When you Google Image Search wanted criminals, the one thing that sticks out ...
just how utterly unassuming most of the faces staring back at you really are.
“Of course there's the odd mugshot that screams "I'm not a great person" but for the most”
part, these faces are ones that you would pass in the street and not even give them a second glance. That sentiment could definitely be said about David Miller. Hello. Hello.
Hi. There he is. Oh there you are. Well that's all right. We got there.
Listen.
Are you still getting a shit together at all?
I'm good. I'm we can get going. Yeah, yeah, yeah, I didn't want to, I realized how late it was over there. Well, all right. Let me just get a drink and I'm back in a flash.
Perfect. The 70 years old, David has lived a life that is almost unbelievable, the head of an international drug trafficking business that's spanned across multiple continents, a decade behind bars in Australia, relentlessly pursued by the US Drug Enforcement Agency, wanted by Interpol. Not to mention two death penalty sentences and the only Westerner on record to have successfully
escaped Bangkok's long-prem prison. Also referred to as the Bangkok Helping. Would they have executed me?
“I think they really definitely gave the go ahead.”
Britain didn't care. The Americans quite keen on it. They liked it. A foreigner being executed as long as a Westerner in American. My name is Jack Lawrence.
Welcome to Wanted, or as David likes to put it. Honestly, desire, I don't think. I'm a wanderer of the soul before the end, I'm a plan to be whole, but I'm no alms myself along the way. It's April 5th, 1956 in the West End of London, John and Rosie Millen, welcome into the
world, then you baby boy, who they name, David. David's mother Rosie was, in fact, Australian, and as a result, David would make several trips back and forth between the two countries as a youngster. We've actually got something in common because I was also born in the UK and emigrated to Australia.
“You came over with your mother I believe.”
I did, I came over on the Ossovo when I was three, where the first time.
We went back when I was seven and then ten, so I've sort of imported myself a few times. In fact, I'm Australian by, I'm a straighter, certificate, I thought, it's a citizenship by being decent. It wasn't, it was just a cent, that's just a mom and dad actually bought it in Australia. It's pretty damn, I mean, if that's not forgiveness, what is it?
So your parents were actually born here in Australia. Rosie, my mother, was, and as much as he tried to hide it, my father, John McMillan, was Australian. I mean, he changed his accent several times, but I had just a bit of Australian in there. During the war, he was a major or something in the radio section where they did try
to counter the German propaganda, so I don't know what side he was on, it was pretty good. As for David's father, he says he really didn't have much of a relationship with him. He got himself a CB, which is Commander of the British Empire, so it was real snob, and didn't think much of me. It's not because he probably had any fundamental objection, and it just didn't fit into
he kind of scripted his life, and there wasn't really a role for me in that. David's mother and father would separate when he was still very young, and he would again head back to Australia with his mother and sister, and move to Melbourne. He would attend Corville Grammar Private School in Melbourne, South East, until he was asked to find another school.
After what he says was an incident with his chemistry teacher, who claimed that David had attempted to make a batch of LSD. Some possible early warning signs of what was to come in David's life.
It was the 1970s in Australia, and drug use was not particularly underground,...
called hard drugs were not really distinguished between anything else.
“David says even from a young age he knew that he was going to need control in life, and”
to get control he would need money. In fact, the law was something that was just there to be broken. As he witnessed firsthand, so-called "respected people" doing just that. One of the worst influences my mother thought when I said one of my stepfather's, it wasn't quite that many.
But one Jim Troop was a respected gynecologist who with some other Melbourne doctors were challenging the anti-abortion laws, and they'd been paying off the cost because they were the only properly qualified doctors doing the surgery. It was the vice-quarter of all departments who were in charge of taking an interest in that sort of thing.
So all the surgeries were in cash, and when it became public, then the doctors got arrested, and they were taken into court, and police were feeling threatened and threatening us in our household. So even imagine this, my mother said it was the worst possible influence where we were surrounded by respected people who came home with a suit, or a bag full of cash.
The police were the enemy, the laws were there to be broken, and I was 14 years old. So how would David go about taking control? How was he going to make his money? Well, he would find that answer in the local library. By 18, I was really going to the library looking at what was the quickest and most profitable
thing to do in the world, and again, this book of record made a very plain that the wholesale price of opium in the fields of turkey compared with the streetpice in New York City is a vital product with 127,000 percent.
“I thought, okay, I think they left out a bit in the store room, and by chance I ended up meeting”
some safe crackers who'd retired and wanted to put their money into something. They used to buy marijuana from the Murray River Valley, the tellings there, but really what they wanted was somebody who could import, and I thought I could do that, it just seemed to be my kind of thing. David formed a friendship with this group of former safe crackers, guys that were all loyal
to each other, always looking out for one another, and he felt drawn to their world.
