A PAL of Brazil’s best-known fugitive Ronnie Biggs has told how Scots hoods the Gillespie brothers could still be alive and well in a South American bolthole.
Chris Pickard, 66, said the drugs cartel leaders, who are feared murdered, could easily have slipped off the radar in the massive country.
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He spoke on the 60th anniversary of the notorious Great Train Robbery that catapulted Biggs into criminal folklore before he spent 31 years on the run in Rio de Janeiro.
Chris, who ghostwrote the late crook’s autobiography, was asked about the feared siblings James, 50, and Barry, 46, who haven’t been seen since 2019.
And he insisted the pair, from Rutherglen, near Glasgow, could still be hiding out in Brazil.
He said: “Given the size of the country, you could disappear anywhere over there.
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“The Gillespie brothers could so easily by now have had somebody fix them up with papers that make it look like they have the right to work and live in Brazil.
“There are still people who turn up in Brazil and you’re not really sure why they’re there.
“Like the USA, it is made up of a lot of different states.
“So once you move from one state to another, you can sort of go off the radar and start again.”
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The writer, from Woking, Surrey, continued: “These guys are obviously well funded and well connected, so people could be supplying them with false passports and documents.
“And if they have got friendly with Brazilians, there’s probably someone there who could help with a bank account, credit card, different name, that sort of thing.”
The Gillespies were last known to have been hiding out in the city of Fortaleza, the capital of Ceara state in the north east of Brazil.
It’s understood they were staying in a plush beachside apartment before they vanished. Sources claim the duo have come to harm, but no bodies have been found.
New clues about their fate emerged in June when associate James ‘The Don’ White, 46, pled guilty to a series of organised crime raps after being extradited from Fortaleza.
The High Court in Glasgow heard how the mobster, of Gartcosh, Lanarkshire, told his estranged wife Kirstin, 40, and deputy Paul Fleming, 39, his former bosses had vanished in 2019.
And White announced that he was taking over Scotland’s biggest cocaine,dirty cash and weapons gangs. Chris said the chances of the Gillespies still being anywhere near the spot where White was snared by Brazilian cops are slim.
But he revealed there would be an array of other options open to any fugitive gangsters.
He said: “Two Scots guys wandering around Fortaleza would get spotted easily.
“If they were to move down south to places like Salvador or Recife, people would tend to think they were tourists so they could pass for a bit of time.
“But if they were further south in Sao Paulo, people with a European appearance could probably get by easier. There have been a lot of major criminals who have been found after living for many years in Brazil.
“Some of the Italian mafia were discovered running very good Italian restaurants in Rio.”
Chris grew close to Biggs while based as a journalist in Brazil.
He has now ghostwritten his life story, The Great Train Robber: My Autobiography, which has hit the shelves six decades after the 1963 mail train heist at Ledbury, Bucks.
So he is well-placed to know the pitfalls facing hoods on the run when they follow in the footsteps of his pal. And that’s one of the reasons why he does not rule out the grim possibility the Gillespies may never be seen again.
Chris explained: “You still stand out in Brazil if you’re a foreigner.
“The Gillespies chose Fortaleza in the north east, which the authorities keep an eye on because at one stage it had a very bad reputation for sex tourism.
“If you had a couple of burly Scots lads suddenly setting up there, they would be on the radar of a lot of people — both good and bad.
Up in Fortaleza, it would be so easy to take them out in a fishing boat, weigh them down and throw them in the ocean — and they would never appear again.”
He added: “In Ceara. the state where Fortaleza is, you don’t have to go far out of the city to be in the backwoods, and it would not be that difficult for someone to disappear.
“If someone has been doublecrossed or some shipments disappear, nobody trusts anybody.”
Fortaleza is 1,600 miles from Rio, where Biggs lived from 1970, six years after escaping from jail, until he agreed to be flown back to the UK in 2001.
He spent the next eight years in prison before dying in a London nursing home in 2013, aged 84.
We told last month how White elevated himself to head the Scots drugs cartel after the disappearance of his former bosses.
But after his arrest in Fortaleza, he spent 20 months in a Brazilian jail fighting extradition before he returned to Scotland last August.
White trafficked co*ke and guns across three continents and was caged for nine years for running a global drugs empire. A week later his second-in-command, Fleming, was also sentenced to nine years behind bars. He had earlier been extradited from Spain.
Fleming admitted organising the smuggling of cocaine from Brazil, Colombia, and Bolivia.
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Police Scotland launched a fresh appeal in January to find the Gillespie brothers. But it is understood cops later told relatives they may have come to harm.
Detective Inspector Michael Lochrie said: “Despite previous appeals which focused on Netherlands and Brazil, we are still appealing for anyone who has information about their whereabouts to get in touch.”
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