Underbelly (42 page)

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.