Rio de Janeiro つづき

Information about Mr. Reynolds’s survivors, aside from his son, Nick, was not available.

Because of the audacity of the enterprise and the size of the cache of loot, the Great Train Robbers became celebrities of a sort in England, especially those who had eluded the authorities, at least for a time.

The most famous of those, Ronnie Biggs, was sent to jail in 1964 for his part in the robbery, but escaped and went free for 36 years, living most of the time in Rio de Janeiro. He returned to England in 2001 and was immediately sent back to prison to serve out the remaining 28 years of a 30-year sentence; though, in ill health, he was released in 2009.

Mr. Reynolds lived in penury and relative obscurity after his release, and he was arrested again in the 1980s for dealing amphetamines.

He served as a consultant for a film about the robbery, “Buster,” which focused on another of the robbers, Buster Edwards, who also escaped to Mexico but gave himself up in 1966.

In the 1990s Mr. Reynolds published a well-received memoir, “The Autobiography of a Thief.” He also wrote occasional essays for newspapers.

“We all have our benchmarks,” he wrote in The Guardian in 2008, speaking about professional aspirations in general and those of thieves in particular, “and for us the benchmark was the Brink’s robbery in Boston in 1950, which was the largest robbery in the United States at that time. We wanted to do something as spectacular as that. We wanted to draw our line in the sand. I was quite young at the time and I liked the challenge. I wanted to move in those circles. It’s insanity, of course, and we knew that we would be in the frame as soon as the robbery happened but it’s the same madness, I suppose, that drives people to bivouac on the north face of the Eiger.”