Cocaine Bear, or the Story of How an American Policeman Became a Famous Drug Dealer

On September 11, 1985, a resident of the town of Knoxville, Tennessee, found on the path leading to his house the body of an unknown white man who had literally fallen from somewhere out of the sky. The man was wearing a bulletproof vest and night vision goggles, and from behind his back there were lines stretching to the canopy of the opened parachute.

In a green army backpack attached to the body, the police who arrived at the scene found 40 kilograms of cocaine, $4,548 in cash, 6 Krugerrands (gold coins minted in South Africa), a knife, two pistols with additional magazines, a bag of dry rations, a pack of vitamins, a compass, an altimeter, documents in various names, a Miami Jockey Club membership card and an airplane key. The package of cocaine was marked USA 10, and the value of the drug, according to a police expert, was at least $15 million.”

The next day, the remains of a twin-engine Cessna 404 were discovered 60 miles (96 kilometers) from the body, and eight more numbered packages of cocaine were found on the ground along its flight path. With numbers from 1 to 9. The only thing missing was package number 3. It became clear that the dead man found in Knoxville was most likely transporting drugs on board a private plane. For some reason, he began to drop packages over a large forested area on the border of Georgia and Tennessee, and then jumped himself, but, unfortunately, he crashed because he opened his parachute at too low an altitude. Who was this man and what led him to such an unexpected end?

Andrew Carter Thornton the second, as newspapermen wrote about him, was born “with blue blood in his veins and a silver spoon in his mouth.” He came from a family of wealthy Kentucky horse breeders and never knew what poverty was. Andrew's parents sent him to study at a prestigious private school, and then, in order to teach his son order and responsibility, they applied for admission to a military academy, which he successfully graduated from. After graduation, Thornton enlisted in the military and was assigned to the U.S. Army's 82nd Airborne Division, where he received a Purple Heart during the invasion of the Dominican Republic.

After the service, he got a job with the Lexington police, where a few years later he volunteered for the narcotics department, which was just beginning to be formed. In parallel with his service, he studied at the law school of Eastern Kentucky University, where he received a higher education in public order. In general, Thornton could have easily risen to the rank of some big police chief, retired, raised horses, drank cocktails and led a completely respectable life, but he chose a completely different path.

The systemic fight against drugs was just taking shape, and no one knew how to do this work correctly. Everything had to be invented on the fly. For the bosses, the most important thing was the result, and not the methods by which it was achieved. Thornton worked as an undercover agent, carried out control purchases, acted as a wholesale buyer and often communicated with drug dealers. Constantly raising the level of risk, he realized that he was already bored with being just a policeman. Thornton wanted more.

He began selling confiscated goods, planting drugs to make arrests, often resorted to violence, and at some point he finally crossed the line that separated a representative of the law from a criminal. Thornton did not use drugs and did not need money, as he received a fairly impressive inheritance from his family. He was attracted by a constant sense of danger, which intoxicated him and gave him courage, and impunity gave him the feeling that he was smarter than everyone and no one in the world could beat him. As a result of this internal psychological transformation, the drug agent retrained as a drug dealer, becoming the leader of a criminal community known as “The Company”, which for several years successfully smuggled drugs from Colombia to the United States of America. It was the largest and most notorious drug case in Kentucky history.

In his free time from law enforcement and crime, Thornton received a pilot's license, took up martial arts and began skydiving, making hundreds of jumps. Friends called him a survival specialist and a man who was always prepared for any disaster. In 1977, Thornton retired from the police and allegedly began practicing law. But this was only a cover and the end point of the transformation from policeman to criminal. His main occupation is not criminal law, but drug smuggling - cocaine and marijuana.

In the criminal organization called "The Company", Thornton was not alone. His old friend from his private school days, the son of the former mayor of Lexington, Bradley Bryant, who was responsible for official cover, money and the necessary connections, also participated in the business. The third person in the organization was Henry Vance, Thornton's former colleague from the narcotics department. He was a member of one of Lexinton's most respected and influential families, leaving the police force for politics and becoming an assistant to the state governor. Vance was their eyes and ears in the governor's office, responsible for political cover and inside information regarding any investigation into their activities.

Thornton handled all logistics and distribution. As a retired police officer, he knew the intricacies of local law enforcement agencies and actively exploited their weaknesses. In addition to Thornton, Bryant and Vance, the criminal enterprise involved a former Lexington police officer, an active narcotics agent, the son of a state governor and numerous other people. This organizational structure and the specifics of the state of Kentucky made their criminal business practically invulnerable.

The first serious problems began after Bryant decided to contact Jimmy Chagra, the largest drug lord in the southern United States at that time, who imported marijuana into the country on a truly industrial scale. At the end of 1978, they conducted a joint operation and delivered 9 tons of selected weed from Columbia to Lexington. A couple of months later they bring the same amount. For transportation, they no longer use a twin-engine Cessna, but a transport Douglas DC-4.

