If he sensed any antipathy, Robbie didn’t let it show.
His charm is legendary, his voice smooth, his smile quick. One of his in-laws says he studies books on how to project the right body language – to come across as plausible and frank without making any damning admissions.
He drew well in the genetic lottery; at 41 his boyish good looks and dark hair made him look years younger. In 2009, the hair was grey but he still had the looks inherited by son Tom (also a brash young bookie) and daughter Kate, one of racing’s best-known public faces.
The diminutive nickname ‘Robbie’ indicates a parental favourite, and hints misleadingly at a softness that few detect in the character of the eldest son of the most ruthless bookmaker in Australian racing’s chequered history.
If there is a fault, he looks slightly effete, far more like his small, fine-boned and once-beautiful mother than his stout and imperious father. But Robbie inherited his father’s calculating mind, the mind that took a shady publican and small-time bookie’s son through law in the 1940s – when other young men were fighting a war – then from the bar table to the betting ring, fame and fortune.
THE Waterhouse history would make a television serial, a sweeping saga of a family on the make, rolling on from the Rum Corps for six generations.
In fact, part of the family history has already become fiction. There is a story – so often repeated in newspapers and at least two books since the 1950s, that it passes as fact – that the Waterhouses are descended from an officer and gentleman, a Lieutenant or Captain Henry Waterhouse, who arrived with the First Fleet in 1788, and later helped John Macarthur import the first merino sheep.
There was an officer called Henry Waterhouse in the First Fleet, who went home and later returned with the Third Fleet. But a genealogy expert commissioned by Bill Waterhouse in the 1960s to track down this socially-desirable connection wrote a 12-page report stating that after ‘rather exhaustive research … my conclusion is that no legitimate relationship exists to Captain Waterhouse’.
The captain fathered one daughter, Maria, who died childless in England in 1875. The expert stated the racing Waterhouses’ real ancestor was one Thomas Waterhouse, an apprentice carpenter at Darling Harbour in 1828, and son of a Windsor farmer of obscure origins.
This must have disappointed the king of bookmakers, because he allegedly ignored the research he’d asked for – instead citing Captain Henry Waterhouse as a forebear whenever something was being written about the family.
Regardless of pedigree, or lack of it, for almost 200 years Waterhouses have made fortunes as bookmakers, hotel keepers and builders. Those are the official occupations. Stories also abound of smuggling, cock fighting, black marketeering and sly-grogging.
‘Lights were put under the wharves to try to stop them smuggling stuff off the ships at night,’ asserts one longtime observer who has been on first name terms with three generations of the family. ‘They were in everything.’
The taste for fighting cocks goes back to Bill and Jack’s great-grandfather, Thomas Waterhouse, a famed street-fighter who had thirteen children, ran the Greengate Hotel at Killara and most of Sydney’s cockfighting. The blood sport, illegal but still strong in the 1950s, was run for betting, and where there was betting, there were Waterhouses. Preferably with the odds in their favour.
At his peak in the 1960s and 1970s, Bill Waterhouse was one of the biggest and, it seemed, most fearless bookmakers in the world. He took on and beat huge punters like Frank (later Sir Frank) Duval, known as the ‘Hong Kong Tiger’, and Felipe ‘Babe’ Ysmael.
Robbie’s meteoric rise from country racetracks to the rails at Randwick in just seven years, something that took others 25 years, raised eyebrows. His father’s view (‘He’s a genius’) didn’t cut ice with those who pointed to the family’s wealth and influence as a more likely explanation.
Although the Waterhouses’ potent political ‘pull’ in Sydney has waned since Sir Robert Askin was the state’s premier, their name for decades drew a nervous reaction among most who know them and many who don’t. On the record, associates and relatives are tight-lipped about ‘Big Bill’ and Robbie. Off it, they have more to say, little of it complimentary.
Racing people tell black jokes about the family. Says one former bookmaker: ‘They say if Jesus Christ had been a Waterhouse, Pontius Pilate would have been crucified.’
