Senor Nice by Howard Marks

Author:Howard Marks
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Europe, Biography & Autobiography, Travel, Great Britain, General
ISBN: 9780099453932
Publisher: Random House UK
Published: 2007-06-09T19:55:12.604261+00:00

Seven

BRAZIL

I walked downstairs into the dark basement of a West End lap dancing club in Soho. Naked Russians twirled around the poles, lights flashed and music blared. I vaguely recognised the silhouettes of Dave Courtney, Bernie Davies, Tony Lambrianou, Charlie Breaker and other members of the Firm huddled together with the Alabama 3. I moved towards them.

Someone tapped me on the shoulder. ‘Thanks for coming along, Howard. Haven’t seen you for a while.’

It was Bruce Reynolds, mastermind of the Great Train Robbery and the most gentlemanly of those who live outside the law. I first met Bruce during the mid 1980s. Actor Larry Lamb had played him in the film Buster and Larry was friendly with my first wife, Ilze. He had introduced me to Bruce. I met him again ten years later through his son Nick, a talented sculptor and musician who played with the Alabama 3 and with whom I had worked at various spoken-word events. It had been a year or two since Bruce and I had last met, at Farringdon’s Tardis Studios, where we had read extracts from our respective autobiographies. He had seemed troubled. I remembered our conversation.

‘What’s up, Bruce? You seem worried.’

‘It’s not really a case of worry, I’m just concerned about Ronnie. You know me, my boy Nick, Dave Courtney and Roy Shaw went out to Rio to see him for his seventieth birthday?’

‘Yes, Nick told me about it. Wasn’t it also the birthday of the robbery?’

‘That’s right, the thirty-sixth anniversary. We did the robbery on Ronnie’s birthday in 1963. We always have a laugh about that. But Ronnie’s ill, really seriously ill, and completely skint.’

Ronnie Biggs, fleeing from thirty years in a British prison, had arrived in Brazil in 1970. Four years later, Scotland Yard detective Jack Slipper arrested him in Rio de Janeiro. Biggs beat the extradition attempt as a result of having fathered a Brazilian dependant, Michael, with his girlfriend Raimunda and went on to record ‘No One is Innocent’ for the Sex Pistols. In 1981 a gang of bounty hunters kidnapped him in Rio and smuggled him to Barbados by boat. A Barbados court decided the rules governing extradition to Britain had not been properly adhered to, and allowed Biggs to return to Rio, where he lived in a dilapidated apartment in petty-crime-ridden Santa Teresa, on the city’s outskirts. Biggs made money by selling T-shirts and photographs of himself and entertaining tourists with escape stories. In 1997 the Brazilian Supreme Court rejected a new request by the British government to extradite him. During the next two years he suffered a series of strokes, which left him partly paralysed and unable to speak.

‘You know what he told me out there, Howard: “You got me into this, Bruce. Can you get me out of it? I’ve got one more wish in life, and that’s to buy a pint of bitter in a Margate pub.”’

‘What does he expect you to do?’

‘Help him get back to this country.’

‘What! He wants to swap a beach in Brazil for a cell in Wandsworth nick? I hope you persuaded him not to.

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