Underbelly 5 Read online

  McMillan was one of a small group that put together the school’s student newspaper, a rather more raffish publication than the official school publication, The Grammarian. That an artistic classmate, Peter Grant, drew a caricature of him for the newspaper, emphasised his maverick image. He didn’t bother with the usual sporting and academic endeavors and so there is only one photograph of him in The Grammarian. In it, he sits at the centre of a group, a cloud of dark curls around his lean face – holding a copy of MAD magazine in front of him, as he looks coolly at the camera.

  Not everyone fell for McMillan’s winning ways. A veteran housemaster, ‘Kanga’ Corden, took Paul Tankard aside one day and warned ‘that I wasn’t doing myself any favors hanging around with the likes of McMillan. Kanga had McMillan’s number, all right.’

  Word must have spread in the staff room because, at the end of fifth form, McMillan vanished. His mates returned to Caulfield for their final year, but someone had quietly told him not to. Reasons for this were never made public.

  But, in the new year of 1973, the consensus was that it was something to do with drugs. In light of later developments, that seems likely.

  TAYLOR’S College 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, do not study elsewhere.

  Among Taylor’s annual intakes of hardworking students was a sprinkling of more colorful characters who have rebelled 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, a dead one, shot by an underworld associate.

  McMillan was never going to be a gunman. 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 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 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 Day of The Jackal, there was also some Walter Mitty in his readiness to lace reality with fantasy. It’s hard to know where one starts and the other ends.

  There are people in Melbourne – 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 twenties. 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 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 was 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 neighbor’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.’

  LONG after the wily old policeman had retired from ‘The Job’ and taken up bowls, they still used him as an example to recruits of how curiosity and alertness can crack a case wide open.

  The lesson went like so. Back in 1980, like neighbors 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 the 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 neighbors 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.

  IN 1979, Australia’s drug scene was tiny compared with what it would be two decades later. Heroin was scarce, prices high and ‘street’ purity low. The potential for profit was huge. For anyone with the nerve – and no conscience – it was tempting.

  David McMillan had never been one to resist temptation. Even his fondest admirers would admit that. Few outside family and close friends knew it, but when he had visited Britain soon after leaving school, he served several months in Reading Jail. His tools were forgery, false identities and fraud. His aim was smuggling – although, whereas he would later insist he was smuggling gold and gems to feed his growing drug habit, the evidence would indicate a far more valuable contraband.

  McMillan’s girlfriend was Clelia Vigano, daughter of the well-known hotelier and restaurateur Ferdie Vigano. Clelia’s grandfather, Mario Vigano, had married a European countess, was the proprietor of the original Mario’s restaurant in Exhibition Street, and had prospered so that the family became a Melbourne institution. But Clelia, beautiful but doomed, fell into – or was attracted by – bad company. She and McMillan shared an addiction to heroin and high living, that was to cost him years in prison – and Clelia her life.

  That was later. In 1979 McMillan, then 24, was bursting with confidence. He had teamed up with Michael Sullivan, who was several years older but, like McMillan, a middle-class heroin addict with few of the obvious markers of criminal behavior, but all of the instincts.

  Sullivan had been a champion schoolboy pole vaulter whose veteran coach, Wal Chisholm, considered the best athlete he’d trained in 40 years. Sullivan beat the Commonwealth medal winner when still a teenager,
was the first Australian to clear sixteen feet and qualified for the Mexico Olympics in 1968, but missed selection in favor of older competitors.

  ‘If he’d got to Mexico he would have won a medal at Munich (in 1972). He was such a tremendous competitor,’ muses the old coach, who still sticks up for his one-time teenage prodigy, although he admits the young Sullivan was as happy to go surfing as train. Then came an ankle injury that ended his career and started a depression that only heroin seemed to help. By the time he met McMillan, he was an addict who dreamed of easy money.

  Tim Egan, a detective who was to match wits with the pair for months, says: ‘These were conmen-cum-commodity dealers who realised that a kilo of gold might be worth $29,000 but a kilo of heroin was worth $290,000. Their key personal characteristic was arrogance. They worked on the principle that their phones were tapped – but they kept going anyway.’

