How a privileged son of Newfoundland became one of the world's most efficient marijuana traffickers — and then gave it all up.
An intriguing ad ran in the Employment Wanted section of a Toronto newspaper in February 2001:
FORMER MARIJUANA SMUGGLER
Having successfully completed a ten-year sentence, incident free, for importing 75 tons of marijuana into the United States, I am now seeking a legal and legitimate means to support myself and my family.
Business experience: Owned and operated a successful fishing business -- multi-vessel, one airplane, one island and processing facility. Simultaneously owned and operated a fleet of tractor-trailer trucks conducting business in the western United States. During this time I also participated in the executive level management of 120 people worldwide in a successful pot-smuggling venture with revenues in excess of $100-million US annually...
Among the advertiser's references was the US district attorney who was responsible for his arrest in 1990 and who had reminded the trial judge that the offence could carry the death penalty. The ad made news around the world and also captured the resilient spirit of Brian O'Dea, a remarkable man who, even in his darkest hours of addiction and criminality, never lost the love of family and friends.
The O'Dea family is well known in government and legal circles in Newfoundland. But the family's prominence could not protect their middle son from sexual abuse at the hands of priests. Brian became the black sheep, and turned to drugs in his late teens for the money, for the excitement, and for an escape from himself. Twenty-five years later, when the cops finally knocked on his door at the end of a massive DEA investigation, he had given up the trade and was a recovered cocaine addict working as a drug addiction counsellor in Santa Barbara. He had finally begun to understand how he had ended up in the drug world. He was tried and sentenced to ten years to be served at Terminal Island federal prison in Los Angeles Harbor.
High interweaves extracts of his prison diary — perceptive, funny and alarming all at once — with the vivid recounting of his outlaw years and the dawning recognition of those things in his life that were worth living for.
The Dawn of an Old Day
SANTA BARBARA, CALIFORNIA. Eight o'clock in the morning, 1990. I lay in bed, thinking about the hospital. A heroin addict named Danny had come in the night before. I could still feel the pressure of his head on my shoulder as he sobbed his wretched heart out. I'd started to work with him, then left about midnight. I wanted to go back that morning, see how he was doing. Poor bastard.
A hard knock on the door. Just from the knock, I knew this day was my day.
I got up, put on the bathrobe my friend Molly had made for me — a black and white thing — and went to open the door. There were venetian blinds on the windows. They were partly closed, but through the slats I could just see the hands and the handguns. I felt this strong desire to disappear. I opened the door. One guy held up a badge with one hand — a Drug Enforcement Agency star.
"My name is Gary Annunziata, and I'm with the Drug Enforcement Agency," he said. "Your name Brian O'Dea?"
"I wish it wasn't, but it is."
