Underbelly (43 page)

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.

Apart from original research of newspaper files and interviews with sources too numerous to mention on both sides of the law, the authors have drawn on the assistance of Sydney journalist Ray Chesterton for those chapters relating to the Wood Royal Commission. As acknowledged in the text, we have relied heavily on the work of Deborah Locke and Trevor Haken with Sean Padraic where appropriate.

For their generous guidance we are grateful to Mick Kennedy, David Waterhouse, Chris Murphy, Stephen Gibb, Scott Paillas and Dylan Welch. We thank Harry Rekas and Danie Sprague for nailing the right images.

 

Chenoweth, Neil:
Packer's Lunch
(Allen & Unwin)

Dale, John:
Huckstepp: A dangerous life
(Allen & Unwin)

Drane, Robert:
Fighters by Trade
(ABC Books).

Goodsir, Darren:
In the Line of Fire
(Allen & Unwin)

Haken, Trevor with Sean Padraic:
Sympathy for the Devil
(ABC Books).

Lennox, Gina and Rush, Frances:
People of the Cross
(Simon & Schuster).

Locke, Deborah:
Watching the Detectives
(HarperCollins).

McMillan, David:
Escape
(Monsoon Books).

Noble, Tom and Smith, Neddy:
Neddy
(Kerr Publishing).

Reeves, Tony:
Mr Sin
(Allen & Unwin).

Reeves, Tony:
Mr Big
(Allen & Unwin).

Saffron, Alan:
Gentle Satan
(Penguin).

Silvester, John and Rule, Andrew:
Tough: 101 Australian Gangsters
and the
Underbelly
series of books (Floradale & Sly Ink).