The Green Lambot Michael Sullivan at the wheel. They waved to each other and it's all good. And that's the last time he sees the Lambo. And that's the end of that, you would think, But unbeknown to Joe Tranto, a lot is going on in Michael Sullivan's life. He met the drug carrying guy at the maternity hospital in Oast Melbourne, knowing that the police are going to be very reluctant to start a shooting war in a maternity hospital.
I'm Andrew Rule. This is life and Crimes. We often delve back into history for stories and when came out of the blue. Recently, I got a message from a listener called Joe Taranto, and Joe shared a story with me that I thought was well worth sharing with everybody. And it goes something like this, Joe Taranto, we must remember he's a respectable member of the community. He's a hard working, white collar guy who's never done a wrong thing in his life. So let's just get that straight
right at the start. But Joe did have a brush with criminality way back, and this is what happened. Joe was a hard working fellow. He worked for the de luxe paint company. The headquarters were in Mulgrave may well still be in Mulgrave for a liner, unless it's now made in China. And he had a good job there, sort of in the computer area, and he obviously earned
pretty handy money even though he was relatively young. He was turning thirty and he was in the process of courting a young woman at work there hadn't yet got married and had children, and he thought, I'm turning thirty, I want to buy an exotic Italian car. He knew that his father wouldn't approve of such a thing, and Joe thought, I want to buy something like a Lamborghini. So he pulls together some money and he looks around the marketplace at the time, and we're tooking nineteen seventy seven.
It's a fairwhile ago. Joe's now grandfather. Back then he wasn't, and he decides to buy a Lamborghini Urrako, which was one of those really nifty, sharp little Lambos made at that time. Mid engine motor two seater, goes as if it's a cutcat and corners as if it's on rails, an astonishing vehicle for that era. When Holden's and Fords were fairly agricultural. It was a revelation to driver car
like that. It was just a few years old when he bought it, very low mileage, probably a seventy three model. I think they came out and he is delighted with it. It's a vivid green Lamborghini. He's just this stage. He's still living down on the Bay side somewhere, and he drives it around a cash and cleans it and it's beautiful, and he's going around with the girl that would later become his wife. I think her name was Jennifer. And
it's really really good fun having this Lamborghini. But of course they get married and in rapid order they buy a big new house with a big new mortgage down at Mentaliza, and I think his bride, Jennifer, points out that perhaps it would be more sensible to invest the money tied up in the Lamborghini, which is seventeen thousand
dollars a fair bit of money in that era. Let me say, I know that because my first year of work in seventy five, I earned about three thousand, so it was quite a bit of money for a young person in those days. He agrees, says heah, right, I'll sell my Lambeau while it's still worth something. And one of the reasons he agrees is that he knows it still has some value. He knows that it's probably gone up a bit in the market because they're rare, they're
a collector's item. He's kept it in perfect order. In fact, he took it back to be serviced by the guy that had sold it to him, this European car dealer guy, and it was really good. So he advertises it in a large newspaper that ran classified advertisements. You will know which one, and it was in the for sale columns, but it was probably the only Lamborghini Uraco for sale
that work. He gets one bite. He gets one telephone call from a prospective buyer, and the guy on the other end of the line, friendly, bright sort of blog says, I'll come down and look at your Lamboat, and they make an agreement to have a look at it. The ad was on Saturday, I think the next day or Monday, the guy turns up to look at the Lamboat and this fellow turns up down at Joe's house. He turns up in a big black American car, which was unusual
you know it's not not everyone was driving those. And he's a youngish guy, guy that's even younger than Joe. And he's really well dressed. He's got an athletic, good looking guy. He's beautifully dressed. Immaculate was the word Joe used. Quite an impressive fellow, and he's very easy to meet. He's quite charming, good conversationalist. Chat chat chat, nice line of chat. And he looks over the lambeau said, oh look, I love the look of it. I'm pretty keen on it.
Can I bring my wife back, you know, whenever this week and have another look and if it's okay, we'll get it checked over. And it's okay, I'll buy it now. That is the sort of conversation you often have with tire kickts, people who come and look at good cars and then go away and they're never going to buy them. They're just looking at cars for basically a way to kill a lazy weekend. But anyway, this fellow turns up again.
