Duncan Campbell

The two men sitting in the front seats of the Range Rover in an Essex country lane one icy morning last December had no faces. They had been blown away by a hitman. They and their companion, who was lying in the back seat, had all been shot dead before they could even reach the car door handles. We got their names soon enough – Tony Tucker, Patrick Tate and Craig Rolfe – but who were they?

A robber is a bandit, an outlaw, a desperado. A thief is a tea-leaf. A robber ends up at the Old Bailey – the London Palladium of the nation’s courts – and gets a ten stretch. A thief appears before the beak at Old Street magistrate’s court and gets three months. A robber takes the girlfriend off to Longchamp for the weekend. A thief goes home to the wife in Up-minster. So why did Bruce Reynolds, a main player in this country’s robbery of the century, choose to call his book The Autobiography of a Thief ?’