Matthew Cox | Inside True Crime Podcast - How I Escaped One of the World’s Toughest Prisons | David McMillan

Episode Date: February 28, 2025

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. His exploits were detailed in several books and in the 2011 Australian telemovie Underbelly Files: The Man Who Got Away.Follow me on all socials!Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/insidetruecrime/TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@mattcoxtruecrimeDo you want to be a guest? Fill out the form https://forms.gle/5H7FnhvMHKtUnq7k7Send me an email here: [e-mail] Prison Consulting? Book a Call With Dan Wise https://calendly.com/federalprisontime/matt-coxDo you want a custom "con man" painting to shown up at your doorstep every month? Subscribe to my Patreon: https: //www.patreon.com/insidetruecrimeDo you want a custom painting done by me? Check out my Etsy Store: https://www.etsy.com/shop/coxpopartListen to my True Crime Podcasts anywhere: https://anchor.fm/mattcox Check out my true crime books! Shark in the Housing Pool: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0851KBYCFBent: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0BV4GC7TMIt's Insanity: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B08KFYXKK8Devil Exposed: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B08TH1WT5GDevil Exposed (The Abridgment): https://www.amazon.com/dp/1070682438The Program: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0858W4G3KBailout: https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/bailout-matthew-cox/1142275402Dude, Where's My Hand-Grenade?: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0BXNFHBDF/ref=tmm_pap_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=1678623676&sr=1-1Checkout my disturbingly twisted satiric novel!Stranger Danger: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0BSWQP3WXIf you would like to support me directly, I accept donations here:Paypal: https://www.paypal.me/MattCox69Cashapp: $coxcon69

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Quiet night in on Friday. It's good to have a routine, and it's good for your eyes too, because with regular comprehensive eye exams at Specsavers, you'll know just how healthy they are. Visit Spexavers.cavers.cai to book your next eye exam, eye exams provided by independent optometrists. The day one of the trial was smugglers' helicopter escape plan that was across the tabloids. I couldn't even kill myself in this jail. I actually wanted to escape just to kill myself. I had to develop a bit of a system to get over these internal walls. It had another moat on the inside of the prison that ran around, it was actually a sewer, and that had barbed wire in the middle,

and I couldn't figure a way of getting my ladder over to the other side. But when I got out of that cell, when I squeezed through the bar, the night and looked up at the sky that I hadn't seen for two and a half years. I've never seen the night sky. I've never seen stars or everything. And then look back into the cell. But the people I knew in there, I thought, suddenly it was all finished.

It was all gone. That didn't matter anymore. My survival out here was what mattered. Hey, this is Matt Cox. I'm with David McMillan. He has a skis. two prisons where he was on death row and it's going to be a really interesting podcast. I hope you check it out. Thank you very much.

Hello, Matthew. And thank you for taking me even by wire to Tampa in Florida. And I think you've introduced me a little bit, but just to let people know, I'm now quite ancient, but from the age of 20, you know, they say up until you're a, 18, you are looking for trouble, but after 18, you find it. And I certainly did. I troubled around smuggling, made just about every mistake that's possible. And I found myself in Bangkok, Thailand, looking at a death sentence. In fact, only a couple of weeks away from a death sentence.

Got out of that one, which we'll talk about, I guess. Did I learn anything? I guess I must have, but did it stop me? No, I was in Karachi in Pakistan several years later, looking at the death penalty there. Was that an escape? Not in the literal sense that it was in Thailand, but as we'll find, it was in some ways more difficult. Okay, so just the accent and... your appearance and the fact that I've read maybe, I think there's like 20 books that were written by,

I can't believe I can't remember. You know the character of Sean Dillon? Not exactly. Oh my gosh. Are you, you're going to know, I have to look this up. I'm sorry. Hold on. Okay, go ahead. Matthew was looking for, is it a fictional character? Yes. Real one. Okay. No, no. Sean Dillon character novel.

Okay. Let's see. Hold on. It is, oh, yeah, Jack Higgins. So Jack Higgins. Oh, I know the Russian. Yes. He wrote a series about 20 books on one of the characters' name is Sean Dillon.

And when, after you and I spoke the other day, I was, my wife and I, were working out the next morning and she said well when are you going because i explained that we had technical difficulties and she said when are we going to or when are you going to be interviewing him again and i said you know i told her oh i'm doing it friday and then i said you want to know what's so interesting and she said what i said when he talks i can't help thinking about the character of sean dillon and there hasn't been an actor that you know of who's played him there probably is but i i haven't seen Like I, there's no way this character has not been turned into some kind of a series, but I say what you're saying.

So the nature of the character in the Jack Higgins book is somehow, he's probably, it would have benefited from my voice. Yeah, yes. I mean, when you speak, that was the voice that I heard when he spoke. Only the difference is, and look, I'm not great with accents. He was, he used to be a hitman for the IRA. These books were written in the 80s. Oh, that's right. I think that, you know, the IRA were much respected for their assassinations, and I figure an Irishman would have some issues with my accent. But I've had to, from time to time, adopt accents because of the passport I was traveling in. Being a smuggler, I knew quite early on.

I'd already blackened my name before I was 20. So I got myself a fresh passport under a name. And the way to do it in those days, children, was to go and look up the birth and death records and look for somebody who died in infancy. So they couldn't possibly have travelled and get a copy of that birth certificate and then fluff up everything around it.

And there you are. It's not quite so easy these days, but I suppose I would have had about 25 different passports. So I would arrive back in my destination country or in any country and have to have a quick look while I was standing in line at the immigration desk. All right. Jim Smith, born on such and such, no trick questions. What's the birth sign associated with that birthday, little things like that. And pretty much forget them after that. But just to give your viewers an outline of what the smuggling operations fundamentally were,

what is it? It's crossing a border and not letting the people who don't want you to cross with some illicit goods, as they see it, from finding out. So, how do they know or feel? You might be dodgy character. Where have you come from? How long were you there? Are you traveling alone?

What's your business? And I grew up in Australia for, I suppose, about 15 years. My accent is actually a very old-fashioned Australian accent that you don't hear anymore. But it's slightly somewhat English, of course. Were you born? Australia? No, I was born in London, and it was, I've still got some eight-millimeter codochrome from 1958 of little David learning to walk in Hyde Park, and nothing's working. I keep collapsing, even though I'm wearing a highly fashionable little trench coat. My father produced

what was a very large banknote of the time and worth a lot more than it sounds, five pounds in those days. It was something like half the annual salary of a stevedore. And he was waving this in front of me, and I just know my instinct, even at two years old, but this is something worth grabbing for. And I'm standing up, and I finally get my little pudgy pour on the thing, and I sit down again. And you could say that for the rest of the 60 years that followed, I've been repeating those steps, reaching out and grabbing for it. But. I left there, the parents broke up, I went to Australia. I did, I worked for a television channel doing a kids' news program when I was 12.

I really enjoyed that, though it was not, back in the 60s, that was frowned upon at the high school. You beat up the kid that had the temerity to be on television, which was a kind of fade, Ponzi kind of thing to do. So I carried a large knife under my jacket at school. I don't know what I would have done with it, but it looked pretty damn impressive. I even fell in love with one of my co-presenters, Leslie Billing. I wonder, whatever happened to that. But there was an age difference. When you're 12 and the girl is 17, you know, Matthew, there's going to be difficulties.

By the time, the family fortunes had declined somewhat by the time I was in my teenage years, and I actively sort out where I could make my fortunes. Now, people have to really cast their minds back to the late 60s and early 70s. I don't suppose there's too many people alive who can do so. But the view was that we would change the world. Was that revolutionary times, perhaps in the mind, not in reality? People think of hippies and protests and anti-Vietnam War era marches. But in general society, protesting against the Vietnam War

more was considered virtually being a traitor. The long hairs were just dirty scum. Nonetheless, we thought we'd be the inheritors of the world when we grew up. So as far as drug law was concerned, look, it's your mind, your body should be entitled to do what you want. Or was that just an excuse to get in there and make some dirty money? to say when you're late. But I...

Can't you do both? Well, we tried to. Look, we didn't charge an awful lot extra. When we got tie sticks, they're kind of marijuana stick. We had a little grocery store and we could buy tomatoes which were a bit shrivel looking or under the county you'd get words of these tie sticks.

And we only put, I think, about 25 cents on the stick. So it wasn't. You know, there was some effort to be a little bit noble amongst the happiness. But I ended up, I got a job for a while as an assistant manager at a cinema, a peculiar place. It was underground literally in the sense that it was below a huge building. And it had kids movies on during the day and soft-core porn at night.

So there was a, well, you could say a difficult transition between the audiences and dads would come down and say, they'd listen to my name at that stage. but could you look after the rug rats for a while? I'm just going to go down the pub and get blind drunk. Look, that's like two jobs. I'd have to tell them I don't get paid for two jobs and leave the silence in the air there. So I'd have to look after these little buggers

until they got collected. And then the dirty old men would come down. Actually, not many of them. They're very peculiar spread of an audience there. And the porn was nothing particularly wild. I mean, the names were catchy, Skulgur report number 64 or something, often from Germany. Right. So the point to that story is that some of the girls who have worked there, had boyfriends who were, as they described, them gamblers.

And they would run downstairs. and disappear out the back door and police would follow. A cut to the chase here, the connection led to a bunch of retired safe crackers, almost retired, and what they wanted to do something with their money, and selling a lot of weed would be good, some hashish. I put my hand up, went to India, had no real connections. I had one of the One of the old bank robbers had escaped there, pretending to be a Harry Krishna, and I had him. And you know what?

It was Greg Roberts, David, another David. He went on to write a book called Shantaram. But by the time I got to the ashram with the Krishnas, he'd bolted into something else. So I was back on the street getting the Shushine boys to try and find me connection. I eventually found them. I went back, and all the old safecrackers were kind of surprised to see that I'd got through with this. I mean, it was, Matthew, it was the worst smuggling job.

I had some fancy kind of complex plan where I'd taken in some electronic equipment and put lead in it, chuck the lead out, put the dope in there. All that fell to pieces. I ended up taking a very ancient 1950s Grundig radio. gutting the thing completely, stuffing six kilos of Nepalese hash in there, and just landing back at Sydney. How old were you? I would have been 19 years old, I guess, yeah. There was a single customs officer on duty, and he just took pity on me.

He knew perfectly well, I was loaded up two gills, but he just said, look, are you going back there? No, no, no, I said, I went, all right, see that you don't, you can take your, well, we'll call it a radio, Shelby, and get going. So I thought I was tip-top number one smuggler. But the surprising thing was, all these old villains, when they took a look at that and saw that something was actually going to happen, said, well, why didn't you bring Coke or smack? We could have all been rich. I'm scratching my head then, because they didn't make big. speeches about how, you know, how the drugs are a bad thing got people into trouble.

But you won't be shocked, will you, Matthew, that when it comes to money. Why just survive back to school when you can thrive by creating a space that does it all for you, no matter the size. Whether you're taking over your parents' basement or moving to campus, IKEA has hundreds of design ideas and affordable options to complement any budget. After all, you're in your small space era. It's time to own it. Shop now at IKEA.ca. Certain stated principles get put aside there, don't they?

Oh, yeah. Very quickly. Next thing, I worked at getting multiple passports. I could travel completely. Now, remember, there's quite a large profit. But I mean, you could say five times what there is on smuggling by air than there is these days. So it was still economically sensible to leave on one passport, travel to a safe country, say, the UK, as it was then, or France, switch passports, go back into Asia, load up, come back, switch again, go back, and so when I landed at Sydney the second time. I would only show that passport that hadn't been tainted by any Asian stamps on it.

