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♪
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In a Kentucky mall, you can meet
a very famous taxidermy bear.
This is my first time seeing the cocaine bear.
The what bear?
Yes, the cocaine bear.
There's a reason why he's called the cocaine bear.
This story is amazing.
♪
One day in the woods, a bear finds a huge bag of drugs.
And the bear got high.
[ Bear growling ]
The cocaine was 95% pure.
No, really, they found him laying there
with the cocaine around him.
[ Chuckles ]
That's a very interesting story in itself.
But this is the origin story of the cocaine bear,
featuring the larger-than-life man who started it all.
He was mercurial and mysterious.
He lived on the edge.
He had a James Bond wristwatch that shot tear gas.
These are Kentucky Blue Bloods
that got together to go into full-time smuggling.
He was a bad dude!
This is such a powerful story.
It has corruption, it has murder.
Judge John Wood was fatally wounded by a single gunshot.
Drugs, murders, gun running, you name it.
Holy crap, you would never believe it,
but it did actually happen.
Believe it or not, this story even has cows...
on drugs.
Oh, come on! [ Laughs ]
This is the true story of the cocaine bear.
You wouldn't forget it. Let's put it that way.
♪
The backwoods of the Chattahoochee National Forest
in North Georgia are stark and remote.
In December 1985, a hunter finds something here
that sparks a legend.
♪
This legend has grown to be quite a story.
And in 2023, that legend
is brought to life by an incredible movie.
[ Bear roars ]
And soon the whole world is talking about it.
Number one trend on Twitter. Everyone's talking about this.
[ Bear roaring ]
A bear did cocaine!
This will be the winner of the decade probably.
Cocaine Bear, Fran.
Take One. Mark.
♪
Well, my name is Francis Bishop Wiley.
And in December of 1985,
I was Assistant Special Agent in Charge
of the Georgia Bureau of Investigation,
in Gainseville, Georgia,
and right now I'm retired.
I received a call at the office
from a game warden in Fanon County, Georgia.
And he advised that a hunter had found a bear
in the woods on a mountain
and that there was a parachute and a duffel bag close by.
I dispatched two of my agents to the scene.
They radioed back and advised me
that there indeed was a bear, parachute, and duffel bag.
So I said, well, this is very strange.
I mean, very odd that we would even find something like this.
I told them to take it to the Georgia crime lab
in Atlanta, and they did take the duffel bag
and found residue of cocaine on it.
There was no cocaine in the duffel bag,
so where did the cocaine go?
Well, the bear ate it.
♪
The bizarre story of this bear and what happened
actually begins three months before.
[ Thud ]
In the middle of the night, a Knoxville resident
is awakened by a sound from his backyard.
It wasn't until the next morning
that he looked in his driveway
and immediately called the police.
♪
My name is Jimmy Jones.
I'm a retired Knox County sheriff.
From the time I was 16 years old,
I knew I wanted to be in law enforcement.
We were just in the office that day.
It was a normal day, just like any other day.
The call came in from dispatch. It was an elderly gentleman,
and he said that there was a gentleman out in his driveway
who was trespassing,
and if the police didn't come he would take care of it himself.
♪
The "trespasser" is the dead body of a skydiver,
and JJ is called to the crime scene.
♪
This is a very quiet community, usually.
There's very little crime, very little happens.
When we arrived on the scene, the individual was found
in the gravel driveway area between the houses.
♪
We were surprised to see this individual here.
His parachute was kind of wadded up beside him,
like it hadn't fully opened.
The gentleman was deceased.
There was a duffel bag that was hooked to the individual.
The duffel bag contained somewhere
between 30 and 40 packages marked USA.
All of them were labelled the same way.
We knew when we cut into it, it was still moist,
and the smell would just hit you in the face.
It was a very high quality of cocaine.
♪
Somewhere between 30 and 40 kilos of cocaine.
It was probably worth hundreds of millions.
I was amazed.
And I was just a kid. I mean, I wasn't but 24, 25 years old.
I had never seen anything like that.