He turns up driving an Alpha Romeo a few days later, and with him are two very beautiful young women of what Joe took to be Spanish origin, are in fact probably both the Colombians, I think South Americans, and one he thinks was the buyer's wife, and the other he thinks was the bias wife's sister, so wife and sister in law. The buyer's name, or the name he gave him was Michael Sullivan, which turns out to be his real name. Astoundingly, it was his real name, because as
it turns out, he was quite a colorful character. And Michael Sullivan says, yep, love it. They had a drive. They all four got in the car. You know, there's a little dickie set in the back, and they managed to fit in and went for a drive. Yeah, it's great, it's wonderful. We'll just get it checked over by the mechanic guy. And in fact, Sullivan said, we can take it to your bloke. It's fine because he services it. He can do it, and if it's got a I'll
buy it. So Joe is asking twenty two thousand dollars. Now that's five more than he pay for him because he thinks it's gone up a bit, And Michael Sullivan, and this is intriguing, did not try at all to haggle, even though it was really a bit over the top. The car was probably worth twenty and Michael Sullivan didn't haggle one bit. He just handed over one thousand dollars in cash and said, I'll pay you twenty one with a bank check. And that's what happened. He pays with
a bank check. Bank check is bank and he picks up the Lambeau anyway he goes, and that's that. You would think this is just before Christmas of nineteen eighty, and it's probably five weeks before Christmas nineteen and eighty when this transaction happens. On Christmas Day of nineteen eighty, our man Joe Taranto has driven his uncle and aunt home to somewhere on the other side out of town Mooney Ponds, I think, because they'd had Christmas dinner and
couldn't drive whatever, And he drove them home. And he is driving down the Pan Highway on his way back to Mounteliza and he sees the Green Lambo, and the Green Lambot's got Michael Sullivan at the wheel. They wave to each other and it's all good, and they drive beside each other for a while and that's the last time he sees the Lambo and that's the end of that you would think, but unbeknown to Joe Tranto, a lot is going on in Michael Sullivan's life. Michael Sullivan
is a very interesting character. We already know he's young and immaculately dressed and buying expensive cars. In this conversation, already we've met the fact that he's driving a big black American car and Alfa Romeo and he's just support a Lamborghini and this guy's in his twenties. In conversation, he has told Joe Taranto that he's owned thirty four cars so far in his life, which is a lot if you've twenty six or something, and means he's turning
them over very rapidly, several per year. Expensive cars. Now, that is a sign of someone with a lot of disposable income, and that is exactly what Michael Sullivan was. And what Joe Taranto doesn't know is that Michael Sullivan is the let's say, business partner of a scullywag called David McMillan, whose name we have mentioned in these podcasts before. McMillan the villain, which he very much was. And David McMillan was a very smooth character, very clever guy. He
was a graduate. In fact, he was expelled from Corfield Grammar Corfield Grammar School which is the school that produced Nick Cave the musician, and Christopher Scase, the disgraced businessman, and the late Lord Mayor and big man around Melbourne, Ron Walker. All these people went to Corawfield gramm and they were pretty sharp operator some of them, and of them probably McMillan was the most sharp and most villainous.
And McMillan was a very naughty lad. He was charming, he was articulate, he had all the social graces, but he was a scoundrel and he would rather turn a dishonest dollar than earn two honors dollars. He was that sort of bloke in just nature of the beast. He'd
actually been born in England of Australian parents. His dad had been an officer in a I think he was an Air Force office anyway, as an officer in World War Two, and was quite a distinguished former soldier or a former military person who got a job after the war in the I think early BBC television days. McMillan's mother was quite a well known beauty. She was a beautiful woman and talented and clever and all that sort
of stuff. And he'd been born in London, of life there, and then later on his beautiful mother had decided to go back to Australia, to Melbourne, and she took him and his sister, young David and his sister Debbie, and she had a series of relationships. But she was married at some stage to a fellow called Nashed, and they had a boy called Simon who became the very very fine journalist Simon Nash, who used to work at the Age newspaper and at the ABC and became a very
respected and fine documentary maker in Australia. And so this is the pedigree of this David McMillan, who is the business partner, let us say, of Michael Sullivan, the man who's bought the Lamborghini. And I hear you think, well, why is he telling us all this? Well you need to know the setup. The setup is that McMillan and Sullivan and a couple of very beautiful young women are living some of the time in a house down near
the Bay. I'm going to say Sandringham, one of those sort of places, perhaps one in Brighton, perhaps another one in South Thierra, they might have had one in Carlton. They had a range of properties around the place, and they would turn up here or there or the other one, and they would always be driving these exotic cars, and every few weeks would be a different car, you know. And at one of these addresses, the old chap next door, former policeman, retired policeman, he starts to take a bit
of notice. He thinks these people are young, and they're beautiful, and they're obviously very wealthy because they do nothing but get up at ten o'clock in the morning and by go shopping and buy lots of stuff. And they're always driving these exotic cars. And there is no sign of a day job. It doesn't look as it's any of them work. They don't send to go anywhere except to
go shopping or traveling or having holidays. That is very so, being a nosy old ex copper, he puts one a month together and gets eleven and he works out that probably they're up to no good, that they've got an
