“I’ve had a loopy life,” admits Fran Wiley, the previous Georgia Bureau of Investigation particular agent talking to me from the Blue Heron Vintage Mall in Cleveland, Georgia. You wouldn’t guess it from her present-day environment—folksy paintings, Wedgwood china, property pottery—however Wiley has dodged gunfire, purchased narcotics undercover, flown in helicopters with out doorways, and staked out mountaintops ready for personal planes transporting cocaine. As she tells it, she was the primary feminine particular agent in command of North Georgia.
Wiley additionally labored on an notorious Nineteen Eighties case involving a bear who overdosed on cocaine in Chattahoochee Nationwide Forest. That element isn’t the craziest of the case, not to mention her profession—but it surely’s at present recirculating within the zeitgeist due to a brand new Common film directed by Elizabeth Banks. The film’s plot, which seems like a meme on steroids, includes a bear ingesting a brick-size bundle of cocaine and terrorizing Georgia locals together with Keri Russell and Margo Martindale.
The precise cocaine bear expired after it had absorbed nearly three or 4 grams of cocaine in its bloodstream, although it might have eaten extra. The medicine had been dropped by a aircraft smuggling tons of of kilos of the drug from South America.
“Have you learnt what a Candy ’n Low packet appears to be like like?” Wiley tells me by cellphone. “That’s one gram. So the bear had about three of these. This was pure cocaine, not minimize.”
When Wiley first heard about Cocaine Bear, she was shocked, and never in a nice manner.
“I don’t consider in selling something that hurts households and destroys households,” she says. “I do know that is purported to be a horror-comedy film, however the one factor it’s going to do is earn money for Hollywood. That’s the best way the world is. However that’s not the reality of [the story]. So I’m telling you the reality.”
By December 1985, Wiley had been promoted to assistant agent in command of GBI’s drug workplace. She bought a name from a sport ranger alerting her of a lifeless bear in Fannin County. “They mentioned, ‘We’ve bought a hunter up right here who discovered a lifeless bear. There’s a parachute and a duffle bag, and we predict y’all ought to come up.”
Wiley advised two brokers to pack a physique bag, gather the bear, and take it to the Atlanta crime lab.
“The necropsy by the pathologist confirmed that the bear [absorbed] about three, 4 grams of cocaine, and that’s how she expired,” says Wiley. “It was a feminine bear, about 175 kilos, six ft tall, black. A Georgia black bear.” She factors out one key distinction between the movie and the real-life occasion: “Once we discovered the bear, there was no cocaine close to her.”
Wiley discovered that “a aircraft on this flight path had crashed on autopilot into North Carolina about three months earlier,” in September. The pilot of that aircraft, Andrew Thornton, was discovered lifeless in Knoxville, Tennessee, across the identical time sporting a parachute in a person’s yard.
Thornton, nicknamed “Slick,” was a former police officer who had gone rogue and develop into an eccentric drug smuggler. When his physique was found, he was sporting Military fatigues, Gucci loafers, night-vision goggles, a cash belt containing $4,500, and a bulletproof vest. He had with him two weapons, rations, and notebooks crammed with coded cellphone numbers.
Based on The Bluegrass Conspiracy by Sally Denton, Thornton left Colombia with 12 duffel baggage stuffed with cocaine. He determined to desert his aircraft after figuring out that authorities plane have been monitoring him. The writer notes that Thornton himself was believed to be utilizing cocaine on the time—greater than a gram a day, based on one supply—and had develop into more and more paranoid as his behavior grew. Per the e-book, Thornton divided the cocaine into units of three, affixing every bundle with a parachute—presumably for a floor crew to choose up in Knoxville—earlier than setting the aircraft on computerized pilot and leaping out of the plane himself. (Thornton was survived by a karate-buff copilot who later cooperated with federal authorities and claimed he had been tricked by Thornton into participating within the mission.)