It was like holy crap, you know?
This-- You would never believe this happened
in sleepy, little, old Knoxville, Tennessee.
[ Laughs ]
We continued to look at the body to evaluate it.
There was at least one attack knife along with some daggers
or spears that were actually in a sheath on his arm,
night vision goggles.
There was about $5,000 in US currency.
There were precious and semi-precious stones
in a money belt.
He had some gold Krugerrands.
Nobody knew what a Krugerrand was.
We heard of 'em, but nobody actually--
I don't think anybody had ever seen 'em.
They were gold, and they have like a little kangaroo
or an animal on the front.
♪
Initially we had no clue what had happened.
None of this is making sense for JJ and his team.
Who is this guy in the driveway?
There's some questions that really haven't been answered.
He was mysterious.
He looked a lot like a soldier of fortune.
He had a 9mm Browning high powered pistol
that was loaded with Teflon-coated 9mm bullets.
Those are the bullets that will penetrate a bulletproof vest.
He also had a wristwatch
that was like a James Bond wristwatch,
but it wasn't one that you would get out of a cereal box.
It was actually a high-quality watch that shot tear gas.
I was amazed every time something came off his body,
a piece of equipment or whatever it was.
I mean, it was just more and more and more.
He also had some very expensive shoes.
In an odd fact that a lot of people noted at the time,
he was wearing Gucci loafers.
[ Ding! ]
♪
I mean, we were still trying to put pieces together.
We really didn't have anything.
Then as more agencies became involved,
we ultimately found out
that the plane had crashed in North Carolina.
♪
The wreckage of the Cessna 404 is still scattered
across this ridge of the Nantahala Mountains.
We did hear that a body had been found in Knoxville
of someone who parachuted out of a plane,
and evidently, the parachute didn't open.
At this time, it kind of appears
that that may be involved with this.
♪
The location of the plane in North Carolina
is more than 100 miles
from the body of the mysterious parachutist.
The aircraft provides a vital clue--
It's registered to a man from Lexington, Kentucky.
In Lexington, the information filters down
to the local papers.
♪
I was a investigative reporter at the Lexington Herald Leader
in Kentucky
from about 1979 to 1987.
♪
The body was identified as Andrew Thornton.
And that erupted the newsroom at the time.
♪
Drew Thornton was someone
who had been in a position of authority,
a police officer who came from privilege.
He was a soldier, had, you know, been wounded in combat.
Personally, I wasn't all that surprised
when I heard that he was dead in Knoxville in a driveway,
having fallen out of a plane.
He had lived on the edge and was--
His luck had run out.
♪
With the body identified, police trace Thornton's
flight path all the way back to North Georgia.
We started receiving more information
that there was more cocaine that had been dumped
along the way of his journey.
♪
The duffel bag Drew Thornton had strapped to his body
when he died
was of the same make, color, and type
that they found close to the bear in Georgia.
The incredible story is quickly picked up by the TV networks.
The medical examiner says the bear had been dead
for at least six weeks.
GBI agents recovered none of the cocaine.
They said it could have been blown away by the wind
or simply dissolved.
One thing's for sure--
The bear did not eat 75 pounds of the stuff.
We believe that the duffel bag that was found in Fanon County
next to the bear
also had 75 pounds of cocaine.
When we found it, there was no cocaine.
There was 75 pounds found with Andrew Thornton
in a similar duffel bag when he jumped to his death.
♪
So who really is Andrew Thornton?
And how is he connected to the cocaine bear?
To find answers, we need to go back decades
to the heartland of Kentucky's blue-blood society.
♪
My name is Ron Bryant.
I was historian for the Kentucky State Park System
and director of Waveland State historic site.
My family has been in Kentucky for over 200 years.
Kentucky historian Ron Bryant
is a distant relative of Daniel Boone.
He knows Kentucky.
There was always old jokes in Kentucky
about everyone being related to each other.
Well, in some cases, the gene pool was rather shallow,
I've got to admit.
♪
But not with Andrew Thornton.
