Matthew Cox | Inside True Crime Podcast - How Brian O'Dea Built a $240M Smuggling Empire

Episode Date: January 24, 2025

Brian O'Dea is a Canadian businessman, author, television personality, and former drug smuggler. He is best-known for a large smuggling enterprise he masterminded in the mid-1980s. Set up to move marijuana in bulk from Southeast Asia to the Pacific Northwest and California, between 1986 and 1988, O'Dea's organization successfully smuggled 76 tons of marijuana worth about $300 million into Washington, transported it to California, and distributed it throughout the United States. Follow me on all socials! Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/insidetruecrime/ TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@mattcoxtruecrime Do you want to be a guest? Send me an email here: [e-mail] Do you want a custom "con man" painting to shown up at your doorstep every month? Subscribe to my Patreon: https: //www.patreon.com/insidetruecrime Do you want a custom painting done by me? Check out my Etsy Store: https://www.etsy.com/shop/coxpopart Listen to my True Crime Podcasts anywhere: https://anchor.fm/mattcox Check out my true crime books! Shark in the Housing Pool: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0851KBYCF Bent: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0BV4GC7TM It's Insanity: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B08KFYXKK8 Devil Exposed: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B08TH1WT5G Devil Exposed (The Abridgment): https://www.amazon.com/dp/1070682438 The Program: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0858W4G3K Bailout: https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/bailout-matthew-cox/1142275402 Dude, Where's My Hand-Grenade?: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0BXNFHBDF/ref=tmm_pap_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=1678623676&sr=1-1 Checkout my disturbingly twisted satiric novel! Stranger Danger: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0BSWQP3WX If you would like to support me directly, I accept donations here: Paypal: https://www.paypal.me/MattCox69 Cashapp: $coxcon69

I got on a plane. The day I got out, a friend of mine picked me up. I had 500 bucks and a return ticket to Bogota, Columbia. And that's where the magic started. And he put his newspaper down on a, on a bureau there, and it went clunk. And the butt end of a gun was sticking out of it. He couldn't speak English. I couldn't speak Spanish. in about 10 minutes he made it clear to me not to go anywhere to stay where I am he will be back so you can get 10 grand for what I'm going to give you for your $500 you go do that and then come back and talk to me he took me back there and it was a suitcase factory it looked like American tourist or luggage but it all had false bottoms as far as we know no one else was doing that process in those days. We were the only ones. And then we went back down to Columbia and we picked up the load and, you know, we crashed it on landing. We lost an engine. We took off with three engines. We lost another engine. We put it in the ocean, 16,000 pounds,

crashing the ocean in the nighttime and no life care. So there were 110 of us in our group. The load came over. The 50 tons is now up in. in Alaska hidden in a fjord with our three boats and they're all hidden up there repackaging it doing a quality control on it barcoding everything getting it ready to sell right they know you know they know but they don't know that you know they know so you can orchestrate something for them to look at while you do what you need to do and that's exactly what we did i'm in the midst of this and I get a phone call from an old nemesis,

an old bad guy that I grew up with, but he's no fucking good. And the moment I got his call, I knew my gut told me hang the phone up, and I did not. Hey, this is Matt Cox.

I'm going to be interviewing Brian O'Day. He is a form. Marijuana Smuggler and a current filmmaker and we're going to be I'm going to be interviewing him and we're going to get into a story and I appreciate you guys watching. Check out the video. Let's start at the beginning. Where were you, where were you born? I was born in St. John's Newfoundland in Canada, which is where I am right now. Newfoundland, many people don't know it. So I will tell you it's the furthest point east in North America. It's an island, 105 miles off the coast of Nova Scotia. And it was where a lot of people during 9-11, their planes got diverted to Newfoundland. Oh, lost you there. I lost you there. Sorry.

It may freeze up a little bit. Yeah. But it's actually recording on both of our computers right now. and it will upload. Okay. So there shouldn't be any issues when it uploads. All right. So in Newfoundland, when 9-11 happened, there were, I don't know how many flights were

diverted to Gander, but all of a sudden this small town of six, seven thousand people had more than doubled its population. And a Broadway play was written called Come From Away. That's still playing in Broadway, as far as I know. of us. So it's a great place. It's an interesting place. And when I was a kid, I couldn't get away fast enough. I've interviewed several Canadians on the show. So it's always amazes me at the, you know, the prison sentences are so. In comparison, they're actually probably reasonable prison sentences, but in comparison to the U.S. prison sentences, they're, you know, they seem light.

But when I, I kind of, you know, if you step back and look at it and say, wait a second, like this guy is selling pot, he got 15 years. And it's like, are you like, that's insane. You know, where in Canada it wouldn't be anything near that, you know, be a few years. Probably wouldn't go to jail. Right. Or I like a lot of times, I would, was locked up in the federal system with a bunch of guys from Canada. And they'd been locked up in Canada before and they're like, yeah, I got five years. and I'm like, oh, wow. So how much time do you spend in jail?

Oh, I didn't spend any time in jail. Like, well, how were you locked? They were like, oh, no, no, they put you on an ankle monitor and you're at home. Like, that's not locked up. That's probation. They're like, no, no, that's incarceration. I couldn't leave my living room. In 1972, I got 19 months, however, for possession of hash that I never saw until I went to court.

That's another story, but the prison that I went to was in St. John. Newfoundland. It was built in the late 1700s. And there were no toilets or running water in the cells. You had buckets for your toilet and you had metal like aluminum bowls for a basin and a pitcher with water, which you would get the water once a day. And once a day you would get in a line with 120 other guys to empty your bucket in what was called a hopper. And, you know, being in a cell with four guys, each one with their own bucket. That is a pretty interesting time of my life, I must say. Oh, my, that's horrible. So you, you grew up, I mean, you, our state system, your two parents, how old are other sisters? I had two brothers, I have, two brothers and two

sisters. My parents were awesome, and my dad owned a brewery. And my mom, my mom, mom was a nurse and they were great people they were awesome people and thankfully and because of them we have a really incredible family today I'm lucky you know I I I was a guy that went off and did something a little different than the rest of my family and they nonetheless always welcomed me and we're always glad to see me and never asked any questions how did that how does Were you ever in trouble in high school and junior, you know, in a middle school, anything? Or is this? Well, I'm in trouble.

You know, yeah. So when I was a kid, I was abused by a Christian brother, an Irish Christian brother. I went to St. Pons, an Irish Christian brother's school. In Newfoundland, when I was growing up, all the schools were running. by the various religious denominations, they were the public schools. So if you were a Catholic, you went to a Catholic school. If you were Church of England, you went to a Church of England school. United Church, United Church had their own schools. That changed in the past few years. But when I was growing up, it was if you were a Catholic boy, you went to a Catholic boy school.

And the first day there, I went from a private school to that school when I was 11 years old. And my first day there, I was abused sexually by the principal of the school. And that went on for about a year. And, you know, that really messed me up. I was a Catholic, trained a Catholic, you know, who believed in heaven and hell. Fortunately, I don't have that burden anymore. but at that time I did and I knew after this began the very first time it happened I began a negotiation with this God thing not to kill me because I just knew God was thinking about killing me

at any moment and sending me to hell forever and so you know when that happens to you at 11 years old and nothing is done about it you don't tell anybody then when you discover things that get you out of your mind, drugs, alcohol, cigarettes, you go for it. You know what I mean? Because the mind is a fucking minefield. It's a terrible place to be. And that's, you know, I can only in retrospect tell you that I think that's what happened.

And, you know, when I, like I drank at an early age, I never really had a drinking problem, but I was always drinking. There was booze in my house all the time to add on the brewery. It was a room that had beer and booze. And I would steal it all the time and we'd go drink them with the boys and never considered myself an alcoholic, interestingly. And then when I discovered marijuana university, well, that was it for me. I found a business, found something that I loved.

