3.7 • 928 Ratings
🗓️ 21 May 2021
⏱️ 8 minutes
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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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