Andrew was a child of privilege.
None of this should have ever happened
according to the way he was raised.
When the news came that Andrew Thornton had died
and how he died,
society was not only in a state of shock.
It was in a state of absolute shock.
♪
Andrew Thornton II was the son
of, uh, Andrew Carter Thornton.
The Thorntons had established themselves
in the horse industry.
And they knew their horses.
And they, in fact, had at least two derby winners.
That's quite a feather in anybody's cap right there.
♪
Andrew Thornton certainly had the breeding--
[ Chuckles ] It's funny to use the word breeding
for someone from Lexington, Kentucky,
because that never hardly ever talks about people.
It's only about horses.
But he really did have the breeding.
Andrew Thornton entered the University of Kentucky,
but his heart wasn't in it.
So he left the University of Kentucky
after a short period of time and volunteered for combat.
♪
He went into the Army, actually won a purple heart.
And he particularly liked flying and parachuting.
♪
In 1968, Thornton returns home a hero and gets married.
But it doesn't last.
This man of action is looking for his next thrill.
He wanted something that was not staid and safe.
He wanted something that was, shall we say, nearly dangerous.
♪
After having a very distinguished military career,
he came back, and he joined the police department.
Thornton liked the idea of being a police officer
because that was an adventuresome life.
♪
My name is Jim Huggins.
I was a supervisory special agent
for the FBI in Lexington, Kentucky.
from 1986 to 1995 when I retired.
I worked very closely
with the Kentucky State Police Intelligence Bureau.
♪
In the '70s at that time, there was a lot of
drug activities starting to show up,
particularly around the college campus area.
It was becoming a major crime problem
for the local law enforcement agencies at that time.
The Lexington Police Department
creates its first narcotics squad.
And the promise of action is a huge draw
for the young Andrew Thornton.
He volunteered for the Narcotics unit.
His best friend, Bill Canan, was already working there.
Bill Canan came from a much different background
than Drew Thornton.
His family was working class.
Drew Thornton likes the fact that Bill Canan is a tough guy.
As a pair, they're made for trouble.
♪
They were trying to infiltrate student groups
out at the University of Kentucky,
and they would hang out in bars
and dress like a regular student.
There also were accusations that they would arrest a drug dealer,
confiscate his drugs,
and then instead of turning them into the evidence locker
like they should have, they'd keep them for themselves.
There were allegations that
they did in fact resell some of the drugs.
It wasn't too big a leap for someone in a new narcotics squad
to think that maybe if they just held back a little bit
of what, uh, they had confiscated
and then turned it back out on the streets,
that they could increase their income.
But why would a wealthy member of the Lexington elite
stoop to stealing drugs?
Nobody really, really, really knew
what Andrew Thornton was doing.
There had been rumors that were going around
that something was bad wrong with Andrew.
For Thornton, it may not have been simply
just to get some extra money.
It may have been to do something
that other people couldn't do or wouldn't do.
It would go along with his whole soldier of fortune lifestyle
that he cultivated.
That would be his downfall,
changing him from a pillar of society
into a pariah in society.
The charmed life of Drew Thornton is about to get darker
on the way to a rendezvous... with the cocaine bear.
In 1975, the cocaine bear was just a cub
learning the bear way of life in the woods of Georgia.
♪
Meanwhile more than 300 miles away in Lexington, Kentucky,
Drew Thornton is relishing his role as a dirty cop
with his tough guy partner Bill Canan...
a world away from his respectable upbringing
in Kentucky horse breeding society.
I think Andrew Thornton was one of these types of individuals
that's grown up with a silver spoon,
and they've gotten just about anything they wanted.
So to have this kind of thrill
is something that excites them.
[ Chuckles ] He was a bad dude.
I don't think Andrew Thornton was rebelling
against his position in society.
I think Andrew Thornton wanted a different type of life.
That's all it was.
He saw himself as being an adventurer,
a person that literally lived on the edge.
Thornton helped create the myth of Drew Thornton.
He tried to build an image of himself that was the superman.
