How the Great Biggs Kidnap went all wrong

Press, 26 April 1979, Page 21

How the Great Biggs Kidnap went all wrong

By

PETER DEELEY,

“Observer,” London

It was to have been the “coup” of the year: Great Train Robber Ronald Biggs, snatched from Brazil, smuggled aboard a yacht, sailed to a Britishrun Caribbean island, and then handed over to Scotland Yard.

But things went awry; instead, Biggs is under police watch — at his own request —in Rio, and three former Scots Guards soldiers have flown home penniless from South America, their months of planning wasted and their dreams of making money out of their story of the “Biggs recapture” all dissolved.

The three men, John Miller, Norman Boyle, and Peter Edwards, work for a security firm that offers bodyguard protection. Miller, aged 34, who comes from Motherwell, was once a mercenary in British Guyana but was deported after an abortive coup there 10 years ago. Miller, Boyle, also 34, from Fife and Edwards, 38, an Englishman, had approached several newspapers last year to see if they would be interested in financing the plan to bring Biggs “back to justice.”

(Ronald Biggs escaped from jail 14 years ago with 28 years of a 30-year sentence still to serve, for his part in the SSM train robbery in 1963. Attempts to extradite him from Brazil have failed.) But nobody believed them, so the three men sought private financing in order to carry out the kidnap themselves and then sell the exclusive rights to the story. The tabloid “Sunday Mail,” in Glasgow, sent a man to the island of St

Vincent, near Barbados, which was to be the point where Biggs was handed over to Scotland Yard. But the plotters never turned up: Biggs discovered what they intended, tipped off the Brazilian police who interviewed them, and the men hurriedly flew home. It had taken them eight months to prepare for the operation. In January, they went to Brazil to carry out a dummy run, met Biggs and befriended him. Telling him they were film producers working on a new James Bond production, they

won his confidence by taking him out for meals and drinks.

At the beginning of April, the three returned to Rio and asked 3iggs if he was interested in a role in the film they were producing. They had chartered a plane to fly to Belem, a town at the mouth of the Amazon in the north of Brazil, and invited Biggs to come with them.

But Biggs, no fool, put through a call to a friend in New York checking on the men’s credentials. The answer was that there was no James Bond film being shot in South America.

Biggs said later: *‘They were nice people but there was no way I was ever going to get on plane with them.”

Once they had reached Belem, the men had planned to drug Biggs, put him aboard a yacht they had anchored there

and sail him the 1000 miles to St Vincent. Britain is still responsible for the island’s external affairs and would have been able to extradite Biggs back to Landon, from where he had escaped 14 years before. Miller, Boyle, and Edwards had hoped to sell their story to British newspapers: they talked to "Sunday Mail” journalist. Gavin Goodwin, and told him they were expecting to make about $lBO,OOO out of the coup. Goodwin said: “They did not consider they were

doing anything illegal. On the contrary, they believed they were trying to help th police — to succeed where Slipper failed.” (Detective Chief Superintendent Jack Slipper of Scotland Yard, failed in an attempt to extradite Biggs from Brazil when he was discovered living there five years ago.)

Scotland Yard knew nothing of the operation and the "Sunday Mail” says it did not spend any money financing the expedition.

Where then did the money come from to pay for air fares, plane, and boat charter — and the hide-out the three had rented in the island capital. Kingstown?

Goodwin says: “The money was put up by a certain prominent figure who lives abroad and who appears frequently in the gossip columns. But I can’t reveal his name.”