Great Train Robbers 'planned second Royal Mail rail heist'

Today is the Fiftieth Anniversary of the Great Train Robbery It has gone down as the greatest British heist in history. Now, previously unseen documents suggest that criminals linked to the Great Train Robbery planned a second raid on another Royal Mail rail service only months later. Police investigating the original theft received a series of "reliable" tip-offs that a second raid – to be at least as vast in scale – was being organised by individuals connected to the earlier one. Informants told police that the gang were planning to ambush a mail train travelling from Weymouth, in Dorset, to London Waterloo. The existence of the proposed heist is disclosed in a new book The Great Train Robbery: The Untold Story From The Closed Investigation Files. Andrew Cook, the author, has studied more than 1,000 pages of previously unseen documents from the Director of Public Prosecutions, the Post Office and the Metropolitan Police to build an authoritative account of the raid, in which £2.6 million in cash – the equivalent of around £44 million today – was stolen when a Glasgow to London Euston mail train was forced to stop in remote Buckinghamshire countryside. The documents also implicate several individuals who were never charged, including two on a list of 14 suspects given to police by an informant within days of the raid, in August 1963. Related Articles Swedish cleaner who crashed train cleared 18 Jan 2013 British have invaded nine out of ten countries 04 Nov 2012 Oliver Cromwell – the metrosexual: how the Lord Protector became the skin protector 06 May 2012 The trench talk that is now entrenched in language 25 Nov 2012 The source also gave an incredibly detailed description of the crime and all the other names on the list were later prosecuted. One of the two was Henry Smith, who had a criminal record dating back to 1947, and was only traced after a nine month manhunt. Officers could find no evidence to link him to the hideout used by the gang after the robbery but concluded "there was not the slightest doubt in our minds of police that Smith... was one of the robbers actually at the scene and taking a very active part in the commission of the offence". They believe Smith – who died in 2008 – spent his money from the raid on buying, through associates, "32 houses (including a row of 11), a drinking club and a hotel in the Portsmouth and Gosport districts". The second individual on the list who was never charged – even though police concluded he was "strongly suspected" – is still alive. The files also lend credence to theories that the original gang included a high ranking Post Office official who passed on details via an intermediary. A total of 17 people faced trial for the robbery, but it is thought there were four other men who helped rob the train, as well as several more who assisted in the organisation, who were never prosecuted. The individuals involved in planning the second raid are not known and several of those involved in the first one had already been arrested by the time it was allegedly being planned. However, police believe there was a clear overlap between the two. The files suggest the gang due to carry out the raid on the Weymouth-Waterloo line would be "at least on the scale of the one that carried out" the first one and, according to some reports, the haul targeted would be up to £6 million – more than twice that stolen from the Glasgow train. The raid was expected to happen early in the New Year 1964, when large amounts of money was due to be transported by rail. The first vague tip-offs were received in September 1963. Then, just before Christmas that year, the officer leading the hunt for the Great Train Robbers, Commander George Hatherill, received further information from three sources about the second operation. According to one document, the intelligence "suggests very strongly that an attack ... was being planned by criminals some of whom were connected with the (original) gang". In response to the threat, officers launched a major operation, code-named "Primrose" - apparently because many of the suspects were connected to an address near Belsize Park, with a "Primrose" telephone code. It involved a survey of the 130 mile track to likely areas for an ambush. Some of the intelligence suggested it would take place at Weybridge, in Surrey, but other locations were also considered. A control room was set up, in Hampshire, to operate each night that the service was running, to receive regular signals from the train and ensure it was safe. Checks were also made on vacant or suspicious properties within a 20 mile area each side of the line, in case the gang had already set up a hide-out, in which to lie low after the raid, as they had done after the earlier heist. Police were particularly concerned that the gang could use caravans in the New Forest. However, detectives also considered that the gang might try to flee straight away with their haul, so established check points to stop traffic. Arrangements were also made to allow police to pursue suspects across county borders. Extra security measures were introduced on the train, with security officers travelling on board and window bars, alarms and loud hailers fitted. The operation lasted four months, but officers eventually concluded that although the original intelligence had been accurate, the gang had abandoned their plans in response to the security measures. Mr Cook said: "It was clear that the threat was taken extremely seriously."

