The True Adventures of Pablo EskoBear

September 11, 1985 may have seemed like a normal morning in Knoxville, Tennessee.  Fred Myers got up and started getting ready for the day.  He stepped out of his front door and saw something in his yard that instantly made the day anything but normal.

In his front yard Fred found a duffle bag containing fifteen million dollars worth of cocaine, along with a man named Andrew C. Thornton II, who was wearing a parachute, a bulletproof vest, night vision goggles, and Gucci loafers.  He carried $4500 cash, two guns, and some knives…and he was dead.

Believe it or not, that’s when things got strange.

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Lest I confuse my readers, I want to point something out right at the onset.  Some of you may remember Pablo Escobar, Colombian drug lord and narcoterrorist who was the Head of the Medellín Cartel.  Escobar and his cartel, at one time, was said to produce the majority of the cocaine that was smuggled into the United States.

While I’d guess much of what I’m about to tell you involved him in some way, it doesn’t matter to this story and he is not in it.

But remember him.         

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Andrew Thornton had an interesting life leading up to that sudden end.

He was pretty much a typical farm kid growing up in Kentucky…if you call being born into a family of racehorse breeders typical.  I mean, one source said he liked to play polo.  OK, forget I said typical, OK?

He got into a bit of trouble as a young man, enough that he found himself in a military academy to avoid jail time.  He must have liked the military lifestyle because he later joined the Army and became a paratrooper with the 101^st Airborne.

After his stint in the Army, the Lexington, KY police department hired him and he worked his way into the narcotics division, but tired of that and went back to college, where he earned his law degree.

My research doesn’t show when he decided he preferred life on the other side of the law.  Some even say his law-abiding narco cop/lawyer life was all a put-on, part of his nefarious plans.  One source says he “used his stint on the right side of the law to build a network of shady connections across the globe.”

By 1981 he was arrested and accused of stealing weapons from a California naval base, as well as helping plan a smuggling operation that would have brought a half ton of marijuana into the United States.

There is a rumor that he agreed to help federal agents who really wanted people higher-up in his operation.  Anyway, the charges were dropped and he received only a small fine and spent six months in prison.  His law license was suspended.

When he was released from prison he got right back into the thick of things.

In 1985 he flew a private jet overloaded with cocaine from Colombia.  He dropped off some of the coke in Georgia and was on his way north when it appears he experienced engine trouble and chose to abandon the plane.  After jettisoning much of his illegal cargo he bailed out of the craft somewhere over Georgia’s Chattahoochee National Forest.

It’s not clear whether he was injured when he jumped out and was momentarily stunned, or if his parachute malfunctioned, but Thornton would probably agree that those details don’t matter as much as the fact that he was traveling somewhere around terminal velocity when he dropped into Mr. Myers front yard.

Andrew C. Thornton’s life of crime was over.

Are you ready, because that is when things got even weirder.

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As you recall, when Andrew Thornton’s jet was about to go down, he threw out much of his cargo over Georgia’s Chattahoochee National Forest before jumping out himself.

Three months later, some men from the Georgia Bureau of Investigation were following a tip and looking for the missing cocaine.  Well, they found it…in a very unusual container.

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Sometime in September of 1985, a bear weighing approximately 175 pounds was wandering through the forest, looking for food and, well, doing what bears do in the woods.  Now bears will eat just about anything that will hold still long enough.  The sweeter it tastes, the better, but they won’t pass up rotten either.  Well, Mr. Bear came across some forty packages of white powder that smelled strangely attractive.  He bit into one and liked the taste.  So he ate it…all of it.  Yes, Mr. Bear ate millions and millions of dollars worth of cocaine.  He ate it and licked the packages clean…all forty of them.

Now, I don’t know when the buzz kicked in, but it probably didn’t take long.  I bet it didn’t last long either.  Cocaine is bad for you, and it’s bad for bears too.  A little might make you feel good, but much more than a little will…kill…you.  It killed our bear friend before he had time to get away from his booger sugar packaging.

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So the agents found forty empty packages that formerly held somewhere around 80 pounds of cocaine, and they found a very dead bear that currently contained somewhere around 80 pounds of cocaine.

Now, Georgia Bureau of Investigation agents are pretty sharp, so they immediately suspected the bear of hiding the drugs, and hauled him to a medical examiner.  The doctor did a necropsy on the deceased and found, in his words, “Its stomach was literally packed to the brim with cocaine. There isn’t a mammal on the planet that could survive that. Cerebral hemorrhaging, respiratory failure, hyperthermia, renal failure, heart failure, stroke. You name it, that bear had it.”

Like I said, the bear’s high didn’t last long.