And I found a business in the midst of it. So, you know, getting out of my mind was a constant thing. Eventually, I shook the God thing. I shook the guilt thing. I shook the Catholic thing. I shook all of that nonsense. But I, you know, getting out of my mind kind of stuck. And this was in college, university.

university and then after you know i i i smoked my way out of university and uh did real quick did anything ever happen with uh your abuser anything did ever catch up with him later on no did now no i did bump into him at my father's funeral my mother's funeral and uh that was interesting i didn't bump into him he showed up at the wake we were irish we have wakes open cough and people come you know my dad when my mom died dad was sitting in a chair next to her body she was in an open coffin in there and you know a couple hundred people show up and pass regards and my brothers and sisters and i five of us at the door greeting people as they come and i'll tell you just very briefly two men and a woman are coming shaking their hands welcoming and looked into the next

person. They shook this guy's hand. I'm looking to the next person. Swear to God. I recognize the hand. I recognized. I didn't recognize the guy, but I recognized the hand. When he shook his hand and I'm looking at the next guy, went, what the fuck? And they looked. And I realized who it was by the fucking hand. Imagine that was, you know, I was 11 years old. I'm 75. Now, that was 10, 12 years ago. You're 75? I am. You're great.

You look great. You look, you know, you sound good. You seem very clear-headed. I am. 53, and I already feel like I'm losing it, you know, and focusing on, I'm losing focus and stumbling over my words half the time. But I've found a purpose in my life at this late stage, and that's Ukraine and you know that keeps me young believe me there's a lot to be done there

and and I got a lot to do and that's what I'm doing well so you're you're in the university you start selling you start selling like just small amounts of marijuana did it very who introduced you to it like what's the progression there so I I used to see these hippies we used to go to this coffee shop in a hotel and I went away to university. I went to Nova Scotia. I went to Catholic Boys University for crying out loud.

Can't get enough of those Catholic men's schools, St. Mary's. And we used to go to Murray's restaurant in the Lord Nelson Hotel. And it was amazing to look at these long-haired hippies who were probably on acid and they had an interesting smell. They smelled of petulia oil.

I mean, this was the beginning of the movement, okay? And it began in Nova Scotia. It hadn't hit Newfoundland, where I came from. And one day I met these two guys, and I was never going to smoke marijuana. Are you kidding me? And one of them said, we got some pot you want to try it so i was with two other guys who i lived with in this

high-rise apartment building um and we were all at st mary's together and i asked them you want to go try that smoke that stuff so we all went up and we were sitting in a closet we had walking closet in our apartment we were sitting in the closet smoking and everybody was getting messed up, but I wasn't. And so they rolled another one and passed it around, and they're laughing and giggling, and I'm not, nothing's happening. Excuse me, so I said, okay, nothing's happening. I got up, and when I stood up, it all hit me like a ton of birds.

And I started laughing, of course, and then I got hungry, and then I went to the fridge, and then I got peanut butter, and I nearly choked to death on the peanut butter because it seemed to take so long to swallow it. But I had found my state of mind. And so I went from that to 75 tons. It took a while to get there, but that was the path that I took. Okay, so that's how it started.

And I liked it so much. I thought, I got to bring this back to Newfoundland. Because I got friends back there would love this shit. People need to know. They need to know. So I... Why just survive back to school when you can thrive by creating a space that does it all for you, no matter the size.

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And they were able to get. Absolutely. Okay. There was business going on. It just, I didn't know anything about it at that point. This was 1966, maybe, 65, 66. And so I brought it back to Newfoundland. land, and, you know, the word gets out, of course. And I'm pulling into the university in St. John's,

and someone sees me coming and says, hey, the cops are here looking for you. And I went, what the fuck? So I beat it back to my house and grabbed my stash that I had, and I buried it out in the yard. And it was a huge yard. You know, we had like 100 acres. And so I went back to the university. And as they pulled in there, the cops surrounded me and took me off and brought me out to the house to search it. And they got nothing. But they knew I had it.

They knew I was up to no good. And, you know, that was the beast for the next few years. I was always ducking him, going to Ontario, buying shit. And then I started managing these bands. And one band, a couple of guys came. from England to be in the band. And they had been in substantial groups in England. So I managed them.

You know, my instrument was the telephone. I was born to play it. And I could manage well, but I couldn't sing or dance or play guitar. And one of the guys in the band said to me, man, you're paying so much for this hash. I can get it for you really cheap in England if you want to go see my mates over there. Fuck, man. In two days, I was on a plane head in England.

And I came back with 10 pounds of hash strapped to me that smelled like or shit. And I just don't know how I managed on that plane without people going, Are you fucking kidding me? It was so bad. Bent is the story of John J. Boziak's phenomenal life of crime. Inked from head to toe, with an addiction to strippers and fast Cadillacs, Boziac was not your typical computer geek. He was, however, one of the most cunning scammers, counterfeiters,

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How a homeless team became one of the cybercrime industry's most prolific counterfeiters. Available now on Amazon and Audible. So I get into Gander Airport where I'd arrived with all this stuff strapped to me and I'm going through customs and the guy looks at my passport and he says, oh. Are you John's son? My dad owns the brewery. Everybody, small place, knows my dad. And I said, oh, where are you comfortable?

Did you have a good time? Come on. And that was it, so I got through. So that was how my, you know, we go up to Ontario. I don't know if you know, but in Newfoundland, in Canada, it used to be this way. It's not so much anymore. But it used to be the Newfi joke. You know, they told jokes in Canada about Newfoundland.

Landers, how stupid they are. The joke's all oriented around our stupidity. And it was called a Newfi joke. They treated us improperly in the mainland of Canada. The way we spoke was different. The words we used were different. It still is. I don't sound like a Newfoundlander.

But if you Google, what does a Newfoundlander sound like? You'll find out. And the accents were broad. They were varied from one part of the province to the other. TV is kind of neutralized all that now. But anyway, where was I gone? You just gotten back with a bunch of marijuana shrap to. You came in.

Oh, yes. And so I got in, I was able to distribute it to get it out there. And I went back again. And this was, so prior to this, as I was saying, I would go to Ontario to get it. And Ontario, they'd say, here come to Newfis. And they'd stick it to us, they charge us way more. Well, I went to England and was buying it for a quarter of what I would have to pay for it with these guys.

And now I could bring it back and I could sell it to them. And so that changed my world. And that's where it began. Very soon after doing that, I had some sent to the house next door to a non-execis. person. Now, I knew the house next door, there was no one living in this place. My landlord owned it. I knew this. And so I knew something got mailed there. I could get my hands on it. Right. So I had two packages sent there filled with hash. One package got through. Two months later, still nothing on the other one. So I figured it's gone. I'd go shower one day. And I hear my

doorbell. And I jump out of the shower and they look down and I see the post guy in his truck pulling away. He's a jeep. I went, damn it, wonder what that was. So I immediately got dressed, ran down, got in the car, took off, found the post guy and said, hey, was you just trying to drop something off at the house? He said, no. And he looked worried. And I went, that wasn't the plan. The plan was for you to be at the door. man was for me to be there. So I said, hmm, okay. So I went to work at the university. I was the head of advertising for the newspaper, the TV, the radio at the university. And I was in my office and my next door neighbor called me and said, hey, you got a dozen cops in your house

just turning it upside down. And I went, bang. Because a friend of mine had just arrived from Texas the night before and he had 20 pounds a pot in his suitcase on my living room floor. It was trouble. Believe it or not, the hash I got convicted of, the pot on my living room

floor with Stan I beat. And I never saw the hash in my life. I bought the hash. It gave people the money. When they got it, they mailed it to me. So the first time I saw it was in court. How I got convicted was, they said they found a piece of paper in my apartment that had a number on it that matched the

registration number on the box with the hash in it. Well, they didn't find that piece of paper in my apartment, but that convicted me. And I got 19 months. They planted the paper? Yeah. They've been trying to get me time and again, showing up. And, you know, I'd always get word somehow, small place, you know and um yeah so they would never stumble across anything and my gut instinct a few times saved me thinking that somebody just saw something that i don't think it's the right person knows it so i'm moving this and gee sure enough an hour later the cops are there looking where that person that saw where something was that shouldn't have seen it and my gut was right and you know i followed my got a lot and that kept me out of prison most of my life stayed out of my head so you got 19 months

at that time yeah and you go to prison on that yeah i went to prison i i did uh just over 12 months on 19 i didn't get paroled i did get parole but my wife came my wife left me i got married before i went in that was you know crazy um and she left me the day before I was to get out on parole, so they decided they weren't going to let me out on parole. They didn't feel good about letting me out with me going to fix her mind. And so I had to do another six and a half months, which was a bit of a pain in my ass.