Great train bunglers: The Great Train Robbers were blundering thugs, not criminal masterminds

For half a century they have been seen as criminal masterminds who pulled off the Crime of the Century. But the Great Train ­Robbers can now be unmasked as ­bungling thugs who were lucky not to be caught before they fled the scene. Fifty years after the gang became household names for holding up a postal train and stealing £2.6million, the myths surrounding Britain’s most famous heist – and the men who carried it out – have been completely debunked. And – according to new book The Great Train Robbery, by Nick Russell-Pavier and Stewart Richards – many of the cops who finally brought some of the robbers to justice were just as ­bumbling, nearly letting them off the hook with a series of errors. The robbers’ ringleaders were Gordon Goody, Charlie Wilson and Bruce Reynolds. Ronald “Buster” Edwards – later portrayed by Phil Collins in 1988 movie Buster – was also at the core of the gang. It is suspected they received inside information that the Travelling Post Office train, en route to London, was ripe for attack. It carried 128 mailbags, stuffed with £2,595,997 in cash – worth about £45million today – but was effectively unguarded. They put together a gang of 16 men and planned to stop the train in the early hours of August 8, 1963, by rigging a signal at Sears Crossing, between Leighton Buzzard, Beds, and Cheddington, Bucks. On the night of the robbery, phone lines were cut to stop signal staff calling for help. But a GPO engineer came close to uncovering the crime when he was called to look into a fault – caused by the gang’s handiwork. One man, John Daly, had been told to alter the signal by placing a glove over a green light and using a battery to turn on an amber light. But inexplicably he unscrewed the bulb. The book says: “Daly’s blunder was one of a number of critical errors during the raid that illustrate the gang’s lack of technical knowledge.” The gang planned to use their own driver to move the train half a mile down the track, before loading the mailbags on to waiting trucks. But “expert” driver Ronnie Biggs suddenly realised he didn’t know how to move the locomotive. They had to get the real driver, Jack Mills, to do it for them. Although he was nursing a serious head injury after being attacked, he managed to spot that the crooks hadn’t released the brake properly. The attack on Mills is often seen as the one dark moment during an ­otherwise trouble-free heist. His ­family say he never recovered from his injury before his death in 1970. But the book says: “The Great Train Robbery raid was peppered with acts of violence. It is only remarkable that other victims were not more seriously injured.” The robbers always said they didn’t carry firearms but one of the workers in the mailbag carriage claims to have heard one member shout: “Get the guns.” Several burst in, armed with coshes. One had an axe. Assistant post office inspector Thomas Kett was whacked on the arm with a cosh as he tried to protect himself. A colleague was hit several times by the same attacker. Another worker was struck across the shoulders by a raider wielding an iron bar. Kett was hit on the head by a robber left guarding the crew – who also laid into another victim. After the heist, the gang hid out at Leatherslade Farm near Oakley, Bucks. At 28 miles from the scene of their crime, it was judged to be close enough to reach before police could respond effectively to the robbery, yet far enough away for the robbers’ presence there not to arouse suspicion. They fled when they heard radio reports that the police were focusing on properties within a 30-mile radius of the robbery. But they left a trail of clues behind them. Police found robbers’ ­fingerprints at the farm, including those of Ronnie Biggs on a Monopoly box, a Pyrex plate and a ketchup ­bottle. The biggest find was 35 mailbags containing bank money wrappers and £627 in Scottish banknotes. The book says: “For the gang to have left these mailbags and cash in the farmhouse seems an extraordinarily stupid mistake.” Aerial shot of the great train robbery at Sears Crossing in 1963 Heist: The train had no guard Mirrorpix But the police also committed basic errors. Roadblocks were set up straight after the robbery, but officers didn’t show up for nearly two hours. At first they had no idea how much money had been stolen – initial reports ­suggested less than £1million. When a local police chief called for dog teams to be deployed and smallholdings to be searched, his orders were ignored. But the book says if they had been carried out “the protracted investigation that tied up hundreds of police officers at vast public expense for many years would have been ­concluded within days if not hours.” Eventually, 16 of the gang ­members were