So I'd get waved through. And took, after the early successes, and a success is not being arrested, isn't it? I had the luxury of looking into it more carefully. All right, let me ask you this. say you're a smuggler. You arrive back in Miami. Oh, well, okay, why not? And you find yourself before two officials, customs officers, your bag's on the table, and ask you to unlock it if it's locked. and then one starts to look through your stuff

and the other one's talking to what would you say is going on what's your function at that moment oh I mean you're obviously you're concerned it'd be hard to even hold a conversation you know because your concern is he's looking through my stuff

what's he going to come across and you're trying to maintain a conversation and pay attention to the conversation like that's right well um this is what's almost certainly happening um between them after all they're in this sense uh your opposition your enemy the one looking through your stuff he can't he hasn't got the time to go through every object um the one that is looking on with whom you're having the conversation he you could call him the spotter why is that because was the one who lifted the lid of your suitcase and then dropped it onto his hand to feel the

weight of the lid to see whether there was something packed in there. He is just the handler. You'll notice he picks up objects one at a time, your toiletry bag, your jumper, a couple of pairs of trainers, and puts them to the side on the empty lid that he's just dropped down. He'll pick them up and sort of half-sniff at them or something like that, but he hasn't got time for anything. What the guy behind who's doing, who's listening to you, Babelon about some hotel difficulties

you had down in Guadalajara, wherever you come from, he is looking for some changing mood in you because your eyes, and you should have been born about this, I certainly would have, Matthew, I would have been, do not look down at your stuff. Very tempting, because you know that teddy bear is groaning with it. Teddy's in misshapen, he's got a swollen head, this stubby little fingers are all fat with goods. So when the checker is lifted up teddy bear, giving a little squeeze, and that's okay, and puts it to one side,

Do you know what the man that you're talking to does? He notices that your attitude changes. Thank you, fuck, you've said to yourself. Teddy's over on the safe side. It's been dealt with. I'm through. I've made it. Marianne, I mean, she was so worried about this trip,

and her dad and everything half knew what was happening. But what you might not have seen as a little tap on the shoulder, the guy who's watching you, because instead of babbling on about your hotel and making no sense, suddenly the conversation's changed. Your shoulders have dropped. They're more relaxed. You're just, yeah, okay, if I missed anything here, you might say,

you know, a complete change of attitude. And the tip on the shoulder is the last thing you touch, that's it. And so the whole thing freezes. And they say, let's close the case for the moment and go to the back. And as you know, the back room is not a place you want to go to. Because there's only one way out of that room and it's in handcuffs. So this is the kind of thing that I came to learn and a whole bunch of other stuff. And my then wife at the time, Claylor, she was the daughter of an Italian restaurateur.

didn't want me doing me all myself, but I kind of felt, you know, this risky. I don't, if somebody's going to do it, at least I can only blame myself. But soon enough, there were probably eight or nine careers. And I'd worry about them, and I'd travel with them, and I didn't want them to, you know, they'd ask me what it was, they were carrying, I'd say, look, think of the worst thing you can imagine powdered babies or plutonium. Just forget about what it is. You'll never see it anyway. So that's not your function. So that was a different kind of thing to do. Now, while this was going on, it's not worth saying why, but I'd come to the attention

of police and one of the careers she dropped off and decided to blab. They hadn't rushed in, they started watching me, it was quite a big operation. I probably, and lawyer told me to get out of Dodge City to leave, just dump everything. And I did at first, when I found that they were out there, and this is now, by the late 70s, it was easier to intercept their radio traffic, so I could hear them talking about the cars I was driving. I did get out of town. Until Clelia, we switched identities. Actually, went to Miami because we went on to the Bahamas and hired a boat for the day and went out to, I said to the little skipper, take me to an island with, just a sandbank really,

something where there's no people and never have been. What's going on YouTube? Ardap Dan here, Federal Prison Time Consulting. Hope you guys are all having a great day. If you're seeing and hearing this right now, that means you're watching Matt Cox on Inside True Crime. At the end of Matt's video, there will be a link in the description where you can book a free consultation with yours truly, Ardap Dan,

where we can discuss things that can potentially mitigate your circumstances to receive the best possible outcome at sentencing or even after you started your prison sentence. Prior to sentencing, we can focus on things like your personal narrative, your character reference letters, preparing you properly for the pre-sentence interview, which is going to determine a lot of what type of sentence you receive. You've already been sentenced. We can also focus on the residential drug abuse program, how you can knock off one year off of your sentence.

Also, we have the First Step Act where you can earn FSA credits while serving your sentence. For every 30 days that you program through the FSA, you can actually knock an additional 15 days off per month. These are huge benefits, and the only way you're going to find out more is by clicking on the link, of booking your free consultation today. All right, guys, see you soon at the end of the video. Peace. I'm out of here. Back to you, Matt. And I swim out to that island with my towel in a plastic bag and then sat there for a while thinking, all right, quit now, go, or go back and take it on.

Now, at that age, early 20s, speaking for myself, the arrogance is monumental. or you think that it's not a matter whether they've got the right to do it, that you can beat them. So I went back and yet there's something, even my lawyer did say this, he said, David, how long they've been following around over a year? What do you think they've spent? Well, they've got their own offices, they don't trust the local cops, they rented him. So they spent a lot of money. So at the end of it, because they don't find anything. or they run in and they go to your house, your office, and they still get nothing.

You think they're going to call it a date? Go back to their boss and say, boss, we just spent $2 million, but it looks like he's quit. No, they'll do something. I dismissed all of that. I thought, look, the Koreans won't talk. Why would they?

You know, I always took care of them. That was the thing to say, if something happens, you've got a choice. You can do the time and you get rewarded or, you know, I'll get you the best deal you can possibly get. I'll even give you a cover story so you can look like you're, you know, ratting out the big boss.

You know, it'll be, you know, we'll make some fictional character for you to talk about. Or plan B, I'll get you out and that's it. And I kind of look forward to that, the idea that if such a thing happened, Would it be possible to break them out? I didn't imagine that this is something I'd be asking for myself, given time. But sure enough it was, it became very elaborate to dump the tails behind me, following

me around to give them an explanation of where I was. I had a business partner, Michael Sullivan, quite a few years ago, quite a few years ago, 2001. I had him, now, as you think of this, your phone, you know your phone's tapped, what's best to do about that? Well, you know you've got a pipeline straight to your opposition. So whenever you feed them down that pipeline, they should accept it.

So I recorded a conversation with Michael when I left Faragea. I said, go to a pay phone, ring my mobile phone, my cell phone, and play this tape over it. And he did, and they were absolutely convinced that I was still somewhere roaming around Melbourne, but just lying long. So when they got a call from the USDA, that... it um and that i'd been located in thailand they were kind of shocked but i really jumped ahead in the timeline here because the the case where the police were following me about the big case

and we got back to 1980 they did steam in they found nothing there were no drugs and they They ran a huge case with a conspiracy. Now, the U.S. courts have got conspiracy cases, and I guess you know quite a few things about them. Would you agree that conspiracy case is much harder to win than the substantive case, a case where, if you've been accused of that you robbed a bank on this day, that's substantive, and were you there,

Have you got an alibi, all of that? But a conspiracy that you plan to do this. And you know you're going to get the same sentence. Or you helped the person do this. Exactly, you were part of the conspiracy. Right. You may not have been the main participant. You were just the guy answering the phones or picked them up.

Right. Or you supplied some cars. Or you were the lookout even. Lots of stuff. And what's the proof in a conspiracy? Percy, scuttleback gossip, just nonsense from some rat that's turned over on the case and done the best deal. I've got to say that we were always a bit, well, kind of nervous about doing business in the US. It seemed a couple of contacts I had there said, look, people here are very much encouraged to make a deal.

if the arrest starts to nibble away at the edges, you might find you've got an informer amongst you and like he might have been caught with something else and that's the deal to get them off. I mean, is that still very common, is it? The law is, especially the federal law, is extremely lenient on people that cooperate. It's geared toward cooperation.

You get an extreme reward or, you know, a reduction in your sentence if you cooperate. And the difference could be half. It could be 75%. It's massive. And, you know, you get three people on the stand that say you were involved. You were involved. You're probably. Exactly.

It doesn't matter much what you do with that. the character assassination of that, but in this big trial I'm talking about, it was already grim because we wouldn't talk, and not Michael, not I, not our wives, not clearly, not Michael's Colombian wife, Mary, oh, and all of the couriers wouldn't say a word, we don't know, advised not to talk. They cranked it up, they arrested not just the guys, but they arrested the wives even arrested my mother at one stage that she got released of course the next day or before that and then couldn't get bail for for the wives and they were in the old women's prison in Melbourne and they

put an informer in with him daniel unfortunately she was an arsonist that was her thing little daniel and there's a protest in there set fire to the place. And Michael and I are locked up in there. And now they didn't have televisions who didn't have portable radios. I think there was a loudspeaker that went through the creaky old cells at night. And you could hear, I think, the last news bulletin around 11 before they shut it off. And the story was about a fire at the women's prison and that some had been hospitalized.

Then the last thing I heard before they shut it off was there, and there'd been three fatalities. So after a restful night's sleep, you can imagine it was not, I tore out when they opened up the next morning. and went straight over to the desk and spoke to the officer there. I have been there a few weeks, I said, I knew him. I said, all right, so what is it? Was it any of them? Because they knew the girls were in there. And he started shuffling around, they've, look, we haven't got everything in.

And I started to fade off then. You know, when you know somebody doesn't want to tell you something because, you it's not going to be good. No one had talked to Michael or I, either of it. So they kind of put us in a holding yard, a little thing where nobody else could go to. Then we got called up for a visit. The visit center was empty, walked through.

The officer was at his little desk in the visit's room. visit from, we don't need to look up, just over that way. I walked around and I could see all of my family there and Clayley's brother. And the girls were dead. Your wife and Michael's wife? My wife and Michael's wife, yeah. And the little assonist as well. The old dormitory that they were in was made of wood.

It was covered in iron bars. The prison officer said they couldn't get in there. The flames got carried away. Now, I kind of zoned out again in a different way. Of course, raging and crying and wanting to destroy the world. But by the time my lawyer came in a few days later, I didn't want to know about any damn court or trial or who was what or and he was saying be careful david you know the police are putting it around that you you and michael arranged that fire you're going to kill all the witnesses

so the couriers they've held up but they're starting to crumble boy the police are dirty aren't they i said it was lucky i had the kind of lawyer that you need in a situation like this i just passed him a note with a piece of paper uh and a couple of numbers i said this This guy, I'll give you $250,000, call my old friend Danny Mack and tell him that I'll, next time we've got a court hearing, I'll tell the police I want to spill, I want to talk, and they'll lead me across the road, the public road from the courtroom to the headquarters. I want the truck to come past and to be thrown these weapons. I was going to go, well, I was going to go full Apache.

That was my feeling at the time. I just didn't care. I played as I saw a nice guy for all those years. So what could best happen then? Oh, Michael and I were thrown in the Supermax prison. It was a disgusting, horrible place, which was newly built. completely closed airspace, faulty air conditioning, whining every night.

Doors were big, thick steel things that opened pneumatically, two-inch bullet-resistant glass, and it only held 50. But this little Supermax complex, about 25 inmates would die a year in the place. And it took two years before the trial came up. They did. So you've got a 25% chance.

yeah yeah dying into if if they're losing 50% in the inmates a year yeah two years that's 25% jeesh and the staff were all off their heads and one of the officers ran into the staff room and shot half a dozen of course he was using blanks but they didn't know that yeah he went open up so oh and and they gave an excuse to run the trial on a high security footing because you know, they were dead around, there were threats made, all of that, we were taken to court in, I know it's customary in newest appearances to have leg irides and medicals and handcuffs and things, but these were extra heavy ones and we'd be chained up, and a helicopter used to take us in for the hearings, but just to make it interesting.

A week before the big drug trial started, oh yeah, that's right, this is a way of these things. I managed to get out of that supermax after a year, it started to, you know, it was dangerous, so to where everybody got back over to a place in the prison where they made number plates. These big, I know it's traditional, but they actually made number plates, and they used to call the big presses, they never get out machines. Because when the press came down and knocked out the number plate, it made a kind of clunker, kunker sound like, never get out, never get out, never get out. In a kind of way, I mean, it was therapeutic. There were a lot of other people around.

Michael, I couldn't think about the misery of losing wives. Confiscation orders were just coming in. Police had moved into my house, had parties all the time. There were oil paintings. They burnt those in the fireplace, smashed up everything else. shit in the pool, the neighbors complained. The regular patrol cops had to come in a couple of times to get their parties down because they were just

trashing about them. Then they they so we've got a couple of scape plans going in the number plate section but one that we actually weren't thinking of doing

flared up. We were descended upon within the prison and taken back to the Supermax, with the guards kicking us all the way over there, saying things like, what? Shooted us from the towers, from the helicopters, into the towers with machine guns, you bastard. And Michael I'm thinking, what? Some, I met a guy called Lord Tony Moynihan, Tony Moynihan, in the Philippines some years before. He was a fraudster from the UK and a Lord of the Realm, appear, they say. A couple of swindles went tits up, and he ended up living in the Philippines.

Did they ever try to get him back? No, it seems not. He liked to think of himself as a kind of stringer for the security service, as the British equivalent of the CIA. Well, he certainly was a dirty double-crosser, and he'd sent over somebody to pretend to be getting us out by helicopter, but actually hoping just to run off with any money advanced on that. But he not only sent this sucker over here to pretend to be a former Greenberry Special

Services guy, they called his federal police friends in Australia at the same time. He said, look, this guy's coming over, you can watch him, he'll be in hotels, he'll be doing this. he's going there to get them out by helicopter. Well, he's not really, you know what I mean, but it'll look that way. So, I'm back in, um, so what was the, well, I'm sorry, what was the benefit? Oh, that's because if he was hoping to set you guys up and get some advanced, some of the, the money in advance, what was the benefit in telling the authorities this is what's happening? Did he, until he already got the money?

The, once they, if they, it was 250,000, if that money had been advanced, then he, the guy who sent over would take some of, but he, his lordship would make sure he got the sizable chunk of it, had something worked out how it had to go to the Philippines first and all of that. But by ratting everybody out on the scheme, he had fulfilled his rat's contract to keep him safe from extradition and everything with the authorities. That's number one. And number two, if he just stole the money and we were intact going to a case that we might win because there were no drugs found or anything, we might not take such a fond view of being swindled at our time of weakness. and might want to have a few words with him taking fishing or something like that. Have a chance. Right. So the best way to deal was that was make the case very hard to win.

