About David - who Is He?
A brief outline of the retired smuggler
My career in the legitimate world didn't last long. By 18, i'd stopped being a camera operator and started crossing borders with contraband. This soon meant building my own equipment, arranging false passports and making contacts in source countries around the world. By the time I was 24, i'd made millions but had major police task forces on my case
David McMillan
The story of
David McMillan
In 1996, David McMillan was held in Thailand’s infamous Bangkok Hilton prison. As his near-certain death sentence approached, he escaped from the maximum-security jail and disappeared into the hinterlands of Baluchistan, Pakistan. Despite Interpol alerts, McMillan continued his smuggling trade, although at a low level. Even so, he was caught and imprisoned several times.
Eventually settling to a modest life in London – far removed from the high life and wealth of his twenties – he wrote and published Escape: The True Story of the Only Westerner Ever to Break Out of Thailand’s Bangkok Hilton. The book was successful, and did not go unnoticed in Thailand. A slow but relentless process began to return McMillan to chains in Bangkok..
- With Unforgiving Destiny – The Relentless Pursuit of a Black Marketeer, David McMillan brings together the threads of his successes and misadventures.
- He details his large courier operations, his links in Colombia and to the mafia in New York City, and the mini empire he had built.
- Then, the downfall, as his couriers turned state witnesses, resulting in a long prison term.
Falls & Rises
- 1996
After his Thailand escape, McMillan became Western advisor to a tribal lord on the Afghanistan border before creating a new life and identity in London.
- 1998
Long haunted by the death of his first wife a decade earlier, McMillan courts and wins the English girl who cannot know his past. Yet a call to Afghanistan during Taliban rule, destroys, again, all he has built.
- 1999
Freed from the torture cells in Karachi, McMillan begins once more. The observer may condemn his ethics, yet admire his resilience.
- 2000 - 2012
“The only linking cord over those years,” writes McMillan, “was DEA man Bill Shenkmann — he appeared before me for all the major arrests.” That twine of the US agent’s obsession binds this 37-year chronicle together, as McMillan survives alone, culminating with the final attempt in 2016 to extradite him through the London courts.
- 2016
David McMillan overturns the extradition case, then on the desk of the UK Secretary of State in London.
- Today
David, finally retired, speaks from his YouTube channel and writes when he has the energy.
