Celebrity villain Ronnie Knight has died aged 89 after spending his final years living on a state pension having frittered away his ill-gotten gains.
Knight pocketed £1.3million in today’s money for his share in the 1983 Security Express heist - then a record for cash stolen in a robbery.
But after 11 years on the run, the former husband of actress Barbara Windsor ended up in a rented one-bedroom flat in a sheltered housing complex for the elderly in Cambridge.
He passed away on Monday, a few years after being diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease.
Speaking at his home in Luton on Wednesday, Ronnie’s brother John, 86, said: “I’m very upset, it’s too early to talk at the moment.”
Knight’s condition was said to have deteriorated recently before he reportedly contracted pneumonia.
The son of James and Nellie, Ronald Knight was born into poverty in Hoxton, east London, on January 20, 1934.
Young Ronnie committed low level offences while aspiring to follow in the footsteps of his older brother Jimmy, who was regarded as a more serious criminal.
He said later: “When I was young, where I came from, living in a sawdust yard, there was nothing else you could do but go out and try and get some money somehow.
“My ambition was always to be like my older brother Jimmy, to have smart clothes and plenty of money. As long as you didn’t hurt anyone, no one was fussy where it came from.”
Ronnie achieved success by running two of the favourite gangland haunts of the 1950s and 60s, the Artistes and Repertoire Club on Charing Cross Road and the nearby Tin Pan Alley.
Recalling one showbiz party, he later wrote of “Noel Coward, tinkling away on the ivories for all he was worth, Roger Moore drawing the girls like horseflies to a cow-pat.”
Knight was earning extra cash from pool tables and peep shows in Soho while regularly rubbing shoulders with celebrities.
He was married to his first wife and childhood love, June, when he met Dame Barbara in the early 60s.
Knight later said: “I’ve loved all the ladies in my life. But I found what I wanted with Barbara.”
The glamorous couple married in 1964 and were photographed the following year with Reggie Kray at his Soho nightclub El Morocco.
Speaking about Knight, Windsor once said: “My first husband was a bit of a rascal but he was a good rascal, he was a very sweet man.”
In 1980 Knight was acquitted with gangland enforcer Nicky “Snakehips” Gerard at the Old Bailey of murdering “Italian Tony” Zomparelli.
The 1974 murder of Zomparelli was carried out in revenge for him stabbing Knight’s younger brother David to death four years earlier.
Knight later wrote in a book that he had paid Gerard to carry out the murder.
Gerard was suspected of 10 killings when he was shot dead in Canning Town, east London in June 1982. The murder remains unsolved.
Knight divorced Windsor when he fled to Spain, wanted by detectives in connection with the Security Express robbery.
He was part of a gang, along with Hatton Garden heist ringleader Terry Perkins, who carried out the heist in Shoreditch around the corner from where he grew up.
The raid was masterminded by Ronnie’s brother John who spent over a year planning it.
John Knight later revealed he had a mole, a retired Security Express employee, who he met in a pub a few months before the job.
An underworld source would go on to claim that this man was a retired police officer who had been in charge of security at the depot and committed suicide.
After his brother was arrested, Ronnie went “on his toes” and hid out on the Costa del Sol.
Ronnie said later: “The robbery had nothing to do with it. The police said I was on the run, but I wasn’t. I was going to go anyway.
“I knew Barbara wasn’t going to go because she was fixed on this showbusiness thing.
“It was an addiction for her. I’d asked her to stop. I had enough money to look after both of us. But she didn’t want to miss a part.
“We had a villa built in Spain, and when we went, she used to bring scripts over. She’d have the script, read it, then get up, phone her agent and fly home.
“It wasn’t a holiday for me. It used to hurt me. What hurt the most were the number of New Years I spent on my own. I wanted her to turn the business down.
“I only left because she was always working. I wanted a life where she was home every night with me, even if I was cooking for her.”
He eventually returned to Britain in 1994 and was jailed for seven years for handling proceeds of the robbery but not the heist itself.
Knight married third wife Sue Haylock in 1987 after he and Windsor divorced.
Like so many villains of his time, Knight ended his life with little money.
After being released from prison in 1998 for the Securitas robbery he spent the rest of his days living a quiet life in Cambridge.
He said a few years later: “’I don’t want people feeling sorry for me because I’m Ronnie Knight. You have to put on a face, show you’re the guv’nor.
“I don’t want people to know I’m skint, because when you’re a skint person nobody wants to know you.”
