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Andrew C. Thornton II, whose life was once filled with privilege and promise, decided that now was the time to parachute from a twin-engine plane in the dead of night to smuggle $15 million worth of Colombian cocaine, attached to his body to the United States.
As the leader of a local drug smuggling ring, Thornton, a blue-blooded Kentucky man who had been a drug officer, thought he had found his calling. Now he was in the midst of his most ambitious drug spree yet. But when Thornton deployed his parachute too late on September 11, 1985, he free-falled thousands of feet into a backyard in Knoxville, Tennessee, instantly killing the 40-year-old, who was wearing a bulletproof vest. Night vision goggles and Gucci slippers.
Before Thornton fell from the sky and realized what author Sally Denton called “the dark side of the American dream” in an article for The Washington Post, another failure during his fatal mission would prove to be much longer. When Thornton was forced to parachute about 200 pounds of cocaine over Georgia after determining the cargo was too heavy for the plane, an American black bear grabbed one of the duffel bags of shipped drugs and began eating the coke. Three months later, after authorities discovered that a 175-pound bear had died of a stomach the coroner described as “literally filled to the brim with cocaine,” the animal was given a new name in popular culture: “cocaine bear.” “.
“The bear got there before we could and he ripped open the duffel bag, got him some cocaine and overdosed,” Gary Garner, an official with the Georgia Bureau of Investigation, said at the time, according to UPI.
Kenneth Alonso, the state’s chief coroner who performed the autopsy, added, “There isn’t a mammal on the planet that could survive this.”
But a new movie inspired by the true events presents a counterfact: What would have happened if the bear had survived and taken a bloody bend? “Cocaine Bear,” a dark comedy opening in theaters nationwide on Friday, is a heavily fictional account in which the eponymous 500-pound American black bear eats a duffel bag full of cocaine and rampages around Georgia, forcing tourists to flock to it ally together to survive an apex predator that jumped on coke. The film was greeted with great anticipation by moviegoers after the trailer went viral late last year, racking up more than 16 million views on YouTube.
Inspired by the true story of a drug smuggler’s plane crash in 1985, the missing cocaine and the black bear that ate it. (Video: Universal Pictures)
Jimmy Warden, who wrote the screenplay, told the Washington Post that while reinventing the bear’s story was fun, he was initially drawn to Thornton and the circumstances of his death, which led to what the The screenwriter described the film as “the perfect setup”.
“Cocaine Bear” is based on a true story: Pablo Eskobear, who overdosed
“Everything I read about Andrew Carter Thornton was more interesting than the last thing I read about him,” Warden said. “What I love about this story is how plausible the instigating incident is because it actually happened.”
Long before he turned to drug smuggling and made a bear famous, Thornton lived the high life. Raised on a thoroughbred horse farm in Bourbon County, Kentucky, he dropped out of college after one semester to join the Army, where he became a paratrooper for the 82, later becoming for his services during the US invasion of the Dominican Republic in 1965 awarded a Purple Heart, Denton wrote for The Post in 1985.
From 1985: Drew Thornton’s Last Adventure
But Thornton’s life took a turn after he dropped out of college for a second time in 1966. When he joined the Narcotics Division of the Lexington-Fayette Urban County Police Department, a Drug Enforcement Administration agent with whom he worked told Denton that he was a “paramilitary figure” in the form of James Bond, “an adventurer, driven by adrenaline rushes”.
Thornton’s turn to drug smuggling began when he became increasingly paranoid and resigned from the police department in 1977 to join a smuggling ring in Kentucky. The ring was affiliated with a larger group called “The Company,” a drug and gun-selling syndicate that authorities estimated in 1980 had more than 300 members and boats and planes worth $26 million.
Betty Zairing, Thornton’s ex-wife, said at the time that Thornton “believed he was an ‘impeccable warrior,'” a term coined by mystical author Carlos Castaneda.
“He was a philosophical, incredibly disciplined, extremely spiritual, and loyal warrior with his own code of ethics who thrived on excitement,” said Zairing zu Denton, author of a 1990 book about Thornton, The Bluegrass Conspiracy.
In 1981, Thornton was among 25 people accused of stealing weapons from the China Lake Naval Weapons Center in Fresno, California and conspiring to smuggle 1,000 pounds of marijuana into the United States to use in Colombia for drugs swap, the Associated Press reported. Thornton’s felony charges were dropped after he pleaded no contest to a drug-related charge, and he was sentenced to six months in prison.
Then, on September 9, 1985, Thornton boarded a plane to Montería, Colombia for the smuggling mission of a lifetime. Bill Leonard, his karate instructor-turned-bodyguard, later told the Knoxville News Sentinel that Thornton lied to him about going to the Bahamas when they actually picked up 900 pounds of cocaine to smuggle to the United States.
After being forced to dump hundreds of pounds of cocaine to lighten the plane’s cargo, Leonard said Thornton exchanged a few words with him before they reluctantly jumped off the plane: “Just do as I tell you and I’ll get you out.”
At approximately 8:30 a.m. on September 11, 1985, Fred Myers was getting up at his Knoxville home to shave when he looked out his window and saw a body tangled in a parachute. When Thornton was found with his neck broken after his parachute failed to deploy, police said he was carrying $4,500 in cash, two pistols, two knives, rope, groceries and more than 70 pounds of cocaine.
“I’ve never had a landing in my backyard,” Myers, then 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 had told him to. Leonard was never charged with a crime, according to the Associated Press.
But months later, in December 1985, new questions surfaced when a three-sentence article in the New York Times reported that an American black bear in Georgia overdosed on cocaine from Thornton’s botched drug depots. Alonso, Georgia’s chief coroner, told reporters the bear was found “in a very badly decomposed state” in the Chattahoochee-Oconee National Forest surrounded by several plastic bags that authorities estimated contained about 75 pounds of cocaine.
“There’s nothing left but bones and a thick hide,” GBI’s Garner said of the bear.
Alonso told UPI the bear, about 3 or 4 years old, likely died within 30 to 45 minutes from acute cocaine poisoning, noting that the animal had suffered from cerebral hemorrhage, respiratory failure, hyperthermia, kidney failure, heart failure and stroke.
“The bear ingested significant amounts of cocaine,” Alonso said, hinting to the Associated Press that the bear did not eat nearly all of the 75 pounds of the drug that was in the area. “He probably took two, three or four grams of cocaine. It could have been more.”
Since then, the bear and man forever bonded through cocaine have been remembered differently. The Kentucky for Kentucky Fun Mall in Lexington claims a stuffed bear is on display is the same one known as “Cocaine Bear” or “Pablo Escobear”. The mall claimed in a 2015 blog post that the stuffed bear once belonged to country music star Waylon Jennings before becoming a spectacle for shoppers. But Shooter Jennings’ manager, Waylon’s son, debunked the claim last December, telling WAVE in Louisville that “Waylon Jennings never owned a stuffed bear of any kind.”
As for Thornton, he’s almost become an afterthought in his own story. Warden told the Post that the man ultimately responsible for “Cocaine Bear” disappeared after the first 10 minutes of the new film. While Thornton’s loved ones suspected he might have been proud of his infamous ending — “He would have loved the concept of warriors falling from the sky,” his ex-wife told The Post in 1985 — others didn’t pay much heed to what, what Thornton might have been thinking in his final moments.
“I’m glad his parachute didn’t deploy,” Brian Leighton, an assistant US attorney in Fresno who once charged him with marijuana trafficking, told the AP at the time. “I hope he got a damn good high from it [cocaine].”