Crime: Paradise Lost

Chatting with a neighbor recently, a Melbourne, Australia, carpenter named Terry Cooke confided that he was one digit away from the winning number in a $28,000 lottery. “I don’t know whether I’m lucky or unlucky,” he said. At the time the remark mystified the neighbor. Last week, after police swarmed into the neighborhood in search of Cooke, he understood. Cooke, actually Ronald Arthur Biggs, 39, was the only man still free of the 15 who halted a Glasgow-to-London Royal Mail train in 1963 and looted it of $7,300,000. Caught and sentenced to 30 years in jail, Biggs escaped in 1965. The last thing he wanted in his Australian hideaway was the publicity of a lottery hit. Even so, the $28,000 would have been nice. Biggs’ $265,000 share of the train lolly was all gone. Before he disappeared, he had been living like any other struggling householder on the block.

Hellish Times. Ever since the great train robbery, things have gone steadily downhill for the bandits who made off with 120 sacks of money. Most were captured before they could spend more than a few quid. Those who eluded Scotland Yard for a while had a hellish time, and it is clear that little of the $6,400,000 that is still unaccounted for went towards riotous living. Consider some of Biggs’ accomplices:

> Bruce Reynolds, free until last November, did splurge at first. A dozen bottles of Nuits St. Georges, a dozen Veuve Cliquot and a dozen Dom Perignon were delivered each week to his London flat. He tooled about in an Austin-Healey, a Thunderbird or a Mercedes 250. Fearful that the police were closing in, Reynolds lit out from his hiding place. He traveled constantly for five years, fleeing through six countries on false passports obtained for $33,000 from criminal acquaintances. When he was finally run down in the English seaside resort of Torquay, he seemed relieved. Said he: “Anyone who thinks that crime pays must be mad.”

>Charles Wilson, escaping jail as Biggs had, fled to Rigaud, Canada, with his wife and three children. But the jailbreak cost $140,000 (for men to free him with cleverly counterfeit keys), and the flight from England about as much. The Wilsons lived in constant terror of attracting attention. “The nagging fear of discovery,” said Patricia Wilson, “gave me a permanent headache.” Said her husband, recaptured in January 1968: “It wasn’t worth it.”

> James White remained free for three years. But he had to flee from Tangier, Spain, the south of France and three other hiding places as acquaintances discovered his identity and blackmailed him for a total of $162,400. White had to pay one landlord $2,800 a week in rent, and in the end still had to flee because the landlord informed on him to collect close to $100,000 in rewards. White was finally captured in 1966 at Littlestone-on-Sea in Kent. Noting that he was “at the end of my tether,” he said thankfully that he was “glad it’s all over.”

> Ronald Edwards lost so much to blackmailers that in 1966 his wife persuaded him to surrender. He was living what he described as “a crazy, unnatural life” in a grubby South London roominghouse and was, he told police, “flat broke.”

The Straight Life. Biggs fared little better. His escape from London’s Wandsworth prison cost $112,000 for a furniture van fitted with a sliding roof and hydraulic lift, two getaway cars and a crew to operate them. Because nearly $110,000 of his swag was in traceable notes, he had to dispose of them in the underworld at a 50% discount. Escaping from England cost him $45,000 for a small boat, hiding places on either side of the Channel and escorts. Abroad he visited a plastic surgeon for expensive ($7,000) alterations to his face and fingertips. He spent 15 months in hiding, then bought a fake passport and flew to Australia as Terrence Furminger. From Adelaide he sent back $2,500 for other passports and air fare for Wife Charmain and their two sons. The last of the lolly went for furniture, appliances and toys for the brick bungalow that Biggs rented, for $26.88 a week, at 52 Hibiscus Road in the Melbourne suburb of Blackburn.

Resuming the straight life, Biggs earned $95.26 a week as a carpenter and was eager for Saturday overtime of $27.94. Charmain, after the birth of a third son, worked the 4 to midnight shift as a packer in a toilet-tissue plant. “That’s the laugh of the whole thing,” she said after her husband fled the police with $40 in his pocket. “You don’t work at night in a factory when you have hidden resources.” Only occasionally did the Biggses splurge. On their last big evening out, a month ago, a Melbourne nightclub photographer snapped a picture of them sipping wine and enjoying crêpes. After the manhunt for Biggs began, the photographer remembered the face and gave police an up-to-date look at the man they have been after for four years.

If the police catch up with Biggs, he will be returned to an English prison. Charmain talks of remaining in Australia. “I don’t want to have to take my children back to the cold of England,” she says. Whatever her plans, she will have some money at last. Australian Consolidated Press is paying $78,400 for the story of how her husband’s ill-gotten gains from the great train robbery were quickly drained.