brought to trial. Seven – Biggs, Goody, Wilson, Hussey, Thomas ­Wisbey, Robert Welch and Roy James – were given 30-year jail terms. Brothers Brian and Leonard Field received 25-year sentences. William Boal, Roger Cordrey and John ­Wheater got 24, 20 and three years respectively. The last suspect John Daly successfully argued there was no case against him. Buster ­Edwards and Bruce Reynolds went on to serve nine years. James White was sentenced to 18 years after three years on the run. So four gang members were never captured. But the book’s authors unearthed documents from the Post Office ­archive showing two police lists containing the names of those who were arrested or who admitted being involved in the robbery. There are 10 new names on the lists – one, Henry Smith, appears on both – and the book suggests he, with three others, could well be the missing gang members. So was the Great Train Robbery ­really all that great? The book argues: “There was a great deal of money stolen. There were a great many people involved and it took a great deal of police effort to bring the criminals to justice. “For the criminals, great plans were made and great dreams were lost. There were a great number of mistakes made... In that sense, the mail-train robbery could be considered great in many ways.” http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/great-train-robbers-unmasked-blundering-1519952

Great Train Robber Goody Confesses Fifty Years On

AN oxygen tank by his side, ­Gordon Goody cuts a frail figure as he sits in his Spanish garden. Regarded by many as the mastermind behind the Great Train Robbery, the ­incredible story of his life is drawing to an end. But before he dies, Goody, 84, wants to tell the truth about his role in one of Britain’s most notorious crimes. And as the 50th ­anniversary of the robbery approaches next month, he speaks publicly for the first time. In an exclusive interview, he tells just how the gang pulled it off and claims that the police had to fabricate evidence to get him sent to prison. “I got away with the perfect crime, so the police fitted me up,” he says. “I’m not saying I was an innocent man being fitted up – I was a guilty man doing his best not to get fitted up, but they were ­determined to get me and they did.” The Great Train Robbery netted Goody and his 17-strong gang £2.6million – ­equivalent to more than £40million today. Some of those responsible, including ­Ronnie Biggs and Buster Edwards, were turned into folk heroes. But Goody’s role in the crime has often been overlooked. Suffering from emphysema and at times struggling to breathe, he says he wants to put his side of the story before it is too late. Goody, who still owns one of the original stolen mailbags, claims that officers from the Flying Squad were desperate to “get him” because he ­humiliated them several times by walking free after earlier robberies. Gordon Goody Leader: Good going into court after raid Getty It all stemmed from a job in November 1962 when Goody, along with Bruce Reynolds, Buster Edwards, Charlie Wilson and Roy James, stole the contents of a cash van at Heathrow airport and escaped with £62,000. When one of the getaway ­drivers was recognised, police pulled in the rest of the gang. “I was put on an ID parade and picked out, so was Charlie Wilson,” says Goody. “Charlie’s case fell apart but the one against me was pretty solid. I knew I had no choice but to get to one of the jurors. “In those days, judges would only accept a unanimous verdict so you only needed to get to one to get the case thrown out. I picked out a likely looking prospect and followed him home. It turned out he’d done time in the past and had no problems taking money to put a spanner in the works.” Goody was later retried for the crime and this time decided to take a different route. He says: “Charlie Wilson knew a crooked copper who had access to the prosecution exhibits. The witnesses that identified me said I’d been wearing a tweed hat. For £200, the bent copper agreed to steal the hat and replace it with one three sizes bigger. “When they made me try the hat on in court, it covered my eyes and nose. It was clear that I couldn’t have been the one wearing the hat. The jury came back with a not guilty pretty quick.” As he walked out of court, Goody ran into the chief prosecutor and couldn’t resist boasting about the fact that he’d got away with the crime. “I couldn’t resist taking the mickey,” he says. “It was a stupid thing to do and I feel ashamed that I did it, even now.” Despite the popular conception that Bruce Reynolds, who died last year, was head of the gang, it was actually Goody who was approached with the original information that would lead to the robbery. Brian Field, a crooked solicitor’s clerk who had been involved in Goody’s defence for the airport