“When [Thornton] jumped out of the aircraft, he both hit himself on the aircraft or knocked himself out, as a result of the [main] parachute didn’t open,” says Wiley. The state of affairs confounded each specialists and people who knew Thornton; he had been an Military paratrooper who, based on Denton, “had jumped greater than a thousand instances into conditions significantly extra advanced and harmful.” It appeared to be a case of unhealthy luck and judgment.
A backup parachute had deployed, however couldn’t assist the burden of Thornton plus his duffel bag of cocaine. Wiley says that Thornton’s parachute matched the one discovered close to the bear, linking Thornton with the medicine that poisoned the animal.
Thornton had left a will—accounting the recipients of his parachute gear, weapons, and vehicles. “There may be to be no funeral,” he wrote. “Launch my ashes in air over my dad and mom farm + then have a celebration.”
Due to the outlandish story, Thornton has attained his personal unusual model of infamy. Along with that includes in Denton’s The Bluegrass Conspiracy, he was the topic of an episode of Dominick Dunne’s crime TV sequence Energy, Privilege, and Justice. His demise impressed a narrative line on FX’s Justified. In Cocaine Bear, he’s performed within the movie by Matthew Rhys, with Ray Liotta enjoying his boss.
When you google Andrew Thornton, “he’s even on Wikipedia,” deadpans Wiley. “Proper there with Dale Carnegie and the presidents.”
Unusual because the story of Andrew Thornton could also be, Wiley has seen stranger. There weren’t many ladies working within the Georgia Bureau of Investigation within the late Nineteen Seventies, when she began out. Within the early days, she was assigned to numerous rape instances. “I perceive that,” she says. “I used to be compassionate and will deal with that higher than a number of the guys.” She says she was at all times the agent caught on scribe obligation—“writing the report and doing the secretary factor. However I didn’t resent any of it.” As a younger girl on the power, she was additionally sexually harassed. On one event, she says a sheriff locked her in his workplace and propositioned her. In these early days, she says, “I used to be extra fearful of the lads I labored with than the unhealthy guys.”
Her male coworkers began taking her severely for 2 causes, she says. The primary time she went to a capturing vary, she shot an ideal rating. Additionally they bought sick of being handed the cellphone each time a caller mistook her for a secretary.
Within the early Nineteen Eighties, Wiley had a front-row seat to the methods cocaine and cocaine smuggling have been upending the felony panorama. North Georgia was a typical trafficking route due to its mountainous and treacherous terrain, scattered regulation enforcement, and heavy low-flying visitors. “Smugglers had distant strips on the edges of mountains and in pastures alongside rivers,” says Wiley, recalling the six-seater Beechcraft planes recurrently used for covert operations from South America. “They’d put a bladder tank on and have sufficient gas to stand up right here.”
Georgia’s sparse rural regulation enforcement was simply outnumbered by these billion-dollar smuggling operations. In 1985, The Atlanta Journal-Structure reported that Georgia’s drug brokers seized about 2,000 kilos of cocaine—however the brokers estimated that they have been stopping not more than 10% of the cocaine coming by means of the state.
“We’d attempt to catch any individual flying in, [but it’s like] a needle in a haystack. We’d get a tip that there was a aircraft coming in, and keep out for a number of days and nights making an attempt to catch any individual,” says Wiley. “However [the odds were] at all times on the unhealthy guys’ aspect. They might at all times fly off in the event that they noticed something funky on the bottom.”
Wiley’s first main cocaine case sounds as tailored for adaptation because the cocaine bear episode. In 1982, over 500 kilos of the drug have been dropped from a aircraft right into a six-mile stretch of Gilmer County. “We’d by no means had something like that occur,” she says. The fallen cocaine amounted to half a billion {dollars}’ value. Locals scavenged the snake-infested hills in hopes of recovering one of many 18 fiberglass containers that held it, every value about $25 million. The farmer who initially tipped off police concerning the discovery later lamented his resolution, telling press that he might have retired early had he realized what the white substance on his property was. Over 100 guardsmen needed to be known as into the world to assist get well the medicine.
