David McMillan (born 1956) is a British-Australian former drug smuggler who is the only Westerner on record as having successfully escaped Bangkok's Klong Prem prison.

[3] 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.

[citation needed] 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.

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[citation needed] he smuggled hashish from India.

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.

Imprudent spending attracted the attention of federal police when a Clénet Coachworks car was imported from California bearing papers that had greatly undervalued the vehicle.

This slip-up led to a major investigation which eventually revealed houses, businesses and properties along the eastern coast of Australia bought with cash and valued in millions of dollars.

McMillan and Sullivan, along with their partners, Clelia Teresa Vigano and Mary Escolar Castillo respectively, had been arrested on 5 January 1982 for conspiracy to import heroin.

The trial heard charges of an attempt to escape Melbourne's high-security Pentridge Prison by helicopter using former SAS personnel in a scheme engineered by a vengeful Lord Moynihan.

[8] The prosecution opposed bail for Castillo, who had a four-month-old baby with Sullivan, because she had access to funds and it was thought she could flee to her wealthy parents in her native Colombia.

"[17] Future Australian attorney-general Robert McClelland when praising Australia's embassy in Thailand remarked that McMillan: "… a prisoner... escaped from the Thai jail in quite exceptional and athletic circumstances.

Due to a financial dispute with the prison superintendent concerning his illegal mobile phone, McMillan was transferred at night to the Hyderabad jail, where he was kept in the dungeons until being rescued by Lord Magsi.

[21] McMillan was arrested again in April 2012, in an operation referred to Bromley police by the UK Border Agency concerning an ounce of heroin mailed from Pakistan.

The third in the Underbelly Files series, the film was based on McMillan's smuggling, arrest, imprisonment in Bangkok and briefly outlined his escape from Klong Prem.

[29] In late April 2017, McMillan published Unforgiving Destiny - The Relentless Pursuit of a Black Marketeer, a second autobiography detailing his experiences in Afghanistan and Thailand and his 2016 trial.

[31] In 2022, McMillan sat down for a two part YouTube video series with LADbible, where he describes his early life & criminal career leading up to his arrest in Thailand[32] and a detailed account of his escape from Klong Prem prison.