heist, passed the details to him. “All I was told was that there was a large amount of money in transit and that a well-organised gang could liberate it,” says Goody. Field ­arranged a meeting between Goody and a contact known as The Ulsterman. He says: “The Ulsterman had a friend who was a postal worker and had given him all the details about the train timetables and security. "He told us the carriage with the money was normally the second car from the engine. "The Ulsterman reckoned that at holiday periods we could be talking in the region of six million quid. I took it to Bruce and the rest of the gang.” Investigators at great train robbery scene End of the line: Train after heist ©Mirrorpix Goody and the others had robbed trains before and considered themselves experts. “I worked out we only needed eight people on the job, but the problem was how to stop the train,” he says. “Buster had a friend, Roger Cordrey, who worked for a South London firm that was always robbing trains. We hoped they’d tell us how they stopped them. "They agreed, but only on condition their whole firm got in on the job.” The gang also needed somebody to drive the train, so they called on Ronnie Biggs who’d done time with ­ Reynolds and said he knew a retired train driver. “Biggs was ­supposed to get a few quid for the ­introduction but he could smell the money and wanted in on the job,” he adds. “A few of us were opposed. He was an ar**hole. But we had no choice.” On the night of the robbery, Cordrey ­simply placed a glove over the green lens of the train signal and attached a battery to the red bulb to switch it on. “If we’d known it was as easy as that, we would have done it ourselves,” says Goody. The train stopped at the signal. Biggs and his friend climbed into the carriage to drive it to the bridge where it was to be unloaded, but the friend turned out not to know how to drive the train after all. Goody says: “We kicked Ronnie out and told him to wait in the van. He hadn’t been any use at all.” Instead the gang turned to the original driver, Jack Mills. When Mills refused to drive, he was coshed on the head and ­threatened until he agreed. That violence marred the gang’s reputation as gentlemen thieves. Mills never recovered from his injuries, suffering headaches for the rest of his life. He died from leukaemia seven years later. The gang always refused to say who had been responsible for the attack but last year James Hussey made a death-bed confession that it was him. Tony Thompson with one of the actual mail bags from the Great Train Robbery The original mailbag Philip Coburn/Sunday Mirror It took nearly half-an-hour to unload all the bags of cash and another half-hour to make the journey to Leatherslade Farm in Buckinghamshire where the loot was to be divided. Goody says: “All the money had been stacked up. That thing about playing ­Monopoly with real money... that never ­happened. We did have a few drinks though.” The farm hideout was later discovered by police who claimed it contained a wealth of evidence. Furious Goody says: “I had worn two pairs of gloves. We also paid someone to clean up, but they did a runner. There should have been nothing left for the police.” He was eventually arrested two months later in Leicester. He says he’d felt certain there would be no evidence to tie him to the robbery, but then police said that yellow paint found on a pair of shoes at Goody’s home matched paint found at the farm. “I knew they had planted the evidence because I hadn’t worn those shoes during the robbery,” he says. At his trial, the same experts Goody had mocked after the airport case admitted that while the paint on Goody’s shoes was similar, it wasn’t exactly the same. He says: “I thought it was going well, but then the argument became that if the police were going to fit me up, they would have used the exact same paint, so that became proof that the paint hadn’t been planted and I was found guilty.” He was sentenced to 30 years and was ­considered such an escape risk that the Army was drafted in to guard him at Durham Prison. He was then transferred to a high-security unit at Parkhurst prison on the Isle of Wight ­until his release in 1976. He later moved to Spain where he has lived ever since with his Spanish partner of 30 years, Maria. Asked what he did with the money he says he buried a lot of it, but most went on legal fees. He also claims some was stolen by people he entrusted to look after it while he was inside. Now he is set to tell all in a TV ­documentary this year and will even reveal the identify of The Ulsterman. On every anniversary of the infamous robbery – August 8 – Goody raises a glass to his gang. Fifty years on, he says the wine will taste that much sweeter now that he has told his side of the story of a heist that made c­riminal legends of them all. Check out all the latest News, Sport & Celeb gossip at Mirror.co.uk http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/great-train-robber-gordon-goody-2097638#ixzz2b5564aZv

