Gentleman Crook

Great Train Robber

Ronnie Biggs and 14 other professional criminals made off with more than £2.5 million ($4.2 million) in used bank notes -- the equivalent of around £40 million ($67 million) today -- after holding up a mail train from Glasgow to London in the early hours of the morning. In the course of the robbery the train driver was badly beaten with an iron bar.

Biggs was sentenced to 30 years in prison but escaped over the wall of a London prison after serving just 15 months -- and spent most of the rest of his life as a celebrity fugitive.

After undergoing extensive plastic surgery in Paris, Biggs made his way to Australia, living there with his wife and two children. Tracked down by police, Biggs fled again in 1969, this time to Brazil.

In 1981 he was kidnapped by a gang of British ex-soldiers and smuggled to Barbados. But legal efforts to have Biggs brought back to the UK once again stalled and he was allowed to return to Brazil.By the late 1990s Biggs was in poor health following a series of strokes and running out of cash. In 2001 he flew back to the UK on a private jet laid on by the Sun newspaper. He was promptly locked up in a high security prison but then moved to a facility for elderly prisoners.