Ray Liotta ‘Cocaine Bear’ Movie: Bear OD’d On Coke That Fell From Sky

ACROSS AMERICA — One of actor Ray Liotta’s last movies, “Cocaine Bear,” mixes a fictitious tale of a bear’s murderous coke-fueled rampage with the real-life story of a Kentucky black bear that ate a staggering amount of cocaine — about 70 pounds of it worth an estimated $15 million — that fell from a smuggler’s airplane.

“Cocaine Bear,” directed by Elizabeth Banks, will be released in theaters nationwide on Feb. 24, 2023. It co-stars Keri Russell, Kristofer Hivju, Alden Ehrenreich, Margo Martindale and O’Shea Jackson Jr.

A film synopsis on Google says that “after a failed drug smuggling operation, a black bear ingests a large amount of cocaine and goes on a drug-fueled rampage.” Hollywood Reporter describes the bear as a 500-pound apex predator on a “coke-fueled rampage seeking more blow and blood.”

There was, in fact, a real-life bear that overdosed on cocaine that quite literally fell from the sky in the 1980s, a time in America’s history when the Drug Enforcement Administration estimated 5,000 people tried cocaine for the first time every day.

Smugglers found ever more creative ways to slip past the FDA and get their product into the hands of their eager clientele, and the story of how the hapless bear came upon it is woven into the often glorified stories of cocaine use by the wealthy and famous in the 1980s.

‘Falling Out Of The Sky

“It’s the marijuana of the ‘80s,” Andrew Fenrich, in 1985 a spokesman in New York for the DEA, told The Los Angeles Times. “The stuff is falling out of the sky.”

The pilots had pre-arranged drop locations, and in remote areas, “you could land a plane and park it on a road for four days and nobody would ever see it,” John O’Neill, at the time a DEA agent in charge of the Denver office told, told The Times.

That explains how Fred Myers, an elderly Kentucky man, woke up the morning of Sept. 11, 1985, to find the body of 40-year-old Andrew C. Thornton II in his yard. Thornton was heavily armed and wearing an unopened parachute and bulletproof vest; bags containing about 35 kilograms of coke and a backup parachute were found nearby.

Thornton, the son of a well-to-do Kentucky thoroughbred racehorse breeder, was an officer in the Air Force, paratrooper and Purple Heart recipient who became a U.S. narcotics officer and lawyer. In 1980, Thornton was accused in a federal indictment of running a drug and weapons smuggling network known as “the Company” that reportedly involved other former Kentucky policed officers, according to Rolling Stone.

Thornton’s plane, set on autopilot, was found about 60 miles from his body. Authorities think his parachute failed to open after he bailed out of the plane. It was reported by the Knoxville New Sentinel that Thornton became “deathly ill with food poisoning” after eating parrot in Montería, Columbia, where he had landed his Cessna 404 to pick up 400 kilograms of cocaine found for the United States.

Thornton’s friends described him as a daredevil and risk-taker who liked free-falling and waiting as long as possible before opening his parachute, so it’s possible he simply waited too long.

“It was chaos,” former Knoxville News Sentinel managing editor Tom Chester said in a 1990 interview with the newspaper. “Nobody believed it. A guy just doesn't fall out of the sky with cocaine tied to him. …”

‘You Name It, That Bear Had It’

And bears don’t just pop their last balloons on cocaine.

Such was the unfortunate fate of a 175-pound black bear found dead in the Chattahoochie-Oconee National Forest just over the Tennessee line in northern Georgia three months after Thornton’s plane crashed. Alongside him were 40 opened plastic containers that once held the cocaine Thornton dropped from his plane.

According to the necropsy, the animal equivalent of an autopsy, the bear died of a cocaine overdose.

“Its stomach was literally packed to the brim with cocaine,” the medical examiner who looked inside the animal's stomach told Kentucky for Kentucky, an eccentric retailer that also sells preserved horse dung from Kentucky Derby champions for the now discounted price of $75 a jar.

“There isn't a mammal on the planet that could survive that,” the medical examiner said. “Cerebral hemorrhaging, respiratory failure, hyperthermia, renal failure, heart failure, stroke. You name it, that bear had it.”

Waylon Jennings And Cocaine Bear

Cocaine Bear was a beautiful specimen, and the medical examiner sent it to a taxidermist to be stuffed. By this time, the bear had been named Pablo Eskobear, or “cocaine bear” in Spanish, it was displayed at the Chattahoochee River National Recreation Area for a time, according to Kentucky for Kentucky.

Then, in the 1990s, an approaching wildfire threatened the recreation areas and officials ordered it evacuated. They packed up Pablo Eskobear and other artifacts and put them in temporary storage in Dalton, Georgia.

When they returned to retrieve the artifacts, they discovered the bear had been stolen. Arrowheads and other artifacts from Native American culture were found at a Nashville pawn shop, but the stuffed bear had already been sold, according to court documents cited by Kentucky for Kentucky

Some time later, it resurfaced in Las Vegas in the country music legend Waylon Jennings’ private collection of stuffed animals, according to the Knoxville Courier Journal. Jennings apparently didn’t know the bear had been stolen, but he knew all about Cocaine Bear from Ron Thompson, like Thornton, a Kentucky blue blood turned Las Vegas hustler.

He said he’d be happy to return Cocaine Bear, but he had already given it to Thompson, who kept it in his desert mansion. Much of Thompson’s estate was sold at auction after his death in 2009. Among the items on the auction manifest: “One (1) taxidermied North American black bear.”

The trail ended at a Chinese medicine shop in Reno, where Cocaine Bear was a store decoration. Kentucky for Kentucky acquired the bear for the $200 required to ship it, the same amount paid by the Chinese immigrant who bought Cocaine Bear at auction.

Cocaine Bear is now on display at the Kentucky Fun Mall, where the proprietors — again the same people who bottle and sell Kentucky Derby horse poop — no doubt have more fun cooked up when the movie debuts next winter.

Liotta died May 26 in the Dominican Republic, where he was shooting a movie, “Dangerous Waters.” He died in his sleep.

Correction: This story was corrected to change a typographical error in this sentence: “Smugglers found ever more creative ways to slip past the FDA and get their product into the hands of their eager clientele.” FDA was changed from DNA.