Transcript generated automatically by AI and may contain errors.
Chapter 1: What events led David McMillan to a life of crime?
When you Google image search wanted criminals, the one thing that sticks out to me is just how utterly unassuming most of the faces staring back at you really are. Of course, there's the odd mugshot that screams, I'm not a great person. But for the most part, these faces are ones that you would pass in the street and not even give them a second glance.
That sentiment could definitely be said about David McMillan.
Hello, hello, hello. Hi. There he is. Oh, there you are. Well, that's all right. We got there.
Listen, are you still getting your shit together? I know, I'm good.
We can get going. Yeah, I didn't want to. I realized how late it was over there.
Well, all right. Let me just get a drink and I'll be back in a flash.
Perfect. At almost 70 years old, David has lived a life that is almost unbelievable. The head of an international drug trafficking business that spanned across multiple continents, a decade behind bars in Australia, relentlessly pursued by the US Drug Enforcement Agency, wanted by Interpol.
not to mention two death penalty sentences and the only Westerner on record to have successfully escaped Bangkok's Long Prem prison, also referred to as the Bangkok Hilton.
Would they have executed me? I think Australia definitely gave the go-ahead. Britain didn't care. The Americans were quite keen on it. They liked a foreigner being executed as long as it wasn't an American.
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Chapter 2: How did David's early experiences shape his criminal career?
So I sort of imported myself a few times. In fact, I'm Australian by... I misread the certificate. I thought it said citizenship by being decent. It wasn't. It was dissent. It's just that mum and dad were actually born in Australia. I thought, well, that's pretty down. I mean, if that's not forgiveness, what is? So your parents were actually born in Australia? Rosie, my mother, was.
And as much as he tried to hide it, My father, John McMillan, was Australian. I mean, he changed his accent several times, but I heard just a bit of Australian in there. During the war, he was a major or something in the radio section where they did trying to counter the German propaganda. So I don't know what side he was on, but he was pretty good.
As for David's father, he says he really didn't have much of a relationship with him.
He got himself a CB, which is Commander of the British Empire. So he was a real snob and didn't think much of me. Not because he probably had any fundamental objection. It just didn't fit into... He kind of scripted his life and there wasn't really a role for me in that.
David's mother and father would separate when he was still very young, and he would again head back to Australia with his mother and sister and move to Melbourne.
He would attend Caulfield Grammar Private School in Melbourne's southeast until he was asked to find another school after what he says was an incident with his chemistry teacher who claimed that David had attempted to make a batch of LSD. Some possible early warning signs of what was to come in David's life.
It was the 1970s in Australia and drug use was not particularly underground and so-called hard drugs were not really distinguished between anything else. David says even from a young age, he knew that he was going to need control in life and to get control, he would need money.
And in fact, the law was something that was just there to be broken as he witnessed firsthand so-called respected people doing just that.
One of the worst influences my mother felt, I say one of my stepfathers, there wasn't quite that many, but Jim Troop was a respected gynecologist who, with some other Melbourne doctors, were challenging the anti-abortion laws. And they'd been paying off the cost because they were the only properly qualified doctors running the surgeries.
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Chapter 3: What was David's first major venture into drug trafficking?
It would be a chance meeting, however, with a man at the money exchange, which would see him pull off one of the worst attempts at a drug importation you can think of, as he's given six kilos of hash and then sets about trying to hide it in an old 1950s radio, jumping back on a plane and heading straight to Sydney.
My first little importation of six kilos of hash from India was pretty hopeless. But I was stuffed into a 1950s Grundig radio that had been eviscerated completely. A kind of avuncular customs officer at Sydney opened my suitcase and there's nothing in it. I think there were three pairs of socks, a T-shirt and this thing.
And you'd just come back from India?
Yeah, yeah, straight from New Delhi. Whack, into Sydney Airport. He looked at it and spanned the tuning dial, which kept on spinning, gravity doing its stuff. Nothing behind there to stop it from spinning. And you said, are you going back there? No, no, I said, I want to see that you don't and take your fucking radio with you. Um... You never get that kind of break these days. No, absolutely not.
They work in teams.
Talk about close call. But this didn't deter David from his ambitions of drug importation. No, he just needed to get better at it.
Soon enough, I'm doing pretty well. Instead of accosting and living on the good graces of some... wizened Sydney customs officer, I've learned how they do their thing, that when you arrive back in the country, they want to know where you've come from. They want to look at your passport and see the history of it. So I need passports, a lot of them.
I also noticed they worked in teams, and if you did get stopped, which shouldn't happen if you've got it all together, but let's just say you do, You would be in front of two officers. The first one would do the searching of your bag. He'd drop the lid onto his hand just to feel the weight of it.
