Prisons and probationMichael Biggs on his life as the son of the train robber – and why he thinks Ronnie's release was linked to the Lockerbie bomber judgment

The following correction was printed in the Guardian's Corrections and clarifications column, Thursday 3 August 2009

Charmian Brent, not Charmaine, is the former wife of great train robber Ronnie Biggs.

Michael Biggs and I meet only a few hours after Abdelbaset al-Megrahi, "the Lockerbie bomber" convicted of 270 counts of murder and now dying of cancer, has been released. Biggs's father Ronnie, "the great train robber" now dying of multiple ailments including pneumonia, was freed exactly two weeks earlier on the same grounds. It is difficult not to link the two events in our initial conversation, no matter how strongly the government denies there was any pre-arranged deal.

"I do believe that when Jack Straw made the decision [last month] not to let my father out on parole, the decision to let him out on compassionate grounds had already been made," Biggs says. "Straw had to look like he was being tough on crime. Let's face it, they knew they were going to let al-Megrahi out, but they couldn't let him out without first letting my father out. Can you imagine the outcry if they hadn't? The way Straw conducted himself in relation to my father was horrible. But good luck to him, he is a politician. That's what he's supposed to do."

We're sitting in the rear garden of Michael Biggs's modest home in Barnet, north London, just a couple of minutes' walk from the nursing home where his father has been settling in since arriving from Norfolk and Norwich hospital a week ago. Michael looks relaxed in T-shirt and shorts, his bright eyes smiling, until I ask him how is father is.

"He's not good," he says, suddenly looking down at the ground, "but the release and everything has brought him round a bit. We're just hoping he can live on for a while. I want him to be able to come and sit in my garden here with us." 'Us' is Michael's Brazilian wife, Veronica, his nine-year-old daughter Ingrid and the family dog, Rio, an eight-year-old bullmastiff that plays happily at his master's feet. "Rio Biggs – he's another Biggsy," says Michael, smiling again.

It is eight and a half years since the private jet carrying an ailing Ronnie Biggs back from Brazil touched down at Northolt airfield. The generally accepted reason behind the wanted man's return was that he came back to receive free medical treatment. Was that really the case?

"He was ill," says Michael. "There was good medical attention available in Brazil. The truth is he came back in the end because he was depressed and he missed England." But surely it was a hell of a gamble? At the time I was still in prison, watching the news as Biggs's plane landed in a packed television room. To a man we were convinced that regardless of whether he was ill or not, Ronnie Biggs was going to die in prison.

"You know, I didn't want him to return, no way. I tried everything to persuade him not to. He'd had two strokes, couldn't speak, could hardly move. He was going downhill fast. But every time I came in the house we shared [in Rio de Janeiro], there were notes: 'I want to go back. Take me back. I want to go home.' I was living with a depressed old man and no matter what I said, he was adamant he just wanted to come home to England."

When they began to seriously consider his father's return, Michael and Ronnie started monitoring the British press for sentencing trends. "We saw that rapists and child molesters were getting out in just a few years, whereas my father had never actually hurt anyone. We knew he would have to go to prison when he came back, to make an example of him, so it was a gamble. But we never thought they would keep him in for ever. He really was very ill after his strokes; he couldn't talk. Why would they want to keep him in for 10 years? He couldn't do any harm to anyone even if he wanted to. We didn't expect them to do what they did."

What "they" did was put Ronnie Biggs in London's HMP Belmarsh, one of the most secure prisons in the country, home to terrorists, murderers, rapists and paedophiles. The reason the authorities gave for keeping Biggs there for six years was that the prison was said to have the medical facilities necessary for his various illnesses. Yet it was in Belmarsh that he contracted scabies, developed septic sores around the opening for his stomach tube, suffered several epileptic fits and had a further stroke. There again, Michael concedes that had his father not returned, Ronnie would probably not have survived much longer in Brazil, owing to the severity of his depression. "He would have been dead long ago if he hadn't come back."

Despite Ronnie Biggs's very real suffering in prison, first in Belmarsh and later in HMP Norwich, many on the outside believed he was getting what he deserved. The attack on the Glasgow to London mail train in 1963, which netted £2.6m and catapulted Biggs from smalltime crook to world notoriety, was the biggest robbery the country had ever seen. The train's driver, Jack Mills, was coshed and left bruised and bleeding – and never worked again. Members of the gang, including Biggs, were sentenced to up to 30 years apiece.

