All things considered it was one hell of a scoop, voted one of the ten greatest Fleet Street exclusives ever — as Colin Mackenzie shyly reminds us a couple of times in this rollicking, rambunctious memoir.
It was of course the discovery in 1974 of Ronnie Biggs, the escaped Great Train Robber, living a life of leisure in Brazil with a variety of lovelies.
Mackenzie, then a reporter on the Daily Express, had located the man the police had been hunting since he escaped from HMP Wandsworth in 1965. Biggs, it seemed, wanted to come home and was willing to give himself up to the British Embassy in Rio. And Mackenzie and the Express would have the story…