A sense of deja vu may have prevailed among more mature readers this week with newspaper headlines that spoke of a man who owes his fame to a train and some oversized bags of swag.
"Biggs faces jail," said this newspaper in 1974. "Biggs faces extradition and jail," it confided in 1981. "Time up for Robber Ronnie?" it asked in 1994. And just last August a tiny news story suggested that "Biggs may be extradited".
On not one of the above occasions did Ronnie Biggs return to Britain for his part in the £2.6 million robbery of the GlasgowLondon mail train. If he stays true to form the man who has been on the run for 34 years won't be returning home now.
He served just 18 months of his 30-year sentence in Wandsworth prison - where, ironically, he had been charged with the monotonous task of sewing mailbags - before he scrambled over the walls and on to a pantechnicon with a specially constructed turret.
He fled first to central Europe and then to Australia, where he hid for a time before settling in South America. In Brazil he has led what can only be called an eclectic life.
The Londoner has made a living showing groups of tourists around his home and, it was reported, writing lyrics for the Sex Pistols. British tourists in Rio de Janeiro paid the handsome sum of £38 to sample the Ronnie Biggs Experience at his home, where they were repaid with the lowdown on his criminal past.
By his own admission he was a womaniser who enjoyed a string of casual girlfriends, all anxious to spend time with the intriguing British gangster.
On February 12th, 1974, he told a press conference in Brazil that one of his more regular girlfriends, Raimunda Nascimento de Castro, nick named Xu Xu by Biggs, was pregnant. He had, he added, spent all his money.
He was arrested soon after but a Brazilian court saved him from completing his 30-year prison term because the law forbade the expulsion of a foreigner supporting Brazilian-born offspring.
Ronald Arthur Biggs was born in London on August 8th, 1929, the same day and month of the Great Train Robbery. His first court appearance came as a 15year-old, for the relatively minor offence of stealing pencils.
As a youth he was in and out of Borstal but he had gone straight for the three years before he committed his biggest crime. Some believed his marriage to Charmian, the daughter of a headmaster, had curbed his criminal instincts.
A biography of Biggs was released in the mid-1970s. Ronald Biggs, The Most Wanted Man told the story of Biggs as he plotted the biggest train robbery in history to when he and his gang sat around distributing the swag.
Biggs got £115,000 in fivers and £43,000 in £1 notes. "Like many others he decided not to bother with the relatively bulky and less valuable 10 shilling notes," wrote Colin MacKenzie.
He was captured, he revealed, because he left his fingerprints on a bottle of ketchup and a Monopoly set.
To make good Biggs's escape from prison and Britain cost £30,000. He sailed from Tilbury Docks to Antwerp in Belgium and was driven to Paris for badly constructed plastic surgery.
"A hamfisted student chiselled his nose without an anaesthetic," MacKenzie wrote.
From Australia he sent his wife and two children a postcard: "The weather is glorious, the opportunities are marvellous and the natives are friendly," he wrote. Mrs Biggs quoted the passage in British newspapers. It became one of the top 10 quotes in Australia that year. A trip to the dentist and the positive identification of the Biggs molars led to a manhunt and his flight to Brazil.
Britain faces a difficult legal battle to put Biggs back behind bars. The request for extradition was announced on Wednesday by the British Home Office and was made to the Brazilian Ministry of Foreign Affairs. The legal proceedings could take years.
And Biggs has at least three unlikely allies in his bid to remain in Rio. Former Det Supt Jack Slipper, his arch-nemesis, said he was not in favour of the extradition. "We are screaming every day about the prisons being overcrowded. We are screaming about the NHS being overloaded. At his age he is going to be very much a hindrance to the NHS. Seeing him on TV he looked a very sick man."
Even the son of Jack Mills, the train driver who was bludgeoned during the robbery, said he would not like to see Biggs return. "As you get older you get mellower," he said. "Let him rot in Brazil," said former Home Office minister David Mclean.
Only time will tell if these are the last rash of "Biggs to be extradited" headlines. Biggs, whose son Mike is now 23, believes he has been punished enough for his crime and punished "in plenty".
"I take all things with a grain of salt," he has said. "If and when I have to leave then I'll worry - maybe."