Robert Ryan: Signal Red

Ultimately, as a robber, you face losing your freedom, but I don't think you can fully appreciate what this means until it is taken away from you. That realisation comes too late, even though you are aware every time you go to 'work', it might be your last job. Your mind plays tricks on you about the consequences of your actions and the chances of being caught. Is it worth the risk? you might ask yourself. But if you're a grafter, you'll dismiss the risk factor and go for the adrenaline. That's the addiction.

True, old-fashioned greed is also a motivating factor, whether it is for money, power or reputation. I guess we all craved one or more of those things, and some of us embraced them all. Upon reflection, I realise that at the time of the robbery I never questioned people's motivation for being 'at it'. In fact, I hardly know them now.

Charlie Wilson lived in the next street to mine in Battersea and we went to school together. He was younger than me and we were pals without being bosom buddies; I only really got to know him in his twenties. In my eyes, he never changed: always cheerful, game for a lark and totally reliable. A very sound man.

I was shocked to hear of Charlie's death, shot by the side of his swimming pool at his home in Marbella, evoking the end of Fitzgerald's Gatsby. The theft of his life only led to retribution and further theft of lives. The moral there is, no matter how big you are, there is always someone bigger and with more power.

Charlie was buried in Earlsfield, local to us Battersea Boys. The service closed with a final flourish of bravado, as the coffin was accompanied by Sinatra doing his version of 'My Way'. That was Chas all right.

Roy James had one ambition when he received his

thirty-year sentence: to get out of prison and pursue his motor- racing career and ultimately his dream of becoming World Champion. He embraced Seneca and the Stoics' principle, as defined by prison doggerel: 'If you can't do the time, don't do the crime', or my favourite, 'Eat your porridge every day and do your bird the easy way.' Nice constructive sentiments, but nobody serves a decade inside without physical and mental damage.

In spite of Roy's pursuit of physical fitness, something had gone when he finally got out. He transferred his ambitions in other directions, and was very successful financially, but perhaps less so emotionally. He had a long-term relationship that broke up and eventually ended up marrying a younger woman and fathered two daughters. It appeared he had made it: he had the country house, complete with ponies and stables, an attractive young wife and lovely daughters. But somehow, it was not enough. Nothing satisfied him. Probably because the grand ambition – to win the World Championship – was lost and gone for ever.

What caused his confrontation with his wife and father-in- law and the events that followed is a mystery, yet such events are all too common in the real world of domestic discord. Ignominiously Roy (forever saddled with the media-invented, or at least media-popularised, nickname of the Weasel, which he hated) went back to prison.

Inside, his physical condition declined. He had seen Bill Boal – innocent of the crime, yet convicted – die inside. He had seen Biggsy kidnapped from Rio and promptly stolen back by the Brazilian authorities. He had seen Buster's tragic suicide. He must have asked himself, as most of us of a certain age do – what is it all about?

He died in hospital of a heart-attack. He was 62.

Roy's mantra was best expressed as pitting yourself against the world, going to the extreme to see if you can hack it. Will you match up? It's a hard code to live by. There is a consolation: I now know you don't recognise success unless you have first experienced abject failure. Your ambition to drive to the edge of the abyss, to seek the impossible and make it possible, certainly invites failure. But if you do fail, it's an honourable failure.

Bruce Reynolds, author of Autobiography of a Thief