea pigs, Roy felt obliged to help.
Students of bad jokes will have seen this coming. Two German doctors and ten human guinea pigs? You’ve got it. Roy died during the tests!
To those who knew him, Buster Edward’s story is really sad. Of all the ‘Robbers’, Buster had the most likeable personality. He was a shy and private man who, other than for a small group of friends, kept himself to himself. You had nothing to fear from Buster.
Generous and loyal to a fault, he would do anything to help a friend out. The irony is that so-called friends bled him of his share of the money whilst on the run. Buster didn’t have a nasty bone in his body and abhorred violence, so he couldn’t do a lot about it. Nearly penniless and with the pressure of life on the run becoming too much for him, he gave himself up in 1967 for a lesser sentence of 15 years. All he wanted was to be with his wife, June.
Although formerly enormously fat, Buster had a very determined nature. In prison he became a fitness fanatic, training for several hours every day. I trained regularly with him and, although ten years his junior and very fit myself, often struggled to keep up.
Buster was released in April 1975 and immediately began to struggle to survive. Being an ex-‘Train Robber’ precluded him from most types of employment and he got little or no help from former friends. Within months he was arrested and convicted of petty shop-lifting, in Harrods of all places. This was widely interpreted as a cry for help. Unfortunately no one was listening.
He then ran a flower stall outside Waterloo Station where he became something of a local landmark. I used to see him nearly every day as I crossed the Waterloo Bridge to visit my girlfriend in North London. Often I would stop and talk for a while.
Fresh out of jail myself, Buster warned me that it wasn’t like the old days. Then, ‘the chaps’ used to rally round and help out a fellow ‘face’. He complained bitterly that no one had helped him. To add insult to injury, a film purporting to be of his life was made, starring Phil Collins. Nobody asked his permission or otherwise consulted him and he was given a derisory £5,000.
Although on the surface he seemed his usual, cheerful self, in private he became increasingly depressed. There was a lock-up garage behind Waterloo Station where he used to keep his flower stall. One day he got drunk, went into the lock-up and hanged himself.
Tommy Wisbey was a trier, there can be no doubt about that. Despite almost criminal bad luck, he had pursued a thief’s life for over three decades. For his part in the ‘Train Robbery’ he was sentenced to 30 years in 1964. The bad news then piled up very fast. Barely two years later, one of his daughters was killed in a car crash.
Then he lost all his money that he had left in the safe-keeping of ‘friends’. In 1967, one of his few remaining friends, tried to retrieve it for him. Jackie ‘Scotch Jack’ Buggie, gangster and sometime lover of Shirley Bassey, confronted a well-known London criminal in a night club. In front of several witnesses, Buggie was shot to death, wrapped in a carpet and dumped at sea. Almost immediately it was disturbed by a mine-sweeper and found by two off-duty policemen out fishing. However, investigating officers were bribed, witnesses intimidated and no one was ever charged with the murder.
Wisbey was eventually released in 1974. In 1982 he was involved in another train robbery, but this time on a much smaller scale (so much for the deterrent effect of the 30 year sentence). Together with as many as nineteen others, they would travel as passengers and let themselves into locked, high value coaches with specially-made keys. Then they would throw the mailbags off the train to be collected by others waiting at the track-side. Over one million pounds-worth of travelers cheques went missing at the hands of the gang. All they could pin on Wisbey though was a ‘handling’ charge and he was fined £500.
In 1989, after an extensive surveillance operation, he and another ‘train robber’, Jimmy Hussey, were arrested in a drugs conspiracy. They were convicted of being in possession of 2.5 kilos of cocaine and one kilo of cocaine respectively. Wisbey was sentenced to ten years; Hussey to seven.
Several other ‘train robbers’ were touched by ‘the curse’, but in less spectacular ways. Following a bungled knee operation in prison, Bobby Welch was left permanently crippled. After years of pain he finally had a leg amputated. Bruce Reynolds lost something far more dear to him whilst in prison, his share of the loot. Poverty-stricken, on release he tried his hand at drugs dealing and was caught in possession of £5,000 worth of amphetamine and sentenced to three years.