The Great Train Robbery: Fun-loving Criminals

Over the police radio came the astonished comment: “You won’t believe this – but they’ve just stolen a train.” The first official notification of the theft of £2.6m from the Glasgow-to-Euston mail train came at 4.30 in the morning on 8 August 1963. Now, nearly 50 years on, we are about to experience a blizzard of anniversary television programmes, reissued books and chin-stroking commentary pieces about what was initially called “the Cheddington train robbery” but soon acquired a more grandiose title. But why, half a century later, are we still familiar with the names of those involved in the Great Train Robbery? How has professional crime changed since then? And what, if anything, does it say about the nation’s fascination with villainy? The previous decade, in 1952, another group of professional criminals had carried out what was, at the time, an even more impudent robbery. It took place in Eastcastle Street in the West End of London and involved the theft of £287,000 (today worth more than £6m) from a mail van and the coshing of the van crew. More than a thousand police officers were involved in the hunt for the robbers and the prime minister, Winston Churchill, asked for daily updates on the investigation. The press could barely conceal its admiration for the theft, which was carried out “with Montgomery-like thoroughness . . . it went off as smoothly as any of our commando raids during the war”. No one was ever arrested for it although it was common knowledge that it had been organised by the London gang leader Billy Hill, who was soon boasting about getting away with it in his ghosted autobiography. It was referred to jokily in the film The Ladykillers three years later, but beyond that it barely lingered on in the national consciousness. There have also been bigger and more complex robberies since the Great Train Robbery. In 1975, 94 security boxes at the Bank of America in Mayfair, central London, were plundered of an estimated £8m. The thieves were in such a rush that they left behind a Picasso and an Enid Blyton first edition. Who remembers the names of any of the robbers? A more spectacular theft of safety deposit boxes was carried out in Knightsbridge in 1987 by an Italian playboy and libel lawyer’s son called Valerio Viccei. He got away with £40m and was caught only because he came back to London from his Latin American hideaway to arrange for the transportation of his Ferrari Testarossa, as one would. Viccei, whom one detective described as having “an ego the size of the Old Bailey”, was jailed for 22 years. Allowed to serve some of his sentence in Italy, he was shot dead in a confrontation with the police in 2000 while on day release from prison. The 1971 robbery of the Baker Street branch of Lloyds bank also enjoyed a certain cheery notoriety because of its modus operandi: the gang had a lookout with a walkie-talkie on the roof of the building opposite who alerted the robbers to the presence of the police as they painstakingly drilled their way into the bank through an adjoining property. A radio ham overheard their conversations and told the police, who initially thought he was pulling their leg. This robbery became a film, The Bank Job (2008), starring Jason Statham, and the cinema publicity suggested that the heist had involved “millions and millions of pounds . . . none of it was recovered. Nobody was ever arrested. The robbery made headlines for a few days and then disappeared – the result of a government D-Notice, gagging the press.” (All of which was nonsense: four of the gang were jailed for 44 years in total; £231,000 was recovered and no D-Notice was even requested, far less granted.) I n 2000, an attempt was made to steal £200m worth of De Beers diamonds from the Millennium Dome, with a planned escape by speedboat down the Thames. The police were ahead of the gang and caught them red-handed. More recently, in 2006, another gang robbed the Securitas depot in Tonbridge, Kent, of £53m. They kidnapped the depot manager, his wife and his young son and held them all until the robbery had been carried out; the robbers were disguised as police officers and wearing latex masks. It was Britain’s biggest robbery ever but most people would struggle to name even one of the robbers involved, the best known of whom was a cage fighter called Lee Murray who fled to Morocco, his father’s home country, and is now serving a 25-year sentence there. It failed to capture the public imagination not least because it involved the kidnapping of a child and woman. The investigating officer, Detective Chief Inspector Mick Judge, said