The Day It Rained Cocaine
The stranger-than-life story of Andrew Thornton, inspiring the movie Cocaine Bear
One fall morning in 1985, a homeowner in Knoxville, Tennessee, found a dead parachutist in his yard. The dead man wore night vision goggles, combat fatigues, and Gucci loafers, and carried several weapons. Tied to his waist were 77 pounds of cocaine.
How the man — a longtime criminal identified as 40-year-old Andrew Thornton — fell from the sky is a weird, wild tale, nearly too strange to be true. But it is.
On September 9, 1985, Thornton flew to Colombia to smuggle 400 kilos of cocaine into the U.S. His travel companion was a popular Lexington karate instructor and family man, Bill Leonard.
Leonard told The Knoxville News Sentinel that Thornton, one of his students, had hired him for protection on a business trip to the Bahamas. The unwitting Leonard had no idea of Thornton’s criminal past.
Mid-flight, Thornton informed Leonard of his smuggling plan. He landed his Cessna 404 in a swamp in Colombia, where thugs wielding machine guns surrounded them, watching their every move.
Leonard began the grim task of loading 880 pounds of cocaine into the plane. The task was doubly sickening. Not only he had been duped into participating in a…
