Cocaine Bear: True story of notorious bear who consumed duffel bag of cocaine | NEWSRUX

When Georgia investigators stumbled throughout the notorious Cocaine Bear in 1985 its reason behind demise was unmistakable.

The 175-pound black bear was discovered subsequent to a duffel bag that had as soon as been full of greater than 70 kilos of cocaine earlier than it was hurled from a drug smuggler’s airplane.

Besides now it was ripped open with 40 empty packets scattered close to the overdosed animal’s carcass.

Now the wild story of the Cocaine Bear has been given the Hollywood thriller remedy and was a film directed by actress and director Elizabeth Banks and has simply seen its first trailer drop.

The film stars Keri Russell of The People, as properly an ensemble solid that features her husband Matthew Rhys, Margo Martindale, O’Shea Jackson Jr, Alden Ehrenreich and Jesse Tyler Ferguson.

And it additionally options one of many ultimate ever film performances of Goodfellas actor Ray Liotta, who died whereas filming the film Harmful Waters within the Dominican Republic in Might.

Cocaine Bear expenses its manner into film theatres on 24 February 2023.

The cocaine eaten by the predator, price an estimated $15m, was dropped out of a airplane in 1985 by drug smuggler Andrew Thornton, the son of rich 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.

In response to the Georgia Bureau of Investigations, Thornton fell to his demise when he jumped out of the airplane and “hit his head on the tail of the plane” and didn’t open his parachute.

When his physique was present in a neighbourhood driveway in Knoxville, Tennessee, Thornton was sporting evening imaginative and prescient goggles, a bulletproof vest and Gucci loafers.

Thornton, 40, additionally had $4,500 in money on him, two weapons, a number of knives and a key to the airplane.

The unoccupied plane he was flying was later discovered crashed a number of hours away within the mountains of North Carolina and when authorities retraced the airplane’s flight path and found 9 duffel baggage stuffed with cocaine.

Three months after Thornton’s demise the lifeless bear, and the tenth duffel bag, have been discovered south of the state line between Tennessee and Georgia within the Chattahoochee Nationwide Forest.

However that was removed from the top of the bear’s superb story.

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

They bought their fingers on it after an exhaustive cross-country search, and element its weird historical past on their web site.

“Its abdomen was actually packed to the brim with cocaine. There isn’t a mammal on the planet that might survive that,” the health worker who carried out the bear’s necropsy advised the corporate’s founders.

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

The bear was ultimately taxidermied by officers and donated to the Chattahoochee River Nationwide Recreation Space, the place it was displayed at a customer centre.

It then went into storage throughout a wildfire, earlier than ending in a Nashville pawn store. From there it was purchased by nation music star Waylon Jennings, who gifted it to a good friend in Las Vegas.

When the good friend, Ron Thompson, died in 2009, his property was auctioned off and Cocaine Bear was purchased by Chinese language immigrant Zhu T’ang for $200.

When Mr T’ang died in 2012 the house owners of Kentucky For Kentucky contacted his widow and she or he agreed to offer them Cocaine Bear, in the event that they paid for its transport.

The bear is now a social media star in its personal proper on the firm’s location on the Kentucky Enjoyable Mall in Lexington.

The film Cocaine Bear relies on an untitled script written by Jimmy Warden and was produced by Phil Lord and Chris Miller, who directed The Lego Film.

Cocaine Bear will likely be Banks’ third function after final directing Charlie’s Angels in 2019 and Pitch Excellent 3 in 2015.