illicit form of income, and indeed they did have. And he started to observe them and note registration numbers, comings and goings and all the rest of it, and he tells he's very good friends in the police force, these former colleagues, and they are getting a bit keen on the idea of the police are getting pretty keen on the idea of detecting drug dealers, especially high end drug dealers, and they look into these people and these fellas Is
McMillan and Sullivan are purportedly antique dealers with an import export sort of business bringing stuff in, but they're not selling a lot of antiques. They now again bring in a container load of something, often from Asia, and appears the police that they're not selling nearly enough to be making the sort of money that they obviously have. And the police formed the same conclusion as the old retired
guy that they're drug dealers. And so it's becoming politically feasible to spend a bit of time and money looking
at high level inputs at this stage. So the Victorian State Police Force, for the first time ever i think, formed a joint task force with i think the Federal Police and they had this Joint Task Force JTF and they called it Operation ares as in aies Ares and they really got busy with these people and started to watch them and they discovered that McMillan, who was sort of the driving force, he was the brains behind the show,
was producing a lot of false identities. He did that thing that was I think probably hit the public imagination in the day of the Jackal, where the operator goes to a graveyard and finds the grave site of someone who died in infancy, a little kid who's born at roughly the right time, roughly the same age, same time as as the operator, and the operator says, oh, here we are Jacques Smith, born in nineteen fifty one whatever whatever, and they take down the details and they could use
the birth date to obtain a birth certificate, a legit birth certificate for that person. But because nothing was computerized in those days, no one actually knows that that person is dead because it's not really recorded around the whole system. And what McMillan was able to do was to build
a whole lot of profiles from dead children. Essentially that he had bank accounts, he had credit card deals and drivers licenses, whatever, built up from these dead people who didn't exist, and he made them exist and he turned them into passports. And so what he had was a suite of passports with his face on them with various names, real names of people that had lived and died twenty years earlier. And he was able to do the same thing for Sullivan and for the women that they were
associated with, and others for other couriers. He had dozens of passports in the end and bank accounts and that was his currency for running drugs because he could then work out and remember this is pre computers, and what he did was astonishing because he would get great big books full of airline timetables, lots of fine print, thousands of line timetables, you know, across the world here A to B tw C, TOD and he would be able to work out that a courier could fly from Melbourne
to Sydney to Singapore to Thailand, then buy some heroin and then switch passports and fly to London and sell on some drugs or whatever, and then switch passports again and obscure their trail around the world by switching passports, reticketing each time in a different name, so that when you flew back into Australia escorting a big heap of heroin, it didn't show on a custom's flagging system you having been in Thailand or in the Golden Triangle, because in
fact you were flying back on a different name and ticket and passport than the one you flew out on. In fact, you might have changed it two or three times while you're away. And this way he would fly back into Australia looking as if he'd just visited London or something like that, which is regarded as a pretty innocent sort of trip, or Scandinavia, these sort of destinations. It was a pretty clever device and it worked very
well while it worked. But of course Operation Areas they started to watch him, and they watched all these different tricks. He had this other trick with suitcases, identical suitcases, and he'd have a courier with one that'd have the drugs in it. He'd have another one that was identical but without drugs in it. When they're on the carousel at the airport, he could pick up the other one, the one with the drugs in it, and walk out with it innocently, And of course if the alarms went off,
he'd go, well, it's not mine. I just looked like mine. I'm sorry, it's all a mistake. So he pulled a Lese Swifties, but the police were on the job. We've probably been through the mc millan story before. But in the end, he sort of knew they were onto him. They moved against him. He knew they were following, but he's still he knew the police for following him around Melbourne, and they knew that this Thai courier guy was flying
into Melbourne. The police watched this guy fly into I think Sydney and then go out to something like Broken Hill on a bus or something, and then Too Adelaide and then Perth and then back to Melbourne. And he did all this stuff to break his trip up to sort of evade detection, but the police stuck with him. They had these undercover guys and all sorts. And when our man Chowdery, his name was Chowdery, this Thai courier who was sort of a partner in the business. He
was their TI connection. Let's say he gets to Melbourne and stays at the Hilton Hotels. Then was when police break into this guy's room. He's gone down for dinner or something. They break in, They get an electric drill and they drill into the bottom of the suitcase and they pull the drill out and there's the white powder on the drill and they taste it or take some
to test it. Beauty, it's heroin. So they knew they had the right guys with the gear, but they still took a lot of catching because McMillan sort of knew the police were onto him, and he played this big chess game with him. What he did for the actual transfer of the drugs and money, the swapper Rooney. He pulled this thing knowing he was being watched. He met the drug carrying guy at the maternity hospital in Nurse Melbourne.
