David McMillan (smuggler)

David McMillan
David McMillan 2004
Born	(1956-04-09)9 April 1956 London, England, United Kingdom
Occupation	Photographer, TV presenter, drug smuggler, writer

David McMillan (born 1956) is a British-Australian drug smuggler who is best known for being the only Westerner on record as having successfully escaped Bangkok's Klong Prem prison. His exploits were the subject of the 2011 Australian telemovie, Underbelly Files: The Man Who Got Away.

McMillan was born in Saint Marylebone, London, England, on 9 April 1956. He is the son of John McMillan CBE, who was the controller of Associated-Rediffusion Television. After emigrating to Australia with his family, McMillan attended Caulfield Grammar School in Melbourne, Victoria. As a child, 12-year-old McMillan appeared nightly on the Nine Network's 'Peters Junior News', presenting news stories for children in a regular 5-minute TV bulletin. After working as a cinema projectionist and camera operator in Sydney, he began a short-lived career in advertising with Masius Wynne Williams in Melbourne.

A part-time job at a city cinema introduced McMillan to the fringes of the underworld; a group of safe-crackers who had turned to narcotics when police surveillance curtailed their traditional profession. Connections with the free-marijuana hippie lobbyists brought those two worlds together and a tempting opportunity for McMillan, who was well-travelled. At the time, he was a distributor of the monthly magazine, The Australasian Weed, a drug-reform periodical, and advocated the complete lifting of the prohibition against drugs for recreational use. McMillan then began a career as a drug smuggler, during which he developed the bag-duplication system at Sydney's Kingsford-Smith Airport in the late 1970s as he smuggled hashish from India. In 1979, McMillan fell out with disgraced peer Lord Tony Moynihan after the exiled lord attempted to trap McMillan in a gambling-sting operation using the large-scale bets of the Chinese-run cockfights in Manila. Moynihan had hoped to employ McMillan's technical expertise to detonate an explosive capsule in the necks of fighting cocks, and so determine the winners.