And so the headline in the paper of day one of the trial was smugglers escape, helicopter escape plan that was across the tabloids of the morning of it. Even the judge pretending that he didn't notice that that was the amount. And we're being dragged in in chains, and there is helicopters, but it's the police helicopter taking us to court. I won't go into it, Matthew. Court cases are boring and miserable thing, but it ran for six months, 119 witnesses. There were 6,000 pages of transcript of bugs and recordings and stuff like that.

The careers had all turned the state's witness. One of them was very hard to break down because he admitted he was a complete. scumbag and had done the deal just to get out of trouble. And he'd also told the cops, look, I'm under threat here. He'll have to guard me until the trial's over. And he continued his street trading with this police escort. A couple of people got back to me and said, you know that rat, Peter Howard, he's down there on the street dealing away like mad, setting up shop in one of the cafes.

And we keep spotting these cops looking after him. And people are running away, and Peter saying, I don't worry about them. No, no, no. They're here to make sure that I can do what I damn well want. And when somebody's indemnified, anything they say can never be held against them. So Peter not only said that he built smuggling devices from me, and he knew all about it, But he also admitted to five or six different accounts of theft and a couple of drug deals that were hanging over his head.

So he could never be brought to trial for any of those things because he'd said this while he was under complete immunity from prosecution. And no matter how, the worse we made him look, the more credible his story was. Anyway, the jury went out. They were a little bit on our side because they felt like the state who overdone it, you know, in our case that it was serious drugs, but on the other hand, it wasn't huge amounts, you know, like two, three, five kilos, and we were drug users ourselves at the time.

And it was somewhat sympathetic, so they came back after a day and said to the judge, we can't decide. Well, he's not about to blow $5 million for a trial on that, so he sent them back out. And they stayed out. The only thing they asked for was, oh, yeah, they got $60,000 cash out of my office. They wanted to have a play with that. Oh, yeah, there were some drugs in the case. The police, because they went all the way to Thailand, brought back two kilos of heroin,

set it up on a little stand in the court as an example of what heroin when brought from over that part of the world looks like. Oh, that's, that's true. And we, this, there was a whole operation to stage this little platform of the steaming pile of heroin. But it had been brought, and when, of course, I had my lawyer always really probed deeply on the mechanics of how they brought this stuff in and what the license looked like and who was involved. But Judge, he was on to me about that. The same with the recording things. I was asking about, where was the recording center?

for tap phones and what equipment did they use and you know how many people man the station what was its location he knew that i was just fishing around to try and get information for a letter so the jury were out for five six six days and then they came back do they have a verdict not at all they don't want to work sundays oh no they want to go on a picnic and they even had a list of all the food they wanted on the picnic. So a bus was organized for them, and they went off on their Sunday picnic. And the judge is gritting his teeth through all of this, but he knows he's got to go along with it because kind of upset the jury.

They even asked for that two kilos of heroin, and they're allowed to examine any physical bit of exhibit. The judge kind of very delicately said, well, it was there, but we had to take it away because they complained about it being in court. But what is it you want, I mean, you're entitled to, but it is to kill us about it. I must mean one of my own kind on the jury, I think. Anyway, who knows what I was going to do. I had heard that there might have been a friend on that jury.

Finally came back and read out their verdicts, not guilty, not guilty, not guilty, but just one count out of the 12. I went down on, that was enough for the judge. He gave me, effectively 15 years for that. So back to the high security, I went, and it was kind of a, took me a while to pick myself up from that, from the Supermax. I was in that horrible, you know what these cells look like. There's all concrete, the bed's concrete, the sink is steel,

the air is dry and stale, and screws are. half all mad and I'm in this jumpsuit and when you go on a visit it's had a little padlock up the top so you couldn't unzip it and hide anything and nothing all my previous life had been taken gone all everything every stitch of clothing every object every photograph every letter nothing all trashed by the police or all confiscated my wife dead gone the only I had with some old cassette tapes from the bug that was planted in the house, and I could hear. My wife, Cleo, walking around the house with our dog, and her phone call had come in. It was her sister, and she said, Clay, are you all right?

You sound upset. You've been crying? Oh, a little. Oh, yeah. And this was back when I was still up to mischief, and we were still okay. There was nothing wrong that I knew. And her sister said, is it bad good? Is he done something?

No, no, no, nothing to do with it. And the conversation ended. But it stayed with me, I can tell you, for 45 years, because I'll never know the answer to that. Never. Anyway, so I'd been released, and they were right on me as, I mean, they even came to visit me before I got to

release and say it will be on your case and sure enough they were so i decided to leave uh australia good forget about australia well you got to the uk you said you you received 15 years yeah yeah i served uh 10 or actually about 11 years uh i got it for the great helicopter escape that was a load of bullshit uh i got an extra year for that um so i was that the the way it works in uh under English law, and that includes Canada or Australia. You do about two-thirds of a sentence, then you're released on parole. Okay, so how much time did you actually do inside in the prison? This is what I mean. It came to 11 years.

You did 11 years in prison? Yeah, yeah. But I worked my way to increasingly more relaxed conditions. In fact, the last part of it was in an open prison. It was an old country farmhouse. It had been used for a prisoner of war camp in 1980 or 16. And we used to find old tunnels down underneath the main residence there. And I had a job in the cafe that served visitors and the staff. I'd worked in a couple of other places with uh satisfactorily in the prison system so the prison superintendent warden chief warden governor as they call them there um he took me down to this little cafe and handed me the keys and he said

listen i've heard about you david you're all right but this place has got to make a profit and i think you know what that means so one thing only rule don't let these bastards at these keys and make sure you lock the till at night and put the cash away and i wouldn't even keep it in this building So that was quite a bit. And I did have to clarify. I said, well, I'm not going to let my fellow prisoners run around in here. It's really the staff canteen anyway. I'm not talking about them.

I'll fuck the prisoners. No, I'm talking about my staff. Don't let any of the prison officers order you to give them the keys. They can tell them to come and see me or tell them to fuck off or whatever you want to do. But don't let them have it. So this was kind of unusual. And I'd go into town, the local, small town, and do shopping twice a week and take a car and a driver. And the officers would line up for that one because they knew with me they could dart off somewhere and go and have a drink or, I think, what's the name?

What was the name? Oh, she didn't know. Anyway, she was a kind of a married woman who, with her husband, worked at the prison, and she'd go off and have her head. And this is when I was in town supposedly shopping. But the shopping, I should tell you, was actually a list of the things that my fellow prisoners wanted, the specialties, the Kalamatta olives or the hummus, or whatever it might be. All the goods I needed for my little cafe, the head cook for the prison, he would steal those for me.

In fact, I cut through the paperwork on that one by getting a copy of the key to the storerooms. So I was making a profit. The prison was making a profit, and the only problems I ever got was if I lost some of the staff and my trips into town. I had the prison boss on the radio saying, where is she? I said, look, you know where she is. What, she's getting a hair done again. You go and get her and bring her back. You've been out three hours.

This is long enough. Tell her, I won't let her go out again. So it was a quite upside-down world there. And I'd done all sort of prisony kind of things. I made a lot of stuff out of woodwork and carvings, little Chinese boxes. I packed all that stuff up when I was finally released, sent it to. my friend's place. But it was on from the very beginning. The police were waiting. All my little outworks and carvings, they intercepted that on the courier van that took it

back home and smashed it all up, so the courier brought a whole lot of broken wood. I said, well, that's, didn't make it, did it? A bumpy ride coming over here, was it? I don't know. Look, I can't say, I was told not to say anything. So these were really going to annoy me these people. I mean, I got a small apartment, and they'd break in there and rearrange the furniture, you know, sort of gaslight me, or leave obscene messages on my answering service. I ended up with a girlfriend, and they pulled her aside and said, look, don't have anything to do with him. He'll be having a working as a career in a minute. Enough was enough. I decided to leave the country, and that's when I was heading for Europe.

multiple passports again, and they were not easy to get when I'm being followed night and day. I even had to kind of make a clumsy one that they'd get onto, so the real one they wouldn't find. It was, I think, what's it in the U.S.? What's the kind of little history of getting false passports? It was an easy one. It's not so easy now. I mean, you know, my understanding is that at one point, using the, the death certificates would actually work back in the 60s, 70s, by the 80s, you know, that was no longer something that was going, was working because when you die in the United States, the, the mortuary, right? Like you go in to have, you know, or the funeral home. Yeah. They get your, you know, they get your death certificate and they send it into Social Security so they can get a $250 rebate to help pay for the funeral.

Well, that notifies Social Security that you are deceased. So the U.S. State Department, which issues passports here, they get an updated list of all the people. that have been deceased. So if you were to apply using a social security number for a deceased person, they would have that name and social security number. Okay. So the way I did it was I surveyed homeless people that had never had a U.S. passport. I would then go get a driver's license in their name.

You know, I would order. Sorry, did they have a social security number, the homeless? Oh, yeah, of course. You're issued one at birth. So what I did was I would, I would, you know, I'd survey them and say, basically, I would say that I was, I was doing surveys to determine where the Salvation Army is going to place their next homeless facility. And I'd give $20. I'd say, you know, it pays $20 right now. And I made myself a little laminated badge that I was a statistical surveyor.

Right, right. And I had a whole form. The form looked very legitimate. and I had the clipboard, the whole thing. And so I would go out and I'd say, yeah, it pays $20 cash right now. And they go, oh, yeah, what do you need? Your name, date of birth, where were you born, what county, what's your mother's maiden name? Like everything I needed to order a copy of their social security card, copy of their birth certificate.

I would register to vote in their name. I would get a copy of their driving record. And then I would go into a state where they'd never had a driver's license. And I would, I would take that, I'd go get an ID or a driver's license in their name. Then I would go apply for a passport in their name. They'd never had one, you know, and so I would get a passport in their name. In the U.S., you don't have to provide fingerprints. Right.

The only time you're fingerprinted is if you're traveling excessively to, you know, there's a watch list of, you know, if you're going to Syria and, you know. Yeah, we'll do it. they're going to fingerprint you. But I would get the passports and then I could travel on them. I could go to Jamaica. I could go to Greece, to Italy, wherever I wanted to go on a passport. And, you know, you go through customs and they ask you and you show them a passport, which was issued by the State Department.

My picture shows up when they, when they scan it, my picture shows up on the screen. It's me. So that was how I figured out how to get around it. Okay. And all those are difficult steps, though. You know, most people have a hard time getting their own passport. How hard is it to get one in someone else's name? It's difficult.

Look, Matthew, what you're showing there is something, the reverse, the thing I, we've all come across in the underground world, and that is that so many crooks are just simply lazy that they don't want to do the work. I've been asked by time to time people say, oh well, who's your guy that gets the passport or who's the guy that makes your equipment for what you've got to do? Well, that guy is me. And if you think you're coming in on some job where it's easy money, no, no, go back and fantasize

and watch movies or whatever the fuck it is you do. but in the real world, if you want any kind of safety, you have to do work from the ground up. And clearly, that was the way. I mean, as you found that, people are not willing to make that effort? I find that even when you hand them the documents and you hold their hand, they still manage to screw it up. I have a buddy that used to provide people with these.

a false driver's license, a false, like all the false documents, and as soon as they made a little bit of money, they would blow the next deal. They would get on drugs. They would, they would just do ridiculous things. It was like, you can't be given any responsibility. And yes, I agree. Most criminals are extremely lazy. They don't want to take that extra step. And as you say, not particularly in control sometimes I used to think that so many people I'd meet in prison

were actually in a quiet way kind of glad to have their lives controlled in that way and grumbled about it and bitch and all that but outside they look like completely you know the string had been undone on a balloon and they'd just run around

like banging off the walls I actually spoke with someone the other day. I did an interview and we were taught that kind of came up in a way. And I've talked about this before where there are some people that do really well in prison. They can't manage to even feed themselves on the outside. Even the most general way, they can't even run a room and get even, they can't apply for food stamps. They can't do the most basic things on the outside. But in prison, they thrive.

I don't know why that is. I don't understand. Um, well, it's, if we broke... Hey, so what did you want to talk about? Well, I want to tell you about Wagovi. Wagovi? Yeah, Wagovi. What about it?

On second thought, I might not be the right person to tell you. Oh, you're not? No, just ask your doctor. About Wagovi. Yeah, ask for it by name. Okay. So why did you bring me to the circus? Oh, I'm really into lion tamers.

You know, with the chair and everything. Ask your doctor for Wagovi by name. Visit Wagovi.combe.com for savings. Exclusions may apply. On a prison population, we would find a bunch of borderline nut cases that don't quite qualify for the nut house itself because they're actually able to wipe their ass and feed themselves. So that's enough. You can go to prison.

