Cocaine Bear: True story of infamous bear who consumed duffel bag of cocaine and got Hollywood treatment

When Georgia investigators stumbled across the infamous Cocaine Bear in 1985 its cause of death was unmistakable.

The 175-pound black bear was found next to a duffel bag that had once been filled with more than 70 pounds of cocaine before it was hurled from a drug smuggler’s plane.

Except now it was ripped open with 40 empty packets scattered near the overdosed animal’s carcass.

Now the wild story of the Cocaine Bear has been given the Hollywood thriller treatment and turned into a movie directed by actress and director Elizabeth Banks and has just seen its first trailer drop.

The movie stars Keri Russell of The Americans, as well an ensemble cast that includes her husband Matthew Rhys, Margo Martindale, O’Shea Jackson Jr, Alden Ehrenreich and Jesse Tyler Ferguson.

And it also features one of the final ever movie performances of Goodfellas actor Ray Liotta, who died while filming the movie Dangerous Waters in the Dominican Republic in May.

Cocaine Bear charges its way into movie theatres on 24 February 2023.

The cocaine eaten by the predator, worth an estimated $15m, was dropped out of a plane in 1985 by drug smuggler Andrew Thornton, the son of wealthy Kentucky horse breeders.

Thornton, a former lawyer and narcotics police officer, had been on a cocaine-smuggling run in a Cessna from Colombia and was dropping packages off in northern Georgia.

According to the Georgia Bureau of Investigations, Thornton fell to his death when he jumped out of the plane and “hit his head on the tail of the aircraft” and failed to open his parachute.

When his body was found in a neighbourhood driveway in Knoxville, Tennessee, Thornton was wearing night vision goggles, a bulletproof vest and Gucci loafers.

Thornton, 40, also had $4,500 in cash on him, two guns, several knives and a key to the plane.

The unoccupied aircraft he was flying was later found crashed several hours away in the mountains of North Carolina and when authorities retraced the plane’s flight path and discovered nine duffel bags full of cocaine.

Three months after Thornton’s death the dead bear, and the tenth duffel bag, were found south of the state line between Tennessee and Georgia in the Chattahoochee National Forest.

But that was far from the end of the bear’s amazing story.

Now stuffed, the bear, which has been named Pablo Eskobear after Columbian drug lord Pablo Escobar, is an unlikely tourist attraction at the “Kentucky For Kentucky” mercantile store in Lexington, Kentucky.

They got their hands on it after an exhaustive cross-country search, and detail its bizarre history on their website.

“Its stomach was literally packed to the brim with cocaine. There isn’t a mammal on the planet that could survive that,” the medical examiner who performed the bear’s necropsy told the company’s founders.

“Cerebral haemorrhaging, respiratory failure, hyperthermia, renal failure, heart failure, stroke. You name it, that bear had it.”

Xural.com