slipup of scotland yard

One of the greatest Fleet Street pictures ever taken was by a runt of a photographer named Micky Brennan.

He was on a plane back to London after Scotland Yard’s Jack Slipper stuffed up the arrest of Great Train Robber Ronnie Biggs in Rio de Janeiro.

Slipper – or Slipup as he was called in a book by journalist Anthony Delano—was going home empty-handed. Mainly because the Brazilian cops he demanded arrest Biggs were traffic police.

Brennan stayed awake on the plane and waited and waited until Slipper’s sidekick went to the toilet and he took a famous shot of Slipper snoozing next to an empty seat. The one Ronnie Biggs should have been in.

It was a Fleet Street classic. Brennan, a tiny, talented, Irishman, was a friend of mine and we had been in Rio on the Biggs chase together.

My favourite story about Brennan was in New York when he once, brazenly, approached a gorgeous woman in an East Side bar and asked her:  What would you say to a little f---.  And she coolly   replied:  Hello little f---.

But that’s a different story.  Back to Rio and Jack Slipper from Scotland Yard who died recently.

The foreign press descended on Rio after the Daily Express had an exclusive that Biggs was there. Before that the Great Train Robber escapee had worked as a carpenter at Channel Nine in Melbourne. He had also spent most of his ill-gotten gains having cosmetic surgery and paying off other spivs to hide his identity and whereabouts.

Biggs was actually a minor player in the Great Train Robbery. Although he and a couple of others botched a plan to burn down the country farm house where they all hid out after the snatch and even left fingerprints on a Scrabble board which led to the arrests of several gang members.

In Brazil, Biggs was free – after the aborted Jack Slipper arrest attempt – and, ironically, I was in jail. I had gone in, without a visa, and was slipstreaming a London journo named Ralph Champion. Brits didn’t need a visa for Rio. Aussies did.  And I was travelling on a New Zealand passport at the time.

Almost got away with it, with a Pommie accent, but was sprung at Rio’s airport and locked up in a green metal shed. They eventually released me on the condition that I left within 24 hours – which I didn’t—but they confiscated my passport.

The next day – in the foreign press pack – I was at La Cateche, the Rio Police headquarters. I was at the front of the pack until I looked down at the Police Chief’s blotter and saw my name on it. The Police chief was wearing two pearl-handled pistols on his hips and I edged back into the crowd as subtly as I could.

It was a bizarre time.  A London journalist named Dermot Purgavie came up with the best line. He said: There’s an awful lot of copy in Brazil.

The irony was that Biggs had a Brazilian girlfriend named Raimundo Nascimento Da Costa. Years later she would appear as a stripper in St. Kilda.

Biggs got her pregnant. Good call. The father of a Brazilian child cannot be deported.

The problem was that Raimundo had had four or five miscarriages. The sick joke in media circles was that if it happened again it would be “a miscarriage of justice”.

Well, when you are a foreign correspondent, in a place like Brazil, you make bad jokes like that.

Remember the most notorious foreign correspondent line during an insurgency in Africa:  “Anybody here has been raped and speaks English?”

The Ronnie Biggs story in South America was a soap opera.  They moved him from a prison in Rio to the capital of Brasilia. His estranged wife, or ex-wife, Charmian Briggs flew in from Australia. It was obvious that she did not know about the pregnant Da Costa.

It was a bizarre press conference. Before all of this I had a journalistic fluke. A former colleague named Uli Schmetzer, then working for the Reuters news agency in Rio, had given me the address of Biggs’ apartment. I had hired a Brazilian interpreter who took me there. The caretaker let us in. After a bribe.

We found damning, condemning tapes, of Biggs discussing his bank accounts in a bank in Flinders Street in Melbourne. The tapes alone would have convicted him. I shared them with a Fleet Street newspaper  reporter because on a Sunday in Brazil we couldn’t find a tape recorder to transcribe them.

It was a weird and wacky time. While chasing all elements of the Biggs story I also had a tip that a fugitive Australian businessman named Alexander Barton could also be in South America. Either in  Brazil or Argentina. He ended up in Argentina. In the meantime I trudged the streets of Rio.

I figured a wealthy man, if in Rio.would stay near Copacabana. And so I visited every hotel on Avenida Atlantica and, in broken English told every receptionist “ me journalista…, Australiano”.

The avenue was about five kilometres long and I visited every hotel.

He wasn’t there but I finally found him --  about five metres from the  hotel I was staying in, the Leme Palace.

His wife answered the door and denied who she was or who was with her. I had befriended a secretary at the Australian Consulate who had shown me some files. I saw a shadow flitting behind Mrs. Barton in the hotel room and shouted out his passport number. Pinged.

Barton was jailed in Brasilia but managed to get bail and then flee to Argentina. Several years later, when I was Editor of the Sydney Sun, I sent my investigative reporter (and later radio producer and then film  script writer) Terry Hayes to Uraguay to find Barton and bring him back to Sydney. Unlike Hinch and Barton an ailing Ronnie Biggs is still the only one in jail.

September 11, 2005

©Copyright Derryn Hinch 2005