Prison Break: Shantaram to the Bangkok Hilton, The World's Most Wanted Australians by Mark Dapin

Author:Mark Dapin [Dapin, Mark]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Non-Fiction, True Crime, History, Australia
ISBN: 9781761062506
Publisher: Allen & Unwin
Published: 2021-08-03T00:00:00+00:00

13

The Helicopter Escape that Wasn’t

‘The rule is, escape early and escape often,’ said David McMillan. But when the police finally came for his drug business, McMillan had no plan to get away. ‘I can’t tell you how many times I’ve thought, Alright, if I had a week’s notice, what would I have done?’ he said.

‘The best time to run is at the first chance you get,’ said McMillan, ‘because, no matter what you’re arrested for, things will mostly get worse for you. The position you’re in will deteriorate.’

McMillan, Sullivan and their mules were smuggling heroin from Bangkok sealed in chessboards and stereo tuners. It was a fantastically lucrative trade. McMillan had houses in the wealthy bayside suburbs of Brighton and Beaumaris. He ate out in expensive restaurants, got high on the finest class A drugs, and slept with a beautiful Porsche-driving heiress. Andrew Rule—on the story, as ever—wrote that investigators watched as McMillan ‘so careful in other ways, would brazenly double park his car in the city and wander around the streets, carrying a plastic bag full of cash, buying whatever took his fancy’.

And what do you think the detectives—the ‘D’s, the ‘dicks’—made of that, as they covered their mortgages with their wages and saved their overtime pay for a fortnight in Queensland with the wife and kids? As they drove their stuttering Falcon into the car park for a stopover in a family room in a motel? Children stacked in bunks opposite the double bed? You wouldn’t be dead for quids, mate.

The Australian Federal Police, Victorian Police and Customs had formed a joint taskforce that began an investigation—codenamed Aries—to bust the McMillan–Sullivan operation. McMillan realised he was being watched and bugged by the taskforce, so he put them under surveillance, too. He collected a list of names of every investigator on Operation Aries, and used scanners to secretly monitor their communications. McMillan knew he was not dealing with geniuses, and the wallopers were not used to dealing with clever crooks, either—so why should brains (and guts and dash) not triumph over brawn (and the law and the state) just this fucking once?

In December 1981, Supahaus Chowdury, McMillan’s Thai co-conspirator, was detected coming into Melbourne with heroin. The police swooped on a handover meeting between Chowdury and McMillan, but the two men escaped. Later in the month, Chowdury was arrested on a cash-collecting run into Melbourne. Once again, the Australian taskforce was unable to catch him with drugs, but Thai police raided Chowdury’s premises in Thailand and found plenty.

Taskforce Aries came for McMillan on the morning of 5 January 1982. They found him in bed with Vigano in his Beaumaris home. Sullivan was arrested in Brighton, in bed with his partner, Mary Escolar Catilo. McMillan had a packet of heroin, $8000 in cash and the usual dealers’ (and junkies’) tools. It was not much of a base for a big case. McMillan, Vigano, Sullivan and Catilo (all but antiques dealer Sullivan listed as ‘unemployed’) were found to have ‘up to 12’ false passports each.

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