Underbelly 5 Read online

  Although he hadn’t smoked for eight months he walked from the surgery to the closest shop and bought a packet of cigarettes. It was just after 9.30am when he lit the first one.

  ‘I just stood in the car park wondering, “How can I ring my wife and tell her?”’

  By the afternoon he was in a specialist’s office at the Alfred Hospital, discussing radiotherapy. At best it would only slow the disease – like using sandbags to try stopping a tidal wave.

  He was told the cancer may have been dormant in the spine for nine years before it became aggressive. ‘Who knows why?’

  Later he was offered chemotherapy but declined. He decided not to fight the inevitable.

  FRANK Green wanted to stay in school in 1949, but his father had other ideas. ‘He told me I was going to be an apprentice carpenter at A.V. Jennings.’ The young Green stayed in the building trade for nine years, until he joined the police force in 1959. He was soon selected as a member of the notorious ‘Bodgie Squad’ – a group of plain-clothed police given the job of tackling teenage misbehavior in Melbourne.

  They would arrest the worst, but their informal instructions were to take the law into their own hands and simply frighten teenagers into behaving. In 1967 he was assigned to a similar group, known as the ‘Silent Six’, again to clean up Melbourne.

  They were dealt with on-the-spot or locked up,’ he would recall. The group arrested 800 people in five months.

  Today, he would probably be disciplined for bending the rules, but in the 1960s it was part of policing, and he was awarded a Chief Commissioner’s Certificate as a commendation.

  Years later he was to meet a man who was one of his targets. The man thanked Green for giving him ‘a kick up the bum’ rather than a criminal record.

  For the next 20 years the career policeman was to investigate organised crime. He worked in the ‘facility section’, a small group which planted listening devices to pick up intelligence on Melbourne’s criminal networks.

  He was to sit for more than two days on the roof of an East Melbourne building, watching men and women in formal clothes, gambling in an illegal casino.

  Once he had gathered the evidence, he gave a sign and a raiding party burst in to make arrests.

  He investigated some of Australia’s biggest armed robbery and safe-breaking gangs and saw drug trafficking change from matchboxes filled with marijuana, to regular heroin seizures of more than 100 kilograms.

  He worked with the Royal Commission into the Painters and Dockers Union, headed by Frank Costigan, QC, and saw for the first time how computers could be used to investigate organised crime. According to Frank, ‘Costigan didn’t receive his fair dues for what he did,’

  Like many career detectives, Frank Green did everything to avoid traffic duties, but when he was appointed Assistant Commissioner (Traffic) he was to find it was the most satisfying period in his professional life.

  When he took over in 1989, the annual road toll was 777. By 1994 it had dropped to 378. Frank Green and many others helped save hundreds of lives.

  He was a regular in the media – bullying, cajoling and pleading with motorists to drive responsibly. In 1993 he was appointed Bastard of The Year, for promoting speed cameras and booze buses.

  The next year he was named Father of the Year, largely for the same reasons.

  In late 1994, aged 59, Frank Green went to Chief Commissioner, Neil Comrie, to tell him he was resigning. That night he took his wife, Norma, out for dinner in Ivanhoe to celebrate. ‘I got busted by a speed camera.’

  AS Frank Green talks about his life and its inevitable end, he knows his time is running out. The cancer has spread from his pelvis, through his back to his left shoulder. The former robust policeman is only 61 kilograms.

  He says the cancer is like the Pacman computer characters, ‘chewing’ at his spine. He tells an old friend who rings, ‘I can see the end of the road now.’

  Frank, 65, and daughter, Debbie, spend time going through a life time of paper work, to see what is worth keeping for the family and what should be dumped. It is as though he is shepherding those close to him through the final journey.

  He sits in a room where he can see the spectacular garden he and Norma have planted over the six years since his retirement. A pillow supports his back because his brittle bones can split from the slightest pressure. He keeps his left leg on a small, soft footrest and a walking cane by his left hand.

  A blue wheelchair sits empty near him.

  Norma, his constant companion and best friend, brings him a cup of tea and two mince pies. They remain untouched.

  His voice rasps. He sips water to sooth his throat and uses a handkerchief to wipe sweat from his face. He winces as he shifts in his chair, but never mentions the pain. Norma moves around the house keeping busy. In three hours she doesn’t stop working. She chips in with an answer whenever Frank calls out for a second opinion to a question.

  He discusses his death with no bitterness and his life with no regrets.

  ‘Given the chance I would do it exactly the same again. It has all been fun. I have always been lucky to be in the right place at right time.’

  It is strange to hear a dying man talk of his good fortune. Perhaps it comes from the fact that Frank survived cancer fourteen years earlier. He had his stomach and spleen removed but it was the post-operative infection that almost killed him.

  He says that after his first bout with cancer he tried to treat every new day as a bonus. As a senior policeman, he would offer help to any member of the force who was touched by the same disease.

  He observes how many of his oldest friends have difficulty dealing with his terminal cancer.

  Some come to visit and try to ignore his debilitated state. Others don’t come at all.