  McMILLAN perfected a way to beat the passport and airline ticketing system which, before computers were used, still relied on manual filing. He haunted the newspaper archives at the State Library, where he scoured 1950s death notices for the names of infants whose age would roughly correspond with himself or his friends. Then – either personally or by sending someone else – he applied for copies of birth certificates in the dead children’s names. Because there was no cross-referencing of births with deaths, these could be used to apply for passports once he had established other fake, proof of identification material – student ID cards, credit cards and the like.

  McMillan had what some considered a freakish ability to absorb information. He all but memorised a book of international flight schedules he got from a travel agent, allowing him to devise complicated routes to exploit busy periods and cut the risk of Customs searches.

  He befriended a city travel agent, and bought multiple sets of tickets in different names so he and his couriers could switch identities halfway through a trip.

  With multiple passports and double sets of tickets, McMillan would land in Bangkok for a few days, buy cheap high-grade heroin, seal it in a specially made stereo tuner and hand it to his courier. Then, using fresh passports and tickets, the pair would fly on separately to a European destination – often London – not regarded as a likely source of illicit narcotics, before returning to Australia using the original tickets and passports.

  The aim of this elaborate ruse was to present at Australian Customs – always at a busy time, usually in Sydney – using passports with no sign of an Asian stopover of the sort that attracted attention.

  It worked well for a while. Between March 1980 and April 1981, McMillan orchestrated seven courier runs through Bangkok to Europe and back. Then he found that drug smuggling and drug using don’t mix.

  McMillan’s ‘mule’ on that trip was a drug addict called Mark Anthony Jordan. The police reconstruction of what happened is that, in Bangkok, McMillan handed Jordan a stereo tuner with 1.692 kilograms of heroin packed into its casing. Jordan was high on heroin, but, instead of aborting the European leg of the journey, they went ahead.

  Jordan was obviously drug affected and, at the airport, he was detained and searched. McMillan, using the name William Knox, flew on. He was apprehended by the Belgian police in Brussels, and held for 24 hours, but was released and went to London, where he met another courier, a Melbourne gardener called Peter. Days later, using another alias, McMillan flew via Amsterdam to New Zealand – then back to Australia, via Brisbane.

  Jordan was rotting in a Thai jail (where he would eventually die) and McMillan had avoided the same fate by a whisker. If he’d retired then, he might have got away with it forever. He knew he was a marked man, but he didn’t turn over a new leaf – just a new angle.

  Enter Supahaus Chowdury, Thai drug supplier. Days after getting home McMillan, Sullivan, Clelia Vigano and Sullivan’s de facto wife, a Colombian called Mary Escolar Castilo, were introduced to Chowdury by a Melbourne drug dealer.

  In the following months, McMillan had a special antenna installed at Sullivan’s house in Brighton, like those at his own houses in Brighton and Beaumaris. This let them use powerful radios and scanners to communicate secretly – and monitor police messages.

  The police were also preparing. The Chief Commissioner, Mick Miller, called in the head of the drug squad, Geoff Baker, and another senior policeman, and proposed a joint taskforce with the Federal Police and Customs. The taskforce, codenamed Operation Aries, had more than 20 investigators and a secret inner-suburban headquarters. It was the first time Victorian police had formally worked with The Feds’ and Customs.

  Warrants were drawn, telephone taps and ‘bugs’ installed, and surveillance teams set loose. McMillan and Sullivan must have suspected they were being watched; it didn’t stop them. Detectives recall how 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.

  In November, Chowdury called to say he was coming from Bangkok. Sullivan warned him to land with a tour group at a busy time. He did – on 4 December, 1981. But investigators were watching him. In Melbourne, Customs x-rayed two ornate cutlery boxes he was carrying in a carpet bag, but found no abnormality. He went to the Southern Cross Hotel; the police were in the next room with a listening device. After midnight, he took a taxi to meet McMillan and Sullivan in Brighton. The police sneaked into his room, drilled a hole in one of the cutlery boxes, and found heroin.

  McMillan and Sullivan knew they were being watched, but played on. ‘It was a game to McMillan,’ recalls Geoff Baker, now long-retired from the drug squad. ‘He was an egotist. You could read his mind: “I’ll take them on”.’

