Enfeebled by three strokes, unable to speak and saddled with medical bills he couldn’t pay, Biggs, 71, last week threw in the towel and flew home to Britain, there to be arrested and whisked to Belmarsh Prison to serve out the remainder of his 28-year sentence. “I am a sick man,” he told The Sun, a London tabloid that has told his story in a series of gaudy front-page exclusives. “My last wish is to walk into a Margate pub as an Englishman and buy a pint of bitter.”
It’s a tabloid natural, this tale, a guaranteed best seller. But to many Brits, it’s something more: a media scam. More than a year ago friends of Biggs approached a London public-relations man, Max Clifford, with a proposition: would he help get a newspaper to pay for Biggs’s return in exchange for exclusive rights to the story plus payments that Clifford describes as “upwards of [Pound sterling]100,000.” Clifford turned them down, but The Sun didn’t. In April, according to the newspaper, it launched “Operation Ron,” a stealth mission to bring Biggs home. It chartered a private Dassault Falcon 900 executive jet, arranged with Scotland Yard to meet the plane when it landed and last week bundled Biggs aboard. When he re-emerged in London, sporting a T shirt emblazoned with The Sun’s logo, the newspaper heralded its feat as a “scoop,” one of the “biggest coups” in news history.
It wasn’t, of course. The story, choreographed and paid for, was widely denounced as a “charade” and a “publicity stunt.” As for Biggs, he’s counting on Britain’s free health-care system to nurse him through his old age–and the courts’ leniency. His lawyers argue he is too frail for jail–if not for that pint in the pub of his dreams.
