Career
In the 1960s, he was an armed robber who was tagged "Public Enemy No. 1" by Scotland Yard. He was apprehended and given a 23-year jail sentence. He escaped from prison on several occasions and after his final re-arrest in 1970 he was given a sentence of 26 years. He subsequently took an Open University degree in Sociology and was awarded a BSc first class. He was paroled in 1978.
He wrote his autobiography, McVicar by Himself, and scripted the 1980 biographical film McVicar, which starred Roger Daltrey in the title role. After his release from prison he studied for a postgraduate degree at the University of Leicester.
In 1998 he lost a libel action brought by sprinter Linford Christie over his claim that Christie was a "steroid athlete". Ironically, six months after McVicar lost the libel action, Christie's track career was ended when he received a two-year ban for taking a performance-enhancing substance.
In 2002, McVicar published a book about the Jill Dando murder, Dead on Time, in which he paints the convicted killer Barry George as a sophisticated liar, trying to appear too stupid to carry out a difficult mission. The book appeared after George's first appeal was rejected. (The conviction was overturned in 2008, and George released.) McVicar wrote Who Killed Jill? You Decide, in which he examines the British jury system. This second book is purged of the chapters recounting 'personal experiences' which McVicar claims were the product of poetic licence for the most part.
McVicar by Himself remains a benchmark for a classic escape yarn and one of the most popular stories of real and daring prison escapes of all times. In a recent TV series, Real Prison Escapes, a commentator and a McVicar contemporary observed that "John McVicar would have danced his way out of Alcatraz blind-folded". He is an outspoken opponent of prison rehabilitation initiatives, claiming that he was never reformed, but rather, chose not to be a criminal. Unlike other notorious 1960s Eastenders involved in crime at the time, he doesn't like talking about his past and refuses to "be defined by it".
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