Cocaine Bear (GT Mini)
Ghost Town: Strange History, True Crime, & the Paranormal
Ghost Town
3.7 • 938 Ratings
🗓️ 21 May 2021
⏱️ 8 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
The 1985 tale of drug smuggling gone bad included an unsuspecting bear in the midst of the chaos.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Bears, drugs, and rock and roll. I'm Jason Horton. I'm Rebecca Leib. And this is Ghost Town. |
| 0:21.8 | It's a tale of drugs, planes, parachutes, and one unlucky bear. This epic crime story centered |
| 0:28.3 | in Knoxville could soon be coming to the big screen. I read sometimes entertainment trades to see |
| 0:34.8 | what's happening. And I saw that Elizabeth Banks, it is in the public arena. This information is |
| 0:41.0 | out there is developing a movie about cocaine bear. And I vaguely remember something about cocaine |
| 0:48.4 | bear. I couldn't really place it. Did some googling and went down and outrageous formal that we are |
| 0:56.0 | going to talk about today. Cocaine bear was briefly famous in 1985 when it was found dead in the |
| 1:01.1 | wilds of Kentucky after eating roughly 15 million dollars worth of cocaine. But that is just the |
| 1:07.2 | tip of the iceberg. On September 11, 1985, an old man in Knoxville, Tennessee woke up and went |
| 1:13.9 | outside where he found the corpse of a man in his driveway. The body had goggles on. It was |
| 1:18.8 | wearing a bulletproof vest and was strapped to a parachute. The body also had some other interesting |
| 1:24.4 | features, a couple handguns and 14 million dollars worth of cocaine on it. Just here every day |
| 1:30.8 | warning in Knoxville. The man phoned the police and when they arrived they identified the dead body |
| 1:35.5 | as Andrew C. Thornton II, the wealthy son of an elite Kentucky horse breeding family. |
| 1:41.1 | Former paratrooper, narcotics officer, and lawyer who left all these jobs because they were too |
| 1:46.0 | boring. He left them all to become a drug smuggler for a ring known as the company. Thornton had |
| 1:51.2 | received a purple heart after an injury in the Dominican Republic. He was deployed there during |
| 1:55.2 | the revolution. Thornton for real got bored of his life and decided to, it's like the bigger rush, |
| 2:02.9 | decided to do more dangerous work than he already was doing, which was already very dangerous. |
| 2:08.9 | On September 9th, Thornton embarked on a mission with Bill Leonard, his karate instructor turned |
| 2:13.5 | bodyguard. The pair hopped in a sesna 404 airplane and flew to Monterey, Colombia with plans to |
| 2:20.0 | pick up 400 kilograms of cocaine and smuggle it into the US. In a 1990 interview with former |
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