They had a need and David decided he could fill it. So he leaves his job at the city's cinema and decided that he was going to have a crack at importing the drugs that these retired safe crackers were after. One of them gives him a loan for a few thousand dollars, David sets off for India on the hunt for some hashish.
His initial plan was to import a big piece of machinery which had whites in it, then they would be removed and replaced with the drugs and thus weighing the same on its return. Good plan on the outset, but David soon found out that he would have to pay an extraordinary amount in duty just to get it into the country. So that was off the table.
It would be a chance meeting however with a man at the money exchange, which would see him pull off one of the worst attempts that a drug importation you can think of as he's given six kilos of hash, and then sets about trying to hide it in an old 1950s radio, jumping back on a plane and heading straight to Sydney.
My first little importation of six kilos of hash from India was Reggie hopeless, but our
staffed into a 1950s grandeur radio that had been a visorated completely, kind of a vernacular customs officer at Sydney opened my suitcase and there's nothing in it.
“I think there were three pairs of socks of t-shirt and this thing.”
And you just come back from India? Yeah, yes, straight from New Delhi, whack into Sydney airport. He looked at it and spent a tuning dial which kept on spinning gravity doing it stuff, nothing behind there's a stubborn spin at you. I don't know, I don't see that you don't take the fucking radio with you.
You never get that kind of break these to it.
No, they've worked in teams.
“Talk about close call, but this didn't deter David from his ambitions of drug importation.”
No, he just needed to get better at it. Soon enough, I'm doing pretty well, instead of costing and living on the good graces of some wizard Sydney customs officer, I've learnt how they do their thing, that when you arrive back in the country, they want to know where you've come from, they want to look at your passport and see the history of it, so I need passports a lot of them.
I also noticed they worked in teams, and if you did get stocked, which shouldn't happen if you got it all together, but let's just say you do. You would be in front of two officers.
The first one would do the searching of your bag and drop the lid onto his hand just to fill
the white of it. Then he'd lift up, pretty much every object, toilet, free's bag and zip it, give it a jiggle zip it up, put it aside and roll it down, lift up something else. Could he search everything? No.
Did he have any special information? Likely, it's not.
“But you've come from a many feet place and you're a young guy, so you know, but this is what”
happens. The guy watching from behind with whom you're having some kind of stupid conversation because you're getting yourself this thing we found, when the guy who's going through your stuff, lifts up teddy bear, gives him a bit of a squeeze, a heft and puts him aside in a clear objects.
You, if you don't know where I did by then, how the shoulders drop down, you look up at that officer that you've been talking to, oh, yes, suddenly you're a new man. Now, well, I didn't really like badly and, you know, how the girls in Bangkok is like talking to a different person. As soon as you change like that, he taps the man who's doing the searches, the last object
was it. Wow. And there was a part I liked, the research and the people didn't have the passion for it. In recruiting, I said to some people, I don't want lazy criminals, you've got to run away from it.
And people say, oh, if there's something, there's going to be a problem with this stuff, I'm dropping it and running. You've got to be impatient about it and it got to the point really where I didn't want to let the stuff go, especially, I was like, cope from Columbia, I had some care over it, packing it and using lemonade so that no odor would ever escape from it.
When I finally get back to my little zone of operations and unpack this thing, I fell carefully because I could use the devices for a few times, and then I put it there in front of me. Jack, I didn't want to let him go, well, it was a herb idea and it would take on our kind of ships, feminine personality.
David was so involved and obsessed by the process of smuggling drugs that even went
and he got to the stage of having curious and putting them through training, he was always
close by. It was like some school teacher in their final exam when they were going through, I couldn't leave them alone, I'd be in a couple of seats, up on the plane. So you would go with, like, training as it were, couriers to make sure that they were okay. I am particularly when I'm on a real job, I didn't want to make any decisions, that
would be a disaster. And even if they were asking what it was, they were smuggling, I'd
“say, well, I don't think I'm the worst thing you could imagine.”
So, Tonyan, you know, just anything that would take it out of their mind, you don't want to think about that, you will never see it anyway. So, whatever, if you come to grief, you have the choice then, oh, the best lawyers, your time in prison will be surprisingly comfortable if that's what you want, but I'm hoping you'd say David, get me the hell out of here, and I'll come in and get you out and I'll
really enjoy that. So, as I said at the start of this episode, David McMillan is not a man, you would look at and think, well, there's a hardened criminal. I mean, of course, he's now 67 years old and a very slightly built man, but even in his more shall we say, sprightly years, he had more of a look of a man that you might meet
at the bank about a home loan, not someone you'd go to to get your hands on 10 kilos of
Columbia's finest.
however, he was also dealing with some very dangerous people, so how did he avoid getting himself into trouble with them?