But it went beyond what he was really capable of.
Always a show-off, Thornton liked to demonstrate
his athletic arrest techniques
to his buddies in the police department.
And so he tried to jump over a car,
and at the same time, he was wearing a weapon.
And the weapon went off, and it ricocheted and shot him.
[ Laughing ]
♪
It does no more than graze his leg and his ego.
But that doesn't stop him from escalating his game
from street dealing to flying illegal drugs into Kentucky.
♪
I've been a pilot for over 40 years,
and then later I became
an aviation writer and photographer.
♪
I think one of the most fascinating stories you'll find
in drug smuggling is the story of Drew Thornton.
♪
There's a personality type who looks for a way
to make life bigger.
Sometime in the mid-'70s,
Drew Thornton decided to move beyond street level crime
and become a smuggler.
Drew was primarily bringing really plane loads of marijuana
into Kentucky for distribution throughout the state.
I mean, this was a big thing.
They had devised a plan that worked well.
All they did was go get it, transport it back,
cut out the middle man.
I would have never imagined that this was happening.
♪
Through their contacts in the Lexington drug scene,
dirty cops Andrew Thornton and Bill Canan
establish a network of out-of-state wholesalers
who supply them with larger quantities of pot.
Thornton would be coming in on the weekend,
when a lot of recreational flyers would be coming back in,
so the radar scopes would be full of airplanes.
And you could easily unload your luggage into a car,
head up the highway, and you're done.
Drew Thornton flew in many, many loads of marijuana.
He was making a substantial amount of money.
♪
As 1976 draws to a close, life is good for the cocaine bear.
But 200 miles away, things are about to get complicated
for our pair of dirty cops.
♪
In the late '70s, when the narcotics squad in Lexington
was cultivating people who could become informants,
one of those people was Melanie Flynn.
Melanie Flynn met Bill Canan,
who was trying to use her as an informant.
She was furnishing him with information
about drug users and purchasers
around the University of Kentucky.
Melanie by all accounts
was just helping out the local cops.
She felt like this was the right thing to do.
Melanie doesn't know she is working with crooked cops.
But soon she begins to suspect
that the drugs circulating in Lexington
are being supplied by Drew Thornton and Bill Canan.
And I think they became concerned
that she may be a threat to their operations
and would go to the authorities
and cause them some major problems.
She leaves work one day and is going home
and is never seen again.
♪
Her car was later found abandoned
in an apartment complex on the north side of Lexington.
♪
She was last seen about two blocks away
parked at an intersection,
talking to two people in a dark van.
An investigation later by Kentucky State Police,
there was some belief that maybe those two individuals
had been Drew Thornton and Bill Canan.
♪
When you go from drug smuggling
and you escalate to a crime of murder,
that's really taken it to a whole 'nother level.
And that has not been proven yet
of however Melanie Flynn is still missing.
♪
After Melanie Flynn's disappearance,
a pocketbook that she was carrying
was found by a fisherman in the Kentucky River.
And in that were some medications that were hers.
Melanie Flynn is probably one of the most tragic characters
in all of this.
To this day, we don't know what really happened to her.
And the rumor mill was running very, very much.
One rumor is that Drew Thornton
is the subject of an internal affairs investigation.
He quits the police.
Now he's free to move into full-time smuggling...
and the path is clearing for his final flight
over the woods of North Georgia.
♪
In the woods of North Georgia, an innocent bear has no idea
that there is a man 200 miles away plotting something so huge
that their worlds will one day collide.
I have heard many people say in talking about Andrew Thornton,
they would relate him to the myth of Icarus
flying too close to the sun.
And that's exactly what he did.
[ Chuckles ]
♪
By 1977, Drew Thornton is no longer a cop
and can now expand his drug smuggling business
with no one looking over his shoulder.
He thought of himself as smarter than everybody else,
had no fear.
And he would push that envelope
where many people wouldn't do that.
The only way for Thornton to go big is to find new partners.
He turns to an old friend from Lexington,
a man named Bradley Bryant.