It was the big maternity hospital in Nase Melbourne. Knowing that the police are going to be very reluctant to start a shooting war in a maternity hospital. So he drives a car in a lame there's the hospital. They had this sort of lameway through the basement of it, roughly between two bits of it, and he puts the windows down on the car and as he drives through, somebody throws her the money in, and they throw the
drugs out to somebody who catches it. And they did it like that and they were able to make their escape even though they knew the police were watching them. They got away with that for a little while. Eventually, of course, the police nailed them. They were charged with lots and lots of stuff. They were charged with multiple conspiracies to import all this stuff, lots of stuff, and it was a very long trial. So we had McMillan and the Lambeau driving Sullivan and the tie guy Chowdery.
They were the main guys, but they also had all these people on the periphery. There was another dozen of them, and they faced all these different charges. There was I think a record court hearing took one hundred days of court time, which was a lot. That's twenty weeks and five months worth. And it went on and on, and the jury came back and it actually found these main principles not guilty of everything except one major charge. They discounted this charge and that charge, and this charge and
that charge. But in the end they nailed them on one major charge, which was enough to put them in Pentridge. And there they are the cell door slams. They're in Pentridge with the real bad guys of tough guys with tattoos and all the rest of it, and they've sort of fish out of water in there. But McMillan said, never fear, We will buy our way out. We've got a lot of money out in the world. He had an accountant in Carlton, a man called Max who's no longer with us. Max had his access to very large
amounts of cash and could assist in that regard. And Sullivan's alleged sister, Sullivan had an older sister, well that's what they called her, and it's well held it was actually his mother. This woman that he thought was his twenty year older sister was most likely actually biologically his mother, and it had been one of those situations whereas a young woman she had had this child and pretended that it was her own mother's baby, and so on and
so forth. And Sullivan's alleged older sister, really his mother helped them quite a lot, and so did various other people, some because they liked him, such as a lawyer I know that was very friendly with them, and others who were They knew journalists, they knew people in showbies, they knew lawyers, they knew a lot of people, and they've been friendly with a lot of people right around the social spectrum. And McMillan said this thing up. It was
a great idea. It came unstuck, and his idea was that they were going to be rescued from Penridge by helicopter, and his people out in the world had got hold of a rogue English Air Force or Army Marine helicopter pilot and he came and stayed at I think the Southern Cross Hotel or the Winds Windsor Hotel, I think it was. That they had this chopper lined up to hire it and they were going to do this touch and go landing in the exercise yards or playing fields
out of Penridge. Pentridge in those days had football grounds and all sorts of stuff, lots of area acres of ground, and he was just going to bring the chopper over and do a touch and go landing and they were going to jump on it and they were going to fly off, and they had this whole plan. It was wonderful. It was pure James Bond, and it might nearly have worked,
but there was a hole in the bucket. And the hole in the bucket was that somebody somewhere must have had their phone tapped or whatever, or someone sold them out or whatever, and the policer knew this was on, and the policer or in the next room at the Windsor Hotel, listening to the chopper pilot as he entertained one of the waiters in the room, and they realized
that they were on the job. And while they had the chopp a pilot where they wanted him, the chopper wasn't going to be landing in Pentridge, so they were able to stimy the escape plot at the chopper level. The chopper never got to take off and grab them.