that the robbers’ plans had been “very clever in parts and very naive in others. There was some very sophisticated preparation and also some very silly mistakes that they had not thought through at all.” And Roger Coe-Salazar, the then chief Crown prosecutor for Kent, said at the end of the trial in June 2008, “It is quite easy for it to end up being seen in a romantic, even an Ocean’s 12, way. There is nothing romantic or victimless about a child being held at gunpoint by a masked man.” The Securitas robbery exemplified how the execution of such crimes had changed over the years since 1963. At the end of the Securitas trial, Bruce Reynolds, the ringleader of the train robbers, wrote a piece for the Guardian in effect a review of the later crime. He suggested that perhaps the robbers would have carried out the heist even if they had known that they were going to get caught, as “Nipper” Read, one of the detectives who pursued the train robbers, had suggested about them. “We all have our benchmarks,” he wrote, “and for us the benchmark was the Brinks robbery in Boston in 1950, which was the largest robbery in the United States at that time. We wanted to do something as spectacular as that . . . It’s insanity, of course, and we knew we would be in the frame as soon as the robbery happened but it’s the same madness, I suppose, that drives people to bivouac on the north face of the Eiger.” He pointed out how such crimes had altered in the intervening years. The Securitas robbers faced the same problems that we had because we both had a large group of people but it was different for us because we all came from a common background; we shared the same mores and we trusted each other. With Securitas, they had two Albanians and seemed to have half> of the team from Kent and half from south London. Their other problem was that their robbery, like ours, was too big. You throw down the gauntlet to society and obviously society has to respond. Reynolds concluded: “If you really want to make money nowadays, you should go into hedge funds.” He gave his fee for the article to Amnesty International, as he did the advance on the last edition of his memoirs. Under the Coroners and Justice Act 2009, ex-criminals are not allowed to profit from writing about their crimes. The law was attacked by Baroness (Ruth) Rendell as it made its way through the Lords; she cited Jean Genet as just one writer who would have been affected by it. The nature of professional crime, as Reynolds suggested, has changed in the same way as industry has. The old family firms and local enterprises have been replaced by multinationals. Criminals prefer now to be as faceless as a chief executive, rather than knock out their memoirs and feature in the press. By the end of the 1960s, drugs were already beginning to replace robbery as a simpler way of getting money and many professional criminals moved into that field. I bumped into one old thief a few years ago who had sent his sons to public school with the proceeds of his crimes and now saw them working in the City and earning more than he could ever have dreamed of. Reynolds died in February at the age of 81. The death of an old villain these days follows a pattern: recollection of past crimes, a quote or two from their memoirs and some grainy old photos from outside the Old Bailey. This is generally followed a couple of days later by a few articles from the vicarish end of the commentariat on how shameful it is that criminals are portrayed as lovable rogues or diamond geezers when they are nothing but lowlife crooks. Usually these articles make reference to Robin Hood and Dick Turpin and then despair at the national affection for some criminals. The Independent ran a classic of the genre in which Reynolds was dismissed as a “lowlife loser” who was little different from Raoul Moat, who in 2010 shot his ex-girlfriend, killed her boyfriend and blinded a policeman who later committed suicide – a comparison about as fatuous as likening Chris Huhne to the Yorkshire Ripper because motor vehicles were involved in the commission of both men’s crimes. So why do we still run through the details of the crime and remember the train robbers’ names? One reason was the length of sentences – 30 years each for seven of the defendants – handed out by Mr Justice Edmund Davies. “Let us clear out of the way any romantic notions of daredevilry,” he said. “This is nothing less than a sordid crime of violence inspired by vast greed.” Jack Mills, the driver of the train, was hit over the head during the robbery and never worked again. “As to violence,” the judge said, “anyone who has seen that nerve-shattered engine-driver can have no doubt of the terrifying effect on law-abiding citizens of a concerted assault by masked and armed robbers in lonely darkness. To deal with this case