The Bare Truth About the Cocaine Snorting Bear - B6

Bonus 6: A movie about a cocaine snorting bear going on a brutal killing spree hits home with CB Hackworth, although it misses the mark when marketed as non-fiction.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Murder in Miami is a production of iHeartRadio. In the
early eighties, cocaine was having an impact on many more
places in the United States than Miami. C. B. Hackworth
was a young newspaper reporter in Northern Georgia at the time.

Speaker 2 (00:26):
In September of nineteen eighty two, we had the first
and biggest case of cocaine literally dropping from the sky.
It was almost six hundred pounds of uncut cocaine, worth

(00:47):
an estimated half a billion dollars. It was a big story,
and that's not the case that the movie Cocaine Bear
is based on. That came several years later. As it
turned out, it was more like climate change. It turned

(01:07):
out cocaine falling out of the sky on a continual basis.
It wasn't just one case or two cases. It took
us a minute to figure it out. But the driving
force behind this new phenomena was that North Georgia, with
its cliched, quiet little communities up in the mountains, is

(01:32):
as far as you can get from South America or
the Bahamas to the United States. With a large shipment
of drugs in a plane that is modified to carry
extra fuel as well as the drugs. This first case

(01:53):
in Gilmour County seemingly would not necessarily be directly related
to lamar Chester. Nevertheless, in retrospect, to look at an
old article of mine and see that that far back
before I'd ever even heard of Lamarchester. Roy Harris, the

(02:14):
agent in charge of the Georgia Bureau of Investigation's field
office in Atlanta, told me that they felt like there
was a mastermind behind this and other cocaine cases we
were experiencing in North Georgia.

Speaker 1 (02:34):
And the phenomenon of cocaine falling from the sky seemingly
inspired certain sorts to seek out the woods of Northern Georgia.

Speaker 2 (02:43):
There was a noticeable increase in the number of people
going up to Gilmour County and exploring the outdoors. I
think both we as journalists and law enforcement were concerned
that people were coming to North Georgia on weekends recreationally

(03:07):
who had not ever previously been inspired to enjoy our
beautiful North Georgia mountains.

Speaker 1 (03:15):
It's this specific era of specific snow covered mountains that
inspired the hit movie Cocaine Bear, a gory comedy from
Universal Pictures and director Elizabeth Banks featuring a five hundred
pound black bear on a killing spree in a Georgia forest,
spurred on by consuming a considerable amount of cocaine.

Speaker 2 (03:37):
The movie Cocaine Bear. When they say inspired by true events,
that's a phrase that Hollywood uses very very liberally to
promote a movie. It's loosely inspired by case in which
the pilot of an airplane jumped out of it with

(03:57):
cocaine strapped to his body. It had already dumped a
large amount of cocaine, which he apparently intended to go
back and get. He also probably thought that he was
being pursued by drug agents. It appears that that was
not his plan to jump out, but greed got the

(04:20):
better of him, because he strapped some of the cocaine
to his body. He was wearing a parachute. However, that
cocaine provided enough extra weight that his parachute did not work,
so he and his cocaine plummeted to earth, and that

(04:42):
gentleman perished. But the story about the bear is so
fictional every aspect of it is inflated. The actual bear
was found in close proximity to cocaine, and subsequent tests
indicated that it had ingested an amount of cocaine. It

(05:05):
was not a five hundred pounds bear as the movie suggests.
It was I think about one hundred and twenty five
pounds or something like that. And it's not that it
shed the weight because of chronic cocaine use.

Speaker 1 (05:20):
The Gainesville Times, Hackworth's former newspaper, has tackled the task
of weeding fact from fiction in the case of the
cinematic cocaine snorting Bear.

Speaker 2 (05:30):
The movie has riled a number of former GBI agents
who were directly involved in this case. The Times, where
I used to work as a good article you can
look up that sets the record straight. They did an article,
tracked down the former agents and got quotes from them,

(05:54):
and they're really not happy about this movie. This was
indicative of a real problem that we were having. And
I don't mean by that the problem is wildlife dying
from cocaine. I'm telling about the importation of cocaine. So
I think something that agents and former agents dedicated a

(06:18):
significant portion of their life and energy attempting to curtail.
The agents feel so strongly about this that friend Wiley,
one of many agents I knew well. She's quoted in
the Times as saying, I think it's just evil, and

(06:38):
another agent said it was a total farce.

Speaker 1 (06:42):
But that doesn't mean Hackwerre thinks Cocaine Bear is entirely
without merit.

Speaker 2 (06:48):
It is almost entirely fiction. I'm not even trying to
diss the movie, especially having not seen it, but I
am going to diss the degree to which they are
playing the based on a true story tagline used for
lots and lots of movies and all of those tape

(07:11):
liberties with the facts, But this one is a fabrication
almost whole claw. The only part that is true is
that a man plunged to his death with some cocaine
and a bear got into it and turned up dead.

(07:33):
I don't even think they ended up believing that the
cocaine was the cause of its death, or that it
had ingested enough cocaine to die from it. I think
Elizabeth Banks is enormously talented. I can understand why the
subject matter of this script would be a movie that

(07:54):
somebody might make. It happens to be Rayleioda's last movie
is a really great actor. I will see it. I'm
looking forward to seeing it, although I'm going to wait
until it's on one of my streaming services.

Speaker 1 (08:14):
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