When Robbie married the legendary trainer T. J. Smith’s daughter Gai in 1980 it was hailed in the social pages, rather cloyingly, as a ‘fairytale wedding’ between the ‘prince and princess’ of racing.
Wherein lies a sub-plot to the Waterhouse family war – the falling out between Tommy Smith and his brother, Ernie, over the Waterhouse connection. Ernie Smith’s thinly-veiled distaste for his niece’s choice of husband exploded into acrimony when Gai took over from him as stable foreman – cutting out the prospect of Ernie’s son, Sterling, taking over the Tulloch Lodge empire when Tommy retired.
Once asked his reaction to the Waterhouses’ troubles, Ernie Smith’s retort was short and sharp: ‘I’ve never had anything to do with them. I’ve never mixed with them, and never will.’
18
McMILLAN THE VILLAIN
Working on the theory that desperate prison escapees do not use umbrellas, he opened the brolly, held it close to his face and strolled off to find a taxi.
WHEN the police came for David McMillan, they used a sledgehammer on the door. They found him in bed with the doomed and beautiful Clelia Vigano, the society restaurateur’s daughter who would later die in a prison fire.
McMillan was 25 then, already an accomplished drug trafficker who had parlayed a polished line of patter, a photographic memory and multiple passports into so much money he had trouble spending it. Sometimes he would fill a plastic bag with cash and wander Melbourne, buying beautiful things he didn’t need: sports cars, clothes, the latest electronic gadgetry. He was the most charming of villains: a ‘conman cum commodity dealer,’ one investigator called him, in grudging admiration.
The charm meant a lot of Melbourne people got to like him while he was spending money. The villainy meant many tried to forget him once the law caught up. Late one night, one of his brother’s girlfriends — young, beautiful, innocent and ‘a little tipsy’— came knocking at McMillan’s elegant South Yarra apartment, seeking counsel for a broken heart.
McMillan recalls that he must have cut an outrageously theatrical figure that night: part Mikado, part mobster, part agony aunt. ‘I was hospitable — if that is accurate for someone who answers his door at 1am wearing a $4000 Japanese bridegroom’s kimono with matching pistols (silenced, of course) holstered under each arm,’ he recalls, lampooning his younger self.
The guns were as much an affectation as the silk kimono. Part of a heist of several hundred weapons stolen from a South Melbourne warehouse by a robber friend, the pistols did not last long. He gave up carrying them after accidentally putting an armour-piercing round through the floorboards of a first-floor bedroom – straight through the ceiling of his father-in-law Ferdi Vigano’s Brighton bar. Luckily it was a few minutes after closing time, when the place was empty.
‘Guns were boys’ toys for sure and not as much use as we’d hoped at that age. After Danny Mac [the late armed robber Danny MacIntosh] took down Guthrie Trading [a firearm warehouse] we all looked like cowboys. The robbery left us with repro Lugers, .357 magnums, countless .22 target pistols (those that so well went on a lathe for silencer fitting) and .38s to spare. The police were not happy and complained, in fact begged, that we be responsible as to who was allowed to purchase. They feared nutters tooled up and drunk.
‘I bought a .357 Automag, a fine and expensive automatic with no gas leak so that with sub-sonic ammo, it was muted if not whisper quiet. Unfortunately my experience of the damn things was not promising. One night at dinner in Acland Street, St. Kilda, I excused myself to fetch some papers from my car. Nearby I came across five louts laying into some poor kid who was t
oothless and in the gutter. I took one of the pistols from my Fiat (they have a little stash glove-box), screwed on the fat silencer for effect and walked to the group and waved the thing about.
‘To my surprise, it was the kid in the gutter who spoke first: “Mind yer own fucking business,” he spat out, struggling to his knees. “What’s it to you!”’
I went back to my meal.
‘I realised bang-bangs were more trouble than they were worth. Hung up and buried, reserved only for special occasions.’
But giving up guns did not mean giving up ‘the life’, despite discreet warnings from a network of well-connected friends, some of them lawyers.
Looking back, the message was clear, he admits: quit before the police get serious. Even when warned of a taskforce, Operation Aries, set up to snare him and his accomplice Michael Sullivan, he ignored it. He knew they were tapping telephones but he wanted to play the game.