leniently would be a positively evil thing.” Mills died seven years later of leukaemia that the coroner said was not related to his injuries. In 1963 the usual sentence for a robbery was about 12 years and the death penalty for murder was still two years from abolition. As Reynolds observed later, the message sent by the sentences was that if you were now going to get a 30-year term for robbery you might as well carry a gun. And in 1966, three robbers shot dead three unarmed policemen in Shepherd’s Bush, west London, rather than be arrested. One of them, Harry Roberts, remains in jail to this day. From the 1970s onwards, it became standard practice for robbers to carry firearms. Another reason why the story (and myths) around the train robbery took off was the period. It was 1963, the year of the Profumo scandal and the Beatles’ first LP. The BBC’s That Was the Week That Was poked fun at an establishment already reeling from the Profumo disclosures. Private Eyehad just arrived on the scene. It was the end of the age of deference, when judges and politicians became figures of fun. There are echoes of that mood and lack of respect today, because of the behaviour of politicians, the City, the Catholic Church. One of the first of more than 20 books about the robbery, The Robbers’ Tale, by Peta Fordham, published in 1965, likened the gang to “Henry V’s men at Agincourt . . . what feats they did that day”. The robbery seemed audacious, in tune with the times. That some of the perpetrators escaped or were never captured kept the story alive and turned it into a long-running soap opera. There was Ronnie Biggs, who escaped over the wall of Wandsworth Prison in 1965, fleeing to Brazil and avoiding extradition from there by fathering a child by an exotic dancer. He was later kidnapped by a bunch of exarmy chancers and finally came home to tussle with the then justice secretary, Jack Straw, over whether he should ever be allowed out of jail. There was Charlie Wilson, who was tracked down to Canada and then, having served a sentence, was shot dead as he prepared a barbecue on the Costa del Crime. There was Buster Edwards, who after his early release in 1975 sold flowers outside Waterloo Station and became the subject of a film starring Phil Collins and Julie Walters. Edwards hanged himself in 1994 (he’d said how “dreary” he found law-abiding life). The 1960s also saw the rise and fall of the Krays, lionised by some in the media and treated gently by parts of the establishment, notably Lord Boothby and Tom Driberg. The Krays were looked down on by the robbers, who saw them as bullies who didn’t earn their own money but took it off weaker people. They mocked them as “Gert and Daisy”. So what of our fascination with criminals, real or fictional, artful dodgers or diamond geezers, Raffleses or Corleones? The words we still use for lawbreakers offer a clue. Outlaws, bandits, desperadoes – all have a romantic feel in a way the nicknames for the police – plods, peelers, busies, the filth – do not. Perhaps some lawbreakers – particularly those who do not cause physical harm – fascinate the law-abiding because they represent forbidden fruit, disobedience, a frustrated transgressor within. “Know ye not me?” asks Satan in Paradise Lost. “Not to know me argues yourselves unknown.” Some of the high-profile robberies, too, won grudging admiration because of what was stolen and the belief that if you have salted something away in a safety deposit vault or acquired lots of diamonds you must be up to no good. Reynolds did not portray himself as a victim, from a deprived background, driven to crime. He knew he could have made an honest living. He had fancied a career in journalism and, as a teenager, he had walked into Northcliffe House, the first newspaper office he found on Fleet Street, saying he wanted to be a reporter. He worked for a while as a messenger at the Daily Mail; who can tell whether the Almighty, on the dreadful day of judgement, might not conclude that the Mail had caused greater pain and damage to society than the train robbers? And he was smart enough to have turned his hand to any number of jobs, had he not sought the adrenalin rush of criminality. A week or so before Reynolds died, eight masked and armed men stole diamonds worth an estimated £30m that were being loaded on to a Swiss-bound plane at Brussels Airport. Once again, some of the coverage was breathless. All this may merely serve to remind us of the words of another ex-con of a different era who pondered on our fascination with badness. “Wherever God erects a house of prayer,” wrote Daniel Defoe, “The Devil always builds a chapel there;/And ’twill be found, upon examination,/The latter has the largest congregation.” http://www.newstatesman.com/culture/culture/2013/04/great-train-robbery-fun-loving-criminals