And drug addict? A ton of drug addicts. Yes. giving the vast majority of people who can handle their intoxicants perfectly well and know when to draw the line, giving us all a bad name by just overindulging, stealing money from their friends, mostly too lazy to even go out robbery, robbing places in a systematic way, just from whoever trusts them, they'll steal out. And then had the gall to go into a courtroom, said to the judge, well, it wasn't me,

or I know, it was a dirty rotten drug dealers have gotten me in all this trouble. It's pretty grim. So the prison population is, I don't know, in the good old days, you could find 10% of people who were serious. And you'd know who they were because they wouldn't be in a rush to say hello, and they had their own little worlds organized, and how their cell was rigged up. You know, they got, made the best of what you're called out of a prison system. But it's barely even that now. You know, years ago, I used to say,

well, a young person, look, if you want to get ahead in the world, get yourself, go over to Amsterdam, break a window, something that get you into prison for a few weeks. I had to get something fairly decent over there. but you'll fill up your little contact book with great names. Oh, yeah. Everybody you want. But now I'd be tempted to say, look, the bad thing about it, prisons aren't what

they used to be. They're really just nut houses or places for wife beaters and snitchers. So, oh, in incompetence, you just find the whole place annoying and wish you were somewhere else. So there's not one virtue left even in Australia. Sorry, I have a quick question. In Australia, do you have a federal system and a state system? It is. It's even though all the, like early America, all the street names and the town names are British. When it became quasi-independent, It still has the crowd as a head of state and likes it that way. But each state had its own Supreme Court and legislature, a two-chamber one.

And federally, they have a Senate and a House of Representatives. So it's very similar to the U.S. In fact, if it wasn't for, I think the similarities between Australia and the U.S. are very, very strong. except that the U.S. is more mature, in the sense, is older. And so you've got quite big state difference. If you go down south, people are quite different than there. Even East Coast, West Coast, there's sort of a different outlook. Somebody said to me years ago, in the protest movement,

there was, Abby Hoffman was going to surround the Pentagon, and all the hippies were going to hold hands and levitate. the Pentagon into the air. Now, the East Coast people thought that'll be a great medium moment, it'll look good, they can stage this and that, it'll move the course ahead. Whereas the West Coast Californians, hippies, thought, yeah, the Pentagon's really going to get into the air with all this, you know, positive energy going on there. So quite a lot flakier they did.

So there was those, and there's some, I suppose if we have some time in the future, we could probably compare what the style and the manner of different places is like in the U.S. We, when in the early days, it used to be a thing to go to a country or a place you didn't know and then score. It didn't really matter what you scored, but the important thing was you had no confidence. and you had to go out there and do it. And it was quite a good thing. You got to know the underbelly of the town quite quickly. And I certainly found Los Angeles a lot more weird than New York, which was very business-like in a messed up way.

Yeah, I was going to say in that, so in the federal system here, you know, you have more you have more, not a whole bunch more, but you have more serious criminals in the federal system. I guess it would, yeah. In the state system, you have, you know, you have rapists, you have burglars, you have guys that have, you know, stuck up convenience stores, stolen purses, stolen cars, these, you know. Yeah, the real dregs of the criminal world. Right.

Yeah. In the federal system, you have, you know, guys that are. ran a Ponzi scheme. You have, you know, a lot of, not a lot, but a substantial amount in comparison to the states, white-collar criminals, or even the drug dealers in the federal system have done things much more sophisticated. You have, you have smugglers, you have people that manufactured methamphetamine, like they set up a lab somewhere. Or as opposed to in the state, that's not the state, you have, if you're a drug dealer, you were selling drugs on the corner. In the Fed, you were, no, we were bringing them in from Mexico or, you know, from Thailand or.

Doesn't it, I got the impression that doing time in the federal system was much more rigid and in some ways harder to work in any angles on it, you know, get to better conditions and things. Well, so in the federal system, you have better conditions. Like the buildings are nicer, there's air conditioning. you have, but, but you also have, they're very strict. They're very strict on the inmates. You know, you have dress codes and you have, you know, you're, you have stand-up count and you're, you know, polite and you're, it's very, you know, there's a, there's a regiment to it.

And, you know, you're not going to have conjugal visits. You're not going to have contact visits. You're, you only get very few, oh, it's, it's very few visits. You have very limited time on the phone. You have, it's, you do, and you do a ton of time. The same type of crime in the state you might get a year for or two, you'll get 10 years in the federal system. Wow.

They don't care. They, they, they, and you do 85% of your time, no matter what. I mean, that's, that's, I suppose you would have, I would have thought as an outsider that looking at the, because it's federal, they could have been a bit more sensitive. about it because they have fewer people to answer to and they haven't got you know the complexities of state systems of local mayors and counselors every all the little things that get in the way but I would have thought that a federal ones they could have said look it doesn't make sense to lock up people forever

and we need to advance people through to a working outside open prison system as quickly as they they can manage. You would think. That's not the way. Yeah, there's still behind all of it. It's still politicians. You know, it's still politicians. And then nobody gets elected by saying, hey, let's, you know, some of these guys, you know,

let's slowly acclimate them back into society. Let's educate them. Let's, even though all the numbers, all the statistics say, the better education you have, the less likely you are to commit crime. Doesn't matter. The more you educate prisoners while they're incarcerated, the better chance they have of not coming back to prison. It doesn't matter.

The more you monitor them on the outside. If you give them a 10-year probationary sentence or put them on an ankle monitor and let them have a job, they have a less chance of coming back to prison. It doesn't matter. Like they get elected by saying, lock them up and throw away the key right it's um it is really hard to change that when the when the politics of I spent a little time in a Danish prison the law there

when they set up the prisons department and the sort of justice system they made it so it was utterly independent from politics that would be the only way to do it and and their own kind of constitution within that system So it doesn't matter what the politician comes and says. Politician doesn't have to sign off on anything. There's no governor to sign up it. The prison service decided. And they also part of their charter is that they are obliged to send you out better than you came in.

And if they fail in that, they then have to provide, they write you off. If you've served more than six years, they expect that you've probably, this is a service, more than six years in a closed prison, you're probably not going to very well adapt to the real world again. So 90% of inmates, if sentenced to anything, are in open prisons. And they can serve their time at weekends. If they've got a job, they don't want them to lose their job. And the sentences are generally a lot less. And even in the closed prisons, sections have no more than 25 inmates and they have big kitchens and you're paid enough to go to the local supermarket within the prison you have to do your own shopping you have to work you have to be as normal as

possible you know things are not handed out like toilet paper and razor blades even you know if you're and and people generally don't come back unless they're in a particular kind of group of people that have decided to be criminals there. Right. And just by the way, in that country, it's two motorcycle gangs, holds Angels and the Banditos. And they are the most serious criminals

who get as an organized form there. I'm not too sure whether they ride too many bikes anymore, but they certainly get up to a bit of mischief here and there. And yet in the UK, it would never, to have suddenly imposed open prison estate, he would say, on the prison service here, it would be disaster. People are so us and them against, you know, fuck the world and society owes me everything, I'm going to destroy

it. They really, and I think that's partly population. When you've got, you know, we have these big countries with big populations, whereas the Scandinavian ones have little population. And there's more of a sense of community there, so they don't feel like they wouldn't destroy everything. So very hard to bring it. I mean, can you imagine if you tried to have, it said to, I don't know, even 75% of inmates, oh, listen, you're all going off to an open prison and those of you are not violent, you actually be reporting weekends. That'd be fine, but for most inmates who are used to close conditions,

and they went to their new prison which was like some kind of a motel they just run off and get drunk yeah they wouldn't know what to do I was going to say most of the inmates every time they would give us some kind of benefit some kind of new program the inmates ruined it no it was ruined

yeah yeah no fuck I was going to say what so what happened when you went to you finally moved out of they it sounds to me like they basically made your life so miserable, you just said, they ran you out of Australia. You're right. I thought, I at least learned that much that you can't fight and win. So that was it. I got a couple of good passports very elaborately, you know, having to hide all the mechanisms for that from them, to say, got away, clean. And I stopped, though, in Bangkok,

pick up some money because it had been years I'd lost everything I had a Thai business partner there who had some money for me but I also made a phone call to the guy knew from Chiang Mai it was Thai but he was very careless and what I didn't know at the time that his uncle was huge you know they talk about the golden triangle it had like three main groups and all of that. Well, they served four and this uncle was in one of them. His was the white horse brand on the stamps from the laboratories. And in nothing about that, or worse, that this uncle had arranged for the wife of a DEA agent who was stationed in Shanghai at the office

there. Now in the office up there, they tell the agents not to go out like James Bond and sort of do shit and visit places and things, but this guy insisted on going to see the opium farmers and nosing about, well, the uncle wanted to teach him a lesson by picking up the wife on the school round and letting her go, of course, but just to say, look, your job's behind a desk. You don't run around and my farmers. I can get to you. Yeah. Right. That went bad, and the kidnappers car broke down at the intersection and the police. The new BMO ViPorter MasterCard is your ticket to more.

More perks, more points, more flights, more of all the things you want in a travel rewards card, and then some. Get your ticket to more with the new BMO ViPorter MasterCard and get up to $2,400 in value in your. your first 13 months. Terms and conditions apply. Visit bemo.com slash the iPorter to learn more. When came along the policeman got shot and one of the kidnappers were shot and left one kidnapper remaining with um he let the kids go of course and the nanny and just kept the wife and he had a pistol at her head saying call this do something that was some big monk kind of priest guy that was going to swap positions with him and get the wife out. But it went on for hours and what he'd done to keep himself alive was take some wire

from under the broken down car and where the dashboard was and tied around the trigger of the pistol and keep his thumb on the hammer so that if he got shot, his grip had released and she'd done. So that was keeping him alive. If he hadn't had a third daddy, it would have been dead a long time ago. But this uncle, the big man, had arranged for everything to go well, for the wife to be released, for nothing to be found out, and to dispose of the gunman. But nobody had accounted for, small things make a big difference, don't think, Matthew?

In this case, it was a sweaty thumb on a steaming hot day. And the thumb slipped, hammer went off, bang, killed the wife. And the instructions that everybody had handed down after that, the instructions from the Americans was, we want this guy alive, we know what's behind all this, we want him to tell us about the uncle, and the instructions for the Thai commanders from the uncle, which was, if it goes bad, kill him. Right. It did go bad.

He was killed. But the point to this is that this whole background to this guy, I knew nothing about ever, ever, in any inkling that the uncle was so deeply involved, that the DEA were a sworn enemy, that anything to do with that family would be of interest to them. So his phone was tapped. When I spoke to him, that was recorded, they knew I was in Thailand. When I say they, I mean, the British Australians didn't really care so much. The DA did as well, and they decided to arrest me there on anything. It doesn't matter in Thailand. It doesn't matter whether there's drugs involved or not.

I went to the airport to get out. I could see they're all sniffing about. So I melted into the crowd, disappeared downstairs. You're in an airport to get away. You don't take the taxi from the taxi rank. You try and get a car from the middle of the ones waiting outside the airport so they can beat their way through the traffic. I did that.

Took these little motorcycle taxis once I was back in town. Went at a drink in a hotel bar. I went to a shopping center. Lots of things to get rid of them. them but they were tapping phones including one to a travel agency whose office I was going to use to make some calls from in short I arrived there I was pounced upon arrested I had two passports about 55,000 US dollars on me there was a bit of a conference I believe and there was decided I should be arrested with

some kind of drugs they every after at the airport, they do a bit of a sweep up around the floor, especially before security because people dump all their bits when they get cold feet about going on with it. So some stuff was sorted out from there, and it only takes 25 grams of, say, cocaine or heroin or something at an upper level, even ecstasy, to have the death penalty there. So after a week, when it looked like I could get out of the passport and money charged, I thought that I was very depressing. I realized I never would, and they were charging me with a death penalty offense. Well, I mean, but they didn't catch it on you.

They just planted it. No, no, no. They said that we found it at the airport, and it must have been his. What other criminals could have possibly been at the airport that day? None. I didn't see any criminals. What was it heroin? This was heroin after a bit of decision-making because the first bag looked like cigarette butts

and a bit of weed and a few pills of God-nose-what kind. But the heroin is very reliable. to get the death penalty. So that was about 35 grams or something like that, an ounce or so. And I'm assuming this isn't a long legal battle that takes a decade to fight. Oh, it does take a while because you only appear in court every six to eight weeks and you're only there for one witness or an hour or something like that, if anybody shows up on any side.

You're taken there in leg eye. I mean, really massive elephant chains. They clap this searing around your ankle. Some guy hammers it on there, and you get a shoelace or something to lift up those chains so you don't rattle too much. I should point out that I'm now in, what are the way, I'm 35, my late 30s.

Since I was 18, I've been battling them. I'd lost everything and then gone through this prison sentence. I got out and they're chasing me around. I get to Thailand and they fuck me over. I couldn't even kill myself in this jail. It was huge. It was disgusting. Dillment trees were built for 64 and they had 140, 150 people.

You could rent a piece of cardboard. cardboard to sleep on the floor and the corridor the toilet was if you're lucky it was in one of the cages and so there was a hole in the ground down the end but the corridor people had a huge 44 gallon drum with a plank over the top of it that was their toilet um it's uh they just seem no way out and i thought if i'm that unlucky uh it's a long story i won't really detail he I've written about it before, but the odd seemed so against me that what was the point of going on. So I actually wanted to escape just to kill myself.