But instead of knuckling down and "doing his bird", of course, after 15 months in a cell Biggs escaped over the wall of Wandsworth prison. He fled first to Belgium and then France, where he underwent plastic surgery and acquired a false passport – before heading for a new life in Australia, where he was joined later by his wife Charmaine and his two children, Michael's older half-brothers.

After the police discovered his whereabouts in 1969, Biggs flew to Panama and then Brazil, finally settling in Rio de Janeiro in 1970 to live the "high life", famously drinking cocktails with bikini-clad Brazilian girls and forever boasting of his escape. His behaviour apparently still rankled when, in July, justice secretary Jack Straw blocked Biggs's parole application on the grounds that Biggs was "wholly unrepentant" and had "outrageously courted the media" during his life on the run. Michael was devastated. "We couldn't believe it. The parole board had said he was coming home, then Straw said: 'No, he's not.'"

But was Straw right? Is Ronnie unrepentant about his role in the train robbery, and everything that happened afterwards? "Repentance is a word for priests," Michael says. OK, but is he sorry for what he did? "My father absolutely regrets having committed a crime and regrets that Mr Mills, the train driver, got hurt. Absolutely. But repentance and remorse are the wrong words to describe how my father feels about what happened. He didn't physically hurt anyone. He never even set foot on that train. And anyway, as he says, if he hadn't been involved in the robbery and then escaped, I wouldn't be here and his granddaughter wouldn't be here."

Michael Biggs was born in Rio in 1974. It was because his mother, Raimunda de Castro – then an "exotic dancer" – was pregnant with him that the first attempt by the British government to extradite his father failed. In Brazilian law, no father of a Brazilian child could be extradited and, in any case, there was no reciprocal extradition treaty between Britain and Brazil. A little over a year after Michael was born, his mother left for Europe and Ronnie Biggs was left to bring up his son alone.

"It was hard for my father. The robbery money was long gone. The terms of his staying in Brazil meant that he was not allowed to work. He was getting in serious debt and struggling badly. Then, when I was about two, out of the blue an Argentinian film crew knocked on the door. It was Christmas Eve. My dad said, I've got a hungry kid in the house, nothing to give him for Christmas – I'm not eating so that he can eat. And the crew said, hang on a minute, we'll give you two thousand dollars for the interview. My dad didn't have to think too long about that. And that was how the press coverage started. In those days, the minimum wage in Brazil was about seven dollars a month. The local chief of police told him, if foreign journalists want to give you money under the table for your story, I don't have to know about this. You've got to make a living."

Father and son lived reasonably well off Ronnie's media earnings for the next few years. Then, in 1981, Biggs was kidnapped by a band of mercenaries led by the ex-soldier John Miller, and taken by boat to Barbados. But Barbados turned down Britain's extradition request and Biggs was returned to Rio. While he was being held captive, Michael had gone to the press and had made televised appeals for his father's return – leading to another extraordinary twist in this story.

"I was only six years old and speaking on the telly, saying I wanted my dad back; saying the Queen wanted him but I wanted him more. It was then that the president of CBS records in Brazil saw me and thought I would do well as part of a boy band. We were the country's first boy band."

The band, The Magic Balloon Gang, flourished for six years from 1981, selling 12m records and bringing relative financial security to the Biggses for the next few years. But even that came at a price for Michael. "I didn't have a childhood," he explains. "From the age of seven when I joined the band I was working, grafting sometimes seven days a week. So I missed my childhood years a lot. When other kids were playing football I was presenting a television show. I'd do school in the morning from seven till noon, then record the show in the afternoon. The other boys in the band lived in Sao Paulo, but because of the terms of my dad's parole, we had to reside in Rio. So I had to fly to Sao Paulo every day.

"It meant I had to grow up very quickly. At the weekends we did the concerts – 30,000, sometimes 60,000 people. We toured with Ricky Martin and sold out the Maracana (Brazil's biggest stadium) four times."

