Escape by David McMillian

Conventional wisdom says, “Write what you know”.  David McMillian knows the smuggling trade and how to escape from high security prisons.  This book details his most famous escape from Bangkok’s most notorious prison, Klong Prem also known as the “Bangkok Hilton.”  However, one has to keep in mind that this is the memoir of a psychopath therefore it’s hard to determine what’s the true story is behind the one he presents to us in “Escape.”

The author never pretends he was innocent of his crime of smuggling heroin into Thailand.  He manages to evade capture at the airport, only to be caught several hours later in Bangkok’s Chinatown at a travel agency. His attitude throughout the text is, “How do I buy my way out of this situation.” At the time of this arrest, David had been in the smuggling game for about twenty years. He is a British born, Australian raised and highly intelligent. At the time of the arrest in 1993, he was a multi-millionaire with several houses all over the world.

David uses money at every opportunity to bribe his way to comfort and hopefully to freedom. He begins his stay in an area housing drug trafficking foreigners know as “The Cure.” Many of the people he meets there are addicted to the substances they smuggled. There is much hopeless and he decides he has to remove himself from this environment. He is constantly scheming how to escape.  His first plan is to have a friend meet him at the courthouse when there are only a few guards to subdue. Unfortunately, the man who was going to assist him in this plan dies in a bank robbery.

David moves to a different cellblock. (With his unlimited resources.) One of the worst aspects of prison life is the overcrowding. He manages to have only five others in a cell, where the norm is twenty. He employs Thai “servants” who do his manual labor and cook for the small group of foreigners. He assesses the likelihood of each man to work with him to escape. His confidant is Sven, a Swede who also is facing a long sentence. They work out different scenarios but mostly they wait for their court dates and sentencing. It seems likely that David will receive the death penalty, which is done by firing squad.

The escape takes two years of planning to pull off.  It details the crazy maze he had to bypass with extreme athletic prowess and a bit of insanity.  It gives only a vague glimpse of his underground existence following his escape.  Ultimately, David makes decisions that while brave ultimately benefit one person, himself. After his escape, David went back to smuggling, and was incarcerated again in Pakistan. In this instance, his money did buy freedom. There he met his wife and moved back to Britain.  The UK does not have an extradition policy with countries which have the death penalty.  This allows David to live out in the open without fear of paying for his crimes in Thailand.

I recommend looking up his interview with Danny Dyer on YouTube on his show that showcases Britain’s most notorious criminals.  In the 2007 interview he swears he’s no longer a criminal, but in 2012 was incarcerated in the UK for attempting to smuggle herion throught the mail.  It seems a tiger can’t change his stripes, but he tried for a few years.  I recommend this novel with a dose of salt, bearing in mind that it’s a selective memoir of an unrepentant criminal.