It sounds bad. I even had the hotel in mind from which I was going to jump, the Doucantani, because when you get up there, there's a little hatch that you can climb out onto. There was an old guy. When we go to court in the morning, you have these chains put on. And in this huge prison, Klongprim, sometimes called the Bangkok Hilton, but that applies to other places, had a lot of people going to court every day, and they'd be lined up. There was an old man just waiting, looking depressed on the side of the internal road inside this prison.

And a soundtrack was coming down, doing some repairs or something, building thing. As it approached, he had the presence of mind, you could say, the determination to shove his head between the rotating ties as the truck passed. The two big fat tires that the back rolled over his head and it made a weird poppy sort of sound and twisted his neck into a scrunch. a bit of cloth or something that looked like. And the guys were very annoyed at that. They had their trustees and they had a very big trusting network in this prison. And they were ordered to take that thing away, you know. And they were looking at us, the foreigners, saying, no, wherever it's Thailand, it's different

here, you know. But I thought to myself, I have to applaud the courage of this old guy to just end up. it, you know, and end it now. But there was no, I tried to do it in the police station. This was a miserable enough time. It was just three days before Christmas, and as best I could tell, if my very most intense thoughtful efforts couldn't keep me safe, then it's just going to be torment forever. So I might as well try and end it.

I tried to get a whole lot of sleeping pills. But that actually doesn't work terribly well. The guy next to me, Swiss Freddy, he took over a hundred, over a hundred row hip-mole, you know, which is a pretty strong thing, isn't it? And he was, I thought I wasn't dead, he was still breathing, but he didn't move for near on three days. We'd poke him over himself and thought, No, well, and we're just lying on mats in an underground cell where there's a tiny little

cell-barred window up the top. All that did was letting the grit and traffic fumes and the oil from the passing traffic outside. There were some Chinese guys in there, six of them busted on a big drug case, and they were deciding who'd take the fall, the younger ones, of course. They even brought me a Christmas cake. They had it arranged. And my Thai friend in that jail said, what was my name in there? Oh, I think he, I used Mike for my friends in that place. But anyway, he said, Mike, this is the best time.

Whatever you can do in the police station, this is where you win, if you win. You go to jail, it's finished. I tried, but being a foreigner, they wouldn't. touch money, they wouldn't touch anything. No, I was kind of gone. And the case is they, you can't win. I know of a friend there, he'd go to court on, there was some Canadians involved in a smuggling case.

And he was accused of being the translator for them because he spoke to hire. Evidence against him, well, there weren't even Canadians. It was just some investigation that had gone bad and nobody had been arrested, but the case had been lodged by the Canadian equivalent of the DAA, so they wanted something done. A photocopy of a grainy black-and-white picture

of a group of people sitting at an outdoor table of a cafe somewhere included, you could just about make it out, John's face, sitting there. And the way the court works is, whenever the evidence of the day is, is read into a cassette recorder by the judge, and that's typed up, and that's the case. And the judge got this old picture and said,

oh, yes, evidence against the accused. It actually doesn't translate as accused there. It translates as sinner. Evidence against the sinner, a photograph showing him translating for the drug gang. He got 50 years. So there are a few cases, some people have won, but only when there's a bunch of them and they let a few go just to make it look like they're giving it some consideration as long nobody's interested in it so there's no winning the case but the jail was so

awful and you know my friends were kind of burnt out you can imagine this has gone on for years and I take the jail and then we've followed again and now I'm facing a death penalty they they just they just didn't know whether they could go on with it I just did well Matthew after After it, I survived, I had no choice, there was no way of, the wife of my little friend that I'd met in the police lock-up, she was bringing him things in, like food and so on. They're pretty good, the police, they just let you head what you want, you know, medicines,

things of comfort. And I did ask her for a whole lot of slate and tools, and she, kind of, she was an older woman compared to the young guy who was in his early 30s, and his wife was crowding somewhere in the mid-40s. So I'm experienced enough to know when somebody says, looks sort of miserable and says, get me a fistful of the strongest sleeping pill you can find. It's not just for a good night's sleep, it's for the eternal night's sleep. and so she kind of declined on that.

But a few things saved me a bit. Just to give an idea of the flavor of what happens, foreigners arrested in foreign countries to them. Usually somebody from the consulate services and from an embassy will turn up. Well, I was in no hurry to see the British and Australians because I'd actually seen them as I was being arrested. Some liaison police officers were there in the police station. So they'd been there before I got there.

So this was well planned. And a guy I recognized from the DEA, Bill, he had been in, you know, we were speaking before about this big trial. He'd actually turned up at the trial to give the evidence from what the DEA knew about things in Thailand. And he was there. So, in fact, he would stay with me for years to come after that. Um, they didn't contact me, but an Australian liaison officer came out.

And it was very goading, very, he visited the prison. I said, look, you're finished. If they don't kill you here, you'll be doing at least 20 years after you appeal it down to a life sentence and we'll request you extradition back to Australia and we'll hit you for something around there, what's left of you or anyway. So he was cheery enough and I said, well, I'm starting to recover a bit. You know, necessarily always turn out like you want in life. No, he'd have none of it.

So in a way, I was starting to get the feeling, oh, there's something worth staying alive for, even just to make him eat his words, I guess. But from the, when my friend had said the time in the police station is the best you get, I could sort of understand that when I went out to the court and there were like hundreds of people just swing around because the toilets had backed up again and it was the holding cells were underground. a caucophonous noise. You couldn't, you have to shout just to talk to the guy next to you, and the clanking chains

and little industries around food being passed through the bars in tied up plastic bags and bags of warm rice, bags of God knows what kind of food. And I've noticed the people in the court who were wearing kind of prison uniforms and shorts and a t-shirt in an off-brown colour, they were all chained up. They had these heavy chains on around their ankles. And I saw one guy dressed a little better, but still with the heaviest chains I've ever seen for an elephant.

And he had a garter clip around his calves and his legs, and they were holding up this heavy chains, and they were all polished. And chillingly, I saw there were, where the sea ring was just pushed together with most people. They were, it was somehow welded around his ankle, and you couldn't help but think, how did that happen? How did you do that?

And I could see he was Chinese in origin, so we got talking. He pointed out to me that when I go to the jail, if it's a drug case that can result in a life death. You'll be wearing chains from now on until the end of your sentence. And why was he wearing them welded together? Because he was coming from death row. And he had been already sentenced to death and was trying to appeal it down. But when you're convicted of that, they put some kind of cloth and a wooden curve bit, a wood between your leg and your ankle and the chain with the link, I should say, and then they weld it together because it's never coming off.

And I would find out later on how it would come off. In there, the court proceedings seem to take seconds, you're just remanded, a big iron bus drags you out from the courtroom, guards with machine guns everywhere, looking bored and sweaty and wanting to kill just for the hell of it. It's quite a, certainly a violent town. There's a magazine there that's this kind of police gossip magazine called 9-11 and it's got all the grisly pictures of the latest shootouts and explosions and stuff like that, or even car accidents.

So they're used to a fair bit of bloodshed, you really don't, even though the back of my mind I'm thinking, how can I get away, is there anyway to get out of this? Go to the jail, it drives, goes to a huge complex. All I can see is walls stretching this way, walls that way, huge walls, probably, I don't know, they said the whole nine yards, I think the height of these things must have been about 12 yards high, certainly much higher than it was. And it had barbed wire up the top that was tied to insulators, so that means it was electrified. And the bus drove over a moat, so that it was, I don't know how far this moat, it would

across in probably about 25 feet, seemed to stretch in every direction to the corners and then turn. The bus bumped over some more walls and more doors and we're all heard it off. And yet, when we finally led off the bus and sitting in a little street, it seemed relatively quiet, even though it was only about 4 o'clock, 4.15 in the afternoon, and that's because the prison day had ended. I mean, as we know, that even in the West, a prisoner's life revolves around a single shift of the guards.

There are, some people who are out late doing various jobs or some activity, but generally speaking, the day ends early, doesn't it? And it's no different anywhere around the world. All of us are pushed off, told to get naked, squat on the floor, put our clothes in front of us and wait for the searches and inspections. I mentioned before that the trustee system works in extraordinary ways there. The guards are outnumbered by prisoners probably at least 500 to 1. They walk around with a long stick for demonstration purposes and the occasional angry

swat at one or two, but it's the trustees who do the grunt work and the grit work and the punishments. a trustee will have a little uniform. Still, all prisoners wear shorts, and no long pants are allowed on prisoners in a tied jail. But they've got pilot's wings and insignia and lanyards and epaulets, little decorations on it, and a little holster for a truncheon,

and that's the trustees, and they can beat on prisoners as they see fit. And their master is their particular, prison officer who might be in charge of something and the guy in charge of reception of new prisons that day was known as the skull because of his bald head and I give in English anything he might said because he I got this translated for me so he dealt with all the people when there these are boys who coming back into prison they knew and they'd be sent over

to the barber who was standing there with a pair of electric clippers and some scissors. Bald head, bald head, bald head, oh, nicked a bit, bloodshed, no mind, patched that up. Next. I got out of that one, as I said to a couple of fellow Westerns, religious grounds, no cutting of hair. All right, we're on to that. And I could see, and I'd been warned by the Chinese guy, back of the court, that if my case

was a death sentence case, I'd have chains on all the time. So I shredded my court papers and wrote 15.2 on the back of my lawyer's card. And I played the dumb foreigner when they said, oh, you're caught papers. I don't know. What's your case? And drugs. Oh, no, death, death, death, yeah. More white trash. Yeah, more white trash coming to the prison.

And it was the beginning of being on the bad end of, you know, that they say the privileged white man. Well, you certainly get a lesson in what it's not to be, and the reverse of it all. So that's how they viewed any European that came in. There must be just white trash and beggars and scum floating around the world. Well, they wouldn't be here. They'd be protected.

They'd be rich. Poor people, pretty much the ones who came to jail. So the skull is sitting in his throne that his trustees have put together. People are coming back and bald-headed. They're being sent over behind the modesty. of a single towel held over a piece of string while some guy does an anal search wearing, what rubber gloves?

No, no, no, no, that's for Sissies. He had a pair of knitted wool mittens that were pink in color. Well, had been, but not just one of the fingers, but the forefinger and index finger were brown-stained. So, I just wasn't going to play along with that one.

Early just reasons, yes, embassy, you don't want to get the embassy involved. You're getting embarrassed. Now, I mean, they swallow that about the embassy, but the embassies would be kind of useless. I managed to get out of that one. But when they kept pressing about my case, I gave them this lawyer's card. Lawyer take the papers, I had no have, no have. And they looked, and they looked amongst each other. Oh, yes, you're 15 grams.

Okay, no, you go sit there. Now, all the, really the other, Kevin from Hawaii was with me by then. He came in, and he stupidly admitted to his case being about one kilo that had been hidden in a hotel room ceiling. And so he went over the other bench where they put on these, they were waiting to have these heavy chains put on. And he stayed in them. People learnt fairly quickly some tricks about living in a pair of chains that don't come

off. You make sure you wear light underwear or if it's box and shorts, then the thinnest pair you can get, because you're going to have to thread them down one leg, poke them through this thing off through the gap in the ankle sea ring, flip them over your toes back up again and down on the other foot, and that way you can get them off to wash. Oh, and all washing is over by a tank in the open ground there. And the only thing I give you by way of equipment for your new prison life is a plastic bowl. and that is your food bowl and washing scoop for the big tank where you take a bird bath

as they used to call it scooping up and splashing yourself well um the skull swatted a couple of people he took a thousand bout off me that i had an envelope and said if you were Thai i would have battered you all over the place by now for hiding that and Thai kids had their shampoo squeezed out of the newspapers, their soap bars cut in half, they're all the long trousers that they arrive from the jail cell with, they're all sheared off with a massive and rusting pair of scissors. And then we were good to go, and fishhead soup was served that night, but nobody felt like eating it. He squashed into another huge dormitory in which there's no way you can think of one of these people fitting in. But there's a room leader, and he's over in the corner

He's a different kind of trustees, wearing white shorts and trainers and whatnot. And he delivers his welcome speech, which my Thai friend translated for me. Amongst his lines were, well, hello boys, here we are. For those of you who haven't been there before, and I've seen quite a few of you have been here before. You won't be in this cell forever, but while you're here, see that toilet, that's for me to use. Not for you to use. If you're desperate for pee, ask one of my boys, and they might give you permission to go and have a pee, but don't rattle your chains.

I don't want to hear it. I'm a light sleep, and I'm an angry man when I wake up from a light sleep. And as for doing number two, forget about it. That does not happen. So he spent about like half an hour terrorizing everybody over there. And then sleeping head to toe, literally like sardines in there until, Thank God the morning came at some point and got out to try and make life better. But it didn't get much better in that section.

It was the drug romance section where they, in the greater prison, you'd be allowed to carry cash around with you, but they didn't like it in the drug prison because they were accused to letting rampant trade go on in drugs. So, they had a substitute currency. It was little sachets of headache remedy, Tamcha, aspirin. And a very good testament to how to run an economy. Argentina could learn a thing or two of that, certainly Venezuela. They used to buy boxes of these sachets, and each one would be worth about.

