I had made him promise me when we were married that he would never engage in any criminal activity ever again," she said. I loved him very much. And I didn't want the children to grow up without a father, so the possibility that we were going to go somewhere else in the world together and start life afresh was what I wanted. Bruce Reynolds led a large group of men, including his friend Biggs, on the audacious hijacking of the Royal Mail train.
I had two small children, one of whom was only five months old," she said. Biggs was sentenced to 30 years' jail for his part in the robbery but made his legendary escape from Wandsworth prison 15 months later and made his way to Australia.
The cold, hard reality was I didn't have anywhere else to go. I certainly wasn't going to turn him in, so you have to swallow it and get over it and get on with the next day. Biggs worked as a carpenter while his wife worked night shift in a biscuit factory.
She told Australian Story they didn't have anything of the proceeds of the robbery. It had paid for his legal fees, his escape from prison, false passports, plastic surgery in Paris to change his appearance and their trip to Australia. Home movies featured in Australian Story in showed their happy social life in Melbourne with other young families, but that was short-lived.
When their baby was five months' old they read that Interpol was looking for Biggs in Melbourne. He immediately went into hiding. The next morning Brent was arrested and taken into custody. She wept uncontrollably when her children were taken away. The story sparked worldwide media interest, and media tycoon Frank Packer helped to arrange her release three days later. They could only communicate through third parties.
A friend took her in the boot of her car to meet him in a park where she spent just one hour with him the night before he sailed to South America. We walked in the dark together and we knew then that we might not see each other again," she said.
Six months after Biggs' flight from Australia there was a drastic turn of events — their eldest son, eight-year-old Nicky, died in a car accident. Brent was the driver. Her friend, the late Joan Walter, said Brent received many hate letters from people saying they were pleased that she had been punished by having a son killed.
Brent's long-time friend, Val Reilly, told Australian Story, that she was anything but a gangster's moll who had no education and background. Finally free of Biggs, although she truly never was free of him until he died a year ago, Brent emerged from the burden of his notoriety to follow her own path to intellectual fulfillment.
A Sydney newspaper flew Brent to visit him. She had not seen him for five years. Her fee for the story funded his fight for freedom. I wouldn't say it was a grand passion reawakened or anything. It was just comfortable and it was friendly and it was nice and it was something that I hadn't had in a long time and I really enjoyed it. Brent was shocked to discover that Biggs had a pregnant girlfriend, Raimunda.
He was hoping the baby would prevent his extradition, but he needed to be free to marry Raimunda. Brent accepted her fate and divorced him, but her life was shattered again in when Biggs was kidnapped by British mercenaries and taken to Barbados. Years later, Brent developed cancer.
Her father had died in Britain and she wanted to make peace with her mother. Biggs reached out and suggested she visit him on the way back from the UK, and for the first time since Biggs fled Melbourne they had time together completely alone.
Months later, Biggs had a stroke and was in need of medical care — something which he would get in prison. Please update your billing details here to continue enjoying your subscription. Your subscription will end shortly.
Please update your billing details here to continue enjoying your access to the most informative and considered journalism in the UK. Accessibility Links Skip to content. Menu Close. Log in Subscribe. Why would they want to keep him in for 10 years? He couldn't do any harm to anyone even if he wanted to.
We didn't expect them to do what they did. What "they" did was put Ronnie Biggs in London's HMP Belmarsh, one of the most secure prisons in the country, home to terrorists, murderers, rapists and paedophiles. The reason the authorities gave for keeping Biggs there for six years was that the prison was said to have the medical facilities necessary for his various illnesses.
Yet it was in Belmarsh that he contracted scabies, developed septic sores around the opening for his stomach tube, suffered several epileptic fits and had a further stroke. There again, Michael concedes that had his father not returned, Ronnie would probably not have survived much longer in Brazil, owing to the severity of his depression.
Despite Ronnie Biggs's very real suffering in prison, first in Belmarsh and later in HMP Norwich, many on the outside believed he was getting what he deserved. The train's driver, Jack Mills, was coshed and left bruised and bleeding — and never worked again. Members of the gang, including Biggs, were sentenced to up to 30 years apiece. But instead of knuckling down and "doing his bird", of course, after 15 months in a cell Biggs escaped over the wall of Wandsworth prison.
He fled first to Belgium and then France, where he underwent plastic surgery and acquired a false passport — before heading for a new life in Australia, where he was joined later by his wife Charmaine and his two children, Michael's older half-brothers. After the police discovered his whereabouts in , Biggs flew to Panama and then Brazil, finally settling in Rio de Janeiro in to live the "high life", famously drinking cocktails with bikini-clad Brazilian girls and forever boasting of his escape.
His behaviour apparently still rankled when, in July, justice secretary Jack Straw blocked Biggs's parole application on the grounds that Biggs was "wholly unrepentant" and had "outrageously courted the media" during his life on the run. Michael was devastated. The parole board had said he was coming home, then Straw said: 'No, he's not. But was Straw right? Is Ronnie unrepentant about his role in the train robbery, and everything that happened afterwards?
OK, but is he sorry for what he did? But repentance and remorse are the wrong words to describe how my father feels about what happened.
He didn't physically hurt anyone. He never even set foot on that train. And anyway, as he says, if he hadn't been involved in the robbery and then escaped, I wouldn't be here and his granddaughter wouldn't be here.
Michael Biggs was born in Rio in It was because his mother, Raimunda de Castro — then an "exotic dancer" — was pregnant with him that the first attempt by the British government to extradite his father failed. In Brazilian law, no father of a Brazilian child could be extradited and, in any case, there was no reciprocal extradition treaty between Britain and Brazil.
A little over a year after Michael was born, his mother left for Europe and Ronnie Biggs was left to bring up his son alone. The robbery money was long gone. The terms of his staying in Brazil meant that he was not allowed to work.
He was getting in serious debt and struggling badly. Then, when I was about two, out of the blue an Argentinian film crew knocked on the door. It was Christmas Eve. My dad said, I've got a hungry kid in the house, nothing to give him for Christmas — I'm not eating so that he can eat. And the crew said, hang on a minute, we'll give you two thousand dollars for the interview. My dad didn't have to think too long about that.
And that was how the press coverage started. In those days, the minimum wage in Brazil was about seven dollars a month. The local chief of police told him, if foreign journalists want to give you money under the table for your story, I don't have to know about this.
You've got to make a living. Father and son lived reasonably well off Ronnie's media earnings for the next few years.
Then, in , Biggs was kidnapped by a band of mercenaries led by the ex-soldier John Miller, and taken by boat to Barbados. But Barbados turned down Britain's extradition request and Biggs was returned to Rio.
While he was being held captive, Michael had gone to the press and had made televised appeals for his father's return — leading to another extraordinary twist in this story. It was then that the president of CBS records in Brazil saw me and thought I would do well as part of a boy band. We were the country's first boy band. The band, The Magic Balloon Gang, flourished for six years from , selling 12m records and bringing relative financial security to the Biggses for the next few years.
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