Andrew C. Thornton II, whose life was once full of privilege and promise, decided it was time to parachute from a twin-engine plane in the dead of night to smuggle $15 million worth of Colombian cocaine into his body. was tied to the United States.
A Kentucky blue blood who had been a narcotics officer, Thornton thought he had found his calling as the leader of a local drug-smuggling gang. Now he was in the midst of his most ambitious drug run yet. But when Thornton opened his parachute too late on Sept. 11, 1985, the free fall from thousands of feet sent him crashing into a backyard in Knoxville, Tenn., killing the 40-year-old man wearing a bulletproof vest instantly. Night-vision goggles and Gucci loafers.
Another failure during his deadly mission would prove to be a very long legacy before Thornton fell from the sky and realized what writer Sally Denton described in an article for The Washington Post as “the dark side of the American Dream.” When Thornton was forced to dump nearly 200 pounds of cocaine by parachute over Georgia after realizing that the load was too heavy for the plane, an American black bear carried one of the duffel bags of drugs that had been sent. Got caught and started eating coke. Three months later, when authorities discovered that a 175-pound bear had died with what the coroner described as a stomach “literally packed to the brim with cocaine,” the animal was given a new name in popular culture. Was given: “Cocaine Bear.”
“Bear got there before we arrived, and he opened the duffel bag, he found some cocaine and OD’d,” Gary Garner, an officer with the Georgia Bureau of Investigation, said at the time, according to UPI.
Added Kenneth Alonso, the state’s chief medical examiner, who performed the autopsy, “There is no mammal on this planet that could have survived.”
But a new film inspired by true events offers a counterfactual: What if the bear had survived and taken a bloody turn? “Cocaine Bear,” a dark comedy opening Friday in theaters nationwide, is a highly fictionalized account of how a 500-pound American black bear eats a duffel bag of cocaine and goes on a murderous rampage in Georgia, thereby forcing the tourists to the band. simultaneously hop on coke to escape from an apex predator. After the trailer went viral late last year, garnering over 16 million views on YouTube, the film has received a lot of expectations from moviegoers.
Screenwriter Jimmy Warden told The Washington Post that although it was fun to revisit Bear’s story, he was initially attracted to Thornton and the circumstances surrounding his death, which resulted in what the screenwriters called “the perfect setup”. described as the film.
Warden said, “Everything I read about Andrew Carter Thornton was more interesting than the last thing I read about him.” “What I love about this story is how plausible the inciting incident is because it actually happened.”
Long before turning to drug trafficking and making a bear very famous, Thornton lived a high life. Raised on a thoroughbred horse farm in Bourbon County, Ky. Dropped out of college after one semester to join the Army, where he became a paratrooper for the 82nd Airborne Division at Fort Bragg, N.C. Thornton, who was known to his loved ones as Dru. Denton was later awarded the Purple Heart for his service during the American invasion of the Dominican Republic in 1965, wrote for The Post in 1985.
But Thornton’s life took a turn after he dropped out of college for the second time in 1966. When he joined the Lexington-Fayette Urban County Police Department’s narcotics squad, a Drug Enforcement Administration agent he worked with told Denton he had a “paramilitary-type personality in the mold of James Bond”. “, “an adventurer driven by an adrenaline rush.”
Thornton’s penchant for smuggling drugs began when he became increasingly paranoid and resigned from the police department in 1977 for his involvement in a smuggling ring in Kentucky. The ring was linked to a larger group called “The Company”, a drugs and guns-running syndicate that authorities estimated in 1980 to have more than 300 members and $26 million worth of boats and planes.
Thornton’s ex-wife Betty Ziering said at the time that Thornton “believed he was an ‘impeccable warrior,'” a term coined by mystery writer Carlos Castaneda.
“He was a philosopher, incredibly disciplined, extremely spiritual and loyal warrior, with his own code of conduct that thrived on provocation,” Ziering told Denton, author of the 1990 book about Thornton, “The Bluegrass Conspiracy,” told.
In 1981, Thornton was among 25 men charged with conspiring to steal weapons from the China Lake Naval Weapons Center and smuggle 1,000 pounds of marijuana into the United States to be traded for drugs in Colombia, The Associated Press told. The felony charges against Thornton were dropped after he pleaded no contest to a misdemeanor drug charge, and he was sentenced to six months in prison.
Then, on September 9, 1985, Thornton boarded a plane to Monteria, Colombia, for the smuggling mission of his life. Bill Leonard, his karate instructor-turned-bodyguard, later told the Knoxville News Sentinel that Thornton had lied to him about going to the Bahamas when they were actually picking up 400 kilograms of cocaine to smuggle into the United States.
After he was forced to dump hundreds of pounds of cocaine to lighten the plane’s load, Leonard said Thornton reluctantly muttered a few words to him before exiting the plane: “Just do what I tell you, And I’ll kick you out.”
At approximately 8:30 a.m. on September 11, 1985, Fred Myers got up to shave at his home in Knoxville when he looked out his window and saw a body tangled in a parachute. According to police, when Thornton was found with a broken neck after his parachute failed to open, he had $4,500 in cash, two pistols, two knives, ropes, food, and more than 70 pounds of cocaine.
“I’ve never done a landing in my backyard before,” Myers, an 85-year-old retired engineer, told UPI. “he was dead.”
Leonard survived the landing and took a cab to meet Thornton’s girlfriend, as Thornton told him to do. According to the Associated Press, Leonard was never charged with a crime.
But months later, new questions arose in December 1985, when a three-sentence item in the New York Times reported that an American black bear in Georgia had taken a cocaine overdose from Thornton’s botched drug drop. Georgia’s chief medical examiner, Alonso, told reporters that the bear was found in the Chattahoochee-Oconee National Forest “in a very badly decomposed state”, surrounded by numerous plastic bags, which officials speculated contained There were approximately 75 pounds of cocaine.
The GBI’s Garner said of the bear, “Nothing left but bones and a large pelt.”
Alonso told UPI that the bear, which was about 3 or 4 years old, likely died within 30 to 45 minutes of acute cocaine intoxication, noting that the animal had a brain hemorrhage, respiratory failure, hyperthermia, kidney failure, Had suffered congestive heart failure and stroke.
“The bear consumed a substantial amount of cocaine,” Alonso told The Associated Press, suggesting that the bear did not come close to eating all 75 pounds of the drug that were in the area. “It was probably two, three, or four grams of cocaine ingested. It could have been more.”
Since then, the bear and the man forever associated with cocaine have been remembered differently. The Kentucky Fun Mall in Lexington, Kentucky alleges that a taxidermized bear on display is known as the “Cocaine Bear” or “Pablo Escobar”. The mall claimed in a 2015 blog post that the stuffed bear was once owned by country music star Waylon Jennings before it became a spectacle for shoppers. But the shooter Jennings’ son, Waylon, dismissed the claim, telling The Wave in Louisville last December that “Waylon Jennings never had a taxidermy bear of any kind.”
As for Thornton, he has almost become an afterthought in his own story. Warden told The Post that the man ultimately responsible for the “cocaine bear” isn’t featured after the first 10 minutes of the new film. While Thornton’s loved ones speculated that he would be proud of his infamous end—”He would have loved the concept of warriors who fall from the sky,” his ex-wife told The Post in 1985—others didn’t care much. What must Dia Thornton be thinking in her last moments?
“I’m glad his parachute didn’t open,” Brian Leighton, an assistant US attorney in Fresno who once prosecuted him for marijuana trafficking, told the AP at the time. “I hope he got a hell of a lot out of that [cocaine].”