And you could buy a packet of cron tip the local cigarettes for 30 of them or buy any other service that you might want. So it was quite hard in that section. And there was really, you couldn't just, you have to be patient when trying to bribe your way through these things. People always imagine those countries is, you know, haven for a haven for a... bribery, and I guess things are easier, but they don't really see it as bribery. They don't see themselves as corrupt. They see that they're helping out the odd prisoner or two, the lucky ones. They're very much based that on whether luck's good.

So I had to get to somewhere which would be better, and that took quite a bit of doing, But the prospect for escape didn't look too good. Never heard of it. Never anybody spoke of it. But even during my time in this section, they had like three or four higher buildings stacked up dormitories, and underneath it was some benches where people spent during the day. Opened up in the morning, all lined up, squatting on the ground,

seeing the national anthem, and then all the food systems kick into play. You could, somebody would organize a shopper to go out and buy things. You could not eat what they call government food. It was just a soup and a few. Oh, you were lucky you forgot the fish head. I think they'd fight over that. Mouldy cucumber. Oh, and you had to prey over it as well.

So organized myself with the Chinese cooks and their walks and they got their gas arranged. There was lots to do in that sense, but then again, nothing to do as well. Now, as much as I still wanted to bring about my end, there was an attempt from one of the dormitories, and I really don't know how the street gang managed to keep control of the dormitory

to stop people squealing or had the trustee under control or threatened them with death or whatever they did. But they managed to cut through the mesh of the edge of the dormitory, which is, you could say it was like a window, but it was mostly steel mesh. And where did that take them? Well, it was remarkably like an escape anywhere. The five prisoners had all lied to each other about what arrangements they'd made and how. They probably found themselves quite surprised to be out in the internal streets of the prison.

One of them said he knew how to get to the outer wall, but that wasn't quite correct. Another one said he had a rope hidden, and that definitely wasn't correct. And we're in the 90s here, and there wasn't a huge amount of cell phones around, but there was some, oh, and that wasn't happening either. So that was stuck. They looked around for something to get over that wall, but they simply couldn't. That, they handed themselves in back to the guard. The guard that was on duty that night was sleeping, they went and sort of tugged him, and he was kind of surprised and thought, well, what are you being let out for?

Nothing, boss, we got out of ourselves, what? Now, out of the things you could do and get away with, you could have whiskey, you could have drugs you could even arrange for a woman somewhere or something that passed for one. They had an entire building of a thousand with Thai lady boys or full of AIDS, VD and hormones when they had the money for it, but sometimes their hormones supply dry up so they look pretty hairy indeed over the corner. I mean, you could do almost anything that you wanted inside, but to escape, something that affected the lives and livelihood of the office concerned and everybody, and so shameful letting prisoners, no, they wouldn't have.

So they got locked into what they call the punishment streets. They're not really streets. The name comes from some old tradition of chaining people to the ground. It was actually a series of coat lockers, about half size, with nothing but a little slit like a letter box hole in the top half of it. So that's how they would spend their days in there. Oh, and chained up. And just in case they'd have a bottle of water and a bowl of rice every day.

That was it. Oh, and a paint tin, that was their toilet. They'd probably lost the mood for either eating or even taking a dump pretty soon because every afternoon they'd drag some of them out and beat them with long sticks and all the little workers on the wing and the landing on the grounds would be cleaners would be shoved away somewhere we'd all be put downstairs and have to endure this terrible sound of them being beaten up. And it must have been quite horrendous to just hear, there's whacking into flesh and the kind of crunching sound, as bones were cracking, and piteous wailing.

So they were really picking the tip of the sticks and aiming their targets and soft spots until the hitting was going on people who no longer were conscious enough to even scream. and it would just then be the sound of something heavy, hitting a carcass of meat or something like that. Very hard to tolerate somebody else getting punished. Of course, it's better than, you could say it better than being punished yourself, but how to endure it with somebody else. They didn't survive a lot of that treatment.

The four of them were dead within about, I think, three and a half, four weeks. We put it down to internal bleeding mostly. The Singaporean, because he was foreign, they didn't go too hard on him. But when he finally, after months, got released from his coat locker, he was a strange grey colour and never spoke. My time there, he never spoke again. So this was a section I'd have to get out of. And I managed to bribe and finangle my way into the bigger section

where there were a number of sub-prisons that were for sentence prisoners. And the pressure's off, there's not so many court hearings, you could get organised in there. And I did with a group of them. Now, my supportive friends were still pretty good, but people didn't really know what had happened to me. Michael was still alive in living in Australia. I eventually got the use of what,

really the general store, they would rent out a phone from time to time, but at some reason the name of it was coffee shop and run by Chinese ties. Of course, Chinese times ran everything in Thailand. The government even forced them to change their names into Thai-sounding names, so it wouldn't look like the Chinese.

were doing all the work and ties are doing nothing. This coffee shop was kind of well-organized. It had this general store at would sell rice, of course, instant coffee, lots of other things, but it had a kind of bank tellers cage around the side where for 25% commission, they would give you cash from your account. A very elaborate set of steps happened to get that money back to them from your account, but we didn't have to know about that. They had a little restaurant out the back.

I mean, the cells are still really crowded and conditions bad, but not really as awful as they were in the other place. Yeah, they had a barbershop, too, creaking barber chairs. You could get a haircut. There were Johnny Fontaine pictures on the wall. And I was given the use of a phone after many months and managed to get through to Michael, and I started to explain. I mean, look, Michael, you won't believe. Well, you probably will believe too easily what's happened so many. Michael interrupted me.

He said, David, look, I can imagine you haven't got much time on this. I don't want to know. Just tell me where I've got to be and what I've got to bring. And that's what you like to hear from somebody. Yeah, nice. A friend who you haven't spoken to, who has heard all sorts of stories, but you finally get in touch with you and, you know, it says those things that only your true friend does. So, apart from anything else, it was quite moving.

But I started to work on lots of plans. I recovered from wanting to kill myself. An American guy, Dean Reed, was busy swindling me out of some money. He was a funny kind of, what would you call it an accent, kind of Boston Brahman voice, you know, that sort of slightly Kelsey Grammar voice. And he kept saying that I could get, he was on a very short sentence for something a year, but he spoke fluent Thai. He blended in, well, lots of people came to me and said,

oh, you can't trust this guy. I mean, we've heard stories about him out there. And I knew that. But it was, and people later on said, look, that guy milked you for money. He went to your friends outside, told them ridiculous stories about what he was organizing, even tried to go to London and see people here.

you know, for which he wouldn't have been doing anything. Who knows what he was? But, look, I knew he was tricking me. I knew he was just self-interested. But what else should I expect? I didn't know him outside. But I think he deserved his earnings because he gave me hope, where there was so hopeless.

No one had ever won a case, or certainly no one that was won. wanted to fall. No one had done anything but just grimly survived these places for decades if they survived at all. There was no way out. That policeman was probably right there. It just didn't happen and I wasn't got up. But I needed some sense of hope to keep me going. Anyway, he disappeared into course after he got out, but I couldn't really even gauge the size of the place, it was so big. I had a friend who was a trustee there. He was from Laos. But he was the only trust you could trustee you could trust. He didn't take the job seriously.

He really came to speak to me about it before he took the job. He said he'd been offered it. And should I take it? Because he could help me if he had that job. He could move around. Why was he being so helpful? You know, some people, they look at you and I think they can trust you and they just want a friend. I mean, you must have come across that, Matthew, and extreme places like prisons. It's funny, too, whenever people say to me, like, wow, how did you do 13 years? I always say, you know, hope. Hope is what gets you through it.

Yeah, yeah. That's absolutely true. And not only that, but of the people you met, did you stay in touch with many of them? All my friends are guys I met in prison. I don't have any friends out here that I didn't do time with. Right. Isn't that, that's funny? Why, what happened to the old friends?

Oh, they were never friends to begin with. Yeah, I guess you're right. So what plans were there? I think I probably developed about 15, maybe more plans. There was, one of my favorite ones was escape from the courtroom. And that would be, he had the opportunity because the court was in a new building. And it was quite high about 12, 13 floors. prisoners were taken up in a special lift, a very small one at the side.

And I figured somebody, I knew they could get into the building without going through much security or any really, I'd go to one of the other floors, walk through and intercept this lift as it took me down. So somebody would be in the courtroom to say, yes, he's going, they're taking him away now, so they would be getting ready into position. Another one that would say, yes, they've just got into the lift there, and it's going down. The guy on the, say, the ninth floor from the 12th floor where they'd come from, would press the button there and the lift would stop.

It would open. There'd be two guards in there, unarmed with me as a prisoner, though I would be chained out. So there'd be a bit of work to be done for me to get out of that. But as much as I like that idea, even the work. villains that I knew, the most serious bank robbers that I'd come across. When they came and examined the place, watched all these guards running around with machine guns, they just backed out. And maybe wisely so, they had been an escape from Banquan, where some people got away

from the court transport. The prison bus was stopped, guys on motorcycle. cycles got off and jumped out and let them out, cut them out, had bulk cutters for their chains, all of that sort of thing, took them away on motorbikes. The search for that was so intense when they inevitably got ratted out. The rangers from the army came in to deal with it. Pretty much the only people who profited that day was the old women who scooped up all the brass casings from the spent shells from their machine guns because the

The ones that escaped certainly never survived. That escaping from the court appearances, that wasn't going to work. Had another plan, even some kind of crazy ones where the prison had an auto workshop and I was going to be welded into one of the vans that a prison guard took in for repair. I didn't really like the idea of being welded in there. and just answering the question on the screen. There was another plan. Probably the most far-fetched one was to be taken out,

to be one of a disguised as United Nations medical team workers who had gone to the prison to take out a foreigner. And another Swiss guy, Theo, was going to be on the stretcher and Sten from Sweden, and I were going to have him on there. We'd have all the UN uniforms, and we'd managed to get out of the cell, worked that out, and figured that just deference to this foreign force in the United Nations would get our doors open for us,

but that was a bit sketchy that one. And we couldn't help him sort of cracking up laughing at the thought of it, pretty much. When I got transferred over to this better section, the first thing was to find a place to spend during the day which was private and to get effectively a private cell. There was an old one there that was run down. Me and a Scottish guy, we went to see the building chief. Oh, sat down in his little office. It's hot in here.

What's the matter with your air conditioner? It's not working too good. Look, here's an envelope with some money. You get that damn thing fixed. It must be awful for your boss. By the way, there's an empty cell over there. Can we fix it out? I bet we could get the painters in and have the plastering.

So we fixed up this cell, put in linoleum. I actually got a light-fitting switch put in place. Nobody had that in the prison. It cost me 5,000. I said, look, I just can't sleep at night with that light on it. Every other cell had a light on. made such a big story about it, and paid so much for it, that he agreed to that. So it was, I had an office downstairs in the Out factory, and this is where they made little

pictures out of shells, and I should tell you, the way that the prison worked, if you're a prison guard and started working in one of their six main subprisons, the chief of that section would bring you in and say, all right, what do you want? You've got the sweatshop A, B, or the boot factory, the umbrella factory. Take what you like. They're free. But remember, I want 10,000 months out of each one. So the guard would tell the underling guard, this is your bid.

You bring me that money every month. I don't care how you do it. Beat it out of the prisoners, threaten them, sell drugs. Couldn't care what you do. Just make it happen. So they didn't really care the guards what you did in a section as long as you kept on paying. So I sent myself up a little office there, and soon enough I had the guys who picked my ice up for me to go in the ice chest during the day, guys who organized the food shopping list from local markets.

They didn't go out to do it, of course, but there was another guard in charge of supplies. So the whole network of things that you've paid for, and it sounds like a lot, because I probably had, I don't know, what, nine staff working for me, people to carry water and God knows what. When you're saying $10,000, you're saying $10,000, what, dollars?

No, no, no. This is a $10,000, so you take a zero off that and then divide it by three. So it's like $300. Oh, okay. Yeah. Still. Oh, but yeah, when talking about the sections that have to deliver,

sometimes they'd be hired depending on how many prisoners this guard was supposed to be looking after. They usually have about, I mean, the worst kind of sections the guide could get would be just the industrial kind of things that had contracts with the prison. and very hard to get any money out of them. One of the guards there took to beating the laziest prisoner who was a worker of the day every day. So if the laziest one is going to get beaten, it will be somebody, so it doesn't matter how hard the others were. Somebody will get beaten.

But guys like that didn't do very well. And it also meant they didn't have any money of their own. They were drunkard completely, or they would have bought themselves a better section from which they could get a little bit more money. The art section where I was, where they did these shell paintings, just black and white sketches to make it look like inlaid mother-mobile shelf, they sold quite well outside, particularly portraits of royalty. So the guard there was reasonably happy, but he was a nice drunk too.

He used to post my mail for me. I'd just go over to the table and slide over the envelopes, and he'd be good enough to put the stamps on them. A little button pressing there again. It's asking me about storage size. That, I had to kind of restrict the number of people that would come and see me, because there were a lot of very desperate Westerners there.

