Underbelly 5 Page 22

  Although popular with police and prison officers, McMillan was not as well-liked by fellow prisoners. He and Sullivan were regarded as ‘yuppie crims’ who got favorable treatment.

  Although sentenced to seventeen years in August 1983, McMillan was given day-leave from jail by 1991. His charisma – and network of contacts – was such that The Financial Review published a flowery piece he wrote about his first day on leave from prison.

  He dined out with his family and, on another leave pass, with his former defence lawyer, who now considered him a friend. And he was making plans for a fresh start. He impressed one of Melbourne’s better-known actors that he had a story to tell.

  Later, when he was released on licence, McMillan visited the actor at his beach house. ‘When he came to see me, supposedly to discuss writing a book,’ the actor mused later, ‘he already had a new car and a mobile phone. I should have realised that writing would be too boring for him.’

  Police, however, weren’t as trusting as family and friends. A Romanian who’d known McMillan in prison told an undercover policeman he was ‘the cleverest crim I’ve ever met’ and hinted that his plans didn’t include writing for a living.

  While maintaining an innocent facade, McMillan was busy. Police later heard he was buying rock heroin from other traffickers, crushing it and moulding it into uniform ‘discs’, complete with a brand stamped on it. He then spread the fiction that it was the latest and purest heroin on the market and he was swamped by buyers.

  ‘It was just a brilliant marketing trick,’ says the undercover policeman, who had seen gangsters at work for years. Just before Christmas 1993, McMillan was arrested in Bangkok after running from an airline clerk who questioned his passport. The passport was false, and there was half-a-kilogram of heroin hidden in his luggage. Procedures had changed since the 1980s, and McMillan hadn’t caught up.

  Three years later, he had made enough friends inside and outside prison to go out the window and over two walls.

  And since?

  Word filtered to Melbourne a few months later that he had been arrested on the Afghanistan-Pakistan border. But, somehow, he’d persuaded – or bribed – the authorities to let him go, then vanished.

  He’d be delighted to know – if he doesn’t already – that there is little to stop him slipping back to Victoria. Not only is there no warrant for his arrest known to state police, but the force doesn’t even have a photograph of him on file. Obviously just another lucky break, like the night he skipped Klong Prem prison. Or is it?