Ailing, debt-ridden and yearning for England, Ronnie Biggs is a shadow of the man rendered a legend by his role in one of the most daring heists in British history, and his subsequent escape from the law.
His return to Britain yesterday ended more than 35 rollercoaster years on the run, during which he survived several attempts to bring him home.
Now 71, Biggs sent a plaintive e-mail to Scotland Yard last week saying he wanted finally to return home and face the music. He told the Sun newspaper that he hoped to rely on the mercy of the courts because of his age and failing health and the time elapsed since his crime. "My last wish is to walk into a Margate pub as an Englishman and buy a pint of bitter," he told the paper last week.
On his 34th birthday, he was in a gang which stole a record £2.6 million - estimated at some £50 million in today's money - from a Glasgow-London mail train on August 8th, 1963. The train-driver, Jack Mills (57) was coshed with iron bars during the robbery. He never recovered fully and died in 1970.
Biggs's share was £147,000, but only a month after the heist the gang was caught by detectives led by Jack Slipper. He was tried in January 1964 and sentenced to 30 years in prison. Just 15 months later Biggs escaped from prison, climbing a rope ladder and jumping on to an opentop furniture van with a mattress on board.
He fled with his wife and two sons to Spain, where he spent two months recuperating after plastic surgery in France. On being tracked to Australia, he fled to Brazil in 1970, which had no extradition treaty with Britain, and had lived there since.
In 1974 he made a deal with the Daily Express amid talk of giving himself up if given an early parole date, but it contacted Mr Slipper, who flew to Rio de Janeiro to arrest him. Biggs's luck held. He avoided extradition because by then he had a Brazilian dependant, son Michael, by his girlfriend, Raimunda. His luck continued when, in April 1977, he boarded a British frigate in Rio for a few drinks but was not arrested. In 1978 he recorded No One is Innocent for the British punk group the Sex Pistols. During lean times in Rio he also raised money by selling T-shirts of himself and entertaining Japanese tourists.
In March 1981 he was kidnapped by adventurers and smuggled to Barbados in a sack marked "live snake". The aim was to return him to Britain for a reward. But the Barbados courts decided the rules governing extradition to Britain had not been put properly before the island's parliament and Biggs pulled off another Houdini-like escape.
In January 1994 he published his autobiography, Odd Man Out. In 1997 the Brazilian Supreme Court rejected another request by the British government to extradite him. In March 1998 he suffered the first of three strokes that have left him barely able to speak. But it did not stop him celebrating his 70th birthday a year later in the company of 140 friends, including fellow robber Bruce Reynolds, 36 years to the day after their infamous crime.