High
Confession of an International Drug Smuggler
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- $14.99
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
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 Terminal Island Federal Penitentiary in Los Angeles Harbor. A born storyteller, O’Dea candidly recounts his incredible experiences from the streets of Bogotá with a false-bottomed suitcase lined with cocaine, to the engine compartment of an old DC-6 whose engines were failing over the Caribbean, to the cell blocks overcrowded with small-time dealers who had fallen victim to the justice system’s perverse bureaucracy of drug sentencing. Weaving together extracts from his prison diary with the vivid recounting of his outlaw years and the dawning recognition of those things in his life that were worth living for, High tells the remarkable story of a remarkable man in the late-1980s drug business and why he walked away.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this wistful but honest look at a life subsumed by drugs, now-reformed smuggler O'Dea (a Canadian film producer) pulls back the curtain on the machinations and motivations of a hugely successful, outrageously addicted 1980s drug trafficker whose redemption came too late to save him from prison. Haunted by childhood sexual abuse, O'Dea found escape in drugs and alcohol, eventually building a life around them. O'Dea's over-the-top abuse (an estimated 1000 tabs of acid in five years) and spiral of shame (he would "spend considerable energy avoiding" his brothers, sisters and parents) seemed, paradoxically, to push his illicit activities (and the justifications for them) further. Stories illustrating the lengths to which the smuggling ring would go, and their enormous potential for disaster, include a $100,000 plane rental which O'Dea almost co-pilots into the sea (steering by the lights of the fishing boats below, instead of the stars). Told through a prison-block framing device that returns again and again to the call, "Cuenta! Counting B Range!", O'Dea maintains a sense of numbing repetition that resonates with the addiction narrative and keeps the drug cowboy tales grounded. Throughout his life's many ups and downs, however, O'Dea remains a charming, relatable narrator you can't help but root for.