  He believes that men find it harder to deal with death than women. ‘The first time (he had cancer) there were plenty of well-wishers. They could see I was recovering. But some of the same males this time are backing away,’ he says without anger.

  ‘Why don’t males want to talk about it? I know some of my oldest friends outside of policing find it too hard and seem to need space.

  ‘Maybe they are waiting for the right time. They have their own reasons, but it is a shame. I’m not going to improve. It is not going to get better.’

  But most do come – from every part of his life. Old colleagues and mates he has made away from policing drop in or ring. Crime victims who have become friends also keep in contact.

  A kindergarten director he helped during a siege in 1994 visits. She is an accomplished artist, and her work hangs in the Greens’ lounge room.

  He has lunch with a group of 3AW friends in a trendy South Melbourne restaurant. He is told it is a farewell for retiring breakfast co-host Dean Banks, but it is really just a chance for the group to say goodbye to Frank.

  He wears colorful braces because his waist has shrunk and his pants no longer fit. He has a piece of whiting and sips a glass of chardonnay. Late in the afternoon he pops another pill. When asked he says, ‘It’s morphine, just to take the edge off it.’

  He is able to keep his passion and his sense of humor to the end. He is awarded life membership of the Blue Ribbon Foundation. His work for the foundation and similar groups has helped raise more than $3 million for hospital equipment.

  In mid-December he met with a group involved in another charity and abused them for what he saw as a lack of direction in their activities.

  Later, in the car on the way home, Norma gently chided him for his lack of diplomacy. ‘Doesn’t worry me,’ he said. ‘I won’t be going back.’

  He was determined to continue his weekly radio spot for as long as possible, even though it left him exhausted.

  Every Wednesday he would wake at 5.30 to start taking medication, including an oil to lubricate his voice, then be driven to the studio for his five-minute segment. He would not get home until around 10am.

  But, just before Christmas, he could no longer make it up the
stairs to the studio and had to do his spot by phone. Typically, he didn’t mention his illness and just wanted to warn motorists to watch out for the 30,000 primary school children, who were on holiday and no longer at school.

  He was close to being hospitalised, but wanted to hang out for Christmas with his family. He knew that once he left home he would never return.

  Shortly before he died, Frank wrote a short note on what he thought of life. ‘It takes a real effort to keep from being consumed with the daily comings and goings of life in this crazy age, but it’s a goal which we all should strive toward. We should take time – we should make time – to hold hands, to say a kind word now and then, to make time for giving and sharing. More importantly, we all should take the time to get back to the basics of life – loving each other.’

  He made Christmas with Norma, their two children, Michael and Debbie, and the four grandchildren. A friend rang about 11am to wish him well. ‘It was the old Frank, bright as a button. He said he was looking at the view from his house to Melbourne.

  ‘If you didn’t know you couldn’t have guessed he was crook. He said the doctor would allow him one glass of chardonnay with lunch, and I said, I didn’t think it would matter if you cheat a little at this stage of the game.’

  After lunch, he said he was tired and went outside for a last cigarette before an afternoon nap. He became short of breath, and was taken to his bed. He died five minutes later, with Norma by his side.

  Frank Green always lived life on his own terms. He died the same way.

  CHAPTER 16

  The one that got away

  ‘The cleverest crim I’ve ever met.’

  DAVID McMillan checked out of the ‘Bangkok Hilton’ late on a hot August night in 1996. As jailbreaks go, it was pure Hollywood.

  No one had successfully broken out of Klong Prem prison in living memory. The most recent attempt had been 12 years before, when a Thai prisoner almost died trying.

  The story goes like this: McMillan, 40, is sharing a cell with four Thai prisoners on the first floor of a two-storey block. He weakens the window bars with acid, breaks them, squeezes his lean frame through the tiny gap and lowers himself five metres to the ground, using electrical flex.

  He slips past the prison dining hall and, conveniently, a sleeping guard. He retrieves a hidden bamboo ladder and scales the inner five metre wall, cuts barbed wire with wire cutters, crawls under coiled razor wire, drops to the other side.

  Bolder now, he runs across the prison hospital grounds and scales an outer wall topped with electrified cables, unharmed. Oddly, no one in the watchtowers sees him jump down, then swim across a stinking canal that forms a moat around the notorious jail. He reaches the other side and a waiting accomplice.

  Next day, as headlines about the audacious escape roll off the presses back in Australia, heads roll in the prison. McMillan’s cellmates are beaten for colluding with him; prison officers face disciplinary action for ‘carelessness’.

  Eight remaining Australian prisoners get leg chains and lose privileges.

  Meanwhile, in hiding, the only Westerner ever to escape from Klong Prem plans his next move.

  Fade to black …

  CAULFIELD Grammar has produced its share of the worthy and the notable – lord mayors, captains of industry, leaders in business and bureaucracy, politics and the professions, respected members of rowing clubs, racing clubs and Rotary clubs. But even the best schools have their wayward sons.

