AN EX-DEALER AIMS FOR POT LUCK

Brian O'dea Spins Tales Of His Sordid Past As A Drug Smuggler In A
New Memoir Hitting Stores This Weekend

'My family was in the booze business. My father had 120 people
working for him, who were alcoholics, most of them. One day, he came
on to me about being a pot person, and selling pot and selling drugs . . ."

The story stops here. Brian O'Dea is telling it in his forthright
way, but suddenly he clams up and turns his attention to the
staircase beyond the kitchen table where he's sitting at his home in
east Toronto. A tape recorder is rolling, an interview under way. Out
of nowhere, a young fair-skinned, dark-haired boy has appeared,
interrupting the grown-up talk at the table.

"Ru," Mr. O'Dea says. He snaps his fingers, and the boy stops in his
tracks. It might be too late. The words "my family" and "alcoholics"
and "selling drugs" are out there, ringing in the silence that follows.

"Ru" is short for Rufus, Mr. O'Dea's son. The boy looks at his dad.
"Go up, buddy," Mr. O'Dea says. "Thank you," he adds when the child
obediently disappears. His voice drops to a whisper. "He doesn't know
anything at all, okay? He's just 9."

The mind-boggling nature of what this child does not yet know about
his father's past is enough to reduce almost every other parental
discussion to platitudinous small talk. "He knows something's going
on," Mr. O'Dea says, and he isn't referring to the whole Santa
Claus-North Pole business.

What's being withheld, for this moment anyway, are the details of Mr.
O'Dea's nearly unbelievable story, the life he lived before he
settled down with his third wife and underwent a metamorphosis,
turning into a family man, writer and television host/producer. He
knows, though, that soon he's going to have to fess up -- at 9, the
kid can read, and Mr. O'Dea's story is about to go public. His
memoir, High: Confessions of a Pot Smuggler, is set for release this
weekend. It reveals in minute detail the story of his past life -- of
which he first offered a public glimpse in 2001, when he placed an
unusual ad in a Toronto newspaper: "Having successfully completed a
10-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."

High tells the story of what led to the sentence, and what has
happened since then. These days, Mr. O'Dea, 57, works as the host of
Creepy Canada, OLN's top-rated show. But his life before he placed
the newspaper ad -- which drew more than 600 responses -- was
considerably different, as his new book makes clear. There's Mr.
O'Dea's hard-core drug addiction, for starters. Kicking cocaine was
the most difficult thing he has ever done in his life, he says,
telling the story of scoring a bag of coke after being clean for six
months. He put it in his pocket, and suddenly went into a panic,
"sweating everywhere, going crazy.

"I pulled it out of my pocket and I said to the guy, 'Look, no matter
what I say to you, don't ever give me this shit.' "

And of course there are the audacious drug-smuggling operations, for
which he's most famous, or notorious, depending on whether you're cop
or outlaw. Including the 50 tons of pot he and his crew unloaded from
a boat in broad daylight in Bellingham, Wash., in 1987. He and his
men knew they were being tailed by authorities, but they went ahead
with it -- the deal netted about $200-million on the streets.

But it's an episode that took place before that, when Mr. O'Dea hired
a plane to fly to Colombia, that makes you scratch your head and
wonder, what is it with this guy? Does he not know fear? The pilot
who was in on the deal had never flown a DC-6 before, but he was
confident, Mr. O'Dea says. He had read the instruction manual.

Still, it was a jolt on the way home for both the pilot and Mr.
O'Dea, when they crashed in the Caribbean. Through shark-infested
waters, the pair swam for their lives, behind them $3-million in
marijuana sinking to the seabed.

It was April, 1990, when the law caught up with him. An informant and
former business partner of Mr. O'Dea's had turned him in to U.S. drug
enforcement officials.

Just how he plans to fill in his son about this and some of the finer
details -- his childhood in Newfoundland, the priest at the Catholic
boys school ("come into my office . . ." -- is a question that has
been pressing on him with increasing urgency.

With Rufus out of earshot, Mr. O'Dea resumes his story. He moves on
to the subject of Canada's drug laws. "I choose not to smoke pot
right now, okay?" he declares. "But not because the government tells
me not to, that's for goddamn sure. The government's not my daddy --
so stay out of my life, government."

Back in his drug heyday, his mother, at least, understood his
position. When his father, who was John O'Dea, political leader of
the United Newfoundland Party and second-generation owner and
operator of the Newfoundland Brewery, dumped on him for being
involved with drugs, she defended her son. "You've got a bunch of
alcoholics working for you," he recalls her telling her husband.
"They probably all beat up their wives. The worst thing that happens
with the people Brian deals with is they eat too much or they watch
too much TV."

As for his father, Mr. O'Dea says, "He didn't like it, but he had a
better understanding of it."

The following morning, he's in touch by e-mail.

"Susannah and I sat with Rufus and had a long chat about the past,
and about our lives today," he writes. "He came away from there so
relieved, because he knew there was something big . . . of which he
felt completely uninformed and shut out. Inclusion is better. . . .
To share with him his dad's story . . . the regrets, the highs and
lows, is to inform him further of the possible depths and potential
heights of a life, any life, and it informs him that, while mistakes
may be made, there is a way home . . . Peace and love, B."