Bradley Bryant was a childhood school friend of Drew Thornton.
They went to the same private school in Lexington,
and they both went to the military academy,
so they had a long history.
Bryant was even Thornton's best man at his wedding.
They were the salt of the earth.
They were-- They were the bastions of society.
♪
Bradley Bryant isn't just an old buddy of Thornton's,
he's a successful businessman
with links to organized crime all over the country.
And he wants to be a player in Sin City.
♪
Bradley Bryant went to Las Vegas,
and he met the Chagra brothers, Lee and Jimmy Chagra.
♪
The Chagras were major, major players
in the drug business.
They had connections with South America, Mexico, Colombia.
♪
Jimmy and Lee Chagra would allow Drew Thornton
to import larger amounts of marijuana.
♪
Andrew wasn't afraid to, to go to South America
and risk his life doing it.
But I think that was part of the attraction for him.
♪
If you're gonna bring in tons of marijuana,
you're gonna need an airplane capable of hauling that.
Drew Thornton was flying a four-engine cargo aircraft,
a World War II plane
that was able to carry tons of marijuana into Kentucky.
Thornton's route takes him from South America,
up the coast of Florida, and over North Georgia--
the home territory of the cocaine bear.
[ Bear growls ]
♪
He was bringing in what's estimated to be 10,000 pounds,
five tons of marijuana.
In today's money, that's $5 million.
These are Kentucky Blue Bloods
that got together to go into full-time smuggling
and were pretty successful at it.
People don't understand what a process it would be
to fly into a foreign country,
with a load of drugs coming back to the United States of America.
That takes a unique individual.
They quickly ratcheted up their business,
becoming a major organization in the southeast,
maybe the biggest at that time.
I mean, it was-- it-- it--
it was unbelievable.
♪
Drew Thornton and Bradley Bryant are raking in the cash
on their way to the top of the drug smuggling food chain.
♪
But they're so busy living the high life,
they ignore the warning signs
that it's all about to come crashing down.
♪
In 1978, Lee Chagra was assassinated
in his office.
The suspicion was obviously that it was a retaliation
for some crime that had gone bad.
Lee Chagra's death brings
unwanted police attention for Thornton.
Within months, Jimmy Chagra is arrested for drug trafficking.
And this sets in motion a bizarre series of events
that will send Thornton's life into free-fall.
Jimmy Chagra was to go on trial for his criminal activities.
That trial that would be under the, uh, supervision
of Judge John Wood.
Was often known as Maximum John
for the sentences he would hand out.
The day before the trial was scheduled to start,
Judge Wood was assassinated in his driveway.
♪
Judge John Wood was fatally wounded by a single gunshot
as he was getting in his car this morning.
Emergency attendants worked on the judge
but could not revive him.
♪
John Wood was assassinated by a hit man
hired by Jimmy Chagra.
It's hard to imagine what Thornton's associate
was thinking when he ordered the hit.
It didn't make a lot of sense in many, many ways.
It just simply wasn't done.
People just didn't do things like that.
Perhaps it was scare tactics, but it didn't work.
Jimmy Chagra went down for 30 years.
But that's not the strangest twist in this assassination.
Chagra had hired a gentleman named Charles Harrelson.
If the name Charles Harrelson is familiar,
it's because the hit man has a Hollywood connection.
He's the father of actor Woody Harrelson.
♪
The Wood killing was international news.
Everybody in law enforcement in the United States
knew about it.
That was a line that had not been crossed.
A lot of attention was on anything that happened to do
with the Chagra Brothers, including Drew Thornton.
Suddenly Drew Thornton of little-old Lexington, Kentucky,
is on the radar of the FBI.
There's nowhere left to hide.
♪
The cocaine bear was the second case that was worked in Georgia
where an animal had come to its demise from cocaine.
In September of 1982, the sheriff's office had called
and said a farmer had found a blue canister cylinder
in his pasture with his cows.
And his cows had gotten into the cylinder.
[ Cow moos ]
And I said are you crazy?
