Gratifyingly, the deprotections were successfully achieved using CAN in CH3CN/water followed by subsequent treatment of the reaction mixture with sodium borohydride to reduce the quinone, then with benzyl chloroformate to prepare their N-Cbz-protected form. Under these conditions, the desired Cbz-protected nortropane 12 and homotropane 13 were obtained in 90% and 80% yields, respectively, without erosion of the diastereomeric ratio (Scheme 9A). The Cbz-protecting group was introduced to facilitate product purification but also for both its facile deprotection and conversion to the corresponding N-methyl derivative. Since annulation reactions with the N-p-MeOPh substituted cyclic amines were slow and moderately efficient, we also investigated the deprotection of the N-(ppinacolboryl)phenyl derivative 8j that was formed in good yield. The dearylation of 8j to 13 (Scheme 9B) was conveniently performed in 71% yield by perboric acid treatment, affording after simple extraction the crude phenol, followed by CAN and CbzCl treatment according to the optimized procedure developed for the para-methoxy derivatives 3c and 8e. afforded the β isomers in good to excellent levels of diastereoselectivity (Scheme 10). This strategy is expected to be useful for the stereocontrolled synthesis of tropanes and homotropane alkaloids.