Brian O'Dea is a noted Canadian smuggler. Born in Newfoundland, he first worked as a minor drug dealer in the province. Moving up he became an importer of hashish to Canada from the United Kingdom. After being arrested on a minor charge in Canada he served a brief sentence before moving to Jamaica. where he coordinated marijuana smuggling operations going from Colombia to the United States.
Moving to California, he became one of the leaders in exporting marijuana from Southeast Asia in the years after the Vietnam War. Using fishing vessels as cover he brought boatloads of drugs into the northeastern United States. Controlling a trucking company, two hundred-foot fishing vessels, and a workforce of 120, O'Dea imported hundreds of millions of dollars worth of marijuana to ports in Washington State at the business' peak in the early 1980s. He and his partners would then sell the drugs throughout the U.S. By some estimates he became the world's richest Newfoundlander.
Under increasing threat from the DEA, he quit the business in 1986, but his life declined and he became addicted to drugs. After suffering an overdose in 1987 he rejected drugs, becoming a drug and alcohol addiction counselor. Three years later, however, the DEA finally had assembled a case against him and arrested him. He plead guilty and was sentenced to ten years in jail, being transferred to the Springhill Penitentiary in Canada in 1990. In 1995 he was paroled and became a venture capitalist in Toronto. He attracted much media attention when, in 2001, he published a long advertisement in the National Post, advertising his executive management skills and being blatantly upfront about his past, arguing it was the greatest proof of his abilities. He was eventually hired by a software company and has also become active in Toronto's film industry.