People had been beggars around the world, people who had nothing. People were bored. I had electric cooking rings, whereas a lot of them used around the back of the toilet area there, they'd have just all bits of charcoal. Let's say, had some money, or they'd just burn anything, pieces of plastic

to make their meals on. You couldn't even breathe around in that section. But so I was doing kind of all right and fixed the fan in the room. So they wouldn't be suspicious of me at all. I wouldn't say I was kind of comfortable, but my days weren't awful, horrible. But I was sticking to, I knew they would come to an end. This trial would come to an end, it would go badly. It wasn't going well, as it was, bits of so-called evidence from newspapers, as you

covered stories of me in the past, that first big trial, that was being used against me. I knew there was no winning. Eventually, my Thai lawyer came in and said, look, the agencies, he mainly met the DA, they're getting sick of waiting. Your trial's going to suddenly come to an end in about two and a half, three weeks. You'll be convicted and you'll be on death row from then on. So I had to really act quick. Out of all the plans I've had in reserve,

I'd had the one where you just do it in a very straightforward way. You cut yourself out of the cell. You climb down the wall, you figure out where the hell. the other walls are and you make yourself a ladder and keep climbing until you get to the edge and you know. It sounds kind of flaky and desperate and there were so many unknowns, but I knew in the end that was the only way that really anything was going to work. I'd been preparing for it and I know I could have bought things like hacksaw blades within the prison, sure, but That would have been ratted out, Matthew.

Trustees would have, there were such snakes. I mean, they'd sell the drugs one day and then arrested for it the next. They were absolute toads, too. You'd see them during the day as their personal guard, the one they worked for, was lying around doing nothing. They'd be massaging the guard's legs to make him more comfortable. And the second part was the rapturous look of happiness on the trustee's face. serving my masteries, but the highest calling in my... Anyway, I knew that if I got transferred prisons and then had changed to deal with,

it would be much, much harder, I'd have to set up all again. Prisoners allowed a kind of care package food parcel from time to time. That would come in by mail and it'd be opened in front of a guard who'd sit at a seat at a chair and everybody been kneeling around, going through this stuff, whatever it was. The ties used to get pretty much a hard time. Their clothes would be soaked in case there were drugs in there somehow, or really just to embarrass them, a way of encouraging payments. But the foreigners, because we didn't have local contacts, supposedly, and the parcels

came from overseas, they kind of let us get away with a bit more. And especially, I always, when I got a parcel, I made sure there was a couple of cartons, extra cigarettes in there. And I used to give some to the guard who was doing searching. So, yeah, just go along, take your stuff. But Michael was going to send me these hexaw blades, and I knew it would have to make it something good. So I got a huge parcel, full of food and tins and clothes and cigarettes and books. everything you can imagine in there

so a lot to go through and it arrived and he was going through this and that looking up clothes a big roll of gaffet tapes and stationary pens pebble at there oh cable ties

hanging up the blankets I'd say or whatever but even though the hexawls had been made into it was a scroll a poster with wooden dowel, top and bottom. Inside the dow was the hacksaw blades.

I mean, Michael had done it really quite well. He'd, as I'd asked him, he'd cut a groove with a radial arm sword down the dowel rod, put the hexaw blades in there, seal them up, painted them, made the scroll, handwritten the thing, and then I put it in a special case with inside this big care parcel.

But I needed one thing to be sure, because I thought it would be a bit heavy or a natural, and it was. What would you put in that parcel, Matthew, that would distract the guards satisfactorily to get them to take their minds off of it? I mean something that you can give them? You mean like cigarettes or whiskey or? That's to take their mind off of it. what I'd said to Michael was no whiskey would be a confiscation so that would be a kind of a

was that would that be having a dig at the Muslim way I said to Michael go out and find the most extreme pornography I was going to say Playboy magazines or something but you're saying even worse yeah yeah something that were really getting because they didn't really allow you know even Playboys

were a bit too much for the ties. They're a bit puritanical like that. So when the guard looked down, they saw these glossy magazines, which was, what, teenage anal number 17, three-way vixens from Scandinavian porn. It was, oh, he couldn't contain himself. Daniel was my name in there. Daniel, no, no, sorry, no, cannot. have, cannot, and very carefully put them under his chair for later.

So any thought about what was in that parcel was absolutely dazzled by the shining light of the filthy dreams that he was having suddenly in his head. So I had those. There were some other bits of equipment I needed for the big night. And I'm just rearranging myself a bit here. I was doing court and I had every time I was going there

was very risky I thought they could suddenly spring it on me and managed to get through one more court session but time was running out now I was supposed to leave with this big Swedish guy the Viking had been working out and building up his strength I kind of ran through the plan

as such as it might be with him. But, you know, it was very hard to be convincing that it didn't, why hasn't anybody done it before? And I never really liked hearing that. So, because it wouldn't work so easy if somebody had done it before. They would have patched up some of the holes they've got in their security.

No, no, no. He was very much of two minds, but the real reason was after you get out, where do you go you've got to plan for that and he had no one or nothing because he was a bit of a scallywork a scoundrel he'd stolen from his friends and um done bad things out there um but um what really killed it for him i was down near the the coffee shop general store and these couple guys walked along newcomers they had not only were they're wearing the heaviest chains I've ever seen. But their legs were just all distorted and they were hobbling, like they

were both crippled of some kind that had been badly treated, and yet they were Europeans. They looked like that way. It turned out they were Israelis. They'd been rich in the much smaller town of Shanghai. It's only 250,000. thousand or it was at the time. They'd been taken to the local lockup and they'd got out of there. It wasn't such a hard thing to do. They'd gone to the guesthouse where they'd been staying because they thought they trusted the guy.

Their guy milked them of all their money and eventually ratted them out to the cops and the cops let the guards have them back and they took them back to the jail and then smashed all their legs with iron bars and a dungeon through rocks on top of them. It was only in the strength, I guess, both of them, been in the, Israeli army had allowed one to drag the other one out and give him some water and they survived. So when they came back, they were, I wouldn't say on the way to recovery, but they lived anyway. I mean, you can imagine the pain of unset, broken limbs.

Anyway, they'd been transferred down because the security wasn't tight enough up there, of They, no, when, what was I going to tell Stent, the Viking, about this, the Westerners, and they still half beat them to death. You know, I kind of went up to him and said, oh, it would make fun of funniest thing, Sten. These guys have got out of the prison, and they fucked it up. I mean, not like we're going to, you know, we'll be all right because I've organized this and that. Well, there was no amount of talking about that this was to be. dismissed. He just wouldn't come along, which in the end was a better thing. I switched off my light for the last time in that cell just as midnight came around. And the cell's only

about five people by this time. I'd gone to great lengths to keep people out. I had to give the chief a lot more money because normally even the small cell held about 14, but this was just five, myself, an Indian people smuggler who, he was mild enough, but a complete coward, so I'd have to watch him. Kevin from Hawaii, or Calvin, it was called sometime, myself and Stan, and that was it. So I switched off that light and then got the hacksawes out and then started to go to work. Well, I'd had the hacksawes broken from the thing and hidden somewhere else. So, but there was other things that,

there were no beds in there, but there were kind of little mats. And mine was made up of a crosshatch woven pattern. It was actually 100 meters of army boot webbing from the army boot factory, that nylon cord. A couple of other little things put together. But I found there was a very, It was almost like it was starting to get too late. By the time I'd got everything ready and woke it up, Kevin, very surprised to see what was going on.

Oh, yeah, the little boy, my head butler was in there as well. He was starting to get late. It was after 1 o'clock. I took the axles out and started cutting, but it was, much noisier than you can imagine. You know, when you're timing something in your mind, well, you don't know how long it's going to take, but it never reflected for the sound,

so I had to cut much slower. Even oil just made the cutting slower rather than doing a good job. So by about 2.45 in the morning, I'd only got to the point where the top part of one bar was cut halfway through the lower section of the same bar and that was bending a bit

but I knew how old the whole building was and under what strain it was as it cut through the top bar while it extended and let him do the cutting it sprang away from where it was because it had been in position so long and the whole building had skewed and all of that He'd said, oh look, stay another day, you know, nobody will come here or interfere, we'll put everything back.

I knew it just wouldn't work. People had all come unstuck because somebody spoke. And this Indian guy, he was weak and terrified, and he would have spoken for sure. So I went on with it. It would have been, I had to just stop all of that. I had an old builder's plank, which was being used as a bookshelf. I slid that out of the window. And it had to be locked in place because this plank couldn't go out flat and then bounce around.

It had to go out sideways and then they put us up three floors up because they didn't trust foreigners on the ground floor, that's for sure. and so I had to make my way to the ground after that so this plank had to go sideways then climbed up there grabbed this bar that had been half cut and stretched it back just as I

stripped down and slid out to the end of the plank going hand over hand to the back of it with one arm slung this army boot webbing over both sides and then grabbed it thinking, oh, well, I'll abseil to the ground. Well, that plan was never going to work.

Unless you've absale before, it's not so easy to do. But the odd thing was, when I got out of that cell, when I squeezed through the bar, the night, looked up at the sky that I hadn't seen for two and a half years, I'd never seen the night sky, never seen stars or anything. and then look back into the cell with the people I knew in there I thought

suddenly it was all finished it was all gone that didn't matter anymore my survival out here was what mattered and here I am clinging to the wall like some big insects you're still in the prison

yeah I'm just out of myself a building six and there's seven more buildings to go through And look, I slid to the ground and burnt the skin off my fingers doing so and rolled over and it was soft ground so it was fine. I pulled back that rope down and rolled it up and then went to my daytime office. And there I opened up a cupboard which had six picture frames in there.

Sten, I'd had him pretend to take an interest in oil painting and he'd put together these wooden frames over which you stretch the canvas normally, but they were no more than frames. And they were to be the rungs of a letter. I had in mind using two letters, four long bamboo pole from another factory. This was the factory that made paper paintings of little fake boxes for Chinese funerals. And they hung them over to dry on these long bamboo poles. were about 12 feet, 14 feet long, 2 inches down on the base, tapered to about an inch.

But I still had to get there. And so I bundled up the little things that I would need from my little office room in the art factory and had to look around to see what guards were about. One I could see already sleeping over in the corner. I usually had a bit of a drink and went to sleep these guys. But it wouldn't take much to wake him up, and it was so slow. As I, look, I timed this out during the day and walked a few steps, and then had my watch telling me how long it took to go from one place to another. All that meant nothing on the actual life, on the night, it took forever to go somewhere.

I didn't want to make any noise. I couldn't drop anything. I couldn't put things down. I had to make sure I was keeping on carrying it. Where the bamboo poles came from, that was a factory that had just been sealed up, so I had to break into that. And even the sound of my old parrot beak pliers that I'd nick from somewhere was slow on it. So I did get into that factory, put down the poles either side,

put the picture frames along them, tape them up with the gaffer tape, holding a little torch in my teeth. My mouth was either drying out or drooling, holding this torch in my teeth as I was doing it. You know, not even really wanting to look at the time because I know it's 3 o'clock in the morning by then or after that. I've now got two ladders all taped up. I can't get them out of the factory

because the way I came in was too close to where the guards were. So I had to actually break out the other end of this factory, down where it went on to where the water. So use one of the ladders to climb up to the roof inside the factory, poke the other ladder through the gap in the mesh and the tin, lower it down into the auto shop, pull the other one up, lower that one down, carried the two of them to the auto shop gate, which led on to where the showers and the water tanks and the toilets were in building six. knowing that there were many other buildings to go to, and I didn't really know where they were. Even by the time I rounded one of the corners, the guard was moving, and I had to wait for a bit. I eventually got to the inside wall of Building 6, which had its own barbed wire. I'd had a fifth bamboo pole, and I taped an S-hook around that with some of the gaffir-ta tape,

pull that rolls of kind of old and effective barbed wire, it was ineffective, but it still tangled you up, and pull that outwards so that it, I could get my ladder over to the edge of it. Now, by this stage, I realized carrying two letters wasn't going to work. I take them both together, and I push them up against this internal wall, climbed to the top, and then lower to the bottom and tried to pull it through, but it was still tangling. I had to develop a bit of a system to get over these internal walls. And I'd get into one building and the open courtyard and grassy area, the exercise field, or whichever I could find myself in. I had to avoid building five because it was the punishment section and very small, so I went to the

next one. Was that building three? I don't know. And had a thing where I'd keep this long ladder with the two and join together, hold it in the middle and trot along like a pole boulter. Michael had told me that about pole vaults. He used to be a Commonwealth champion pole bulton before he made up one life and took on another. I stopped looking at my watch and really didn't keep track so much of where I was. But I knew I was heading in the right direction when a smell from the AIDS ward. AIDS was ripping through Thailand at the time, and prisoners were heavily affected.

They put them in a virtually disused section of the prison compound, and they were rotting away in there, so you could smell them from a distance. So I knew if I was near them, I must be close. I even stuck my head up and looked in and saw these gray, shiny, sick face. just looking at me. But, you know, they didn't say anything. And any other type prisoner would have screened the place down the local, the cell box, the little trustees on the wing would have blown their whistles to their lungs exploded if they saw me.