Drugs and money gave him false confidence. The result: after a marathon trial in 1983, a tough prison sentence imposed to send a message to intelligent, educated young people who should know better than to flout the law. Inside, he wrote a fluent inside account of prison life published by the Australian Financial Review but any remorse was strictly for show. Apart, he says, from his guilt over Clelia’s death. If it hadn’t been for him, she would never have been jailed at Fairlea, where a fire killed her – along with the South American girlfriend of his friend and partner-in-crime, Sullivan, a former world-class pole vaulter who had turned to drugs after injury crippled his athletic career.
When he was paroled in 1993, McMillan pretended to go straight but in secret plotted to beat the system. The trouble was, the system had changed, so that when he went back to his old false passport trick, the police were watching. They’d been tipped off by a former jailmate who said McMillan was ‘the smartest crook he’d ever met’. But apparently not smart enough to quit.
McMillan’s charm, cultured accent and intelligence grated on police. A retired detective who worked on the case told the authors: ‘We let him go to Thailand and get picked up there because we thought he might get hanged.’
It was a harsh call but they almost got their wish. When Thai police, tipped off by their Australian counterparts, grabbed McMillan in possession of drugs just before Christmas in 1993, the best he could hope for would be to have the mandatory death sentence commuted to 99 years – if he survived a couple of years in irons, which many didn’t.
He didn’t intend to stay long enough to find out.
AS jailbreaks go, it was pure Bollywood. When McMillan checked out of the ‘Bangkok Hilton’ one August night in 1996, it was thought no European had successfully escaped from Klong Prem in living memory, although some inmates had been caught – or died – trying.
McMillan, then 40, had first bribed his way into a cell with four prisoners on the first floor of a two-storey block. Then began an elaborately nonchalant period of preparation. They built a bookshelf in the cell with a heavy plank that would be vital to the plan. In a craft workshop elsewhere in the prison they made robust wooden frames for pictures that would never be framed. And through a network of discreet friends – including a loyal girlfriend, a jazz singer, and an outwardly respectable Melbourne accountant – he organised various items that would be vital when the day came. Among them were the smuggled hacksaw blades he and a strong helper would use to weaken the window bars on the night of the escape. After breaking a couple of bars, they wedged the plank between two others to form an overhanging beam. Then they looped his ‘rope’ – a coil of webbing used for craft – over the plank well away from the outside wall, so McMillan could let himself down silently, without touching the loose tiles on the wall and creating a racket that would alarm the guards – or nosy inmates. First, of course, he had to squeeze his lean, oiled torso through the gap. His Scandinavian accomplice stayed behind, preferring to face punishment for assisting than take the risk of being killed or captured in the escape attempt.
McMillan slipped past sleeping guards to the hobby room, retrieved tools and other ‘props’, including a roll of heavy gaffer tape that he used to rig a ladder by taping the picture frames to bamboo poles — and scaled the inner five-metre wall. Then he cut barbed wire, crawled under razor wire, carried his ladder across open ground and used it to cross the stinking open sewer inside the outer wall. Finally, he scaled the outer wall, praying as he climbed over electrified cables that rubber gloves and rubber soles would save him. He lowered himself the final nine-metre drop with the rope just as the sun rose.
So far, so lucky. But as a Westerner he risked challenge from guards arriving for work. The fake, black-painted balsa-wood ‘handgun’ he’d carried as a bluff was little use in daylight. It was time for his other secret weapon — a compact umbrella.
Working on the theory that desperate escapees do not use umbrellas, he opened the brolly, held it close to his face and strolled off to find a taxi. It worked – but there were plenty of barriers ahead.
‘It was astonishing to feel how quickly I divorced myself from the prison standing across the road that morning, looking at the building,’ he later told the authors. ‘I knew that it was over, in the past, and in some odd way that all along I’d been a volunteer.
