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Ghost Town: Strange History, True Crime, & the Paranormal

Cocaine Bear (GT Mini)

Ghost Town: Strange History, True Crime, & the Paranormal

Jason Horton & Rebecca Leib

True Crime, Unknown, Paranormal, Weird History, Social Sciences, History, Science

3.7928 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. New YouTube Video Haunted Merch Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/ghosttownpod Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/ghosttownpod Sources: https://bit.ly/3u0NH8w Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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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