TONS OF POT AND A GRAIN OF SALT

Confessions of a Pot Smuggler
By Brian O'Dea,
Random House Canada, 356 pages, $34.95

The dust jacket reproduces a classified ad than ran for six days in
Canada's other national daily (The Globe and Mail declined it).
"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."

On offer were these business qualifications: "I co-owned and
participated in the executive level management of 120 people
worldwide in a successful pot smuggling venture with revenues in
excess of US $100 million annually."

Brian O'Dea, the author of this ad, did not disclose to prospective
employers that for much of his 22-year trafficking career he was
stoned out of his tree, but that's apparent from a reading of his
memoir, High: Confessions of a Pot Smuggler. Not unusually, his diet
for an evening in Bogota might have included "a forty of rum, a few
joints, and several fat lines."

If he is to be believed, his addiction to cocaine grew to mythic and
dangerous proportions. Example: "My insane coke mind convulsed in
fury. I screamed and ranted. . . . I had fifty handguns stashed all
around the house, including a machine gun with a silencer on it."

It's not revealed whether the $1,300 ad paid off with a job, but it
earned O'Dea international media attention and let him reposition
himself as a man reformed ("I have spoken in schools to thousands of
kids"). The classified is typical of the hubris that many readers of
this book may find to be O'Dea's most conspicuous trait. It has been
speculated that in his heyday, O'Dea was the world's wealthiest
Newfoundlander, but his is not a rags-to-riches story. He was born in
comfort, of a prestigious family. His father, John R. O'Dea, owned
the Newfoundland Brewing Company and served in Canada's Parliament;
his uncle was Newfoundland's lieutenant-governor.

O'Dea took an early wrong bend, pilfering cash from parents and
siblings, ultimately thousands of dollars. He discovered marijuana in
the 1960s, and was soon peddling it on college campuses. He graduated
to hash from Britain, high-potency pot from Thailand and, ultimately,
kilos of cocaine from Colombia.

Late in this tumultuous career, he found himself reborn "as an
instant Christian cheerleader." Somehow that didn't deter him from
launching the most massive marijuana smuggling operation in the
history of Washington State, employing high-tonnage fishing boats and
a fleet of tractor-trailer trucks. Much of the contraband ended up in
New York, "where I picked up millions of dollars from strangers on
Manhattan street corners with suitcases full of cash."

The U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency had him in its sights for several
years, and after one embarrassing near-miss was finally able to
indict him in 1990. He remained on bail until mid-1991, then, after a
plea deal, became the unlikely beneficiary of a meagre sentence (by
U.S. standards) of 10 years in California's Terminal Island Prison.

Alternate chapters of High are set in this overcrowded slammer, where
small-time drug dealers unluckier than O'Dea were serving more than
four decades for lesser crimes than his. These chapters are
mercifully brief, but their purpose escapes me, unless it is to decry
(rightly) the harsh treatment of hostages to draconian U.S. drug laws.

O'Dea, according to the front jacket cover, "did ten years' hard time
at Terminal Island." In fact (do writers of these blurbs actually
read the book?), O'Dea spent one year there, then in the fall of
1992, was repatriated to Springhill Penitentiary in Nova Scotia. "A
year later, I was flown to St. John's, Newfoundland, to take up
residence four nights a week in a halfway house." He won full parole
in 1995.

I know this fellow, O'Dea. I've never met him, but I know him well.
In my years as a criminal lawyer, dealers moved in and out of my
office as if through revolving doors, and many were Newfoundlanders
trying their luck on the Left Coast. So I didn't jerk upright when I
found an array of former clients, most of them now living lives
redeemed (though one is a lawyer), showing up in this memoir.

(Maybe because of its long, delightful history of rum-running,
Newfoundland boasts many of our nation's most adept and brashly
daring dope smugglers. Like O'Dea, many come from respected, even
prominent families.)

"Some names have been changed to protect the unindicted," says the
small print on the copyright page. But not that many, and not the
swashbuckling Gary Sexton, whom O'Dea describes as "tougher than a
junkyard dog on steroids." Early into a 10-year sentence, Sexton told
me, he single-handedly formed a Junior Chamber of Commerce chapter in
Dorchester Penitentiary, was granted a day pass to attend a Jaycee
convention in Halifax, slipped his guards, and was quickly in
Colombia, engineering a 17-ton pot deal. "I didn't like Gary and
didn't like the way he had to be danced around," O'Dea complains.
Professional rivalry in the smuggling game.

There are a few scattered gems in O'Dea's otherwise blustery prose:
"It sometimes seems that we Newfies are destined to stand around
looking inward at each other, huddled together as though around a
fire for warmth, our backs to a dark and unknowable sea." But there's
not much in the way of riveting insight here. He speaks of "demons
that had lurked in the dark corners of my childhood," referring to
incidents of sexual abuse at Mount Cashel, though the nexus to a life
of crime remains ambiguous.

Given that he confesses that "this account of a life [is] not always
characterized by perfect truthfulness," one might detect a slightly
self-pious note in an e-mail he sent to a reporter: "I tell my story
not because I want to relate some story of machismo and bravado. But
because I want those who are troubled, disassociated, alone,
frightened or broken as I was . . . to know that there is a way home."

Give me a grain of salt.

[SIDEBAR]

For William Deverell's own fictional take on Newfie pot smugglers,
see High Crimes, newly republished in paperback. His website is
http://www.deverell.com.