But then when I got out, buddy, I got on a plane. The day I got out, a friend of mine picked me up, dropped my shit off at the house. I had 500 bucks and a return ticket to Bogota. all Columbia and that's where the magic started 500 bucks how did you get a con you had a contact in bogus i before i went to prison i met a guy in montreal who was from columbia bennie he was a sweet guy and he said hey you got to come to columbia man we can do things together here's i'm going to give you the name of a restaurant

and a guy to talk to, and he always knows where I am. So he wrote down the address of this restaurant, the name of a restaurant in Bogota. And that's where I went, flew in, couldn't speak a word of Spanish. I could speak French, and I figured it sounds like French. I could probably figure it out. You know, I went and asked for a beer when I got there in the hotel. So I went down to the bar and I said, can I get a beer?

And the guy didn't speak English. And I went, well, that's interesting. no English beer beer a and I pointed at a beer and he said ah servesa and when he did I knew that doesn't sound like any language I knew so I knew I was in trouble I can speak you know interestingly enough I went out that night and I met some people on the street a guy and a girl and they took me back to their place and we had what they called cheese sandwiches which were joints with coke, pot, and tobacco all in a single joint. And we had cheese sandwiches all night when people say never go out in the street in Columbia, you get yourself killed. But somehow

I was lucky, you know. Anyway, the next day I went to that restaurant. It was 10 miles across town in the north end of town. And I took a taxi and I got there. And it. And it was. And it It was all gated and what have you in a big yard, gated in front, and it was all boarded up. Out of business, boarded up. I went, what the fuck? In the back, there was a kind of a smaller shed-looking building, and it had smoke coming out of the chimney back there. So I just started shaking on those gates and shouting. and eventually this little old guy

must have been 120 comes hustling up to the gate and goes see signior and I had the card with Benny the guy who gave me the car I said do you know Benny and I'm not going to say his last name and I'm pointing to the card

and the guy behind the gate goes no say not I don't know anything and I said okay if you see Benny don't give and I wrote my hotel and my room number on the card and gave

it to him. I mean, of course, you know, there's no chance of me ever connecting. So I go back to the hotel. Later that night, I'm watching Bonanza in Spanish, trying to figure out what they're saying on TV.

And a knock comes on the door. Opened up the door and there's a there's a guy's about 5-5 standing there, older guy, slick black hair, pencil-thin mustache, crumpled up newspaper under his arm like this, holding my card that I gave to the guy. And he says, you, you? And I said, yeah, me, that's me. And he looked in the room, he looked like that, and he motioned me to move in. So I backed in the room and he came in and he put his newspaper down on the on a on a bureau there and it went clunk. And the butt end of a gun was sticking out of it. He couldn't

speak English. I couldn't speak Spanish. In about 10 minutes, he made it clear to me not to go anywhere. To stay where I am, he will be back. And he left. The next day. The next day. Next morning he shows up with a guy who lived in Miami, a Colombian who was, you know, in the game. And they wanted to know what I wanted. And I said, well, I met Benny in Montreal. He gave me the card. He said, if I ever wanted to get anything going to come down here and he'd introduce me to some people and the guy said, I'm the people that he would introduce you to. Benny's not available. And he said, so what did you have in mind? I said, well, I wanted to get some cover. and bring it back to Canada and get this thing going.

And he said, that's negotio. We can certainly do that. What were you thinking? How much money do you have? And I told him 500 bucks. I had to pick those guys up off the floor, okay? They thought that was the craziest thing they ever heard. That I would show up in Colombia to try and do a Coke deal with $500 in my pocket.

They just cracked up. And the guy said, man, you got a lot of fucking. balls. And I said, hey, I just got out of prison. I got nothing. This is what I got. I'm willing to do this. And so the guy said, okay, here's what I'm going to do for you. I'm going to give you 50 grams of Coke. $10 a gram. You can bring that back. You can cut it, cut it in half, and you can get 100 bucks a gram. You can get 10 grand for what I'm going to give year for your $500. You go do that and then come back.

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Talk to me where I put something together. So I fucking went, yep, took that stuff. And I went and got a pack of cigarettes and I used a hot pin to take off the cellophane on the pack of cigarettes, slid it out so they didn't break the stamp when you take it, right? And slid the pack out, took it out, took the cigarettes out, put the Coke, 50 grams of Coke fit in the pack of cigarettes like it was made for it, okay? Put the cellophane back in, sealed it up, call the cab, going to the airport.

I happened to do a little bit of that Coke when I was doing that, and I started thinking. That was the worst thing ever can happen to a guy. So then I thought, I can't make this work. I got to go get a carton. So I ran downstairs, called the cigarette. Guys are all over the streets there. And I bought a carton of cigarettes.

Brought it upstairs, opened it with a hot pin, took out a pack in the middle, threw this pack in there, sealed it all up like it was never opened, and going to the airport. On the way to the airport, I start freaking out about it in there. So I ripped the carton open and I take it. the pack out and they put it in my pocket with the pack that I'm smoking from. So I got two

packs in my jacket pocket and I'm going through customs and two guys and you've got to go through immigration to leave the country. And I'm going through immigration. They go this way and I think, wow, what a country to show me where the plane is. So I follow

the next thing you know we're going into a room up on top of it. The designation says Das, Policia Judicial, which is like the FBI. guy, right? And they notice one guy's behind me, one guy's in front of me, and I go, geez. So the guy breaks out a card, and he reads from it in English, and it's English and Spanish and American flag, Colombian flag. And I've been picked out as being someone who fits a description of a smuggler, so they're going to take my luggage off the plane, and they're going to

strip me and search me. And I go fucking nuts. And I pull the macho, I'm a man. You two men and you want me to get naked in front of you. You've got to be fucking kidding me. But they insisted. And so as I was taken off my clothes, I took the cigarettes with the coke in it. And I took the cigarettes I was smoking on put it on top of the cigarettes with the coke in it. And this was when you smoked on planes, okay? You can smoke anywhere. I opened a cigarette pack and I took and put a cigarette and I offered each of them a cigarette and they each took one and I lit everybody's cigarettes and I'm complaining all the time and they're going so sorry sir and I'm holding the fucking coke in my hand with the cigarettes and we're all smoking and I got no clothes on still holding

it. The moment I get something back that I can put that that has a pocket, bam, it goes right in there. And so that was the first 50 grams that I left Columbia with. I went back and did what I said I was going to do and came back. And he said, okay, I'm going to show you what was in that shed out behind a restaurant. And he took me back there and it was a suitcase factory. It looked like American tourist or luggage. But it all had false bottoms and all of the luggage had cocaine in it. And this was how he moved.

In those days, this was just at the beginning of the whole world. This was before any of the gangs and the Escobars and all of those characters. This was just when we were just, you know, barely out of diapers and figuring this thing out. And I, it seemed like fun. It seemed like fun. Okay, the first time you went through, you got searched. I did. So the second time,

No, I figured fuck it. And then this time when I went back and he showed me the suitcase, I figured they're not getting this and they're not even going to, it's not going to be an issue. So this was even crazier. I got to the airport. Same thing happened downstairs. Get all my shit off the plane

and they're, you know, get all my clothes off. My hand, my carry on, which I had. So the Coke was in a carry on. Okay, I had a kilo in each side of it. Well, that was a heavy carry-on. So I had to open the carry-on, and I'm throwing stuff out of it, complaining, bitter, and then I take it and shake it.

And they said, okay, you happy? Take all the stuff, put it back in there, go out of get on the plane and leave. I am sitting next to a guy who's being deported from Columbia, and he's got a bottle of a Guardiente with him. That's a national drink of Columbia. It tastes like licorice. And it gets you very messed up.

