Andrew Drummond, Bangkok | September 08, 2007
THIS is one of the world’s most notorious - and remarkable - heroin traffickers: Melbourne man David McMillan. He should be dead. Or at least wasting away in a Thai jail awaiting death by hanging.
Instead, on this September morning when The Weekend Australian tracked him down to London’s Fulham Road, he was buying the papers on the way to his job, packing health food.
The Caulfield Grammar-educated drug dealer, who for decades helped run a multi-million-dollar trans-national crime empire, is a wanted man in Thailand. Having skipped parole in Melbourne, he cannot return to Australia without facing jail.
McMillan cheated death through a miraculous escape from the infamous Thai jail known as the Bangkok Hilton. He rehearsed for the breakout from Klong Prem prison in 1996 by years earlier plotting to escape from Pentridge Prison’s D Division in a helicopter.
When he was released after a decade in jail in Australia, he skipped the country on a false passport. He has never returned and has no fear that Thai or Australian authorities will come looking for him.
“Simple, really: the British Government will not extradite to a country where the death penalty is still practised, and breach of parole is not an offence for which I can be extradited to Australia,” McMillan says from his London bed-sit. “Besides, I have a British passport.”
Despite still being on the run, McMillan, now 51, has written a book, Escape, about the 30 years he spent moving heroin from the Golden Triangle of Southeast Asia and the Golden Crescent of Pakistan and Afghanistan to Australia and Europe, and his amazing breakout in Bangkok.
“He was charming, a dashing buccaneer, very different from your average crim,” Australian QC Philip Dunn says of the young McMillan.
At the peak of his career in the 1980s, McMillan says he was a multi-millionaire: “I maintained a large flat in Mayfair, homes and offices in Melbourne, and apartments in Bangkok, Hong Kong and Brussels.”
But as he came to the attention of the Australian Federal Police, the US Drug Enforcement Agency and British Customs, he was forced constantly to switch cabs and enter and exit department stores to confuse followers and carry a variety of mobile phones and passports at all times.
McMillan was busted for his first kilo of cannabis at Heathrow in 1979 and served six months in Reading jail.
“I was one of those who thought all drugs should be made legal,” he says.
“I started dealing among friends, but, of course, with the profits being so good it went much bigger. I am not going to pretend what I am not. It is inevitable that as a result I will be labelled a Merchant of Death or something like that.
“I make no justification for my actions. It was just a life.”
McMillan first came to notoriety in Australia in 1983 when, at 26, he was sentenced to 17 years’ jail for spearheading a million-dollar heroin ring.
His then lover, Clelia Teresa Vigano, the daughter of a wealthy Melbourne family, and another woman, Marie Escolar Castilo, died in a fire at Fairlea prison asthey faced trial over the syndicate.
In his three years in the Bangkok Hilton, McMillan had a better time than most drug couriers.
While the foreign prisoners in Building2 battled vermin, worms, TB and AIDS, and had a diet of soup with an occasional fish head, McMillan had his own sanitary toilet and servants, including a chef, whose ingredients came from the local supermarket.
“I had access to television and radio and my own office, and instead of 70 to a cell, we just had five. This all cost about 10,000 Thai baht a week,” he says.
Once he realised the death penalty loomed, McMillan had hacksaws delivered, hidden in posters.
The guard searching his gift box was distracted by pornography, which was, of course, confiscated.
According to McMillan’s account of his escape in August 1996, he sawed through two bars and crawled out along a plank. He descended two storeys to the ground using webbing belts.
By 2.55am, he had reached a prison factory where he kept “an office”. He picked up gaffer tape, eight sturdy picture frames, some civilian clothes and water.
In the prison’s paper box factory, he constructed two ladders from bamboo poles, tape and the frames.
After scaling three inner walls and negotiating “Mars Bar Creek”, a 2 1/2m-wide open sewage trench, he climbed the outer wall.
“I reached the top and opened my eyes to a view I had imagined for so long it was already a living memory,” he says.
After reaching the bottom of the outside wall, he followed the earth path around the prison with a raised umbrella over his head.
“I held to that day’s maxim: ‘Escaping prisoners do not carry umbrellas’,” he says.
It was just after 6am. By 10am, McMillan — armed with a new passport from the city’s Chinatown, with details already logged into the Thai Immigration Police computer — was boarding a flight for Singapore.
“Eventually I heard the sound that was a kiss to every smuggler: the fwump of sealing aircraft doors,” he says.
Having escaped the death penalty, or the minimum of 100 years in prison, McMillan might have thought it time to quit the drugs trade. He didn’t.
He lived in Pakistan with a member of the local nobility, but was arrested in Lahore and brought to Karachi Central Prison on another charge of heroin trafficking.
By another stroke of luck, or as McMillan would have it, “fair justice”, he was acquitted of the drugs charge and by the late 90s was back in Britain.
Did he stop? No. He was last arrested in 2003 at Heathrow airport for trafficking in 500g of heroin. He got four years and is now on parole.
*Drug runner - a dead man laughing
who died while on a round-the-world trip with his girlfriend.
