North Georgia was a common trafficking route because of its mountainous and treacherous terrain, scattered law enforcement, and heavy low-flying traffic. In the early 1980s, Wiley had a front-row seat to the ways cocaine and cocaine smuggling were upending the criminal landscape. They also got sick of being handed the phone every time a caller mistook her for a secretary. The first time she went to a shooting range, she shot a perfect score. Her male coworkers started taking her seriously for two reasons, she says. In those early days, she says, “I was more scared of the men I worked with than the bad guys.” On one occasion, she says a sheriff locked her in his office and propositioned her. But I didn’t resent any of it.” As a young woman on the force, she was also sexually harassed. “I was compassionate and could handle that better than some of the guys.” She says she was always the agent stuck on scribe duty-“writing the report and doing the secretary thing. In the early days, she was assigned to a lot of rape cases. There weren’t many women working in the Georgia Bureau of Investigation in the late 1970s, when she started out. Strange as the story of Andrew Thornton may be, Wiley has seen stranger. “Right there with Dale Carnegie and the presidents.” If you google Andrew Thornton, “he’s even on Wikipedia,” deadpans Wiley. The situation confounded both experts and those who knew Thornton he had been an Army paratrooper who, according to Denton, “had jumped more than a thousand times into situations considerably more complex and dangerous.” It seemed to be a case of bad luck and judgment. “When jumped out of the plane, he either hit himself on the plane or knocked himself out, because the parachute did not open,” says Wiley. (Thornton was survived by a karate-buff copilot who later cooperated with federal authorities and claimed he had been tricked by Thornton into taking part in the mission.) Per the book, Thornton divided the cocaine into sets of three, affixing each bundle with a parachute-presumably for a ground crew to pick up in Knoxville-before setting the plane on automatic pilot and jumping out of the aircraft himself. The author notes that Thornton himself was believed to be using cocaine at the time-more than a gram a day, according to one source-and had become increasingly paranoid as his habit grew. He decided to abandon his plane after determining that government aircraft were tracking him. He had with him two guns, rations, and notebooks filled with coded phone numbers.Īccording to The Bluegrass Conspiracy by Sally Denton, Thornton left Colombia with 12 duffel bags full of cocaine. When his body was discovered, he was wearing Army fatigues, Gucci loafers, night-vision goggles, a money belt containing $4,500, and a bulletproof vest. Thornton, nicknamed “Slick,” was a former police officer who had gone rogue and become an eccentric drug smuggler. The pilot of that plane, Andrew Thornton, was found dead in Knoxville, Tennessee, around the same time wearing a parachute in a man’s backyard. Wiley found out that “a plane on this flight path had crashed on autopilot into North Carolina about three months earlier,” in September. A Georgia black bear.” She points out one key difference between the film and the real-life event: “When we found the bear, there was no cocaine near her.” “It was a female bear, about 175 pounds, six feet tall, black. “The necropsy by the pathologist showed that the bear about three, four grams of cocaine, and that’s how she expired,” says Wiley. The drugs had been dropped by a plane smuggling hundreds of pounds of the drug from South America. The actual cocaine bear expired after it had absorbed just about three or four grams of cocaine in its bloodstream, though it may have eaten more. The movie’s plot, which sounds like a meme on steroids, involves a bear ingesting a brick-size package of cocaine and terrorizing Georgia locals including Keri Russell and Margo Martindale. That detail isn’t the craziest of the case, let alone her career-but it’s currently recirculating in the zeitgeist thanks to a new Universal movie directed by Elizabeth Banks. Wiley also worked on an infamous 1980s case involving a bear who overdosed on cocaine in Chattahoochee National Forest. As she tells it, she was the first female special agent in charge of North Georgia. You wouldn’t guess it from her present-day surroundings-folksy artwork, Wedgwood china, estate pottery-but Wiley has dodged gunfire, bought narcotics undercover, flown in helicopters without doors, and staked out mountaintops waiting for private planes transporting cocaine. “I’ve had a crazy life,” admits Fran Wiley, the former Georgia Bureau of Investigation special agent speaking to me from the Blue Heron Antique Mall in Cleveland, Georgia.
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