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The medical examiner noticed that the bear’s body was in pretty good shape…for a coked-out ursine anyway.  He came up with an idea and called a buddy of his who happened to be a taxidermist.  The bear was soon mounted and presented to the Chattahoochee River National Recreation Area.  So the bear was going home…kind of.  He was put on display in the visitor center for a while before his interesting life’s path took another odd turn.

In the early 90s a wildfire was sweeping the area and park employees were told to evacuate.  They had some time before they had to leave so they gathered up some historical artifacts and the bear, who was now being called “Cocaine Bear,” and put them in storage in the nearby town of Dalton.

When they went back to the storage facility a few weeks later some of the stuff, including the Cocaine Bear, was gone.

Authorities were notified and began searching for the stolen items.  Before too long some arrowheads and old Native American blankets turned up in a pawn shop in Nashville…but not our friend the adventurous bear.

He had been sold.  I couldn’t tell if it was the same pawn shop owner or another, but a pawn shop owner who had bought Cocaine Bear from…somebody, called…somebody.

Well, this pawn shop owner had previously sold some items of interest to country music great Waylon Jennings, who was well known to collect American oddities, especially taxidermy.

When he got Mr. Jennings on the phone, the pawn shop owner told him Cocaine Bear’s whole story…up to that point.

Now, Waylon Jennings knew a man in Las Vegas named Ron Thompson.  According to my sources, Mr. Thompson supplied visitors to Vegas with whatever they required to have a good time…at a price.  It was said that he had an interest in things drug related.  Hmmm.

Thompson had done some, uh, nice things for hard-partying Jennings.  Old Waylon thought Thompson would find the Cocaine Bear’s story interesting, and would love to have the bear to show off to friends. 

Waylon made a gift of our coked-out bear friend.

When Ron Thompson passed away in 2009, much of his estate was sold at auction.

I guess the folks around Vegas hadn’t seen the news stories about the Cocaine Bear so, when bidding started at $200, he was sold to a Chinese immigrant named Zhu Tang.

Tang wanted to use the bear as a decoration in his house.  According to his wife, “He was always bringing home junk from auctions and estate sales and things like that.  The bear was one of his favorite things. He just loved it for some reason. At first, he wanted to keep it in our living room but I wouldn’t have it. It scared me. I made him take it to the store.”

When Mr. Tang passed away, his wife sold off the store and everything in it…except Cocaine Bear.  Her husband had been so fond of the stuffed critter that she just couldn’t let it go with everything else.

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In 2012, a couple guys named Whit Hiler and Griffin VanMeter started a business named, Kentucky for Kentucky, in Lexington, KY.  They filled it with interesting and strange Kentucky-oriented items…like gold plated chicken bone jewelry.  They also gave free “Kentucky Kicks A—“ tattoos.  They had heard about the Cocaine Bear and his relationship to the state of Kentucky through Andrew Thornton’s Kentucky horse-breeding family and cocaine trafficking.  That was good enough to qualify for their store.

They dispatched people to search for Cocaine Bear.  After tracing the convoluted path of our friend, and finding pretty much all the information I shared in the previous paragraph, they found Mrs. Tang. 

When Mrs. Tang heard all they had gone through, she felt they would give our bear-friend a good home on into the future.  So she gave him to them.

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Cocaine Bear had come far since his brief brush with fame in the 1980s.  Hiler and VanMeter cleaned him up, put a hat on his head and hung a sign around his neck, and put him on display in the back of an old Chevy pickup.  If you go in their store and can’t see a big black bear, look for the chicken-headed man.  He’s leaning against the truck where Cocaine Bear now resides.

Oh, by the way, as if the bear’s life hadn’t been odd enough over the past few decades, he gained a new nickname.  Yep, courtesy of his “possible” association with Pablo Escobar’s cocaine cartel, he was nicknamed Pablo EskoBear.

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Now, one would think that Pablo’s interesting career would have reached its zenith with his display next to the chicken-headed man, but no. 

Actress Elizabeth Banks has been tasked with directing a movie loosely based on our friend’s adventure.  She says it’s a “comedy-thriller’.

One article I found says, “When a large shipment of cocaine falls in the mountains of Georgia, a bear stumbles upon the illicit, $14 million stash and accidentally inhales the powdery white stuff. The results are precisely what you’d expect: an unstoppable juggernaut of fur, teeth, and claws.” 

Yeah, it gets bloody.

Cocaine Bear is scheduled for release to theaters on February 24, 2023.

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I tried to link to a trailer for the movie, “Cocaine Bear” that is loosely based on the bear in my post. The problem was, I couldn’t find ANY trailers for the movie that didn’t contain a LOT of strong language. They are available on YouTube in case you want to see them.