“Again, there is a technique that even the most feather way a people can protect themselves”
because I was found that people fear what they don't know, you know, you'd meet somebody for business and say, look, not real, the people now, I mean, they really depend on me for living and they come from a bit the legend, if something goes wrong, they won't really ask anything much, they just have a handful of photos and start tearing up and they see any of them and shoot them or, so let's try and not rock the boat on this one.
So the idea of kidnapping me and ringing many out of me was not, is that somebody would be very reckless to take that on because they just didn't know where this unseen enemy might come from and of course anybody who's really capable of doing anything you certainly don't want to look the per. Certainly, the more, when I say respected, more professional of killers I've met was certainly
never looked apart, I don't know you'd too young but it was guy called Jim Basley, he was
Australia. Jim, you would never expect to look like a kind of grandfatherly type, in fact part of the case against him when it came up was that he refused to shoot the family dog. So a very brief Australian criminal history lesson for you. The man, the David, is referring to is James Frederick Basley, also known as the Iceman
or Machine Gun, and he's long believed to be the hitman who gunned down prominent anti-drug campaigner and liberal politician Don McCay. It's an order supposedly given by the Italian mafia in Australia in the 1970s, and was the subject of Channel 9's Underbelly series "A Tale of Two Cities". James Basley died at the age of 19 in 2018, a free man in a Melbourne nursing home, although
no stranger to the inside of a prison cell. In fact in 1986 he was sentenced to nine years behind bars for the conspiracy to murder
Mr McCay, but was never tried over being the one who actually fired the gun used to
kill the politician. He also was handed a life sentence for his role in the double murder of drug couriers Isabelle and Douglas Wilson, whose bodies were recovered in 1979. However, handed a life sentence Mr Basley would walk out of prison in 2001. Mr McCay's remains were never found.
“Mr Basley kept his secret until the very end.”
Police would describe this man as someone who saw murder as a job and felt absolutely no remorse. But he wasn't really hanging around very, very dangerous people then. But the genuinely strong ones were not bullies, and there certainly amongst this tiny cool, because there weren't many good ones, there was a lot of royalty.
When I was in I was locked up in Thailand, and I was a disaster there. Nobody really knew what had happened to me clearly anyway, they used sort of where I was.
But after months and months and months I finally found myself inside the prison behind
the rice stacks of a little warehouse where they kept food, but the Chinese ties who gave me, and they're bulky looking mobile phone. And I got through to Michael at someone godly out, and he hadn't heard from me a long time. He interrupted me as I began to explain, extraordinary event, he said David, don't explain
anything, we don't have time, just tell me what I've got to do, and what I need to bring.
“I thought, wow, you know, that's what you want.”
That's what you want on your side, absolutely. This Michael that David speaks of was his longtime business partner and former champion Paul Volta, Michael Sullivan, a man whose life likely would have been vastly different if he had been able to represent Australia in the Olympic Games. Michael was in fact the first ever Australian to break the 16 foot mark in Paul Volting,
but was passed over by Olympic selectors in 1968 for the Mexico City Squad.
He would later suffer a severe ankle break, which would not only see him miss...
Games, but also leading to developing addiction to his pain medication, which then led
“to drugs, and his eventual meeting with David, and so along and lucrative partnership began.”
By this stage David had cut ties with the retired safecrackers, and he, Michael, and their tie connection was to chattering, were building a very lucrative business. As David's wealth grew, so does his appetite for the finer things in life. And it would apparently be the purchase of an incredibly expensive American roadster that would eventually bring the attention of Australian police.
They would soon discover that this David McMillan had properties all over the world, Melbourne, Bangkok, London, Hong Kong, and Brussels, and had had more than 11 overseas trips in one year.
However, there was seemingly no explanation for this man's extreme wealth.
The police continued to do more digging on this man of mystery.
“Only to discover a list of 43 couriers across Melbourne, Sydney, and London that David”
was using. Also, no less than 38 birth certificates and 27 passports under false names. The police now well and truly had David and his syndicate in their sights and operation airies was closing in. It would in fact be David's travel agent that would tip him off about police making inquiries
into him.
Two detectives came in with a long list of names they wanted travel details for.
On that list was 30 names. 26 of which were aliases used by David at the time. What made David such a success was his love of risk and adventure.
“However, this would also be his downfall as operation airies swoops.”
In Australia, I was arrested for a very long task force state federal operation. I was one show and get out of town I didn't. Herodants again. I thought, "Well, if there are a big police set up, they won't cheat too much because they'll want to get the goods.