So we proceeded to drink the whole bottle. I came to in Miami airport, in a wheelchair, moving with that suitcase on my lap. And I look, and I see a holster and a gun right there. And I look up and it's a cop. And he's wheeling me. And I said, what's going on? he said i think it's about time y'all got up and walked by yourself sir and i said yes sir i got out of that wheelchair buddy i don't know how i did it with my little suitcase and just beat

it out of that airport i lost my luggage my other luggage in the plane carry on i never got that back but that guy they put me in a wheelchair got me off the plane and that guy wheeled me through immigration. I happen to have my passport in my hand when I passed out and my carry on right under me there. So that's what they saw. I had a suit thing hanging up that the attendant had hung up, but I never got that back. But anyway, so that's how it began. I only did the Coke business to get a stake to get in the pot game. you know i i didn't think i didn't want to be in the coke business but it was a easy business to to get a small amount of a product and turn it into a large amount of money the same amount of

money in pot took up a whole lot more room right it's different of course it's much harder to move too you know the ship yeah the pump yeah yeah yeah harder it's like you can't walk through You need equipment, you need equipment, not just your body. Right. So how did that, that evolved? Did you go back to Columbia? Was this marijuana you were buying in Columbia? Well, I was in a Coke for another while.

I, you know, I perfected a method of dissolving cocaine in methanol and then pouring it into fabric into what were called ruanas or ponchos, wool ponchos made in Colombia. So a small amount of methanol, you could dissolve a kilo of coke in a very small amount of methanol and then just pour that into the ponchos. The methanol evaporates off at room temperature and all the coke now is embedded in the ponchos. And so that's how I would bring it back. Then when I bring it into, I had a lab in LA where I would extract the coke from the ponchos. And, you know, we were famous. Sorry, we made the diamond coke. The diamond looked like crystals was an extraordinary coke, right?

If there's any such thing, I know it's poison, by the way. And one day, I'm in the lab in my garage in Chatsworth, California. And one of my chemist guys shows up in the door with High Times Magazine, and he rips it open, and it's the whole thing we're doing written up in High Times. Now, it's not pictures with me, but it's the whole process that we've just done. So I just fucking freaked immediately, broke the lab down and moved down to Julian in Southern California and set a lab up down there until I got through that particular load. So what were you concerned with that Customs was now, or that they were now going to know how you were moving it? The cops were onto us, yeah.

We were the only ones that were doing that as far as we need. So it wasn't the process. It was you guys specifically. It was us specifically doing that process. As far as we know, no one else was doing that process in those days. We were the only ones. And I didn't know anyone in Columbia doing it. And I knew people down there. And I didn't know anyone in the U.S. that was doing it either. And the product we were turning out in the U.S., nobody else was doing it. It was the diamond. It was called Diamond Coke. And, you know, Let me just say that those were the days when we would go to the clubs down in the valley and dance our hearts out and have a lot of fun. It went from that for everybody to pushing everybody who kept doing it into a closet and who hid out doing it from that point on. You know, there was no more socializing, social having fun doing coke. It just became the fucking enemy that we could not shake.

And I ended up having a heart attack from an overdose after the last big pop deal I did. I figured, you know, when I did Coke, I'd go buy an eighth, stuff like that. But I figured I'll just get a kilo. Fuck it. I don't want to keep going back looking for more. Eight days later, my heart popped because I couldn't stop. Is that why you moved to weed? At that point

Was that part of it? No, I moved to weed long before that. I moved to weed like Colombia. Once I met some guys saw I moved from Colombia, I moved up to Jamaica.

And I lived in Jamaica with a bunch of guys on the run from Newfoundland, where I'm from, who lost a load. And they didn't get caught. They all took off and they got away.

And they were hiding in Jamaica. Everyone had different ID, different names in those days. There was no computers, none of that stuff, right? And so it was easy to be a different person. So I went down there and lived with them for a while. They were moving pot and Jamaican hash up into Toronto, using people who worked for Air Jamaica to smuggle it up for them.

And it was, you know, kind of, it was a struggle to survive doing that kind of work. I showed up with the Coke connection with the ability to get kilos of Coke fronted and changed the game. And that's what we started doing. But then I had a problem with those guys. I wasn't getting enough, I felt. So I left, went on my own. And I met a couple of guys from the U.S. And, you know, we started getting ships and planes and doing that kind of game and running pot up out of Columbia.

or attempting to do so. Okay. How long did that go on? Was there a... Well, I got a boat and it was a hundred-foot Baltic trader built in 1890 in Denmark, some gorgeous boat.

And we sailed it down there for almost a year, and we got stiffed a bunch of times by Colombians while we were waiting for them that the pot never showed up at where we were supposed. supposed to meet in the ocean in the Caribbean. Right. And like four times this happened. So we said, you know what? We're not fucking

doing that anymore. I was out there for a year. So we got a plane. And we went to a plane graveyard. We bought an old troop transporter DC6, four engine. Big, heavy, old plane.

And we got a pilot. He'd never flown a four engine before, but he had two thousand hours in flying a twin and he read the book on the four and he said he could do it but he needed someone to do it to go with them to help him i who only flew the seat of my pants said i'll go so here we went two of us on this fucking monster anyway uh you know that that we had a couple of issues with that. We had to come back halfway down. We had a problem. We had to come back and find the, found the runway in the dark in Georgia. I mean, it was incredible. This pilot saved our lives so often. And then we went back down to Columbia and we picked up the load and, you know, we

crashed it on landing. We lost an engine. We took off with three engines. We lost another engine. And we put it in the ocean, 16,000 pounds, crash in the ocean in the nighttime, and no life care. These Indian fishermen saw us, saved our lives. We dropped the name. Our connection in Rio Hacha was the head of the Wahara Indians, the chief, he called himself. And we used his name that we were working with him. And they hit us under fish and took us in. and that that that was uh you know i kind of moved on after that went up to the u.s

and started running uh coke again up into california can i ask a question the month had you paid for the marijuana that was lost no so you still owe them money for the marijuana the deal was we'd show up with the plane the pilot it and we would split it when we get back. We'll bring it. We had our own airport in Moultry, Georgia. I mean, we had a situation. It was real.

Right. And we owned that airport. No one was allowed at that airport but us. Our front there was it was a repair facility for government airplanes. So, you know, they were glad to have us there in that part of Georgia where nothing was happening. They thought we were going to bring boom business to them. But, you know, that wasn't quite what we had in mind.

Anyway, it was, after that, I left those guys that I was working with after the collapse of that deal. And I went to California, and I started working with guys there who were bringing stuff up from Mexico and in from Belize. And then I met some guys who were bringing stuff from Southeast Asia. And that's where I jumped on. You know, when I first got there, this lawyer who helped me get to California, he said to introduce you to someone might be helpful and he introduced me to this guy.

We were on Wonderland Avenue in Laurel Canyon in L.A. And the guy said, come on, I want to show you something. And he took me just up the road. And we walked into this house, massive house. And you had to walk sidewise. ways in that house. It was filled with boxes that were filled with pot or money. It was the most extraordinary thing I'd ever seen. And I thought, man, this is it. This is where I want to be. And, you know, I struggled to get out of my own way frequently because of my own self-abuse and my own

cocaine abuse. I stopped selling it, but I didn't stop doing it. And then, you know, I'll jump right to the last deal I did. It was all Southeast Asia. I had gathered, how it happened was, I had gathered 30 tons of dinosaur bone. And from the Colorado formation, the most Morrison formation of the Colorado Plateau, where a lot of 115, 120 million-year-old dinosaurs bit the dust. And there's dinosaur bone, it's ubiquitous, it's everywhere. So I came up with this idea with National Geographic to embed a small piece of dinosaur bone in Lexan. And every subscriber, when they were new to subscription or bought a subscription, would get this pyramid Lexan structure. with a piece of dinosaur bone in it.

And the numbers I had figured out for that whole thing, and this was in 1985, 84, 85, was like I'd make about $25 million on the deal when it was all done, which was really pretty good. Yeah. But I needed money to pull it off. I had the bone, but I needed help to put the whole thing together. So I was dealing with these friends.

of mine who were pot importers from Southeast Asia. You had a lot of money. And these guys always had Thai pot. You know, they brought in ubiquitous quantities of it. I'm in the midst of this and I get a phone call from an old nemesis, an old bad guy that I grew up with, but he's no fucking good. And the moment I got his call, I knew my gut told me, hang the phone up. And and I did not. I knew it at that moment to hang it up, and I didn't. So he presented me with this unbelievable opportunity he had, the best offload in the history of offloads

for pot from Southeast Asia. And he said he's never seen anything like it, and he's just trying to sell me on this thing, and he wants me to come and take a look at it because he knows I have the Southeast Asian connections. I can fill up a boat in what is called Thailand. It never was Thailand. It was always Vietnam, but it was called Thai Pot.