  Next day, Chowdury went to Mercy Maternity Hospital, carrying the cutlery boxes in a bag, and met McMillan in the foyer – sitting next to an undercover policeman. It was a cunning move, because police would be reluctant to open fire there.

  Suddenly, Sullivan drove into a lane near the foyer, McMillan and Chowdury ran to meet him, and McMillan tossed the bag through the open car window. Sullivan reversed, almost running over hospital visitors, and sped off. Chowdury and McMillan walked to McMillan’s Fiat as police chased the Rover. Both vehicles, and an Alfa Romeo driven by Mary Escolar Castilo, were lost.

  All the police had was a drill with some heroin powder on it. But it would be enough.

  On Christmas Day, three weeks later, Chowdury landed in Perth, flew to Sydney, stayed in King’s Cross, flew to Canberra and caught a bus to Melbourne. Police followed him all the way. They arrested him at 2.37am on 27 December. He said little and wouldn’t sign a record of interview. Ironically, he was there to get his money, not to smuggle more drugs.

  Meanwhile, Thai police were searching Chowdury’s houses in Thailand. They found bags of heroin, raw opium, partly constructed cutlery boxes and a press for compressing drugs.

  Detectives raided McMillan’s Beaumaris house at dawn on 5 January, 1982. They found him and Vigano in bed, a packet of heroin, $8000 cash, scales, a grinder and other drug gear. McMillan denied knowing Chowdury and said ‘no comment’ when asked about the maternity hospital episode.

  In Brighton, Sullivan and Castilo were also in bed. Police found photographs of Chowdury and Sullivan together. Sullivan claimed Chowdury had given him ‘presents’ at the hospital four weeks before.

  Next day, police took McMillan to a house he owned in Carlton and found a plastic bag with $69,930 sitting on a wardrobe – as much, then, as the house was worth. It helped explain why McMillan had such good information – he could buy it.

  For, besides drugs and money, the detectives had found something else … a list in McMillan’s neat handwriting, naming every taskforce member.

  While they had been watching him, he’d been watching them.

  A MONTH later, Clelia Vigano and Mary Escolar Castilo were dead – killed in a fire that Vigano and another prisoner, Danielle Wright, apparently lit at Fairlea Women’s Prison.

  It seemed a sinister c
oincidence that two women who could have given damning evidence against McMillan and Sullivan were dead. But a coroner found later that Vigano and Wright’s ‘gross recklessness’ had killed Castilo. There was nothing to support the Vigano family’s suspicions that it was premeditated murder.

  Ten months after the Fairlea fire, police heard a whisper about a plot to spring McMillan and Sullivan from Pentridge by helicopter. A transport operator told a policeman he’d been offered a huge amount to move escapees hidden on the back of a truck. Detectives traced a former British soldier, Percival Hole, who had come from the Philippines after being approached by Sullivan’s sister, Norma.

  Police monitored Hole’s hotel room, and heard him boasting of a plan to land a helicopter on the prison tennis court, drop the escapees in a park, take them to a flat where waiting make-up artists would disguise them, then hide them in crates that would be trucked to Queensland. This would be followed by another truck carrying an ocean-going boat, in case of emergencies, and would meet a light plane that would fly them to the Philippines, where Sullivan’s sister had connections with the Marcos regime.

  The plan was smashed. Hole and McMillan’s go-between, his accountant Max McCready, were arrested and jailed. Police who re-enacted the scheme insisted it would have worked, had Hole kept quiet and found a helicopter. And if it all sounded like something out of a film, it was … a Charles Bronson thriller called Break Out.

  McMILLAN did his time easily; Sullivan didn’t. Chowdury worked in the Pentridge kitchens and reportedly donated $18,000 of equipment to the jail when he won early release after ten years.

  McMillan and Sullivan were also generous benefactors to the prison system, according to jail gossip. Rumor has it that a swimming pool built by Builders Laborers Federation members (after union boss Norm Gallagher served time) used $30,000 of materials paid, for by anonymous benefactors connected with the pair.