Now McMillan's plan, had it come off, was this chopper lifts off, takes them just you know, a couple of k's across the suburbs, which it would do in a matter of a minute, and land at a little sports ground in Coburg or something like that, and they were going to run into a nearby flat which was all set up with expert makeup artists in there to disguise them, total disguise, false mustaches, bids, whatever it would take, and then they were going to I think the idea was
they're going to sit in a boat, a really good boat, like a twenty five foot thirty foot or something good enough to go in the ocean, big big motor, whole bit seaworthy thing, and it was on the back of a semi trailer, and the idea was going to hop in that and cover themselves over and a truck would pull out and drive up the highway north through New South Wales up to Queensland somewhere, and the idea was they would launch the boat as if they were going
fishing and go to New Guinea or Indonesia or both one then the other, and escape across the world. Total James Bond fantasy, which actually could have worked, because that is the way that a Malaysian prints kidnapped his own children from Melbourne some years later, same trick. He got the kids, and he got him in an ocean going fast boat when the weather was good, and got the Malaysia and they lived there happily, i think, for many a long year in their gold plated castle in Malaysia.
And of course Tony Mockbell got across Australia where he had a boat delivered by truck, and he was able to get in a hidden compartment in that boat and sailed from western Australia all the way across the world to Europe, to Greece, in fact the Mediterranean. So this plan of McMillan's was not so crazy. That's that story. But how does this come back to Lambeau Man. Well, all that stuff sort of passed Joe Taranto by. He didn't realize that he'd sold his lamboat to such a
scoundrel as Michael Sullivan. And it was only many years later. And let me say this, it was only as we record this in January. It was only just before Christmas last December, so it's a matter of weeks ago. Joe Taranto, who is no longer thirty, he is seventy something. He's got a bit of time to kill before the grandkids turn up for their holidays. And he thought, I'll watch a crime show on the Telly, and he looks through some crime shows and he decides to watch one about
David McMillan. It was in fact one of the Underbelly series and was called Underbelly The Man who Got Away, And that show, that dramatized show was made about David McMillan and Michael Sullivan. And when he watched that show only three weeks ago, he thought that Michael Sullivan, that's the same name as the man who bought my Lamborghini. Oh, my god, I sold my car to these people all
those years ago. I didn't realized that I was dealing with probably Australia's biggest and best ever heroin importers as they were then. Of course, he were some huge heroin importers later, but as of nineteen seventy seven seventy seventy nine, I don't think there were any bigger or better or more busy than McMillan the Villain and his mate Michael Sullivan.
Michael Sullivan incidentally a former champion pole vaulter. He'd been a champion pole vaulter as a youth, as a junior athlete who had set some astonishing high mark I'm going to say sixteen feet in the old but an astonishingly high mark. As a sixteen year old, injured himself in a training mishap or whatever did his knee badly. In those days, they weren't good at knee surgery, and that ended his career as an athlete. His old coach told me,
assured me. He said he would have gone to the Olympics and vaulted for Australia, and he was good enough to vault against anybody in the world. But the injury finished him, and it meant that he was in pain, and he got keen on the painkillers to kill the pain, and that led him into morphine and then into heroine, and that's how he got involved in drugs because of the injury. And in the end, the drugs filled a hole in his life, that hole that was left when
he could no longer be an elite athlete. And that is sort of it, except there we've got Joe Taranto, still married to the lovely Jennifer who persuaded him to sell the Lambeau all those years ago so that they could spend the money tiling their driveway and putting in a pool, which was good, really probably a good use
of their money. Apart from one thing. I noticed that if you look up that particular model of Lamborghini now they bring anything up to about one hundred and twenty thousand dollars, And so if Joe Taranto still had his flawless and immaculate Lamborghini, it would be worth six figures. These days, he tells me, he drives a very plain, sensible BMW Sudan, and no more attendant sports cars for Joe,
no more Lamborghinis for Joe Taranto, respectable retired gentlemen. No more for David McMillan either, because if he's not in jail in the UK, where he's last known to be living, he soon will be, because he's gone in and out of jail for his whole life, including that great story which we have told him before of him getting out of the Bangkok Hilton, which is the name for the
notorious jail in Thailand. He became the first Westerner ever to break out of that jail successfully, and he broke out of it carrying an umbrella and walking away on the basis he said that escape prisoners do not carry umbrellas and that's why he did it. No more and ambiguinnis for him his life is not so good these days. And no more for Michael Sullivan because he's left us.
He died for old Michael, and so the only winner in this one really is Joe Taranto, who's still got the nice house, in ventalizer and having a nice life. Thanks for listening. Life and Crimes is a Sunday Herald's Sun production for True Crime Australia. Our producer is Johnty Burton. For my columns, features and more. Go to herold'sun dot com dot au forward slash Andrew Rule. For advertising inquiries, go to news podcasts sold at news dot com dot au.
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