Andrew Rule: Odd couple heroin traffickers whose luck finally ran out

Like so many crooks, drug trafficker David McMillan couldn’t help flaunting unexplained wealth. And it was his downfall.

Oympics ambition, a deadly prison fire and a crazy plan for a jailbreak by helicopter are just footnotes to this amazing tale.

Helen Barnacle was locked inside one of the deathtrap wooden dormitories at the old Fairlea women’s prison when she heard the sirens, smelt the smoke and saw the flames through the bars.

It was 39 years ago this week, the evening of February 6, 1982. Five women were inside the burning building. Three died, two more rescued by an heroic officer who crawled in to get them.

In her nearby dormitory, Helen and a few other inmates were locked in for the night with an officer who, for security, had no keys. They were powerless to help.

Helen later wrote a song about the fire. She still has the lyrics scrawled on the page of an exercise book with the chords marked ready to play, but has never sung it in public. It is too bleak. One verse goes like this:

“The smoke grew so thick, the flames grew so high, We’re standing by the window watching people die.”

The Fairlea fire is a tragic footnote to the far-fetched tale of two “gentlemen” drug traffickers who fooled the system right up until the tables were turned.

The fire was started by a reckless prisoner as an unhinged protest at prison conditions. She stopped the other two from pressing the emergency buzzer for a few vital minutes that cost them their lives.

Those two, beautiful and doomed, had sabotaged their own comfortable lives by becoming the love interests of an unlikely pair of crooks.

One was Clelia Vigano, pampered daughter of the prosperous and cultured family that ran the establishment Italian restaurant, Mario’s. The other was Mary Escolar Catillo, member of a prominent Colombian family.

Clelia Vigano.

Mary Escolar Catillo.

Clelia was the lover of David McMillan, the ne’er-do-well son of a World War II air force officer. David was born in prosperous circumstances in London but raised in Melbourne by his glamorous and erratic mother, who’d arrived from England in the 1960s to follow her taste for men with dash and cash to splash.

Mary Escolar Catillo had just had a baby to McMillan’s partner-in-crime, Michael Sullivan, a former Australian champion pole vaulter whose life would have been completely different if he got to represent Australia at the 1968 Olympic Games.

Their baby, handed over to Michael Sullivan’s aged mother, was named Sean. Sean Sullivan would later add the surname of his mother’s family, who cared for him for two years in South America before he was returned to his father’s crooked life in Melbourne as a teenager.

Sean Sullivan Escolar, now a DJ and sound engineer in Melbourne, grew up in the shadow of his mother’s criminal death and his father’s criminal life, both of which shamed the otherwise respectable Sullivan family.

In fact, while Michael Sullivan was “doing time” in Pentridge Prison, jokingly known as “the bluestone college”, his much older brother Tim was teaching at Melbourne Grammar, a real bluestone college.

Sullivan was the first Australian to break what was once a yardstick of excellence in pole vaulting — the “16-foot” mark, 4.88m. His coach, a former wartime commando named Wal Chisholm, loved him like a son.

Until the day he died, Chisholm blamed Olympic selectors for cheating Sullivan of his place in the Mexico City squad in 1968. Sullivan would later badly break an ankle and develop an addiction to painkillers that led him to using heroin supplied by David McMillan.

The dandyish confidence man McMillan and the iron-willed athlete made an odd couple in crime circles, but the early signs were there.

McMillan had been educated at Caulfield Grammar, although he was eventually expelled for illicit activities, including using other people’s credit cards and attempting to make LSD in the school science lab.

David McMillan. Picture: Ella Pellegrini

Sullivan had also been expelled from his bayside school for wearing his hair too long, although he was later welcomed back to school as athletics coach and art teacher before he turned to drug-trafficking.

McMillan was addicted to easy money from a childhood spent watching his mother charming her way through life. One of the biggest influences on him was the society abortionist Dr Jim Troup, who lived with his mother during the boy’s formative years.

On the surface, Troup was a polished and prosperous gynaecologist. Behind the mask, he was breaking the then strict abortion laws — paying off corrupt police as he went. A bad example for McMillan the budding villain.

McMillan and Sullivan and their Thai contact, Supahaus Chowdury, were far too successful for their own good. The confidence that allowed McMillan to pull his tricks was a double-edged sword.

He ignored an early warning to “pull up” when he foolishly brought back hash from India packed in a vintage radio.

The radio reeked of the drug but a kindly Customs officer told the young traveller to leave the airport and never try it again. McMillan took the free pass but didn’t take the hint. He imagined he was a step ahead of law enforcement — and, for a while, he was.