The cows had white powder all over their noses.
♪
There's something going on here.
But where did the cows get their cocaine?
[ Cow grunts ]
Could it be the same supplier to our legendary bear?
♪
But back in 1980, Drew Thornton isn't a cocaine smuggler.
He's running marijuana
and lots of it.
♪
After the murder of a federal judge,
Thornton becomes a person of interest for the FBI.
♪
We got notified immediately from FBI headquarters
that a federal judge had been murdered,
and there might be a person in Lexington involved in that.
The FBI has the killer
and the man who ordered the hit.
Now they are shaking down all of his criminal contacts.
But despite the heat,
Thornton and his old buddy Bradley Bryant
are still smuggling.
Thornton was living a very, very good life,
and Bryant was after the money.
So they gambled.
And that's an old Kentucky vice, of course.
They gambled, and they lost, and they lost big time.
♪
In 1981 at a hotel at the Philadelphia airport,
Bradley Bryant's luck ran out.
He was arrested with a huge supply
of automatic weapons, night vision goggles,
and sophisticated communication gear,
something that one federal agent told me
looked a lot like a complicated assassination kit.
Another weapons stash is discovered by the feds
in a Lexington warehouse owned by Bryant.
♪
He's sentenced to 15 years in jail,
and there's bad news for the drug operation's star pilot.
Hidden among the weapons is a notebook.
Written inside is the name Andrew Thornton,
along with code words for marijuana smuggling missions.
Thornton became fearful
for the attention that was gonna come to bear on him.
He immediately dropped outta sight.
♪
It turned out that he was on the run,
and he was still up to his old tricks, flying his airplane.
♪
For months, Thornton flies from airport to airport,
staying under the radar and avoiding capture.
Thornton liked the idea of risk.
He loved excitement, he loved adventure.
He would have enjoyed that immensely.
♪
He landed at an airport in North Carolina,
and customs officials were intercepting his communication
and tracking his flights.
[ Indistinct radio chatter ]
And that's where they got him.
♪
But he wasn't caught with drugs.
♪
Thornton's plane is completely clean.
Someone could have tipped him off...
or he just got lucky.
Thornton was a very, very, very lucky man in many, many ways.
The evidence against him is thin.
Thornton was under suspicion for drug trafficking.
He was indicted for a conspiracy involving drugs,
pleaded no contest to a single count of marijuana smuggling.
Thornton gets off easy and only serves five months.
♪
With all his friends in prison,
Thornton's marijuana empire has collapsed.
But he's not ready to give up just yet.
♪
That's when Drew Thornton became the lone wolf.
He used what connections he had
to start bringing in cocaine...
[ Bear growls ]
...which changed everything.
[ Indistinct conversations ]
♪
In the '70s, there was a huge appetite for marijuana
in the United States,
but then in the '80s, the appetite shifted to cocaine.
It became the drug of choice.
A lot of celebrities were using it,
and it was attractive for the smugglers.
I joined DEA in 1983,
I was assigned to working drug cases throughout Kentucky
that took me to South America.
Once I joined DEA, I learned a lot about Andrew Thornton.
Andrew went from flying tons of marijuana
to flying kilos of cocaine,
because it took a much smaller airplane,
which was less noticeable by law enforcement.
You could make 10 times the amount of money easily on a run
that you would with marijuana.
And a pilot like Drew Thornton could do everything on his own.
♪
By 1983, Thornton's using his connections in Colombia
to smuggle cocaine into America.
I knew that he was a major drug smuggler.
And several agencies were working
to build a case against Andrew Thornton.
He's now set for the flight that will make him infamous
and forever connected to the fate of the cocaine bear.
♪
It's 1985, and Andrew Thornton is back in the big time,
smuggling cocaine into Kentucky.
But in the legend of the cocaine bear,
his fate is sealed,
and his end is fast approaching.
♪
On the night of September the 10th, 1985,
he flew a load of cocaine into the United States from Colombia.