And so I know, no, no, and I'm backing them off, and he kept bugging me. And I made the mistake of saying, I'm talking to the boys, but I'm working on another deal with them. I'm trying to get out of that world. so I got anyway it just got the best of me knowing I was going against my gut and I'll tell you a story about how my gut has informed me in my life after this anyway I I had a meeting with the guys the two brothers about the dinosaur bone deal and them funding it up at a ranch that belonged to a friend of mine and it was super impressive

place. These guys came up and we were talking and so they were going to fund this deal. And as they were leaving, I recalled that I told the bad guy that I was going to talk to them. I just at least mention it to them. So I said

listen, I ran down the driveway and stopped as they were leaving. And I said to him, okay, look, here's a guy I don't like, okay? But he's been in the business. He's I know he's and his brother-in-laws have done big deals in Florida and he says he has got the best offload situation he's ever seen in his life up in

Washington you want to take a look at it they said get in the fucking car let's go get a plane and go up there as we did just like that the dinosaur bone went right out the fucking window got in the plane went up there he picked us up we drove up, and here we are in Anacortis, Washington, there's a dry dock facility owned by the family of the people whose boats we can get our hands on. Totally private, we can use this. It was, he wasn't wrong. It was extraordinary. A Croatian family, a fishing business that's been in business since the Second World War up there. Known on the coast, up and down the coast, everybody knows them, the family.

So I show up with a bunch of money and go buy a big boat. They had a 58-foot long-line boat. So I showed up and bought 100-foot tender vessel, a vessel that would pick up Herring up in Alaska and bring it to factories for processing it to go vacuum it off of Herring Fisserie, hearing boats in the in the in the in the barring scene Alaska so um we fill that thing up with pot buddy and brought it down and killed it and but we had a deal nobody was to do coke if you did

coke you were out so there were 110 of us in our group on our ultimately right we had three boats, big ships, they're not boats. And we had people all over the world. And all of us agreed, no Coke. So I brought my, I had a guy who I had known for quite a while who used to build race cars in the race car world in L.A. And I brought him out to be the chief engineer on our boats. We had a 160-foot boat, 100-foot boat, and a 58-foot boat. And these needed drill serious engineering people. So I brought Frank out. I trusted Frank completely.

And he was my eyes and ears on the boats. He lived with our captain, our main captain, on Mercer Island in Washington, very expensive neighborhood, as did the bad guy who introduced me to all of this. Okay, so no one's supposed to do coke. this guy shows up at the house in Mercer Island three in the morning limo hookers

Coke everything that you just go you you explode inside when you see this shit and you'd had this conversation with him this was a deal buddy this was a deal breaker twice

we didn't do anything about it we had to talk you know you can't do that You know what you are, and we did all that. The third time it happened, Frank called me, said, Brian, I'm leaving. I'm not doing this anymore. I'm not. I'm out.

I said, Frank, stay. I'm coming. So I got in a plane and brought a couple of guys with me. And we went up and we met with this guy. And we told him, you are out. You're out. We'll pay you. The only way you're going to get paid is if we do not see you again until this thing is done.

if we see you again it's over so here's what you need to do you need to go down to florida with your brother-in-law and just fucking stay there someone will be in touch with you if you come around it's over period that was it and he was gone so we split it was 75 tons we split it into two loads we got the first load in it was fucking amazing you know it was all fucking yeah you know trucked across the country up and down had five tractor trailers going everywhere i mean it was just like and money was a chicka ching ka ching did not lose anything he gets word from one of the kids working on our boats from the town where we got all of our crew from he gets word that we pulled off below so he shows up looking for him money

so we're still in the midst of this deal we still have 50 tons of pot in southeast Asia in Vietnam that we had to bring over we're refitting another boat 160 footer we bought the stormbird we got that in in a in a port where we're refitting it building his shelter deck doing the whole thing and we don't want him knowing any of this we don't want him knowing anything so he showed up looking for money knowing we got it we get word so we had to decide what to do what we're going to give him and we know we got to give him something so i figured let's give him a quarter of a million bucks just to fucking it's not too much but it's you know substantial six figures we had a democracy and they said we're giving them 50 grand that's all he's fucking

getting we don't trust him with any more than that and i said boys do not trust him with 50 grand and sure enough gave him 50 grand he took that it was in a supermarket paper bag he went right to the DEA's office and put it on the fucking desk and said I can tell you where there's a lot more like that and he told them our story so they watched us and I only learned this when I was in court and saw all the photographs they were filming us, building the boat, building the shelter deck, filming everybody, and they got all the photographs circled. But they weren't.

Anyway, so we didn't know any of this. We had no idea. We all had scanners, but we couldn't find any federal frequencies. We could only get all the local cops. and we couldn't get the DEA, the FBI, the ATF. We couldn't get any feds on there. So real quick, you feel that the 50,000, he was insulted and pissed. He was bitter because it was the only 50 grand.

You feel like if you gave him the 250, he would have been like, okay, that's a good amount. He would have held him for more. He figured they're only giving me 50 grand. I'm getting fucking. Yeah, here's 50 go away. But if you gave him $2.50, you think he would have said, okay, well, this is going to continue. Yeah.

Okay. So he told the DEA everything. We as we couldn't hear any of the feds on the radio. The load came over. The 50 tons is now up in Alaska, hidden in a fjord, with our three boats, and they're all hidden up there, repackaging it, doing a quality control on it, barcoding everything, getting it ready to sell, right? Using forgeries and bogus identities, Matthew B. Cox, one of the most ingenious conmen

in history, built America's biggest banks out of millions. Despite numerous encounters with bank security, state, and federal authorities, Cox narrowly, And quite luckily, avoided capture for years. Eventually, he topped the U.S. Secret Service's most wanted list and led the U.S. Marshals, FBI, and Secret Service on a three-year chase, while jet-setting around the world with his attractive female accomplices. Cox has been declared one of the most prolific mortgage fraud con artists of all time by CNBC's American Greed.

Bloomberg Business Week called him the mortgage industry's worst nightmare, while Dateline NBC described Cox as a gifted forger and silver-tonged liar. Playboy magazine proclaimed his scam was real estate fraud, and he was the best. Shark in the housing pool is Cox's exhilarating first-person account of his stranger-than-fiction story. Available now on Amazon and Audible. We had a friend who was on his way to prison, actually, from San Diego. He was getting 10 or 15 years for something. But he had a spectrum analyzer, and he told us he would come up to Washington before he went away,

and he would program all of our scanners with federal frequencies that he could get with this spectrum analyzer. Sure enough, he came up and all of our scanners, all got reprogrammed. so now we need to bring down two of the captains from our three boats to talk to them about plans for the offload okay for how we're going to handle it when they get down and now we got as you i just said all of our scanners have been reprogrammed we flew the guys down from washington from alaska tony and bobby both of whom are dead now imagine that i'm still a lot uh we brought those guys down. I picked him up at the airport. The airport is like 85, 90 miles from Anacortis, which is where our offloads going to be. So we're going to drive up there for a meeting. We're in, I got a suburban. And my suburban's got fucking antennas all over it. It's got a bunch of radios in it. It looks like the fucking secret service or something, yeah. So, we're booting it out of the airport coming up the road and my scanner lights up and they're talking about following me and that is a terrible feeling okay so bad so we look at each other and i go fucking fasten your seatbelts boys bam and take off and i just go and they drove for six fucking hours

everywhere. Car coming this way. I got on side roads, country roads, dirt roads. Any car was a cop as far as I was concerned. Coming, following this way, there were all cops. And I just kept going, ended up over in Spokane. And so we all, we had a safe house. And everybody had boxes of quarters, $500 box of quarters.

because those were the days when the phones you could phone a pay phone and it would ring that doesn't happen anymore but in those days it did we ended that by the way they couldn't believe how much money they were clearing out of the pay phones up

in that part of the world and they wondered what was going on that's all they needed to do is track quarters and pay phones in those days and they could tell where a deal was happening anyway we spoke in so i called our safe house and she said you're the fourth followed the day call back in two hours we're arranging a meeting i call back in two hours and a meeting

of the of the organizers of the deal there were like eight of us uh had a meeting set of a meeting at this place where we all arrived and we had to decide what we were going to do so we we just everybody just fucking stay put we're going to go get a detective and find out what what's going on so we called a guy named Howard whitesman who was a great lawyer our lawyer who's Michael Jackson's lawyer he he organized all the defense for OJ Simpson he Howard was the man so called Howard, told him what was going on, said we need someone to help find out what's going on, what they know, what they don't know. So he said, I got just a guy. He used to be a DEA agency, got a fucking private detective agency now to get him on Steve Swanson. So we got Steve on.