Business begins to grow, but then Chagra is arrested in El Paso. The case is being led by Judge John Wood, who became famous for his ruthless attitude towards drug dealers and long sentences for the accused, for which he received the nickname Maximum John. To avoid punishment, Chagra did not come up with anything better than ordering the murder of a judge. Before that, he tried to kill the assistant prosecutor, but he failed. Despite 19 bullets fired, he escaped with a slight scare and a couple of scratches. This time, Chagra approached the matter more thoroughly and, for $250,000, hired a hitman named Charles Harrelson, who successfully completed the order by shooting the judge in the back with a shotgun. This was the first murder of a federal judge in the United States in 100 years and the first (but, unfortunately, not the last) in the 20th century.

Interestingly, Charles Harrelson is the father of famous American actor Woody Harrelson. In 1980, during an operation to capture him, he surrendered to police and stated that he had killed Judge Wood and John F. Kennedy. They even tried to investigate the latter, but they never found evidence. As a result, he received two life sentences and died in prison, where his son often visited him. Jimmy Chagra served 24 years, was able to be released and even entered the witness protection program. He died of cancer in 2008 at his home in Arizona.

But let's get back to our story. After the murder of the judge, all federal agencies that could participate in the investigation took on Chagra’s case, which led to the active expansion of the former drug lord’s criminal connections and jeopardized the “Company’s” business. At this point, according to the investigation, Thornton and Bryant had different views on the future. The first, despite his love of risk and adventure, suggested keeping a low profile and working as usual, while the second, on the contrary, decided to take advantage of the situation and seize control of the imprisoned Chagra’s empire.

In the end, each of them went their own way. Thornton returned to operations at Kentucky and Bryant began his big game. Without enough money and the necessary connections to purchase drugs, he decided to rob a military warehouse and exchange the stolen weapons for cocaine from the Colombians. At that moment, drug cartels were interested in guns and cartridges even more than money. With the help of Bryant's nephew, who had access to the secret US Navy warehouse in China Lake in California, they were able to remove automatic rifles, ammunition and the latest night vision devices. Bryant places some of the stolen goods in a warehouse in Lexington, and transports some to Columbia and exchanges them, as planned, for cocaine.

A few months later, a maid at a Las Vegas hotel smelled marijuana coming from under the door of one of the rooms and reported it to the manager, who called the police. She would not have done this if the guests had not been stingy with tips during the last cleaning of the room. But since they didn’t leave her even a dollar, the maid immediately woke up as a law-abiding citizen, who hurried to inform his superiors about the violation. When the cops arrived at the scene, expecting to find another weed lover in a hotel room with his arm around an underage girlfriend, they instead found an automatic weapon, a phone signal encoding device, $25,000 in cash and a lease for a warehouse in Lexington, which led them to even more weapons, including a heavy machine gun, tasers and night vision devices, which were reported stolen from a military base.

Bryant was arrested at the Philadelphia airport. They found on him a notebook with names, a pistol with a silencer, 10 fake Kentucky driver's licenses, Russian-English and English-Spanish phrase books and a brochure entitled “Top Secret Radio Frequencies of the US Government.” The prosecutor who subsequently handled the case had a serious suspicion that everything that happened was part of an even larger game waged by the CIA in order to exchange military equipment prohibited for export from the United States from the Libyans for a secret Soviet radar, but no one was able to do anything concrete prove. Bryant himself insisted on this version for a long time. It is difficult to say whether this was true or not, but the jury surprisingly found Bryant not guilty of all charges, and he was released. He came out, only to find himself behind bars again a year later. This time on charges of selling 360 kg of marijuana in Illinois. The buyer this time was an undercover DEA agent, and Bryant received 15 years.

One of the names in Bryant's notebook was, as you might have guessed, Andrew Thornton, who was arrested along with 25 other defendants in the case. Thornton pleaded not guilty, was released on $1,000,000 bail, and fled. He was a fugitive for six months, flying his plane from one city to another, until Customs agents intercepted his radio communications and arrested Thornton in North Carolina while he was refueling his Cessna. His participation in the robbery of an armory remained unproven, and in the drug smuggling case he was involved as a pilot who delivered cargo from Colombia to the United States. Thornton made a plea deal and received a $500 fine, six months in prison and five years of probation. He was also stripped of his lawyer's license, but that seemed to be the least of Thornton's worries.

Five months later, he is released from prison for good behavior and returns to what he was doing before his arrest. A year later, based on the testimony given by the informant, the FBI takes him into development. On September 11, 1985, he climbs into his twin-engine Cessna 404 and heads to Colombia for his next shipment. On the way back, two federal jets land on his tail, and Thornton decides to slow down, drop the goods and parachute in order to avoid arrest. You already know how it all ended.

So what does the bear have to do with it? The fact is that this story had a continuation. Three months later, a bear was found dead in the Chatahoochee National Forest. Next to the carcass were the remains of the same 40-kilogram package of cocaine that was in Andrew Thornton's backpack. The bear found the discarded cocaine, tore the packaging and died of an overdose, having eaten almost all of its contents. According to the pathologist who autopsied the bear, its stomach was completely filled with white powder and not a single living creature on earth could survive after ingesting such a quantity of the drug. Intracerebral hemorrhage, respiratory failure, hyperthermia, renal failure, heart failure, stroke - that bear had it all. He went down in history as the “cocaine bear”, or Pablo Esco-bear. His effigy is now on display at a local hipster store, the Kentucky Fun Mall.