Then he'd lift up pretty much every object, toiletries bag, unzip it, give it a jiggle, zip it up, put it aside, unrolled towel, lift up something else. Could he search everything? No. Did he have any special information? Likely as not. But you'd come from an iffy place, and you're a young guy, so, you know. But this is what happens.
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Chapter 4: How did David's importation attempts lead to his arrest?
He also was handed a life sentence for his role in the double murder of drug couriers Isabel and Douglas Wilson, whose bodies were recovered in 1979. However handed a life sentence, Mr Baisley would walk out of prison in 2001. Mr McKay's remains were never found. Mr Baisley kept his secret until the very end.
Police would describe this man as someone who saw murder as a job and felt absolutely no remorse. So you were hanging around some very, very dangerous people then.
A few, yeah, a few were different. But the genuinely strong ones were not bullies. And certainly amongst this tiny core, because there weren't many good ones, there was a lot of loyalty. When I was in, I was locked up in Thailand and it was a disaster there. Nobody really knew what had happened to me clearly anyway. They knew sort of where I was.
But after months and months and months, I finally found myself inside the prison behind the rice stacks of a little warehouse where they kept food. about the Chinese ties who gave me a bulky looking mobile phone. And I got through to Michael at some ungodly hour, and he hadn't heard from me a long time. He interrupted me as I began to explain the extraordinary event.
He said, David, don't explain anything. We don't have time. Just tell me what I've got to do and what I need to bring. I thought, well, you know, that's what you want, don't you?
Yeah, that's what you want on your side. Absolutely, totally. This Michael that David speaks of was his long-time business partner and former champion pole vaulter, Michael Sullivan. A man whose life likely would have been vastly different if he had been able to represent Australia in the Olympic Games.
Michael was, in fact, the first ever Australian to break the 16-foot mark in pole vaulting, but was passed over by Olympic selectors in 1968 for the Mexico City squad. He would later suffer a severe ankle break, which would not only see him miss the Commonwealth Games, but also lead him to develop an addiction to his pain medication, which then led to drugs. and his eventual meeting with David.
And so a long and lucrative partnership began. By this stage, David had cut ties with the retired safecrackers, and he, Michael, and their tie connection, Mr Chowdhury, were building a very lucrative business. As David's wealth grew, so did his appetite for the finer things in life.
And it would apparently be the purchase of an incredibly expensive American roadster that would eventually bring the attention of Australian police. They would soon discover that this David Macmillan had properties all over the world, Melbourne, Bangkok, London, Hong Kong and Brussels, and had had more than 11 overseas trips in one year.
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Chapter 5: What challenges did David face while in prison?
Still nothing. Nobody was waking. They put an informer in the Fairleigh Women's Prison extract some kind of information out of them. But their choice of informer, Danielle, was a poor choice indeed. She was an arsonist, and that was her solution to anything, to set fire to the place, which she did, and burnt the women's prison, that section of it anyway, to the ground.
That caused the death of Clelia and Michael's wife, Mary. And something you I don't want to hear any time, but it's particularly creepy when you're in a prison. And the prisons in those days barely had radios, so 11 o'clock at night they'd switch it off and I'd just heard the beginning of the story about a fire at the women's prison.
Some fatalities, click, and it was off.
So after a restful night's sleep, I came out of the cell in the morning and straight over to one of the officers I knew. Well, I skipped the formalities. Oh, Dave shuffling around, pushing pens around his desk. We look not clear at the moment, but look, I know you're probably a bit worried or that. That wasn't a good sign. And nobody would talk to us.
Michael and I were called up for a legal visit a few hours later. Deserted visit center. One officer on duty who was Busy examining his foot or something. Yeah, yeah, through the next door. And all our families were there. Well, those who remained anyway. So that was, of course, I felt completely responsible and guilty. I felt like...
Really, for the first time, I had blood on my hands, and it was almost like my own. Still, the authorities, to make the best of a bad situation, put it about that we had started to eliminate all the witnesses.
Starting with your own wives.
Yeah.
David and Michael have been held in Jika Jika, the high security section of the infamous Pentridge Prison, home to prisoners like Chopper Reid and Ned Kelly. It was designed as a prison within a prison to hold Victoria's toughest and longest serving prisoners. Jika Jika had six separate units, all with nothing but concrete, electric doors and remote locking.
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Chapter 6: How did David manage to escape from prison in Thailand?
And the local police had to come down to stop the noise.
And once released finally from Australian prison, he decides to leave the country. On his way to England, he'd make a stop off. a stop-off that was going to cost him his life.
And this was during a visit into the prison in Thailand by some Australian liaison officer. He said, oh, by the way, you know your fact, don't you? You're finished. Next time on Wanted.
I'm a wanderer of the soul Before the end I plan to be whole But I know I'll lose myself along the way What's gone is gone. What's past is past. Let me leave the belongs.