I mean, but they moved in and arrested when there was no drugs to be found and it makes a very tough case." Yes. And Jack will be able to find yourself on a murder charge. I hope that they found a body because you got something to win over if it's a conspiracy.
So in Ywendo and talking, so much evidence can go in that's just chatter. I we thought there were 12 careers, they didn't say, "Well, they were good." The code of silence was being upheld so far by all involved. However, police would tighten the screws on the team by arresting both David and Michael significant others and placing them in prison when tragedy would strike.
Because the evidence wasn't very strong, they did a massive resting, the family's got rounded up. My telling wife at the time, a playover gunner was arrested, Michael's Colombian wife was arrested. She just had a baby. There's still nothing, nobody was waiting, they put it in former, in the fairly women's
prison to extract some kind of information out. But their choice of informa, Daniel, was a poor choice, indeed, he was an astonist. And that was his solution to anything to set fire to the place, which he did. And burnt the women's prison, that section of it anyway to the ground, that caused the death of pleasure and Michael's wife, Marri, and something, I don't want to hear any time,
but it was particularly creepy when you were in prison. And the prisons in those days didn't barely had radios, so 11 o'clock at night it switched it off and I just heard the beginning of the story about fire, the women's prison. So the same thing about fortified state 20 miles late, and alarm was received from the romance section at fairly, the fire brigade attended with quite a number of appliances and
on attending, they found a fire burning in the romance section. So fatalities, click, and it was gone. As a result of that fire, three female prisoners are deceased. So after a restful night's sleep, I came out with the silver in the morning and straight
Over to one of the offices I knew.
Well, I skipped the formalities.
“Oh, David, shuffling around, pushing pins around his desk, we, look, I'm not clear at the”
moment, but I know you probably, you know, bit worried or that there wasn't a good sign. And nobody would talk to us, Michael and I were called up for a legal visit few hours later. The deserted visit center, one officer on duty who was busy examining his fort of something. Yeah, yeah, through the next door.
And all our families were there, well, those remained anyway. So that was, of course, I felt completely responsible and guilty, I felt like, really for
the first time I had blood on my hands and it was almost like my own.
So the authorities to make the best of the bad situation, put it about that, we had started to eliminate all the witnesses and started their own wives.
“Yeah, David and Michael have been held in Jaikejika.”
The high security section of the infamous Pantrych Prison, home to prisoners like Chopper Reed and Ned Kelly, it was designed as a prison within a prison to hold Victoria's toughest and longest serving prisoners. Jaikejika had six separate units, all with nothing but concrete, electric doors and remote locking.
The furnishings were sparse and prisoners would exercise in small escape proof yards. Eventually, Jaikejika would be closed down after a number of inmates would die in a fire that had been deliberately lit. However, David and Michael were eventually taken out of Jaikejika, but a supposed planned escape would see them taken straight back again.
The trial was made worse by a lot of stirrings, including the great prison helicopter escape that wasn't it, it was set up by Lord Tony Moyen, my name was a fraudster from the UK settled in the Philippines, I'd sort of done some business with him and knew I couldn't trust him. When he said he'd sending a former SAS commander to arrange a helicopter escape, I knew it was
likely to be just a scam, but I didn't realize that it was actually a scam done with the corporation of the federal police. It came over, sorry, you can get some money out of them, just pretend your SAS, get a quarter
of a million, send me my bid.
All of that. I suppose Lord Tony thought he'd get something out of that before the ex-ville, but he got double-crossed along with everybody else. So really, the beginning of the trial, that helicopter escape, so it was back into the superman's prison again.
So the authorities got wind that this was supposedly happening, and then... Well, they should know because it was there, I'd see it. Yeah, from the day the guy arrived, the Hilton Hotel in Collingwood was, his room was monitored, they put him into a special one, my friend and a accountant Max got draped into it, and went to see him a couple of times, and I said, "Look, keep away from the guy.
God knows what's behind this, he just don't want to be seen there, but it was coincided
with the first week of the drug conspiracy trial."
“And that's what we've got time for, but coming up in our next episode, while David is”
in prison, the police waste no time in enjoying what he's left behind. The police moved into my house and burned Maris, they patted like it was 1999, and the local police had to come down to stop the noise. And, once released finally from Australian prison, he decides to leave the country. On his way to England, he'd make a stop-off, a stop-off that was going to cost him his
life. And this was during a visit into the prison in Thailand, by some Australian liaison, officer, and said, "Oh, by the way, you know, you're a fact, actually, you're finished." Next time, on Wanted. I'm a warrior of the soul, before the end, I plan to be whole, but I've no illness myself
along the way, what's God's law, what's past is past, and I believe what belongs to God's
