by Paul Simpson
He may not have been hanged but McMillan was quickly arraigned on further drugs charges. He was travelling on a false passport in the name of Donald Westlake, and was nearly arrested at Bangkok Airport. It wasn’t long before a group of policemen walked into a travel agency and arrested him; and, as he told the BBC in 2007, from that moment he began planning his escape.
McMillan was sent to the notorious Klong Prem Central Prison in Bangkok. Known ironically as the Bangkok Hilton, Klong Prem was originally established in 1944 as a temporary prison during the Second World War, but after the main prison became overcrowded in 1960, the prisoners were transferred there. Around 12,000 inmates were housed there when McMillan arrived in 1993, with around 600 foreigners. Although these were mainly kept in Building 2, McMillan bribed his way to ensure that he was housed in Building 6: after a check of the various bars, walls and electric fences around the prison, he chose it because it had the thinnest bars in the windows.
Although the Bangkok Hilton was still heavily overcrowded, with some cells about the size of a family garage containing up to twenty-five convicts, McMillan was able to bribe his way into some degree of comparative luxury. By the time that he escaped in 1996, he had set up an office, had a cook and a cleaner working for him, and was in a first-floor cell, with only three other prisoners for company. He even had a light switch installed – something of a necessity given that he was planning on cutting through the bars with a hacksaw blade. Everything that he had put in his cell was there for one reason, and one reason only: to help with his escape.
Escape may have been the goal of many of the Bangkok Hilton’s inmates, but most were put off by the fate of any who tried. McMillan recalled that five men had tried and failed: they had got as far as the outside wall before they were recaptured. They were then put in the punishment cells – steel boxes about five-feet long and two feet wide – and then every day they were brought out in elephant chains and beaten. Four of the five died. It was discouraging to learn that even if prisoners managed to get over the electrified fence without being thrown back by the current, chances were that the monks in the monastery next door would be as likely to turn an escapee in.
McMillan considered using one of his court appearances to effect an escape, but was counselled against it. A previous attempt had seen a group of Chinese prisoners rescued by friends, but they had been tracked down after one of their number hesitated and didn’t go along on the escape. He knew where the escapees were planning to meet, and gave up the information after being tortured for four hours. The special police unit had killed everyone in the safe house.
McMillan was certain he had to get out sooner rather than later. “I knew I was going to get the death penalty and I had to move before being sent to the Bangkwang Prison, known as The Big Tiger, which holds Thailand’s death row,” he recalled in 2007. He obtained photos of the outer wall, showing there was a metre of barbed wire on the top, with an electric cable running through it, connected to insulators. There were no footholds to be had.
Shortly before 3 a.m., using hacksaw blades that he had arranged to be smuggled into the prison inside the rods holding up a poster, McMillan managed to cut through one of the bars, and then, with the aid of a Swedish fellow convict, pulled the remainder apart, so he could squeeze himself through. A disassembled bookcase provided a plank to get to the courtyard, and he then used a rope formed from shower curtains to lower himself to the ground level. He then had to get over six walls to reach the outside.
Breaking into a hobby room, McMillan retrieved a homemade ladder, formed from picture frames and bamboo poles, then stealthily crept past the sleeping guards. This enabled him to get over the other walls, slowly but surely. He cut through barbed wire (which he hadn’t expected to encounter), crawled under razor wire and crossed the open sewer (known affectionately as “Mars Bar Creek”) on the ladder.
The final fence was electrified, and he had to hope that the rubber soles of his trainers and the rubber gloves he was wearing would insulate him. They did. He reached the top of the wall as dawn was breaking, and rapidly slid down his makeshift rope – burning the skin off his hands – to land outside the prison. Then, with the sort of audaciousness that the Australian police had come to expect from him during their long hunt, he opened up a compact umbrella, and nonchalantly walked off to hail a taxi – after all, who would expect an escaping prisoner to be carrying an umbrella?
