THE sun was streaming in through the hotel restaurant windows. Outside, the broad white-gold sweep of the Copacabana beach slid down to an azure blue sea.

Long-limbed, scantily-clad and stunningly beautiful women lay on the sands and watched as muscular men in minuscule swimming trunks posed by the volleyball nets.

It looked like paradise even to someone nursing an horrendous hangover. It was hard to believe that, just 48 hours earlier, I had been shivering under freezing grey skies in the wintery North-East. Or that the night before I had been wining and dining in one of the most famous cities in the world. Or that the guy at the corner table, alone and ignored, was one of the most famous criminals in the world...

But it was. It was Ronnie Biggs. There was no mistaking that face, tanned and weatherbeaten under swept-back greying locks. These were the features that I had seen on a hundred newspaper pages and countless television documentaries. "Do you mind if I join you?" I asked and he waved wearily at the chair opposite him while staring morosely out of the window. He looked like I felt. And then I told him I was a journalist and would he mind if we had a chat.

His expression changed in an instant. Surprisingly, it was not suspicion but a smile that switched on in those eyes. And he became suddenly animated. Ronnie Biggs as large as life and twice as chirpy doing his act for the Press. To see that change was to see what Ronnie Biggs was all about. A man who could perform at the drop of a coffee cup.

'You're not from the Sun, are you?" he asked. "'Cos if you are it'll cost you a few bob." I explained that I was not from any national newspaper and the most The Northern Echo had ever paid for a story during my time was a couple of pints and a packet of crisps.

He laughed. "I'd settle for a pint of English beer," he said, in a prediction of the longings he would express 17 years later just before the very same Sun newspaper flew him home presumably at the cost of "a few bob". We chatted about this and that. Most of what we talked about, I've forgotten. He did, I recall, take the mickey about how my hangover had given me the chance to meet him. It was true. A woman from the Daily Express had flown out with £500 in her handbag to pay Ronnie for an interview. He was not able to take the money. He had been contracted to a Japanese film company which was making the story of his life and he was sticking to an exclusivity clause.

A compromise was reached when our party of travel journalists agreed to pose as British holidaymakers for the film we were supposed to rush up and buy T-shirts from him. In return, the Daily Express would get their interview. That morning, the others had gathered in the hotel lobby waiting for their chance to star before their cameras. To a hungover and dehydrated North-East reporter, coffee and toast seemed a much more enticing prospect. And that's where we came in... And how I came to meet, all too briefly, the Great Train Robber.

It wasn't long before the peace was disturbed and we were hustled outside so that Ronnie Biggs could earn his corn. The cameras rolled, the journalists ran up in tourist guise, overacting like crazy, Ronnie scribbled his autograph on cheap white T-shirts with a Great Train Robber motif on the front. When it came to my turn, he asked my name and grinned and inked out a typically cheeky message. "To Brian not the brain of the train robbery!?" On others he wrote "Crime doesn't pay well not much!" It was that cheek, the wide smile and the dazzling patter that kept Biggs in bread. He was, he said, "just enjoying life, making a living as best I can". And it was his personality, his charm, his notoriety so why shouldn't he make the most of it?

We found out later that he had become irritated with the Japanese film crew. He had been promised £1,000 for the work, but the film was supposed to be shown only in Japan. He had found out that the company was planning to sell it around the world a threat to his future earnings.

A suggestion that the Japanese action was daylight robbery brought only a wry smile. After the cameras were switched off, Biggs chatted amiably with our little group. He charmed the women and asked the men about football. He spoke with pride of his son Michael, who at the time was aged ten and had a record, called Magic Balloon, in the Brazilian pop charts. He made us all laugh when, asked if he approved of his son's career, he answered: "I don't care what he does as long as he doesn't become a crook."

And then our morning with Ronnie Biggs was almost over. The film crew re-emerged to drag him off. Just before he headed back to the beaches and his T-shirt selling, Biggs said: "You haven't asked me if I would ever go back to Britain. They all ask that one." So, we asked: "Would you?" He turned and waved his arms at the sun and the sea and the beach and the beautiful girls... "With all this," he said. "Would you?"

He looked like a man at peace with his surroundings, completely at home in the bright, light loveliness of glitzy Rio. But as the cameramen pulled him away, Ronnie Biggs sent us all a bemused and lingering look. A look that, as we flew homewards a week later, I remembered feeling carried just a trace of envy. After all we could go home again.

And so... This week, seeing a very different Ronnie Biggs, broken and beaten and reduced to grunting out his longing for English beer and Marmite and curry and maybe Margate, I couldn't help but feel I was right. And to feel, that now the old rogue has finally followed us back to Britain, he deserves a chance to end his exile - and what is left of his life in the London home he never really left.