After picking up a doctored passport from a safe house, he went to the airport, using two taxis to confuse the trail. He directed the taxi to the arrivals area, suspecting the departure door would be watched, then prayed that the cash card he was carrying would deliver enough currency from an ATM to buy a ticket. The first machine he tried didn’t work. With seconds to spare he got the cash, bought a ticket and at 10.20am was on a Lufthansa flight to Singapore, boarding as prison guards arrived at the airport to look for him. Then he vanished.
Back at Klong Prem, cellmates were beaten for collusion; warders faced disciplinary action. Eight remaining Australian prisoners got leg chains.
The risk had been enormous – but he’d always thought it was worth it. ‘In Bangkok I would have received a death penalty which would have been reduced to life (or 99 years) after about two years on death row,’ he told the authors. ‘That meant being chained to a wall for the duration wearing welded leg irons.’
In the Australian Parliament seven months later, the future Australian Attorney-General, Robert McClelland, was praising the good work of Australia’s Embassy in Thailand when he said something that still amuses McMillan: ‘… a prisoner … escaped from the Thai jail in quite exceptional and athletic circumstances. In terms of mere escape, it was really quite an achievement. He took the opportunity after his escape of dropping a note to the Australian embassy to thank them for all their tremendous work and said that he hoped he had not caused them any embarrassment by his escape.’
By then, the only westerner ever to break out of Klong Prem and into Hansard had reached London via a rendezvous with his lover in France after hiding with powerful friends in the remote Baluchistan province of Pakistan, near the Afghani border. And he was plotting his next move from the city in which he had been born.
CAULFIELD Grammar has produced its share of the worthy and the notable – lord mayors, captains of industry, leaders in business and bureaucracy, politics and the professions, respected members of rowing clubs, racing clubs and Rotary clubs. But even the best schools have their wayward sons.
In Caulfield’s case, there was Christopher Skase, who flew high, dreamed of being a film mogul, then fell to Earth – exposed as a flim-flam man, disgraced before dying in exile. And there is Nick Cave, the Lou Reed of Wangaratta, whose musical and lyrical brilliance survived the dark influence of drugs to make his mark in the wider world.
Then there is David McMillan a.k.a. Westlake, Dearing, Poulter, Magilton, Rayner, Elton, Knox, Hunter and many more aliases.
Like the young Skase, McMillan was a dreamer and schemer with an eye for the main chance, an ear for information and a head for figures. Like Cave, he was a restless, creative spirit drawn to the dark side. He succumbe
d to the worst of both impulses — the desire for fast money, the weakness for drugs.
Bright, ambitious and a drug user, McMillan was barely 20 when he took on a growth industry. Instead of trying computers or honing talents as a photographer, cameraman and writer, he became a drug trafficker. At least, that’s the prosecution case; when McMillan was arrested in the early 1980s, his defence argued he was a harmless user who subsidised his habit with gold and gem smuggling. A jury acquitted on all but one charge of conspiracy to import heroin — but the judge didn’t buy it, sentencing him and two accomplices to 17 years.
That was in 1983. The trial of McMillan and his associates — the former elite athlete Michael Sullivan and Thai national Supahaus Chowdury — had run almost six months, and it took the jury a record eight days to reach its verdict. The result disappointed McMillan but didn’t surprise him. Before the trial, he orchestrated an audacious scheme to escape from Pentridge Prison in a hijacked helicopter, part of a plan involving disguises, an interstate truck ride hidden in cargo, a sea-going boat and a light plane.
A tip to police foiled what would have been another James Bond episode for a man who lived life as if it were an action screenplay, him playing the sort of rogue who’s supposed to get the girl, the money and the last laugh. The real story is a little bleaker.
HIS mother is old and a little vague now, dozing away her days in a Brighton unit after being the life of the party for decades. He still calls her ‘Rosie’. When she married his father John in the 1950s, she turned heads. In 1950s photographs she looks like Princess Grace of Monaco. They were Australians transplanted to London. John McMillan, after distinguished war service, managed Rediffusion Television and went on to receive a CBE. By the time David was two, the marriage was unravelling and the raffish Rosie had met an Italian film producer who sent her (with David and his sister Debbie) to Australia to have his baby, promising he’d send for them. He never did.
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