And basically, what we learned from Steve was, it culminated in this. Okay. You know that they know, but they don't know that you know they know all right right there is the key to you being able to pull that off that's what he was telling us okay they know you know they know but they don't know that you know they know so you can orchestrate something for them to look at while you do what you need to do and that's exactly what we did and when we finally orchestrated for them to hit our boats there was fresh coffee and fresh donuts right out of the fucking grease that's what you could smell when you walked on our boats was fresh coffee and donuts and they knew they were had ah it was a moment i wasn't there for it however i was with the pot down in california

so you you guys just allowed them to fall so you set it up so that they could seize boats thinking that they had that they were loaded up with with the pot but they weren't so once we knew that they were on to us they were flying up and down the inside passage looking for our boats they knew our boats they knew what we were in they knew they had the stormbird they had all kinds of photographs of it the kathy b the big tender vessel and the st peter the 58 footer they knew all of these boats. They were hidden in Alaska. So what were we going to do? Called a friend in LaConnor, who had a giant boat that he used to bring small boats on the deck up to Alaska to fish the Herring industry. Then all of those small boats would get loaded on his boat and

brought back down to Washington to La Conner. So give you 300 grand for a loan of your boat. 300 grand got the boat fucking took off up there took all the pot put it on there came down now we can't go down to our offload because they're waiting for us there they know our offload

and it's the best offload in the world so what are we going to do they've got cops looking for us out there we got cops waiting for us down there so we pull into Bellingham which is a university town

on a Saturday morning at 6 o'clock and between 6 and 11 Saturday morning offloaded 50 tons of pot into five tractor trailers that went off to California and while they are all out there looking at this and that and the moment it got safely tucked away

in California we pulled the boats out into the open and hey the radio's lit up we're on them and they don't touch him wait to they get crossed the inside patches, they cross the Canadian border into U.S. waters. So that's what he did. The moment we crossed, we were coming down in Vancouver Island and now we're down into the San Juan Islands, Washington. Boom. Seaplane, helicopters, Coast Guard, ATF. I mean, there were 100 of them. And there was donuts for everybody.

so they got very upset but you know and i'm sure a lot of guys lost their jobs or whatever over the deal but they gave us a few years to go have some fun sell all that shit and have you know spend some money and get crazy which you know i did so we pull that deal off and you know not having done coke for almost a couple of years basically maybe once or twice I thought I'd just go get a kilo and, you know, just have nip at it. Eight days later, no sleep, hiding out at a friend's guest house at that same ranch where I put the deal together. I had a heart attack from a coke overdose. He found me there. And I ended up in hospital. I was there for a month.

And when I got out of that hospital, I became a volunteer. there because I had to stay close. I just knew if I meandered anywhere, I was gone. And I started going to AA meetings, and I would go to four AA meetings at fucking day. That's how bad I wanted this thing, right? And when I wasn't doing that, I was working at the hospital,

helping people who were struggling. I eventually became the head of volunteers at that hospital, cottage hospital in Santa Barbara. And I then started doing, doing groups. And I did a group on Tuesday night called Real Presence. And it was, my life was amazing, man. I was having a great time. I was just over 40. And, you know, I was sober for the first time in Fock, a long time. And it felt really good. I knew there was a hammer waiting to fall somewhere. I just knew it. There's no way you throw that much egg on the face of those

guys and walk from it, you know? I knew somewhere, somehow, someday, there was going to be a knock on the door. Sure enough, I'm lying in bed one morning thinking about going to the hospital to work. I was thinking about a guy who came in the night before, a heroin addict. Fortunately, that's something I never had to deal with, but he was a mess. I was thinking about him when a knock bam, bam, bam, bam on the door. And I rolled over in bed and I could just see the door. There was a glass with kind of Venetian blinds on it that were just tilted enough for me to see a gun in someone's hand. And I went, I know who that is. And it's, you know, not the bad guys. It's the good guys coming to have a word with me. I opened up the door and two guys were standing

there. They both had guns in their hand and one guy was holding his DEAID. and he said so is your name Brian O'Day and I said man I wish it wasn't but it is

and he said may we come in and I said you got the gun so they came in and sat me down and one guy was a bad guy one guy was a good guy

and the bad guy said to me look O'Day we know what you do you work with drunk and dopes. This ain't about change of rehabilitation. This is about crushing your life, motherfucker. Now, do the right thing. And I said,

the right thing? Oh, I'd like to call my lawyer. And they said, we wouldn't call your lawyer because we're going to see him next. Sure enough, they went and fucking hammered my lawyer. And they said, you're going to need a new lawyer. Anyway,

they didn't get indicted? What? Did the lawyer get indicted at all? Also? He was going to get indicted. What he ended up doing with him, his house was on the market. He lived on the beach in Malibu. And he, half of the value of the sale was equity. So they went to him and they said this, it was millions of dollars. They said, we'll take half the equity. You pay 100% of the capital gain. And we'll live. you go and that's what they did deal that's the deal right now they never could get the goods on them the way they wanted the goods so they offered me to be able to get out of what i was dealing with if i would give them him and two guys who distributed half of the load and i didn't i couldn't 53 of 55 guys talked two guys i was going to say they're all going to talk Two didn't. I didn't.

And my chief engineer, the guy I brought out there, who was going to quit, he didn't. He said, are you talking? I said, I got nothing to say, Frank. He said, I got nothing to say either. I said, Frank, you can talk, buddy. There's nothing you know that they didn't already hear from someone else. He said, on a matter of principle, I said when I came into this deal that if anything happened, I keep my mouth shut. And I'm fucking keeping my mouth shut. So he did.

And so did I. what kind of times you get compared to everybody else i got the most oh how much 10 nothing nothing i got listen i thought oh my god 10 years i thought oh my god 10 years when i got to prison i was so relieved yeah 20 30 35 50 everywhere you look guys were doing time. And I got 10. And I got sentenced under old law, which was amazing. They could have sentenced me under new law. New law, you do 85% of your time. Oh law, the max they make you do is 66 and you can get out after a third. But they cut out parole so there was no more getting out after a third. But however, I got transferred to Canada. And now keep in mind, I'm one of two guys

it did not talk the DA fucking loved me for keeping my mouth shut and he sent me to Canada knowing I'd get out and sure enough you know I did two years inside then the next two years I did a halfway house in Newfoundland which was you know worse than being in the joint really it it has a faux look of freedom but it ain't yeah and um so I did two in two and a halfway house and it gets six on parole and then four on probation and that's it yeah i always said that like it when i went to the halfway house i would have if i didn't need the money like i was coming out with no money if i didn't need to go to a halfway house and work to put some money together i would have preferred to have done the seven months in prison yeah much worse oh i was in there for two years

okay halfway house this people would come for like 30 days 60 days and be gone i would see i saw i don't know two or three guys come and go three times while i was in there you know what i mean yeah petty criminals going out coming back going out coming back and i was there two years without an incident other than i called my parole officer a chicken shit asshole one day and that was it but other than that i didn't have any problems yeah i was it It's funny. I was locked up for 13 years. And I would see guys get out, get a new charge, come back, do the time, get out, and come back again. Where were you?

Where were you? I was in a Coleman, the federal correctional complex in Coleman, Florida. It's about an hour north of Tampa. Yeah. Yeah. I was in Terminal Island, Los Angeles. No good. It was built for 400.

and there were 1,300 of us in there. Yeah, Coleman was built for, it was definitely overcapacity by about 40, 40, 50%. I worked in the staff training center. So Terminal Island was a training facility for the Western District for prison guards for the feds. So I and a former CIA agent named Ron Rewald, if you ever getting your hands on his book called Disavow? It is a fucking extraordinary book. And they've tried to bury that book and bury his story.