♪
His goal was to move cocaine into the Lexington area,
with an intermediate stop in Georgia
where he had some co-conspirators
waiting to offload the airplane.
You just don't get in a plane and fly to Colombia
and pick up a load of cocaine and come back.
This would have taken some serious prior planning.
♪
Thornton's journey started as planned.
He passed Cuba and navigated the coast of Florida
without incident.
But what happened next?
There are certain facts upon which most investigators agree.
♪
Thornton did not make his landing in Georgia.
Was flying over the National Forest in Georgia
and started throwing out cocaine into the forest.
♪
Probably worth hundreds of millions.
He attached the duffel bags to parachutes,
pushed them out of the airplane,
and then he had about 75 pounds of cocaine strapped to his body.
♪
And then with the remaining cocaine strapped to him,
he put the airplane on autopilot
somewhere near the Knoxville downtown airport, jumped...
And then something happened that he didn't expect to happen.
[ Thud ]
How did Andrew Thornton parachute to his death?
People do have a number of different theories
to how this happened, why it went bad.
♪
The most common story I heard
was that the main chute did not fully open
for unknown reasons.
The reserve chute also did not fully inflate.
♪
People noted at the time that there was an obvious cut
or bruise on his head, and so perhaps he hit his head
going out the door of the airplane.
He was unconscious,
didn't have an opportunity to pull his chute.
It also may have had something to do with
Thornton carrying all that cocaine on him.
♪
From the injuries to his face, the medical examiner believed
that load of cocaine had swung back around
and caught him in the face and either knocked him out
or addled him to where he was confused.
You know, so, it would be a pretty good lick.
But what compelled Thornton to jump out of the plane?
The word on the street was he felt like
he was being surveilled by customs or DEA.
[ Indistinct radio chatter ]
Somewhere along the way, he became paranoid
that he were being followed or being tracked by a DEA plane
or Coast Guard or customs.
A lot of people think he probably jumped out
of the airplane because of his paranoia.
♪
But we checked, and they did not have any aircraft
following him into the United States.
If law enforcement wasn't on his tail, why jump at all?
♪
I think this was his plan all along.
One of the stories that was circulating
was that he actually was ripping off the Colombian suppliers
by intentionally crashing the airplane,
claiming the cocaine was destroyed in the crash,
but keeping it for himself.
Why would he have all those parachutes in the airplane
tied to duffel bags full of cocaine
if that wasn't the plan originally?
No, I don't think so.
He was way too smart to steal from the Medellin Cartel.
They knew who he was.
He-- He would have not lasted very long at all
if he had stolen from them.
Whether Thornton was scamming the cartels or just paranoid,
there's one even more shocking theory
about what happened that night.
One of the theories is that
there was a second person on the airplane.
♪
We initially thought that other people were involved,
but we didn't have any proof.
This is the downtown Knoxville Island Home airport.
Where Mr. Thornton parachuted into the residential area
is about 250 yards as the crow flies
above us on the hill.
About two or three months after Thornton was found,
another parachute was found on the far end of the runway.
We theorized that Andrew Thornton
let the other individual in the plane jump.
And then Thornton put the plane on autopilot.
He would jump out of the plane and let it go across
the mountains in North Carolina and crash.
If there was one other person on the plane,
it would've to be someone that Drew Thornton trusted.
And I don't know of anybody back then
that he trusted more than Bill Canan.
♪
Canan's his very close friend who worked alongside him
at the Lexington Police Department.
Was Thornton's old partner, corrupt cop Bill Canan,
with him at the very end?
Canan was the most likely suspect
until someone else came forward, uh, also named Bill
who, uh, professed that he was on the plane.
♪
In 1990, a man named Bill Leonard told an amazing story
to a journalist at the Knoxville News Sentinel.
♪
Thornton had talked Bill Leonard into travelling with him
to help provide security for him.
But apparently Leonard thought that was gonna be in Florida
or The Bahamas, but Thornton kept flying,
and they ended up in Colombia, surprising Bill Leonard.
♪
You have to ask yourself how plausible that is.