William Boal wasn’t even on the robbery, although he did sit in on some of the earlier planning meetings. Some ‘creative investigating’ on the part of the police saw a watch with traces of paint from Leatherslade Farm planted on him. He was sentenced to 18 years and died in prison of a brain tumour.
Which just leaves Ronnie Biggs. Popular mythology has it that Ronnie is the only ‘lucky’ robber, leading an idyllic life on the run after escaping from prison only one year into a 25-year sentence, imposed in 1964. So has he been untouched by ‘the curse’?
In 1997 I was commissioned to work as a consultant on a ‘Secret History’ of the ‘Great Train Robbery’ for Channel Four. Together with a camera crew I flew to Rio where Ronnie had been avoiding extradition for 33 years. With me was an old friend of Ronnie’s, Freddie Foreman, former member of the Kray Gang.
We met Ronnie in his basement flat in a run-down area of Rio that had seen better days. His reunion with Fred was emotional. The talk was all of hiding out in Fred’s Auntie Nell’s flat, with a suitcase full of money hidden behind the sofa.
Ronnie looked well for a man of seventy, especially considering the stroke he had had the previous year. At the sight of the camera crew he seemed to come alive. Like the old trooper that he is, he launched into the well-rehearsed routine that has stood him in good stead through countless similar interviews over the years.
Later I pulled him aside and asked him about ‘the curse’ and we went through his life since the escape. He had lost most of his money through friends who had betrayed him. Then there was the pressure of life on the run in Australia with his wife, Charmaine, and their three children. When the police caught up with him he had fled to Brazil, leaving his family behind. His oldest boy was subsequently killed in a car crash and Ronnie didn’t hear about it for nine months.
He had been arrested in Brazil and subjected to lengthy extradition proceedings. His marriage to his Brazilian wife, Raimunda, had saved him. He was allowed to stay, but had to eke out a living giving interviews and working as a tour guide. Life had been one long struggle to survive. In 1981 he had been kidnapped to Barbados by an English adventurer, but the courts rejected the illegal nature of his capture and returned him to Brazil. Then his wife, eleven years his junior, had died suddenly. Not exactly a blissful existence in paradise at all.
Ron was adamant though. “I adopted Brazil as my country and I’ve taken the good with the bad over the last 33 years”, he said, as I leafed through newspaper cuttings showing Ron lying by the pool, drinking beer and surrounded by local beauties. It had all been largely a creation by the media though.
On the positive side, he introduced me to his Brazilian son, a fine-looking young man and former pop-star in some of the good days. The family Rottweiler played by the pool between two parrots in cages. I mused that perhaps life hadn’t been too bad in the circumstances. Brazil had been more than some vast open prison for him.
All at once the camera crew were ready again. Ron climbed wearily to his feet, a resigned look on his face. “What a way to have to earn a living”, he said. Suddenly it came to me. Perhaps this was driver Mills’ curse on Ronnie Biggs.
However, there was one final indignity to come. Seriously ill and in need of a crucial operation that he didn‘t have the money to pay for, Ronnie agreed to come back to England and give himself up. Somehow, ‘The Sun’ newspaper had got in on the act. They enlisted the aid of Bruce Reynolds to travel to Brazil and come back with Ron. He was paid a large sum for his help.
Ron duly arrived in England, wearing a white t-shirt with ‘The Sun’ emblazoned on it. One could only reflect on the old man’s state of mind that he had allowed himself to be talked into such a media circus. Further, those of us with experience of the Home Office, knew that they would want their pound of flesh. Old and ill, or not, they would want to make an example of Ronnie for all the years he had got away with it. There would be no mercy on their part.
Located in the top security Belmarsh prison with international terrorists and major drug dealers, Ron finally had his operation. It left him unable to speak and partially crippled. His ever-dutiful son constantly petitions the Home Office for his release on compassionate grounds, but compassion is in short supply where Ronnie is concerned.
So still serving his 30-year sentence for a crime committed over 40 years ago, he sits mute and waiting for death in a top security prison. Surely, this is driver Mills’ curse on Ronnie Biggs.
The End