In three years, he went from broke and virtually homeless to being a millionaire. But, like so many crooks, he couldn’t help flaunting unexplained wealth. He came to police notice by importing a wildly expensive roadster, a hand-built Bugatti replica, the value of which was grossly understated on Customs forms.

Inquiries revealed McMillan had more than flashy cars. He had nine identities and safe houses in Melbourne, Bangkok, London, Hong Kong and Brussels. And he’d made 11 overseas trips in a year.

Former Fairlea inmate Helen Barnacle with daughter Ali.

He once came to the door of a South Yarra apartment to meet a late-night visitor wearing a silk kimono and a pair of matched and silenced pistols in shoulder holsters.

The more police looked, the more they found. He had a list of 43 women from Melbourne, Sydney and London he used as couriers, 38 birth certificates and 27 passports under false names. His trick, in the days before linked computer databases, was to apply for passports in the names of people who had died as children.

McMillan was smart but addicted to risk. And that was his problem. Even when he found he was the target of a police investigation, Operation Aries, the gambler didn’t know when to fold his cards.

If he had listened to his lawyers or tip-offs from people in high places, he could have quit ahead of the posse. But instead of changing his ways, he just pretended to. Arrogance and thrill-seeking led to a dangerous game of cat and mouse.

He knew he was “hot” when he heard surveillance units on his police scanner talking about following a car as it backed out of a drive at the exact time he was backing out of his drive.

His suspicions were confirmed when a travel agent told him police were asking questions about a list of clients, including many of McMillan’s aliases.

According to a detective who worked on the syndicate’s Thai connection, Supahaus Chowdury, the taskforce expected to catch the main players in the act. Chowdury was an anti-surveillance expert who led police across the country, taking planes and public transport from Perth to Sydney then Canberra before taking a bus to Melbourne.

On December 5, 1981, McMillan met Chowdury, who was carrying two cutlery boxes containing heroin. Surveillance police watched the meeting in a lane at the Mercy Hospital and called in the arrest team. But it was a “dead spot” and the radio message was not answered.

Fairlea Womens Prison.

The pair escaped but the clock was ticking. The police came for him with sledge hammers at dawn a month later, bursting down the door of a bayside house in January of the new year.

Aries investigators arrested McMillan, Clelia Vigano, Michael Sullivan and Mary Escolar Castillo, Chowdury and minor players.

Within a month, Clelia and Mary died in the Fairlea fire, which caused McMillan genuine remorse and Sullivan lifelong anguish.

But McMillan wouldn’t give up the battle of wits. He cooked up a plan to get a helicopter to land inside Pentridge to carry himself, Sullivan and Chowdury to a secret location and then use a make-up artist to disguise them before flying to the Philippines.

The back-up scenario was to load the escapers into an ocean-going yacht on the back of a truck and drive it interstate to launch and sail away into the sunset — this a generation before Tony Mokbel’s audacious escape to Greece on a yacht.

The helicopter plot came unstuck before the chopper got off the ground. A former British soldier was convicted over the conspiracy while having some pre-escape rest and recreation in a luxury hotel.

The trial went for 100 days, with 175 Crown witnesses and 8000 pages of transcript. The jury deliberated for eight days.

According to McMillan, a jury member had applied to be a policewoman and the trial was adjourned while she sat an entrance exam. “I am sure she was not biased,” he notes drily in his book.

McMillan, Sullivan and Chowdury beat all but one charge but one was enough: they were convicted of conspiracy and sentenced to 15 years each. Jail legend has it they paid for sports facilities to be improved at Pentridge — but that a wise prison governor stopped Sullivan getting a vaulting pole to “train”. He could vault as high as a prison wall.

McMillan went inside at 26. When he got out at 37, the Financial Review got him to write a first-person piece about how it felt. Chowdury became a jail pastry cook and eventually returned to Thailand. Sullivan never recovered from the death of the beautiful Mary Escolar Catillo.

When he got out, Sullivan chased the dragon and ended up doing more jail time for dealing drugs before succumbing to leukaemia in 2001.

He had lost the love of his life, then life itself, leaving behind the heartbroken Sean.

As for McMillan, in 1996 he would become the first westerner to escape from Klong Prem prison, the notorious “Bangkok Hilton”. Even the spectre of a Thai firing squad didn’t cure him.

But detection grew far more sophisticated during his years inside. He was a 1970s crook facing the 21st century, which explains why he has been jailed all over the world.