After collecting a passport from a safe house, and a change of clothing from another hideout, at 10.20 a.m. he was on a plane to Singapore. The following March, Robert McClelland gave his unexpected testimonial. “A prisoner . . . escaped from the Thai jail in quite exceptional and athletic circumstances. In terms of mere escape, it was really quite an achievement. He took the opportunity after his escape of dropping a note to the Australian embassy to thank them for all their tremendous work and said that he hoped he had not caused them any embarrassment.”
McMillan’s jail exploits didn’t finish there, although his propensity for escape did. He was arrested in Pakistan, but released; he later served a two-year term after being caught at Heathrow Airport in 2002. He is still a wanted man in Australia for breaching his parole in 1993, and in Thailand for the escape, but as he is now a UK resident, he cannot be extradited to a country that might put him to death. McMillan appeared on the Bravo TV series Deadliest Men 2: Living Dangerously in 2009, interviewed by British actor Danny Dyer, in which he seemed to have changed from his criminal ways. However, although he wrote three books about his exploits, and sold the film rights of his escape from the Bangkok Hilton, McMillan was still active in the drugs trade: in April 2012, a joint operation between Bromley Police and the UK Border Force arrested him for importing and distributing heroin from Pakistan. In September that year he was sentenced to a further six years inside.
Sources:
New Strait Times, 21 January 1983: “Police foil jailbreak plot”
Australian Times, 19 September 2012: “Notorious Australian drug smuggler David McMillan jailed in London”
BBC News, 1 March 2009: “How to plan a successful jailbreak”
The Age, 12 September 2009: “There was a crooked man . . .”
Metro, 10 May 2011 “How I made my escape from Klong Prem prison”
The Independent, 16 July 1996: “Queen’s Proctor v Moynihan sons; Fugitive baron’s dissolute lifestyle to be kept secret”
Neos Kosmos, 9 March 2009: “Diatribe: Prison Break”
Blog: Escape with David McMillan: http://escapedavidmcmillan.blogspot.co.uk/2009/07/see-danny-dyer-and-david-mcmillan-tv.html
Bravo TV: 2009: Deadliest Men 2: Living Dangerously
Pro Pilot Forum: A Gun To You (sic) Head: December 2007
Sydney Morning Herald, 29 June 1984: “Jail for escape plan man”
London Evening Standard, 14 September 2007: “Drug dealer who escaped Bangkok jail is on the run in London”
McMillan, David: Escape: The True Story of the Only Westerner Ever To Break Out of Thailand’s Bangkok Hilton (Monsoon Books Singapore, 2007)
McMillan, David: Escape: The Past (Monsoon Books Singapore, 2011)
Escaping into Prison
For most fugitives, the last place that they want to see while they’re on the run is the inside of a jail. The whole point of their flight is to get away, either from what they perceive as a major injustice or from their just desserts. The thought of voluntarily going inside a prison cell would be anathema. But sometimes, hiding in plain sight is the simplest way to stay away – or at least, it was in the time before databases of fingerprints and other identification marks became automatically checked whenever someone was arrested. Cuban refugee Orlando Boquete discovered that adopting other people’s identities was the best method of remaining off the radar – but sometimes that meant doing a short stint inside.
Unlike many of the other prison escapees in this volume, Boquete wasn’t just convinced of his innocence; he really was not guilty of the crime for which he wa
s imprisoned, as would be proved with the advent of DNA testing. He wasn’t a squeaky clean innocent: when he left Cuba in 1980, at the age of twenty-five as one of the Marielitos that Fidel Castro permitted to depart that year, he had already served time in a Cuban jail as an Army deserter. He also left behind him two marriages, and a son.