His story is extremely interesting. R-E-W-A-L-D, Ron R-W-A-L-D, Ron Rewald. So Ron and I worked in the Staff Training Center. The only reason I worked in there was because that was during Desert Storm. And Desert Storm's surplus goods, primarily what we were aiming for, was this room in there that was filled with five pound tins of mixed nuts that came from Desert Storm. So my job was to make sure that every fucking one of those tins ended up on the yard. They were meant for us, but the guards took them for themselves.

Right. So, and that's what I did. I emptied that room over time into the, so right next to where I work was the wreck shack. and all of the pot guys work for the rec department. So every day I'd be hustling out there, the jac, tins of five-pound tins of nuts and hustling them in there, boxes of fruit,

all kinds of, so we, it was, you know, I had a good time. Even though I didn't want to be there. Once a smuggler, always a smuggler.

That's right. We were all, we all had, everybody had something happening there. You know that, you know that. That's how you make them in there. everybody's got to hustle yeah well you know it's funny i i remember guys there was this guy who was

locked up for smuggling he would get in line and slow he'd stand in line with everybody else he'd be loaded down but he would back up as everybody else is going forward in the chow hall he's taking one step back one step back and he would do this it'd take him 30 minutes to go through the whole line to work his way out of the chow hall and then turn around and walk away he was just and he was brilliant he was brilliant at it um crazy you know just time just a little time and pressure and yeah so uh you got out what are you doing now what's happening now i'm in the midst of a film that i i went to ukraine when the war started last year for a couple of months and i put three thousand miles on the car um i drove all around ukraine spent a few weeks at the front

I brought a truckload of medicine and supplies to the front to soldiers out there. It's the most extraordinary thing I've ever done in my life. And I shot 40 hours of footage, which I'm working on right now and trying to pull it together in a film. But I realize I'm missing some key ingredients that will help carry the film. So I'm going to head back to Ukraine here in a minute, and I'll probably be there for another six weeks or so, and then come back. And hopefully the film will be ready. My plan is to launch it at Khan in the spring of next year, 24. But this isn't your first film, though.

No, well, it's my first – is it my first film? Not really, I suppose. I've done a bunch of television. I did a series called Creepy Canada, which was sold around the world as creepy, basically a travel ob for X-Files fans. And then I did a show with Kevin O'Leary, the Sharp Tank guy. I wrote and produced a show called Redemption Inc.

That starred Kevin O'Leary. I was the co-host and a producer on it. And it was like the apprentice for ex-cons. We had 10 ex-cons come together, and at the end of the day, one of them won Kevin O'Leary as their business partner. And it was an awesome show. I had a great time doing that. Did How to Make Money Selling Drugs, which is a great doc.

If you have not seen that, you've got to see it. Okay. And right now I'm working on the working title of this film is the letter i how is that significant the letter i what there is no i in the russian language and so it's a rebellion against russia okay all right do you have anything else you're anything else you want to talk about no that's that's about you know i that's about you know i i I will say that I had a lot of fun

doing what I did when I did it. It's not anything that I did there's nothing you could do today. You could not do it today. The world has changed dramatically. Well, you could do it. You just get caught immediately. Instantly. And it's the vibration

in the whole world is so different. Like we were we were hippies having fun. No one was looking to hurt anybody. No one had any guns. Listen, we did $240 million in pot sales and nobody had a gun. Nobody had a gun and nobody took anything from anyone that wasn't theirs. So that's kind of an interesting thing to be able to pull off in that world. And it was, you know, we just had a good time. We had a good time doing it. Yeah, I have a a friend named

Rusini that I was locked up with and I remember he was doing big time deals and he was saying he was like this was 20 some odd 30 years ago and he was like you know in the upper echelon of drug smuggling he's like nobody brings

a gun you're not he said you're not dealing with people you don't trust he's if they don't trust them then you don't go you don't go you don't not trust them and bring a gun you just don't go and so he was explaining that And he's like, you know, now he's like every low-level guy's got a gun and they don't trust each other and it's just a horrible situation. I'm going to tell you a story.

I tell you I tell you a story about gut instinct. Okay. So a friend of mine said to me one day, prior to getting popped, she said, how is it you never get busted? And I'd been running in and out with Coke from South America for years and pod and shit. And I said, oh, that's easy. I don't think. And she said, what? I said, I do not think about it.

I'm confronted with something, and I make a decision on the spot. I know my gut knows whether to go or not go with it. So I said, I don't think about it. I go with my gut. And you know, 90% of the neurons in our body are not here. They're in our gut. It's just up here they get interfered with by the thinker, the thinker. So I said, I don't think. I just follow my gut instinct. On her counter,

kitchen counter was the complete works of Shakespeare, which I just flipped open at this very moment. This is what I read. You can look it up yourself. Pericles, Act 1, Scene 1. It goes something like this, that it is known is well enough. What grows more known? knows grows worse to smother it. You get it? Yeah. My gut knows. The moment I try and more know it in my head,

I smothered than I don't no longer know. You're overshunding it. I'm thinking, not any thinking is overthinking. It is the gut knows. It's funny. I've gotten that. So my crime was a bank fraud. And, you know,

and I've been caught in banks, handcuffed, brought to the police station. been questioned, been questioned by banks, and always managed for the longest time, you know, up until I was eventually caught. I'd been caught over and over again and just continually got away with different things. And people would say, you know, how, like, how aren't you scared,

aren't you concerned, aren't you that? You know, how do you know, how do you? And I was like, well, you know, I don't really know. I do my research, but I said basically it's intuition. I always say it's intuition. Not, you know, like you're saying your gut, instant, but my, I said, you'd be shocked how many times your intuition is telling you something and you just ignore it, you know, and it's the same thing with bank and bank, I've been grabbed by banks,

by bank staff, by bank fraud personnel and that sort of thing. And they knew. They couldn't put their finger on it, but they knew something was wrong. And I was like, their instinct or their intuition was telling them, this is a fraud, something's wrong, but they just couldn't put it together. And they had to let me walk out with the money. But they knew. knew and there was nothing that said if just in their mind they could in their gut like you're saying in their gut told them something's wrong here yeah put my finger on it but something's wrong but because of i had all the forms i had all the documents they were like they let me walk out with the check or they let me walk out with the cash so yeah i so i i have absolutely a big believer in

that because let's face it what else there's you know there's too many um you know it it's The coincidences are so overwhelming sometimes. There are none. There's a connection. Something's connected. There are no coincidences. There are synchronicities that point to something. It all points to something else.

You know, Jimmy Stewart, the actor Jimmy Stewart years ago. Yeah. Jimmy Stewart kept a book his entire life. And in that book, he wrote every coincidence that ever happened to him. I would love to see that book. I would love to see that book I'm going to tell you one more book story and that's this

when I got sober in 1988 my wife had had enough I had two kids and my wife and kids were down in the valley in San Fernando Valley in Los Angeles I was up in Santa Barbara in the hospital

65, 70 miles away she'd had enough of me I tried to get sober four years earlier six months after that I was back in the bag and I was kind of stayed in the bag for the ensuing four years she sent the kids up to see me

and they came in brought me an envelope and in the envelope there was a key and an address and she had rented a place for me told me she didn't want me to come home this was my new place there it was good luck go get it and oh we used to go back and forth on the phone all the time you know

and you know you don't understand and hang up so one day I was visiting his psychiatrist friend of mine at George Buffano and I was telling him George she doesn't fucking get it she's just she's so wrong and he said, Brian, I'm going to let you in on a little secret. I'm right all the time, but I try and keep it a secret, and I suggest you do the same too. And by the way, so is she. She's always right.

You know how when you're disagreeing with her and you're saying, no, no, no, that you don't understand. What you're saying to her is this. Drop your life experience. Assume my life experience immediately and see this my way. What's wrong with you? He said, hold your rightness gently. Always be prepared to change with new information. And it's just nonsense.

You don't need to be right for anyone else. Ah, yeah. I left his office. I stopped at a bookstore and I bought a book called 10,000 proverbs and quotations and went back to the house. Got on the phone with her. Of course, we're at it again. and we hang up on each other.