How much did Michael know about his father's past? "From a very early age, I knew my dad had committed a crime, although I didn't know exactly what it was. I remember when we used to visit ships that came to Brazil, we'd get goodies from the sailors. So I thought he had robbed a ship. Then one day he sat me down and told me the truth.

"He knew I was going to take shit at school and, boy, was he right. I went through 17 schools. Not only was I the son of the Train Robber – and the son of a stripper – but, worst of all, I was the boy from the band. I took a lot of bullying and had to learn how to fight. I thought, well, there is no point in going back home crying 'cos I'll just get more shit from my dad. So I started standing up for myself. And after I tasted blood for the first time, I ended up becoming a bully myself for a while. Eventually I ended up in a hippy school in Rio called Edem. They were more interested in shagging girls there than getting into fights, so I thought, 'Oh, they're the smart ones . . .'"

Even then, Michael's lifestyle was in danger of taking a heavy toll. "I know I had too many of the pleasures of life, too soon and in abundance. My dad knew it was no point in trying to control me with an iron fist, so he decided to go the other way and become my best mate. And he did it. He told me, 'Mate, you're going about life the wrong way. If you're really going to go down this road – if you want to have a drink and have a smoke and enjoy women – don't do it while you're listening to punk rock.' He gave me an Ella Fitzgerald album, a modern jazz album and an Incredible String Band album – and it turned me towards the cooler way of living. Several times since then, I've just wanted to say to the media: 'Bollocks to you. You know fuck all about my dad's life, you're talking rubbish.' But I stay diplomatic. If you want people to stay on your side, you have to stay cool and just tell the truth."

A year after the band folded, Michael made his first trip to the UK, doing some more recording and making new friends – one of whom he ended up lodging with when he returned to the UK again, with Ronnie, in 2001. But with the money from the band now long gone, he struggled to make ends meet while trying to maintain regular contact with his father in Belmarsh. "That was hard. I'd been a pop star, for God's sake. Now I was working on building sites carrying bags of rubble, doing any labouring job to give me the money to be able to live and visit my father."

Did it ever get too much for him, I wonder. "Not for one single moment," Michael replies. "My dad stood by me, brought me up on his own. How could I ever not stand by him when he needed me most?"

All the same, Michael's relationship with his wife came under a lot of pressure. "The first three years I was here we lived apart, because the government was very vindictive towards my family. Every time my wife and daughter came to England, they would take their passports away. They asked my wife, 'How do you feel that your husband puts his father in front of you and your child?'

"The second time my wife came, she was stopped at the airport and she and my daughter were locked in a room with no tables, no water. They went through all of my daughter's possessions, through her powdered milk, treated them really nastily. The home office said I could only become a British citizen if I could show them my mother and father's marriage certificate. But they had never married. So I asked my mother to come over here and marry my father and that's what she did, so I could stay permanently."

Michael's life here became more secure a couple of years ago, with another typically outlandish-sounding development. He was working as a manager in a money-transfer bureau when a football agent came in to send money to Brazil. "He asked me if I know anyone in football. I said as a matter of fact I did, but I knew them from the pub! He asked me if I thought I could help him place some players. I said yeah, why not, and that's how the idea for my football academy started."

Michael's football academy, EuroAcademy Brasil, has since brought a number of young Brazilian players over to the UK for trials with West Ham and Fulham, and has just placed Lucas Baggio with the Greek club Olympiakos. "A big problem in European football is that players who come over are not ready; not adapted to the type of football, the food, the language. For example, when Gilberto came over to Arsenal it took him a good year to get used to what was expected of him. And when you bring the young ones, sometimes they can't make it because it's too hard to adapt quickly."

Michael explains he is not a football agent but a consultant; he also has a number of other business interests that he feels he can concentrate on now that his father is free.

"I can take the reins of my own life again. It's still early days. My dad came to the nursing home on Monday, now it's only Thursday. But give me three months. Apart from the football I've been dabbling with commodities. People call me from Brazil who have got iron ore mines; they ask me, 'We've got iron ore – can you get us someone to sell it to?' But I haven't been able to concentrate on any of this to any serious level because I've been campaigning for my dad."

And so I ask him, finally, is he proud of his dad? Michael's face becomes serious again. "I'm not proud of what he did, not proud that he was a criminal. But I am proud of the man that he is."

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