Boquete’s life changed for ever on 25 June 1982. He had spent the past two years working in various jobs, and was living with his uncle in a trailer in Key West. He had shaved his head because of the heat, leaving a full black moustache as his only facial hair. That evening he sat watching a baseball match and then the World Cup football matches, which were being held in Spain at the time. He and his cousin then went to buy some cigarettes and beer – and Boquete was arrested, after being identified by a woman who had been assaulted in a nearby apartment block. Two Latino men had entered her apartment; one stayed in the living room, the other entered her bedroom, fondled her and masturbated on her. She had told police that her assailant had a shaved head, and no facial hair, but despite Boquete’s moustache, she told the police officers unequivocally that he was the man involved. The fact that she was twenty feet away, sitting in a police car in the middle of the night did not shake her conviction.
Prosecutors tried to get Boquete to agree a deal, turning evidence against the second man in the burglary. Boquete refused, explaining in court that “If my freedom depends on my falsely stating that I’m a culprit or guilty, I would rather go to jail. I’m conscious of the fact that if the gentlemen of the jury and the ladies of the jury, if they vote against me, they are going to destroy my life, and I’m not afraid to stand here.” The assaulted woman was shown a picture of Boquete the night before the trial, which showed his prominent moustache; for the first time, on the witness stand, she said that her assailant had facial hair. The defence’s only hope was that Pablo Cazola, who had also been arrested for the attack and had pleaded guilty, would testify that Boquete was not involved. He had signed an affidavit to that effect, but he wasn’t willing to enter the witness box. Perhaps unsurprisingly, given that Boquete’s alibi was that he was with family members, the jury chose to believe the victim. Boquete was sentenced to fifty years for the burglary and five years for attempted sexual battery.
He was sent to the Glades Correctional Institution (GCI), near the small town of Belle Glade in Florida. The thousand-bed prison, closed down in December 2011, had been built in 1932, and had its fair share of escapes over the years before Boquete decided to depart from the facility. Four men, including William Barbre, had sawn through a window in July 1980 and made their escape; three were quickly recaptured, but Barbre stayed on the run for nearly six years (he was recaptured after working in the area under an assumed name – he was recognized and arrested). In December 1984, convicted murderer Crawford Lee Grooms used a pair of wire-cutters to escape from the prison, after hiding in the athletics field. He was picked up by police nine days later in Miami on a vagrancy charge.
GCI’s security was pretty standard: there were two fences, with a ten-feet boundary area between them. This was filled with pressure detectors that would set off alarms as soon as they were touched. The outer fence was around fifteen-feet high, and covered with razor wire. Guard towers were dotted around the perimeter, and a van patrolled the outside of the wall on a road near the fence. Beyond that were sugar-cane fields, in which some of the prisoners worked, and an irrigation canal, which was filled with the local fauna including snakes and alligators. This made for a very effective moat beyond the fields – no one in their right mind would risk tangling with an alligator unless they absolutely felt they had to.
Boquete was inspired by the tale of Papillon (see chapter 53); Henri Charriere’s account of his various escapes from French penal colonies may well err on the side of fiction, but Boquete knew it contained important lessons for anyone wanting to get away from false imprisonment. Patience wasn’t simply a virtue it – was a necessity. And observe everything that is going on around you: in the words of the Biblical book of Ecclesiastes, keep your ears open and your mouth shut. Boquete took in all the little details and realized that to get over the fences and escape successfully, he would need some assistance.
Through a contact within the prison, he was able to get hold of a map of the surrounding area, vital if he was to stay on the loose for any length of time. Without making it appear too obvious, he checked out the routine of the patrol van, and estimated that from the time an alarm was triggered, he would have approximately one minute before the van returned from the farthest part of its journey. And he enlisted help from another inmate, robber George Wright (not to be confused with the hijacker George Wright, who escaped from Leesburg State Prison in 1970), while they were jogging in the yard (at least according to Boquete). The two men were both assigned to the cannery plant in the prison, and it was from there that they made their getaway on 6 February 1985.
