Ronnie Biggs of Great Train Robbery infamy–which morphed in time into pure fame–was good at robbing trains, escaping from prison and eluding authorities, but he was a genius at the ways of cultivating celebrity before such things were common knowledge. From Margalit’s Fox’s New York Times obituary of Biggs:

“Mr. Big­gs’s en­dur­ing rep­u­ta­tion stemmed not so much from the heist it­self as from what hap­pened af­ter­ward. Tried and con­vict­ed, he es­caped from prison and be­came the sub­ject of an in­ter­na­tion­al man­hunt; spent the next 36 years as a fugi­tive, much of that time liv­ing open­ly in Rio de Ja­neiro in de­fi­ance of the British au­thori­ties; and en­joyed al­most preter­nat­ur­al luck in thwart­ing re­peat­ed at­tempts to bring him to jus­tice, in­clud­ing be­ing kid­napped and spir­ited out of Brazil by yacht.

The fact that the rob­bery hap­pened to take place on Mr. Big­gs’s birth­day al­so did not hurt.

Dur­ing his years at large, Mr. Big­gs, aid­ed by the British tab­loid press, cul­ti­vated his im­age as a work­ing-class Cock­ney hero. He sold mem­o­ra­bilia to tourists, en­dorsed prod­ucts on tele­vi­sion and re­corded a song (‘No One Is In­no­cent’) with the Sex Pis­tols, the British punk band.

As much as any­thing, Mr. Big­gs’s story is about the con­struc­tion of ce­leb­rity, and the ways in which ce­leb­rity can be sus­tained as a kind of cot­tage in­dus­try long af­ter the world might rea­son­ably be ex­pect­ed to have lost in­ter­est.”

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“No One Is Innocent”: