Working on the theory that desperate prison escapees do not use umbrellas, he opened the brolly, held it close to his face and strolled off to find a taxi.
WHEN the police came for David McMillan, they used a sledgehammer on the door. They found him in bed with the doomed and beautiful Clelia Vigano, the society restaurateur’s daughter who would later die in a prison fire.
McMillan was 25 then, already an accomplished drug trafficker who had parlayed a polished line of patter, a photographic memory and multiple passports into so much money he had trouble spending it. Sometimes he would fill a plastic bag with cash and wander Melbourne, buying beautiful things he didn’t need: sports cars, clothes, the latest electronic gadgetry. He was the most charming of villains: a ‘conman cum commodity dealer,’ one investigator called him, in grudging admiration.
The charm meant a lot of Melbourne people got to like him while he was spending money. The villainy meant many tried to forget him once the law caught up. Late one night, one of his brother’s girlfriends — young, beautiful, innocent and ‘a little tipsy’— came knocking at McMillan’s elegant South Yarra apartment, seeking counsel for a broken heart.
McMillan recalls that he must have cut an outrageously theatrical figure that night: part Mikado, part mobster, part agony aunt. ‘I was hospitable — if that is accurate for someone who answers his door at 1am wearing a $4000 Japanese bridegroom’s kimono with matching pistols (silenced, of course) holstered under each arm,’ he recalls, lampooning his younger self.
The guns were as much an affectation as the silk kimono. Part of a heist of several hundred weapons stolen from a South Melbourne warehouse by a robber friend, the pistols did not last long. He gave up carrying them after accidentally putting an armour-piercing round through the floorboards of a first-floor bedroom – straight through the ceiling of his father-in-law Ferdi Vigano’s Brighton bar. Luckily it was a few minutes after closing time, when the place was empty.
‘Guns were boys’ toys for sure and not as much use as we’d hoped at that age. After Danny Mac [the late armed robber Danny MacIntosh] took down Guthrie Trading [a firearm warehouse] we all looked like cowboys. The robbery left us with repro Lugers, .357 magnums, countless .22 target pistols (those that so well went on a lathe for silencer fitting) and .38s to spare. The police were not happy and complained, in fact begged, that we be responsible as to who was allowed to purchase. They feared nutters tooled up and drunk.
‘I bought a .357 Automag, a fine and expensive automatic with no gas leak so that with sub-sonic ammo, it was muted if not whisper quiet. Unfortunately my experience of the damn things was not promising. One night at dinner in Acland Street, St. Kilda, I excused myself to fetch some papers from my car. Nearby I came across five louts laying into some poor kid who was toothless and in the gutter. I took one of the pistols from my Fiat (they have a little stash glove-box), screwed on the fat silencer for effect and walked to the group and waved the thing about.
‘To my surprise, it was the kid in the gutter who spoke first: “Mind yer own fucking business,” he spat out, struggling to his knees. “What’s it to you!”’
I went back to my meal.
‘I realised bang-bangs were more trouble than they were worth. Hung up and buried, reserved only for special occasions.’
But giving up guns did not mean giving up ‘the life’, despite discreet warnings from a network of well-connected friends, some of them lawyers.
Looking back, the message was clear, he admits: quit before the police get serious. Even when warned of a taskforce, Operation Aries, set up to snare him and his accomplice Michael Sullivan, he ignored it. He knew they were tapping telephones but he wanted to play the game.
Drugs and money gave him false confidence. The result: after a marathon trial in 1983, a tough prison sentence imposed to send a message to intelligent, educated young people who should know better than to flout the law. Inside, he wrote a fluent inside account of prison life published by the Australian Financial Review but any remorse was strictly for show. Apart, he says, from his guilt over Clelia’s death. If it hadn’t been for him, she would never have been jailed at Fairlea, where a fire killed her – along with the South American girlfriend of his friend and partner-in-crime, Sullivan, a former world-class pole vaulter who had turned to drugs after injury crippled his athletic career.
When he was paroled in 1993, McMillan pretended to go straight but in secret plotted to beat the system. The trouble was, the system had changed, so that when he went back to his old false passport trick, the police were watching. They’d been tipped off by a former jailmate who said McMillan was ‘the smartest crook he’d ever met’. But apparently not smart enough to quit.
McMillan’s charm, cultured accent and intelligence grated on police. A retired detective who worked on the case told the authors: ‘We let him go to Thailand and get picked up there because we thought he might get hanged.’
It was a harsh call but they almost got their wish. When Thai police, tipped off by their Australian counterparts, grabbed McMillan in possession of drugs just before Christmas in 1993, the best he could hope for would be to have the mandatory death sentence commuted to 99 years – if he survived a couple of years in irons, which many didn’t.
He didn’t intend to stay long enough to find out.
AS jailbreaks go, it was pure Bollywood. When McMillan checked out of the ‘Bangkok Hilton’ one August night in 1996, it was thought no European had successfully escaped from Klong Prem in living memory, although some inmates had been caught – or died – trying.
McMillan, then 40, had first bribed his way into a cell with four prisoners on the first floor of a two-storey block. Then began an elaborately nonchalant period of preparation. They built a bookshelf in the cell with a heavy plank that would be vital to the plan. In a craft workshop elsewhere in the prison they made robust wooden frames for pictures that would never be framed. And through a network of discreet friends – including a loyal girlfriend, a jazz singer, and an outwardly respectable Melbourne accountant – he organised various items that would be vital when the day came. Among them were the smuggled hacksaw blades he and a strong helper would use to weaken the window bars on the night of the escape. After breaking a couple of bars, they wedged the plank between two others to form an overhanging beam. Then they looped his ‘rope’ – a coil of webbing used for craft – over the plank well away from the outside wall, so McMillan could let himself down silently, without touching the loose tiles on the wall and creating a racket that would alarm the guards – or nosy inmates. First, of course, he had to squeeze his lean, oiled torso through the gap. His Scandinavian accomplice stayed behind, preferring to face punishment for assisting than take the risk of being killed or captured in the escape attempt.
McMillan slipped past sleeping guards to the hobby room, retrieved tools and other ‘props’, including a roll of heavy gaffer tape that he used to rig a ladder by taping the picture frames to bamboo poles — and scaled the inner five-metre wall. Then he cut barbed wire, crawled under razor wire, carried his ladder across open ground and used it to cross the stinking open sewer inside the outer wall. Finally, he scaled the outer wall, praying as he climbed over electrified cables that rubber gloves and rubber soles would save him. He lowered himself the final nine-metre drop with the rope just as the sun rose.
So far, so lucky. But as a Westerner he risked challenge from guards arriving for work. The fake, black-painted balsa-wood ‘handgun’ he’d carried as a bluff was little use in daylight. It was time for his other secret weapon — a compact umbrella.
Working on the theory that desperate escapees do not use umbrellas, he opened the brolly, held it close to his face and strolled off to find a taxi. It worked – but there were plenty of barriers ahead.
‘It was astonishing to feel how quickly I divorced myself from the prison standing across the road that morning, looking at the building,’ he later told the authors. ‘I knew that it was over, in the past, and in some odd way that all along I’d been a volunteer.
After picking up a doctored passport from a safe house, he went to the airport, using two taxis to confuse the trail. He directed the taxi to the arrivals area, suspecting the departure door would be watched, then prayed that the cash card he was carrying would deliver enough currency from an ATM to buy a ticket. The first machine he tried didn’t work. With seconds to spare he got the cash, bought a ticket and at 10.20am was on a Lufthansa flight to Singapore, boarding as prison guards arrived at the airport to look for him. Then he vanished.
Back at Klong Prem, cellmates were beaten for collusion; warders faced disciplinary action. Eight remaining Australian prisoners got leg chains.
The risk had been enormous – but he’d always thought it was worth it. ‘In Bangkok I would have received a death penalty which would have been reduced to life (or 99 years) after about two years on death row,’ he told the authors. ‘That meant being chained to a wall for the duration wearing welded leg irons.’
In the Australian Parliament seven months later, the future Australian Attorney-General, Robert McClelland, was praising the good work of Australia’s Embassy in Thailand when he said something that still amuses McMillan: ‘… a prisoner … escaped from the Thai jail in quite exceptional and athletic circumstances. In terms of mere escape, it was really quite an achievement. He took the opportunity after his escape of dropping a note to the Australian embassy to thank them for all their tremendous work and said that he hoped he had not caused them any embarrassment by his escape.’
By then, the only westerner ever to break out of Klong Prem and into Hansard had reached London via a rendezvous with his lover in France after hiding with powerful friends in the remote Baluchistan province of Pakistan, near the Afghani border. And he was plotting his next move from the city in which he had been born.
CAULFIELD Grammar has produced its share of the worthy and the notable – lord mayors, captains of industry, leaders in business and bureaucracy, politics and the professions, respected members of rowing clubs, racing clubs and Rotary clubs. But even the best schools have their wayward sons.
In Caulfield’s case, there was Christopher Skase, who flew high, dreamed of being a film mogul, then fell to Earth – exposed as a flim-flam man, disgraced before dying in exile. And there is Nick Cave, the Lou Reed of Wangaratta, whose musical and lyrical brilliance survived the dark influence of drugs to make his mark in the wider world.
Then there is David McMillan a.k.a. Westlake, Dearing, Poulter, Magilton, Rayner, Elton, Knox, Hunter and many more aliases.
Like the young Skase, McMillan was a dreamer and schemer with an eye for the main chance, an ear for information and a head for figures. Like Cave, he was a restless, creative spirit drawn to the dark side. He succumbed to the worst of both impulses — the desire for fast money, the weakness for drugs.
Bright, ambitious and a drug user, McMillan was barely 20 when he took on a growth industry. Instead of trying computers or honing talents as a photographer, cameraman and writer, he became a drug trafficker. At least, that’s the prosecution case; when McMillan was arrested in the early 1980s, his defence argued he was a harmless user who subsidised his habit with gold and gem smuggling. A jury acquitted on all but one charge of conspiracy to import heroin — but the judge didn’t buy it, sentencing him and two accomplices to 17 years.
That was in 1983. The trial of McMillan and his associates — the former elite athlete Michael Sullivan and Thai national Supahaus Chowdury — had run almost six months, and it took the jury a record eight days to reach its verdict. The result disappointed McMillan but didn’t surprise him. Before the trial, he orchestrated an audacious scheme to escape from Pentridge Prison in a hijacked helicopter, part of a plan involving disguises, an interstate truck ride hidden in cargo, a sea-going boat and a light plane.
A tip to police foiled what would have been another James Bond episode for a man who lived life as if it were an action screenplay, him playing the sort of rogue who’s supposed to get the girl, the money and the last laugh. The real story is a little bleaker.
HIS mother is old and a little vague now, dozing away her days in a Brighton unit after being the life of the party for decades. He still calls her ‘Rosie’. When she married his father John in the 1950s, she turned heads. In 1950s photographs she looks like Princess Grace of Monaco. They were Australians transplanted to London. John McMillan, after distinguished war service, managed Rediffusion Television and went on to receive a CBE. By the time David was two, the marriage was unravelling and the raffish Rosie had met an Italian film producer who sent her (with David and his sister Debbie) to Australia to have his baby, promising he’d send for them. He never did.
Rosie and her brood did the best they could.
‘I suppose I had about five stepfathers,’ McMillan recalls. ‘Surely, the most understanding would have to have been George Arnaud — French George — who, until he met my mother, was a quite contented bachelor with a successful fashion business in Flinders Lane.’
Arnaud looked after the two older children in his big Kooyong Road house while Rosie and baby Simon ‘decamped to Lake Eyre to play cook for the land-speed record trials for Donald Campbell’ in 1964.
‘She went for the strong, silent types,’ McMillan says drily. One of Rosie’s consorts was the infamous abortionist, Dr Jim Troup, and she finally ended up with George Tsindos, long time proprietor of Florentino’s restaurant. A regular at social events with the millionaire set, Rosie had no money of her own. McMillan suspects that childhood anxiety about money and his mother made him fixated on providing lavishly — regardless of how he did it. While sister Debbie worked hard and half-brother Simon would become a respected journalist and television producer, David was always willing to take short cuts.
At 12, he earned a weekly wage – and schoolyard fame – presenting the ‘Peters Junior News’ on television. After switching from Prahran High to Caulfield Grammar he directed and starred in an action movie spoof his classmates still laugh about. In it, he escapes ‘jail’ with a replica pistol, foretelling what would happen in real life 25 years later.
It’s as if, says a lawyer who once represented him and became his friend, he was unable to separate real life from the reel unspooling in his mind.
For someone who impressed most people he met as charming, clever and generous, the young McMillan developed – or affected – some bad habits early in life.
When he arrived at Caulfield Grammar in fourth form in 1971 – the form above Nick Cave – he seemed, one former classmate recalls, ‘from another world’.
The teenage McMillan didn’t blend in. Or he didn’t want to. By an accident of birth – he was born overseas and his parents were divorced – he was different in ways he didn’t try to hide, from his smart accent to his subversive attitude. It struck some of his classmates later that his cultivation of differences between himself and the herd was an affectation that came to define his character and behaviour. Hard work and obeying rules was for others. He was too cool.
While most families lived ordinary lives in conventional suburban homes, McMillan lived by then in an apartment in Alma Road, St Kilda, with his mother and the two other children. This whiff of bohemia fascinated schoolmates who caught a glimpse of life with Rosie. She seemed, as one put it later, ‘a bit more glamorous than our mothers, with a cheeky sense of humour’.
Meanwhile, at school, McMillan fanned his own notoriety and showed an early taste for the best things money could buy.
‘He was a dodgy bugger,’ recalls one classmate. ‘He gave the impression of living life on the edge,’ recalls another. From scamming free canteen lunches to using credit cards he said he’d ‘found’, he made his mark in ways that teachers and parents frowned on. ‘He wasn’t a good influence,’ judges one classmate, ‘but he was ever interesting.’
McMillan helped publish the student newspaper. In the one photograph of him in The Grammarian he sits at the centre of a group, dark hair curling around his lean face, holding a copy of MAD magazine as he looks coolly at the camera.
Not everyone fell for McMillan’s winning ways. A veteran housemaster, ‘Kanga’ Corden, took a classmate called Paul Tankard aside one day and warned ‘that I wasn’t doing myself any favours hanging around with the likes of McMillan,’ Tankard told the authors. ‘Kanga had McMillan’s number, all right.’
It was a timely warning. When year 11 finished, McMillan vanished from the school. His classmates didn’t know exactly why at the time but it turned out he had been forging prescriptions — and cheques. The following year, like many another wayward youngster, he found himself studying (or not studying) his final year at Taylor’s College.
Taylor’s was, and is, a Melbourne institution in both senses of the word. For years, it has offered an alternative route to tertiary education for those prepared to pay – and who, for various reasons, are not enrolled elsewhere.
Among Taylor’s annual intakes of hardworking students was a sprinkling of more colourful characters, rebels against mainstream education. Some of these were failures having another try; others had been expelled or had left elsewhere under a cloud. In the class of 1973, David McMillan fell into this category. The following year it was a tough kid from Marcellin College called Alphonse Gangitano, later to become a notorious gangster and, later still, dead famous, shot by an underworld associate in what would become a great career move. In death, he became the ‘star’ he always wanted to be in life, albeit played by local hero Vince Colosimo rather than the Hollywood heart throbs Alphonse fantasised about.
Unlike Gangitano, McMillan was never going to be a gunman or a bash artist. It wasn’t his style. But, for all his intelligence, he wasn’t destined for an academic career, either. He skipped classes, forged passes, and that was the end of his formal education. At 17, he was picked up for passing dud cheques and was already on a road leading to what a media lawyer friend later wryly described as ‘his Midnight Express life’.
An eclectic and voracious reader, McMillan devoured information he thought he could use. The boy who’d regularly duped the school tuckshop was graduating to the big time, still by trying to beat the system.
He was later to try the more cerebral criminal arts – forgery, disguise, fraud and smuggling – but, at bottom, he was a confidence man. Everything else he did was based on his ability to befriend and to deceive. But, like all con artists, he had to convince himself before he could convince others. If he imagined himself as a character from The Day of the Jackal, there was also some Walter Mitty in his readiness to lace reality with fantasy. It was hard to know where one starts and the other ends.
There are people in Melbourne – otherwise sensible people at the top of their professions – who firmly believe that McMillan was a misguided genius who was, however briefly, a whiz kid in the advertising industry in his early 20s. Proof of this, they claim, is that he was the creative force behind several well-known television advertisements in the mid-to-late 1970s.
Whether McMillan even worked in advertising at all is a moot point – and, if he did, he was never prominent. People in the industry don’t remember him, and yet he told friends he’d been responsible for successful Mars Bar and RC Cola commercials, among others. A close relative also remembers things differently, saying he had never held down a job for long, even if his knowledge of photography and film might have won him enough work on the fringes of advertising to weave a believable tale from a thread of truth. The truth, says the relative grimly, is that his greatest talent was using deception to avoid work.
‘He was very kind in some ways, but cruel in others – and always a shocking liar. He was always trying to con other people and very lazy.’ An example: as a primary school student he was offered pocket money to weed the garden, but he immediately tried to persuade a neighbour’s child to do the chore for him – at a reduced rate. He didn’t want the work, only the profit. ‘And he got caught doing it,’ says the relative. ‘That sums him up.’
Ask him now, and he says that after a year at Taylor’s, he dabbled in working as a film projectionist. And that a part-time job at a dodgy city cinema – which catered to ‘the raincoat’ brigade – put him in touch with the fringes of the underworld. He worked with girlfriends of safe-crackers and thieves who had turned to selling drugs when police surveillance cramped their style. His connections with student pro-marijuana activists bridged two worlds: hippie culture and hard core crime.
McMillan’s first serious crime was to smuggle hashish from India in a 1950s Grundig radio. ‘A fairly avuncular customs guy pulled the radio out of the case. You could smell the hash. He looked at the passport and then at me and said, “Take your radio, get going and never let me see you again”. I didn’t realise he was letting me go because he didn’t want to wreck my life. (At the time) I thought I was wonderful. So suddenly I was in charge of international hanky panky.’ It wasn’t until much later he realised he’d been too arrogant to understand he’d been given a second chance. Perhaps it would have saved him many years in jail had he been arrested that day. Instead, he turned to importing heroin, using multiple passports and a friendly travel agent.
‘I came back to rose petals and red carpet,’ he jokes. First alone, then with Sullivan, he made obscene amounts of money — but never enough to quit. His own belief is that authorities started watching after he imported a wildly expensive car (‘a reproduction 1930s Bugatti’, he says derisively) from the US, using a false name and passport. But it might be that he came under notice in more ways than one. You could not make – and spend – the sort of money he was without attracting some attention. Especially if you happened to live near a wily veteran policeman.
LONG after the old copper had retired from ‘the job’ and taken up bowls, the force still used him as an example to recruits of how curiosity and alertness can crack a case wide open.
The lesson went like this. Back in 1980, like neighbours everywhere, the policeman was curious about the new people in the house next door. They were young, good-looking, smart – and conspicuous spenders. The woman drove a Porsche and her boyfriend a Fiat. They had friends with a late-model Rover, an Alfa Romeo and a big American car, and they came and went at all times of day and night. Glance through a window and you’d glimpse the latest in electrical gear and cameras.
Then there was the landscaping and the renovations – even in an affluent Melbourne bayside suburb like this, it seemed like over-capitalising. A sign, perhaps, like the ‘grass castles’ in the vineyards of Mildura and Griffith, of black money with nowhere else to go.
But the really suspicious thing about the people next door, it seemed to the old cop, was that they didn’t seem to work. They would disappear for days or weeks at a time, but when they returned they lived the indolent lives of spoiled teenagers with bottomless allowances. Late to bed, late to rise, eating out most nights. Their main past-time was to amuse themselves, it seemed to him.
The policeman started jotting down car registration numbers, and running the usual checks on the names that came up. He passed his suspicions on, up the chain of command.
First came the surveillance and the intelligence gathering. The policeman’s nomadic neighbours were near enough to ‘cleanskins’ but if they lacked criminal records, they were on the way to getting them. For a start, they were using heroin – and dealing in it to support not only their habits, but their affluence. It was soon clear they had more than cars and cameras – they had properties everywhere.
Heroin brought them into contact with people for whom treachery was a way to survive. It was only a matter of time before a word was dropped discreetly in an interview room in return for bail or a blind eye. And the word was that the private school crew with the European cars did more than use the stuff and sell it to others. They were importing it.
It wasn’t as if McMillan and his crew didn’t get some warning. His lawyer called him in one day to say ‘big people’ had warned him they couldn’t overlook it any more. A taskforce was being formed. McMillan arrogantly insisted the police had suspicions but no evidence. He said he had not yet invested enough to retire. Besides, he had ‘business partners’ who wanted enough for their retirement. The temptation for ‘easy money’ was too great.
It couldn’t last. After a cat and mouse game with investigators culminating in a James Bond car chase, he and Sullivan lost ten years in jail and the women they loved. Then, instead of going straight, came the Thailand debacle in 1993, followed by the great escape of 1996.
After that — the missing years.
CUT to 2009. The location is Chislehurst, a village turned suburb south of London in Kent. It’s outer commuter belt, where collars are white, lanes leafy and mortgages hefty. Richmal Crompton, who wrote the William books, lived here. Now David McMillan does, too, in a two-storey brick house with a Porsche in the drive, Asian antiques in the hall, French champagne in the refrigerator, a pair of pedigree dogs on the couch.
It all, he says, belongs to his partner — a Londoner called Jeanette who fell for him while visiting her husband in prison in Pakistan ten years ago, where McMillan had been locked up during his border hopping years. Her husband, accused of smuggling tonnes of hashish, lost both the case and his wife. Her two teenage daughters now regard McMillan as a father figure.
For years, old friends and family members in Australia grew suddenly vague when McMillan’s name was raised, but now his ‘retirement’ means he can drop the secret life he led after going over the wall at Klong Prem. Luckily, he says poker-faced, he faces a death sentence in Thailand, where they lash condemned men before machine-gunning them. It means Britain will not breach its anti-capital punishment policy by extraditing him. And although he ‘owes’ Victoria a few months of parole, it is not enough to trigger extradition. He is safe if he stays quietly in Britain.
At 53, he says, he has given up his wicked ways ‘to turn my hand to trade’. It’s almost honest. He tinkers in a shed, restoring furniture. Well, not so much restoring, he admits, as transforming wooden dining room sets bought from local charity shops into gleaming ‘French’ artefacts. Easy work for someone who has built so many containers with hidden smuggling compartments.
‘A spray of antique white eggshell, a layer of matt finish and hand-brushed gold lines topped by that distressed effect made to imitate 100 years of family living,’ he purrs.
The profit margin is good, he says: £200 ($A390) purchase, £150 of materials and a sticker saying ‘WAS £1750 — NOW £1100.’ It’s not the Sopranos but it’s a living. Proof that it’s hard to keep a bad man down.
In 2008, he wrote a book: a self-mocking journey through the violence and despair of prison, climaxing with the jailbreak. As for what happened between Bangkok and the present — being harboured by a Baluchistan warlord, arrested in Pakistan and banged up in Sweden — he says he’s saving that for his next book.