And I flipped the book open. And this is what I read the moment I flipped that book open. This is the grave of Mike O'Day, who died maintaining his right of way. His right was clear. His will was strong, but he's just as dead as if he'd been wrong. Buddy, it's like, bam, lightning hit the page. I could not believe that I read that at that moment. But I was confronted with myself in a way.

that actually made a difference to me. And it's made a difference to me ever since that day. That was bibliomancy right there, buddy. The book spoke to me. The book spoke to me. So there are two book stories. Yeah. That's great.

Yeah, I just can't imagine the, yeah, like what are the chances? There's just no chance. You know, there's no chance that you flip it open. It's actually got your name. and that the actual proverb or, you know, is a direct reflection of what's happening in your life at that moment. Exactly. There's something connected. That's the energy of life somehow got in touch with me.

Well, I don't want to take any more of your time. I appreciate it. I'd also like to say that, you know, one of the problems I have, like doing these podcasts, is a lot of times you get somebody and they don't really know one they don't really know their story and two they certainly a lot of times they just don't really know how to tell the story

but you know you did great I'm definitely glad Wade told me to contact you was like you got to contact this guy yeah thank you yeah I appreciate it do you have anything do you want me to put the links to the movies

anything specific I can put in the description box Did I send you a clip from the film I'm making in Ukraine? No. Okay. So I'm going to send you that clip. It's not the film. It is elements from the film.

Okay. So, and let me just say this about that, as John Kennedy would have said. The, what Russia is trying to do in Ukraine is eliminate the Ukraine. Ukrainian culture, period. That is what they're doing. So the struggle is about culture surviving. The struggle is about the Ukrainian culture standing up and saying, here we are, we're not going anywhere.

So while I've got 40 hours of horrendous footage, as you will see some of it, I'm going to make the center of the film, the Ukrainian culture, which is yet to be properly incorporated. You will see some of it in there. these people will be part of this central focus of that. And I'm working on what that's going to look like right now, putting together another 100 grand to go finish it over there and finish editing it here.

As soon as I get that money raised in the next kind of 30 days, I'll go back to Ukraine for another six weeks or so. How long is this clip? This clip is six minutes. do you want me to put it on the back like right now we're ending the podcast i can put it i can have um totally i can have it in there okay put it on there i'll uh send you a link is this on is this on youtube no it's not it's uh i'll send you a link where you can go grab it perfect i'll send it's on my google photos got it i'll have um as long yeah i'll have uh colby will embed it in uh

on the back of the video. And I'll send you a link to another video that you can look at just for fun. Masterminds, a smuggler supreme. Or you can Google Masterminds a Smuggler Supreme. It's on YouTube. It's 22 minutes of the last deal I did. Listen. So you were on the TV show, Mastermind.

I not only was on that show, that show was my idea. and the producers who did that show did my story first although I don't think it's the first story that shows up in the series but those guys they were my friends and I said listen you guys I said to Tim

the producer Tim O'Brien I said you should be doing a show about guys who pulled off deals that didn't get caught and why well most of those guys got caught ultimately they did but they had a lot of play

without getting goddess did I. So let me tell you, I'll tell you a story. Okay. I was on the run for three years at one point. I was number one on the Secret Services Most Wanted list. I was still conducting running scams. And I was actually with a girl that was, you know, with me. They called us like the Bonnie and Clyde of a bank fraud.

So, you know, there's all these TV. There's TV shows. There's articles and stuff. I remember I used to love. and this was in this would have been in 2004 maybe 2004 or 2005 we were in Charlotte, North Carolina and I used to watch that show all the time and I remember watching one of those episodes and at one point I remember turning to her and saying listen they're going to make a show about me I'm going to be on one of these shows one of these episodes one day and she looked at me and she

said you realize these guys all got caught yeah but I'm not going to get caught and you know it was just that arrogance that but it's so funny because you know a lot of times i'll i'll mention that show to people and they're like yeah i don't remember or sometimes they people remember that was a great show oh it was a great show it was a great premise uh and you know they never gave me any credit they just took that idea from me the next thing you know we talked about it one day the next thing you know i got a call from tim and cameron saying hey we're going to do that show and we wondered if you'd i said oh thanks for fucking cutting me in yeah but yeah i did it of course i couldn't help myself listen i i can't you know i'm constantly having stuff

you know i know i know anything about about you know really my background or anything but i wrote a a bunch of true crime stories while i was locked up i've got like seven or eight books i put out in true crimes or like over basically about two dozen synopsies of true crime stories. I'm working with several producers right now in a couple documentaries, but yeah, I can't tell you how many, like Hollywood's the worst. I'd rather deal with criminals. They're the worst. Yeah. I, I, uh, I, I was working in the film business with a friend of mine and, you know, done a bunch of TV shows. He's very successful. And one day he walked in and I had everything packed up on top of my desk in a box.

And he said, what are you doing? I said, buddy, I can't do this anymore. I cannot hear one more fucking no for a good idea that we have from someone who knows a whole lot less than us. So I'm just going to go find something else to do. And that was it. I got out of the business. The only reason I'm doing this film right now is because when the war started, something struck me. and I have a friend who filmed on the front line.

He documented the war crimes in Bosnia, Herzegovina, and Rwanda for the International Criminal Court. So he's seen bodies strewn on streets with machetes chopping them up in Rwanda. It was unbelievable. So I called Frank, and in 30 years he'd been in every front in the world. And I just wanted, the war got a grip on me And I wanted to have a chat with someone who understood war And fucking 15 minutes we decided that we probably should go What the fuck am I going to a war front for?

And I called a friend of mine who wants a television network And he gave me 30 grand right away He said there's 30 grand So then I called the Film Development Corporation in Newfoundland And they gave me 40 So all of a sudden I had 70 grand to go to Ukraine, which I did. And I spent six weeks over there,

put 3,000 miles on the car, ducking bullets and bombs. And it was the best thing I've ever done in my life. And I cannot wait to go back. Crazy, huh? Mm-hmm. Well, I hope the documentary, I hope it works out. Thank you. We'll definitely put the clip.

I appreciate it. I'll send it to you in five minutes. All right, let me sign off real quick, hold on. Hey, you guys, I appreciate you watching. Do me a favor, hit the subscribe button, hit the bell so you get notified of videos like this. Leave me a comment and watch the clip. Colby is going to embed it right now at the end of the video, so check it out. A Cossack, a Cossack, Disho.

Cossack, Cossack, a Cossack, a Cossack, ducan. Oh, Zagniekoy. Oh, Zagniello. I don't know. I'm gonnae. And I'm just a lot of And then, Oh, and then,

And then, And then, And then, Oh, Oh, Thank you. Thank you. I'm scared.

Yeah. Oh, I'm glad you. Oh, I'm sorry, I'm gladdened to Du Bochka, Every Ukrainian has their own Every Ukrainian has their own front in this war. It's a war they are winning together. Here we had the opportunity to help volunteers load a truck with supplies for the front. Group leader Serhi has done this ride behind the front lines at dozen times.

And this trip with us will be his 13th. I arrived in the UK as a refugee. I started my life from scratch there. So when the Ukrainian war started, when I start seeing the images of the people leaving their houses, and I start seeing images that reminded me of what I went through.

And while many people who went through war went through, I decided immediately that this is where I want to be. On March 16th in 2022, Serhi was one of 1,300 Ukrainians hiding from the constant Russian shelling in the drama theater in Mariupol. Serhi went in with his wife, his daughter, and his mother-in-law. Sirhi came out, wounded, and alone. arrive every day, they are looking for help. And every day we just try to cover over 500 personal and group requests for food, for medicine and for hygiene products. So if there

is any possibility to help us with this, it would be really great and it will really help. My son, this time, he was on the table. He heard something, it was, he closed. And then I'm to come to the house,

he's left, I'm going to put down, oh, it's a, it's, then we're that's a

but they're still, still, still. Still, still. Despite the intense, despite the despite the intense and Despite the intense and inhumane bombing of these Ukrainian homes,

the blown out windows and the walls, these eggs survive intact. They remind me so much of these resilient Ukrainians who, despite an enemy's relentless attempt at destruction and devastation of their culture, The Ukrainians persist, whole, and united. Oh, yeah, Lissu, Lysu, Chumne zealone. Thank you.