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 famil...

In the early 1980s, Brian O’Dea was operating a $100 million a year, 120-man drug smuggling business, and had developed a terrifying cocaine addiction. Under increasing threat from the DEA in 1986 for importing seventy-five tons of marijuana into the United States, he quit the trade–and the drugs–and began working with recovering addicts in Santa Barbara. Despite his life change, the authorities caught up with him years later and O’Dea was arrested, tried, and sentenced to ten years at Ter...