But, you know, the Bill Leonard that I knew was a stand-up guy,
and you could believe him.
Leonard has never been charged with a crime.
And I spoke to former detectives from Lexington
who believe his story.
They're convinced that he was an unwitting accomplice
in that smuggling run.
I don't know how you account for the fact
that someone as experienced as Drew Thornton
as a paratrooper did not survive that night
and the totally inexperienced Bill Leonard did.
Pure luck? Perhaps.
I've asked a number of the investigators
from the federal aviation
to the FBI to the state police in Tennessee.
Nobody has any answer.
♪
Much of what happened in the skies over Knoxville
remains a mystery.
Can more answers be found in North Georgia?
And what really happened to the cocaine bear?
♪
On Andrew Thornton's final flight in 1985,
he drops several duffel bags full of cocaine
over the Southern United States.
There was a map
that showed where the cocaine was found along the way.
And you could just about track his line of flight
where the packages were thrown out.
♪
One lands in the woods that are the home of the cocaine bear.
[ Bear growls ]
One of the DEA agents called back and said,
"You know that a bear
got into that cocaine down there in the woods."
And I was like, "Oh, come on."
And at first I thought that, you know, that was, they were,
they were kind of gigging me a little bit,
but actually, it did happen.
♪
When Fran Wiley's officers get to the scene,
there is no cocaine left.
She has her own theory about what happened to it.
There was no cocaine in the duffel bag at the scene.
So where did the cocaine go?
Well, the bear ate it.
Well, no, the bear didn't ate it.
The bad guys got it.
♪
The bear would've never been able to consume
75 pounds of cocaine.
The pathologist told me that it had consumed
about 3 grams of cocaine
that was 95% pure.
It would probably would have been dead
within the first or second bite.
♪
My theory is that Mr. Thornton had a predestined location
for his ground crew to pick up the cocaine.
And I think that they did.
They probably saw the bear had got into it.
♪
And they picked up the remaining and left.
♪
I've heard many variations of this story
about the bear
in Lexington, Kentucky, that is on display.
♪
They are portraying it to be Pablo EskoBear.
♪
But that is not my bear.
There's no way.
♪
The bear was in no condition to be taxidermied.
I think the purveyors of the display,
if you press them, they would tell you
that it's not the same bear.
It's symbolic.
So, what do the mall's owners say?
They claim that their "taxidermy bear
is 100% Cocaine Bear,"
and that "if disbelief is your choice,
then we created the most fantastic story ever."
♪
The whereabouts of the real cocaine bear
is as mysterious as so much of this legend.
The story begins with reports of a dead parachutist
found wearing Gucci loafers,
and even that may be a myth.
There were incorrect accounts
as to what exactly he was wearing on his feet.
There was one indication that he had Gucci loafers.
In reality, Thornton's shoes were described
as the "Gucci loafers" of the parachuting world.
He had some very expensive jumping shoes on.
When I was told about them, they were equated to Gucci.
That's how they tried to correlate it to me
was this would be like Gucci.
♪
I don't think we'll ever know what really happened.
I think we have gotten pretty close
with the bits and pieces
and the puzzles that we've put together.
With the individuals that are still alive
and the agencies that did the legwork that they did,
I think we got as close to knowing what happened
as we ever will.
A curtain was drawn over the conspiracy,
the drugs, the murders.
If I had to go to my grave with that on my conscience,
I would not want to stand very tall
on the day of judgment is all I can say.
♪
Bradley Bryant served his time and then dropped out of sight.
Bill Canan was jailed in 1994 for federal drug charges.
He passed away in 2020.
♪
And as for Drew Thornton, his myth lives on,
alongside that of the cocaine bear.
He was a bad guy.
These guys did this stuff for fun,
and, and that's kind of scary.
Thinking about Andrew Thornton and the cocaine bear,
would've Thornton liked to have been associated with that?
I think he would've thought
the bear was getting more attention than he did,
and I don't think he would've liked that whatsoever.
But he probably would've been amused by it.
♪