But these guys dying in an agony just didn't have the strength to say anything. But I knew as only two buildings away from the outer wall. I met a couple of other obstacles, it's kind of long to explain, but one was just a wall of barbed wire and I had to go under the mud in that one, so it was pretty messy by the time I reached the inside of the outer wall, and it had another moat on the inside of the prison that ran around, it was actually a sewer, and that had barbed wire in the middle, and I couldn't figure a way of getting my ladder over to the other side. because the other side, where the war was, where I had to be, where I had to put my ladder against it,

that only had about a foot and a half of ground underneath it. And I had to devise a plan to get over there. I guess I found a way. I found a way. Those who want more detail on my exploits will probably read the last book I wrote. But I did find myself propped up against that outer wall between the guard towers as dawn was coming. That glow was in the sky and I reached up there and looked over.

The ritual plan was to somehow get over and safely down to the ground on the other side and swim the moat. But I realized finally when I was looking at it, that the swim to wear, this was all guard's houses. So it was kind of a mess. I used the last of my drinking water to clean myself up, put on my long trousers, because they were never allowed. And the ones I'd had kept aside were khaki,

so maybe from a distance I might look like a guard, except what with a white face? No, I don't think. so, managed to very carefully into my way through the electric cables there, and taking the chance that the rubber of my trainers would insulate me pretty well, and I did, and again, the last of my little bit of rope to see me to the bottom, the inside track, the little path that ran around the jail. Now, going across the moat wasn't going to work. The only way out was to, and I realized it was in the wrong place, not where I thought I'd end up, not at the back of the prison, but in fact near the front, I realized I'd have to walk around the front and cross one of the small foot bridges that went over that part.

I pulled up by ace in the hole, as they say. It was one of my job that I was supposed to work at inside the prison, but never did. It was in the umbrella making factory, where they made pop-up umbrellas. I'd taken a black pop-up umbrella with me on my little journey through the prison because I thought, well, if I'm in this situation and I'm going to be passing people, what is one thing that escaping prisons don't have, don't use, don't think about if there's rain, an umbrella? So I popped that up, kept my head under it, walked my way in a kind of reasonable but relaxed pace, and he even poked out looking up to see whether the guard towers were watching.

Two weren't, but one was, and he probably wondered, who the hell's that coming in on the backside path? But as I said, the guards lived over that side, so I'd hoped, and perhaps he thought that it was a late-coming prison officer. was sneaking in the back way to avoid being bawled out by his boss. But in any event, I rounded the corner, found the little moat crossing that goes over the front but the stalls were setting up, their breakfast goods, their coffees, their baked donuts, the goods they'd sell for people visiting prisons, went over that. I even think my personal guard, the one who I'd leave with one of my... ATM cards that I'd send him out every month for cash from the ATM, give him an honest 10%.

I think it was he who was arriving, and he couldn't see my face, of course, but you know, when you know somebody and the way they walk, there's something about their footsteps that kind of remind you of who it is, and maybe he had some, I wouldn't have even thought, possibly it was me, but something about it. But I moved away from there fast enough and got to the main road. climbed a big old steel pedestrian crossing over the six-lane highway, one of its goes to the airport

and other one back into town I turned around and looked back at the prison and thought to myself why are they doing it? Why are they staying there? Why the prison is staying there? Why do they choose to live there for 20 years

and not try everything that can possibly do to get out? I made arrangements for a passport to be kept hidden from me by the guy I mentioned before that the only good trustee in the whole prison, the one who was from Laos, he was getting out and he, though he was deported, he was back quick enough and came to see me. And when I was making arrangements for a passport to be ready for me with him, he was saying, look, David, you've got no chance of this, really none. I'll come and see you as the years going, don't worry, I'll come.

and bring you things, and I know this guard and that one, you know, I'll always be able to organize something. It is not, I can't do that. I'd rather die trying on this. Just please put that passport where it is. And by the way, you know you have to get it stamped into the country a few weeks beforehand, and it's got to be on the computer and got to be this and got to be that. And the only photograph I can give you to make this thing up is my old radio operator's

license, which I've got many years ago, so it's a little bit old. Yes, yes, yes, yes. So he explained to me where it would be kept and gave me a key, but I often wondered, would he do it? Right. That's what I was thinking. He thought it was so hopeless. Yeah, I know.

And he had to, you know, call in some of the people who are in the people smuggling business and, you know, getting them to go out to their man at the airport and get on the computer and other than all that. But he'd given me the key to this place, so I thought, yeah, and he seems so genuine. Anyway, I didn't have time to stay on that footbridge and look back at the prison all morning. I thought it better get the hell out of it. Climbed down the other side, held a taxi, took him to the local shopping, Senator got rid of him, went around the backside, I got another taxi, got to this block of

apartments, the flats that I didn't really know anything much about, found number 64, put the key and opened it. Well, the door's open, that's a good thing. There's actually some boy staying there. He seemed to know of me, or didn't know that I might be coming, but knew there's something about me, he said, oh, did you get bail or something like that? I said, yes, sir, something like that. Look, I just need to use the toilet, because that's where this thing was supposed to be. I went in the toilet cubicle, sure enough, there was a, I was too dehydrated to take a pee, but there was a mirror as described behind the assistant tank, and I felt down along that, yeah, my fingers have touched something, is it an envelope?

me. And I pulled it out and there was something in there and it felt good. And I'm thinking, what are the odds that a guy I've met in prison, got out of the prison, gone and had my, I knew this photo wasn't even the right size for a passport, had to be adjusted and everything like that. And all the things put on the case. Anyway, I opened it up and I had a look and, sure enough, there was me staring back at me, and it was a British passport, nicely used, good enough, and had been stamped in, and the papers for the, that you have to fill out before you leave at the airport that had to be done three weeks before by the immigration officer as a tourist thing. They were all in there, sitting there ready to go.

I thought, well, I'd give you a kiss if you were here now, and I thought, well, I'd give you a kiss if you were here now. So I didn't waste any time. I remembered the vision of the broken legs of the Israelis stayed within my mind. So I went down, jumped in another taxi, and arrived at the airport. Now, before I'd left the cell the night before, I was a bit worried about my headbutler. It was only like five and a half feet tall how he'd be treated the next day. and I gave Stend some money

to look, see what you can do, make sure and I gave him my good watch and I kept my little crabby Cassio that actually kept better time because I turned around in the middle of the night of all this cutting away and there he was

Little Jet, that was his name it means number seven because he was a seventh child he was not just as he normally would be for sleeping he was at his Sunday go to meet and close He was all dressed out when he had his best shoes on and he had his letters and photos

and his postable things all in a plastic bag with a rubber man. He was ready to go with me, you know, follow me anywhere. And I thought myself, hey, you are, a bit braver than my Swedish friend who shit himself at the prospect of being a freeman. But I had to, you know, both Sten and I explained to him, no, no, no, look, you don't. can't go tonight. And David's going, you can't follow. Not this night. And I said, look, I'll send you money. I'll do my best for you. Whatever you want. You're not doing a long time. You don't want to be wanted being shot at it or whatever. And kind of reluctantly, he'd

settled down. So, and where would he have gone anyway? were, um, I, the point of this is I'd gotten rid of most of my cash, so the two ATM cards that I still had, had to work really to give me some flexibility about where I was going to go. I had it up to the bank, put one in, tapped it up. I thought, well, okay, it's probably best to go to a European country. It's a long haul. It's going to be at least 12 hours, but I'd be into a jurisdiction where I could put up an argument for, you know, even if something rather led to me being identified or if this passport falls to bits or whatever.

Right. And I'm not really looking at the screen, and I don't want to look at the screen, you know, because it's saying, please refer to your bank. And I can tell you when you escape from a prison and you depend on your life for the money that comes out of an ATM. To get that message on the screen is not something you want to see. So I had one more card, though. So I gave it a rest, and I didn't want to use the machine straight away.

I went down to the long-term luggage lockers where a visiting friend had left an overnight bag with a change of clothes and some toiletries and collected that. It had been sitting there for two and a half months already. came back to the machines and put the second card in after thinking through some options but none of them were very good staying in the country whatever now the second card paid out about $500 so where could I go on that not far I bought a ticket because time was on the

March to the next Singapore flight that was going on. Now, Singapore's close enough by in terms of time, but not so good in terms of jurisdiction. They would have sent me back to Thailand immediately. They have the death penalty of their own. They wouldn't have bothered about extradition courts. I wouldn't be a citizen of theirs. I'd be on a phony passport anyway, wouldn't it? So sending me back would have been no trouble.

But I'm in the line already for departure. And at every point I'm waiting for something to go wrong. If I stick my head above, when I was back in there, above the parapet of the roof of a wall, turn a corner and I see somebody and I'm confronted by them and I can't get out of it. So even at the airport, I'm having trouble getting the money and then I bought a ticket and I've checked in. and I'm going to the immigration desk and the guy behind the desk there has got this new passport

he's typed up the forms right he's tapping on the screen the keyboard he's frowning at it this of course and I'm thinking well this is where it all ends right it's a fake passport right

yeah yeah well it's a real passport stolen within a few weeks ago but who knows if some other mechanism they explained to me that there's thousands and thousands of passports stolen or lost every year if they put all the stolen and lost

ones onto a list then every time somebody oh I found that passport I reported missing last week all right let's go off to the airport and it'll blow up on them and so they don't put all of those on a big list because there'd be millions of them for every

country you go through the only ones the only people are on a list is a watch list and that's very limited it's that country's wanted felons it's people have been requested being put up there by Interpol and even

most countries wish Interpol to keep their business to themselves because unless it's a red notice it usually doesn't go on there red notices and notify an arrest on site and all that kind of thing anyway

As I'm speculating on all the stuff, I've missed the sound of the immigration officer stamping my passport and handing it back. I've got on board and there the flight's delayed and airline steward, what would you like? Some water, please. Definitely a bit dried out by then. But Captain mumbling something about something with one passenger and sorry, the delay won't be long. Well, I sort this out. Yeah, one passenger, that's me. they're coming for me.

Now, thwump, a very satisfying sound again of the doors closing and simply muttering doors to manual, as they say, before the plane takes off. And it did, and it was only an hour's flight. But what have I got to do during that hour? I've got nothing to read except this stinking passport. Hmm. And I tell you what, I don't like it any better than I did when I'm not. I first saw it after an hour.

I kept finding folks in it, the stitching, the binding, the lemonade over the photo. I didn't think much of it. And I was not alone, in that opinion, when I landed at Singapore, and I went to the immigration desk there, the officer on duty looked at this passport. This photo is not a first-generation photo. copy of one. Why would anybody do that? And he slid it over to the ultraviolet lamp. And in the case of British passports, they're looking for the green glow of the imprinting on the covers. And he's put the photo part of it under there. Oh yes, and I'd forgotten it needs to show three little

crowns are overlapping the edges in pink. And bless my little Chinese friend, Laotian friend, three little crowns in pink showed up there. And the passport officer gave me a passport, stamped it, gave it back to me, almost as much as to say, look, I know it's a stinker and it's a fake, but it passed the UV test. So I'm in the clear. Go about your business, be it good or bad. and I was out of there I took a taxi straight out dumped that in the

centre of town took another one found a three-star hotel you don't want five-star the security is a big flash you've got a big shots in there nosing around

you don't want to be looked at you don't want a one-star hotel some dump where there's connivors and scammers all trying to get a hold of you now a three-star

sort of commercial travellers regular decent hotel is just fine went there checked in. As I was checking in at the desk, I'm thinking this thing, passport's got to go soon. McClintock was his name. George McClintock. You and I are going to have to part ways. But anyway, I wasn't really concerned about that day. It had been a long one. So I threw my stuff in my room, went down to the hotel shop, bought a pair of swimming

trunks and grabbed it down and went straight up to the rooftop when they had the swimming pool. Got it stood on one end, dived in for the most relaxing, peaceful, deep, hugging the ground of the pool swim I've ever had and surfaced on the very other end of the pool. Heaved myself up as the relatively fresh chlorinated water of the swimming pool ran from me around and the stinking sludge of some Bangkok clung, and looked over the railing and wondered, well, where to next? And that, really, dealt with Bangkok, you know, very strange to be within the space of 24 hours, really, 16 hours,

really, in a horrible prison where not likely to survive, or certainly be in any shape and stay forever or death, to be a free man with a different identity in a hotel that no one knew about. A strange feeling indeed, but worthwhile. So I enjoyed that before. Well, what would you have done next, huh? I said I'd have gotten out of that country. have gotten tried to get like you said tried to get to a european country well and get myself a

better passport yeah you know i didn't have a very good sleep that night as a free man because i was thinking how can they work out who i am where i i mean you put yourself in the in the shoes of not so much the ties, they wouldn't, they're not really great investigators in that sense they've got no reason to be, my enemies, the Bill Schenckman from the USDA or some board Australian, I couldn't imagine the British doing anything, they never make an effort. But how would you figure out who I was? Would there, can you think of any technique that would reveal my name? I'm just pressing another button here.

I mean the well I mean hey that was David McMillan and we're going to have him back on for the second part of his story and it is another escape from a death sentence

I really appreciate you guys watching do me a favor if you like the video hit the subscribe button hit the bell so you get notified of videos like this share the video leave me a comment in the comment section And we're also going to leave David's book in the description box. We're going to leave the link for his book.

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