The machinery at the cannery tended to malfunction, and when it did, the four guards’ attention was focused far more on arranging to get the forty or so prisoners back working than on thoughts of escape. Boquete and Wright took advantage of this and when the machine went wrong for the third time in a week, they simply slipped away while the guards were distracted. Using a door frame which had been left out for them, they went over the first fence, pulled the frame after them, sprinted across the pressure-pad-filled strip (activating the alarms, they believed), and then leaned the wooden block against the outer fence, and scrambled up it to the wire-covered top. Jumping from the outer fence, and with the prison van still not back in sight, they raced towards the canal.
At the time, the prison authorities suggested that the first they knew of the escape was when one of the other prisoners in the cannery told them that Wright and Boquete had disappeared, but whether that or the activation of pressure pads was the cause, within minutes the search dogs had been called out. For the next three hours, a helicopter, tracking dogs, sheriff`s deputies, Belle Glade police and the Florida Highway patrol all combed the area searching for the men.
By that point Boquete and Wright had separated. Both men had risked jumping into the alligator-infested canal, but while Boquete remained in the water as long as he dared, Wright had headed swiftly for the main road. The dogs were able to follow the scent as far as Highway 715, but the prison’s Assistant Superintendent Willie Floyd had to tell reporters that “somewhere along the highway, they lost their scent”. Wright may have been picked up by an accomplice; he refused to explain what happened to him when questioned later. He was on the run for about eighteen months, and was captured in the Pacific North West.
Boquete spent two nights hiding very close to the prison, attacked by ants but aware that the intensive search for him wouldn’t go on for too long. On the third morning, he crossed the sugar-cane fields and the canals until he reached the railroad tracks. He knew from the map he had purchased that there was a truck depot not far away. However, when he reached it he realized that he was too exhausted to go much further, and after an abortive attempt to get help from his family in Miami, he asked some Mexican labourers for assistance. He joined them, working in the fields, until they all pooled their earnings, bought a truck, and headed for Miami.
For the next ten years, Orlando Boquete lived an incredible life, adopting many different identities, and staying one step ahead of the law. He kept pieces of sandpaper in his wallet, so he could rub his fingertips and make his fingerprints just that little bit different. He trained himself not to respond to his original name if called by a stranger, which saved him from recapture on more than one occasion. His good looks and charm got him into and out of many dangerous situations, up and down the eastern seaboard of the United States.
Using fake social security numbers, or adopting those of dead people whose decease hadn’t yet registered with the authorities, Boquete was able to work. Occasionally these people were wanted for something, and he’d serve brief terms for drunk and disorderly, or driving under the influence.
He worked on a construction crew inside a prison, and took clothing and other items to a fellow Cuban refugee who had been arrested and was being held in a central Florida prison on drugs charges. He spent some time working in Illinois and Arizona, disappeared to North Carolina for a time when he was warned that he needed to get away from Florida. But he kept coming back to the Cuban community, known as Little Havana, in Miami.
He was arrested repeatedly for minor offences, but in March 1995, the charge was more serious. Boquete was using the name Hilberto Rodríguez and was found with an illegal firearm. He was sentenced to a year imprisonment, but soon absconded from a work party, gaining help from a drug-dealer friend, Ulises, who he had known since he first returned to Miami after breaking out of the GCI.
Boquete stayed with Ulises, but this proved to be a mistake. When the Florida Drugs Enforcement Agency took an interest in his friend, it was Boquete who ended up arrested for possession of two pounds of marijuana. And once in the police station, the increased computer networking between jurisdictions marked his downfall. Palm Beach County were after someone with those fingerprints, and the law enforcement officers realized that Hilberto Rodríguez and Orlando Boquete were one and the same.
Given an additional year and a day to his sentence for the escape (and the time on the original award starting to run once again), Boquete faced the prospect of many more decades in prison for a crime he didn’t commit. But he was to benefit from a change in the law covering DNA testing in the state of Florida, following the case of Frank Lee Smith, an innocent man on death row whose conviction was only overturned when he was terminally ill.