  In Caulfield’s case, there is the late Christopher Skase, who flew high, dreamed of being a film mogul, then fell to Earth exposed as a flim-flam man, disgraced and died in exile. And there is Nick Cave, the Lou Reed of Wangaratta, whose musical and lyrical brilliance survived the dark influence of drugs to make his mark in the wider world.

  Then there is David Peter McMillan. AKA Westlake, Dearing, Poulter, Magilton, Rayner, Elton, Knox, Hunter and many more aliases.

  McMillan, like his two more famous schoolmates, is a long way from home these days.

  That is, as far as anyone knows. Few know where he is, and those who might know become suddenly vague when the subject is raised. Which is not surprising, given that he’s a wanted man who, technically, faces a death sentence in Thailand and years of jail time in Australia … if he’s caught.

  Like the young Skase, McMillan was a dreamer and a schemer with an eye for the main chance, an ear for information and a head for figures. Like Cave, he was a restless, creative spirit drawn to the dark side. His undoing was that he succumbed to the worst of both impulses – the desire for fast money and the weakness for drugs.

  McMillan – bright, ambitious and a heroin user – was in his early twenties when he decided to get in on the ground floor of a growth industry. Instead of getting into computers or honing his natural talents as a photographer, cameraman and writer, he became a drug trafficker. At least, that’s the prosecution case against him; McMillan, always a good talker, swore he was a harmless addict who subsidised his habit with a little gold and gemstone smuggling.

  A jury almost believed him – acquitting him of all but one charge of conspiracy to import heroin – but the judge was not so sympathetic, sentencing him and two accomplices to 17 years in prison, to the delight of the police taskforce that had matched wits with the McMillan crew for months. A disgruntled defence lawyer said later that the sentence was as severe as if they had been convicted of all 12 charges, not one.

  The year was 1983. The trial of McMillan and his associates – a former Olympic standard athlete, Michael Sullivan, and a Thai national called Supahaus Chowdury – ran for almost six months, and it took the jury a record eight days to reach its ‘little bit guilty’ verdict.

  It was, then, the longest and most expensive criminal trial in Victorian legal history – and, while the result must have disappointed McMillan, it clearly didn’t surprise him. Before the trial had even begun, he had orchestrated an audacious plan from his cell, to escape from Pentridge Prison in a hijacked helicopter, the first leg of a plan involving heavy disguises, an interstate truck ride hidden in cargo, a sea-going boat and a light plane. The police were tipped off and foiled what would have been another surreal episode in the existence of a man who lived his life as if it were a screenplay, with himself playing an anti-hero … the sort of lovable rogue who’s supposed to get the girl, the money and the last laugh over bumbling authority.

  The real story is a little bleaker.

  FILMS always fascinated David McMillan. As a boy, he earned schoolyard fame presenting the ‘Peters Junior News’ on television. After switching from Prahran High to Caulfield Grammar mid-way through secondary school, he directed and starred in an action movie spoof his classmates still smile about, 28 years on. It’s as if, says a lawyer who once represented him and became his friend, he is 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 behavior. Others might work hard and obey the rules, but he was too cool for such bourgeois stuff.

  Born to an Australian expatriate couple who worked in British radio and television before separating, he had arrived in Australia as a child with his mother (and her new husband), his sister and younger half-brother.

  Where others, given the same start, might have soon blended with the majority, McMillan didn’t just guard his outsider status, but pr
omoted it. He impressed some people more than he did others, but they all agreed on one thing: he loved beating the system.

  He inherited charm, talent and looks from his mother, a stylish, attractive and worldly woman regarded with some awe by his classmates, who thought her (as one put it later) ‘a bit more glamorous than our mothers, with a cheeky sense of humor’.

  While most families lived conventional nine-to-five lives in conventional suburban homes, McMillan lived in an apartment in Alma Road, St Kilda. There was a whiff of bohemia about his home life that fascinated his schoolmates, whose horizons, then, didn’t extend far beyond the Yarra. A few of them visited the flat at lunchtimes or after school, and glimpsed insights into a teenager who fancied notoriety and the best things money could buy.

  One contemporary recalls McMillan boasting that his mother knew the then controversial abortionist, Dr J.G.A. Troup, ‘which was quite out of our league’. Another remembers his enviable record collection – every disc a coveted ‘import’.

  He was a ‘big noter’ with champagne tastes, and he cut corners to get what he wanted. A couple of examples have stuck in memories for almost three decades.

  ‘He was a dodgy bugger,’ recalls a bemused Paul Tankard of his one-time classmate. ‘He gave the impression of living life on the edge. He made a practice of going into the school canteen by the side door, and saying he was there to get lunch for a teacher – a “Mr Wilson” – so that he would not only bypass the queue but get a free lunch.’ Tankard and another classmate, Pater Cole, scripted the short film which McMillan was to direct, shoot and act in. Tankard recalls McMillan boasting he had obtained the film stock by using a credit card he had ‘found’. The question is: did he commit this small fraud – or just convince his friends that he had? A lie, either way.

  ‘You knew you couldn’t rely on him and that he wasn’t a good influence,’ Tankard concludes tolerantly. ‘But he was ever interesting.’