Speaker 1: Murder in Miami is a production of iHeartRadio. In the
Speaker 1: early eighties, cocaine was having an impact on many more
Speaker 1: places in the United States than Miami. C. B. Hackworth
Speaker 1: was a young newspaper reporter in Northern Georgia at the time.
Speaker 2: In September of nineteen eighty two, we had the first
Speaker 2: and biggest case of cocaine literally dropping from the sky.
Speaker 2: It was almost six hundred pounds of uncut cocaine, worth
Speaker 2: an estimated half a billion dollars. It was a big story,
Speaker 2: and that's not the case that the movie Cocaine Bear
Speaker 2: is based on. That came several years later. As it
Speaker 2: turned out, it was more like climate change. It turned
Speaker 2: out cocaine falling out of the sky on a continual basis.
Speaker 2: It wasn't just one case or two cases. It took
Speaker 2: us a minute to figure it out. But the driving
Speaker 2: force behind this new phenomena was that North Georgia, with
Speaker 2: its cliched, quiet little communities up in the mountains, is
Speaker 2: as far as you can get from South America or
Speaker 2: the Bahamas to the United States. With a large shipment
Speaker 2: of drugs in a plane that is modified to carry
Speaker 2: extra fuel as well as the drugs. This first case
Speaker 2: in Gilmour County seemingly would not necessarily be directly related
Speaker 2: to lamar Chester. Nevertheless, in retrospect, to look at an
Speaker 2: old article of mine and see that that far back
Speaker 2: before I'd ever even heard of Lamarchester. Roy Harris, the
Speaker 2: agent in charge of the Georgia Bureau of Investigation's field
Speaker 2: office in Atlanta, told me that they felt like there
Speaker 2: was a mastermind behind this and other cocaine cases we
Speaker 2: were experiencing in North Georgia.
Speaker 1: And the phenomenon of cocaine falling from the sky seemingly
Speaker 1: inspired certain sorts to seek out the woods of Northern Georgia.
Speaker 2: There was a noticeable increase in the number of people
Speaker 2: going up to Gilmour County and exploring the outdoors. I
Speaker 2: think both we as journalists and law enforcement were concerned
Speaker 2: that people were coming to North Georgia on weekends recreationally
Speaker 2: who had not ever previously been inspired to enjoy our
Speaker 2: beautiful North Georgia mountains.
Speaker 1: It's this specific era of specific snow covered mountains that
Speaker 1: inspired the hit movie Cocaine Bear, a gory comedy from
Speaker 1: Universal Pictures and director Elizabeth Banks featuring a five hundred
Speaker 1: pound black bear on a killing spree in a Georgia forest,
Speaker 1: spurred on by consuming a considerable amount of cocaine.
Speaker 2: The movie Cocaine Bear. When they say inspired by true events,
Speaker 2: that's a phrase that Hollywood uses very very liberally to
Speaker 2: promote a movie. It's loosely inspired by case in which
Speaker 2: the pilot of an airplane jumped out of it with
Speaker 2: cocaine strapped to his body. It had already dumped a
Speaker 2: large amount of cocaine, which he apparently intended to go
Speaker 2: back and get. He also probably thought that he was
Speaker 2: being pursued by drug agents. It appears that that was
Speaker 2: not his plan to jump out, but greed got the
Speaker 2: better of him, because he strapped some of the cocaine
Speaker 2: to his body. He was wearing a parachute. However, that
Speaker 2: cocaine provided enough extra weight that his parachute did not work,
Speaker 2: so he and his cocaine plummeted to earth, and that
Speaker 2: gentleman perished. But the story about the bear is so
Speaker 2: fictional every aspect of it is inflated. The actual bear
Speaker 2: was found in close proximity to cocaine, and subsequent tests
Speaker 2: indicated that it had ingested an amount of cocaine. It
Speaker 2: was not a five hundred pounds bear as the movie suggests.
Speaker 2: It was I think about one hundred and twenty five
Speaker 2: pounds or something like that. And it's not that it
Speaker 2: shed the weight because of chronic cocaine use.
Speaker 1: The Gainesville Times, Hackworth's former newspaper, has tackled the task
Speaker 1: of weeding fact from fiction in the case of the
Speaker 1: cinematic cocaine snorting Bear.
Speaker 2: The movie has riled a number of former GBI agents
Speaker 2: who were directly involved in this case. The Times, where
Speaker 2: I used to work as a good article you can
Speaker 2: look up that sets the record straight. They did an article,
Speaker 2: tracked down the former agents and got quotes from them,
Speaker 2: and they're really not happy about this movie. This was
Speaker 2: indicative of a real problem that we were having. And
Speaker 2: I don't mean by that the problem is wildlife dying
Speaker 2: from cocaine. I'm telling about the importation of cocaine. So
Speaker 2: I think something that agents and former agents dedicated a
Speaker 2: significant portion of their life and energy attempting to curtail.
Speaker 2: The agents feel so strongly about this that friend Wiley,
Speaker 2: one of many agents I knew well. She's quoted in
Speaker 2: the Times as saying, I think it's just evil, and
Speaker 2: another agent said it was a total farce.
Speaker 1: But that doesn't mean Hackwerre thinks Cocaine Bear is entirely
Speaker 1: without merit.
Speaker 2: It is almost entirely fiction. I'm not even trying to
Speaker 2: diss the movie, especially having not seen it, but I
Speaker 2: am going to diss the degree to which they are
Speaker 2: playing the based on a true story tagline used for
Speaker 2: lots and lots of movies and all of those tape
Speaker 2: liberties with the facts, But this one is a fabrication
Speaker 2: almost whole claw. The only part that is true is
Speaker 2: that a man plunged to his death with some cocaine
Speaker 2: and a bear got into it and turned up dead.
Speaker 2: I don't even think they ended up believing that the
Speaker 2: cocaine was the cause of its death, or that it
Speaker 2: had ingested enough cocaine to die from it. I think
Speaker 2: Elizabeth Banks is enormously talented. I can understand why the
Speaker 2: subject matter of this script would be a movie that
Speaker 2: somebody might make. It happens to be Rayleioda's last movie
Speaker 2: is a really great actor. I will see it. I'm
Speaker 2: looking forward to seeing it, although I'm going to wait
Speaker 2: until it's on one of my streaming services.
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