The Cop Who Built a Drug Empire

A body falls from the night sky. To understand this tragic death, police must follow a winding trail of clues. They struggle to learn whether it was merely an accident or something far more sinister. Each menacing clue heightens the mystery as police seek to uncover the identity of a man who kept dangerous company.

In this program, some of the names have been changed.

September 10th, 1985. Midnight.

A plane flies under the radar.

Two men prepare to bail out. It was a desperate act, but they were out of options.

“You’ll be fine.”

They put the plane on autopilot. Uncertain of the dangers that awaited them, they leapt into the vast night sky.

The next morning in Knoxville, Tennessee, Sam Reed and his daughter went about their morning routine. Nothing seemed out of the ordinary until Sam’s daughter headed outside for the morning paper.

“Dad, a man was sprawled on their driveway. Dad!”

“What is it?”

He didn’t appear to be breathing. Sam’s daughter called 911.

“Knox County 911.”

Knoxville Police Lieutenant Jerry Day was alerted.

“The dispatcher called us and said, ‘We have a dead body. It has a parachute attached to it.’ And it appears this individual has died from a fall.”

Police and paramedics arrived in minutes. Paramedics confirmed the man was dead. No one in the neighborhood had seen anything suspicious. The man must have fallen in the middle of the night. It appeared he had been dead for some time. His primary shoot had not deployed. Although his hand clutched the rip cord, it appeared the emergency shoot opened on its own.

“We have someone who is skydiving in the middle of the night, which is very unusual. If you do have skydivers, they’re usually out in open areas in daylight time. So we knew immediately that we had something that was going to be very unique.”

Nothing about the situation was what the officers expected, including the condition of the body.

“What we were expecting to find was an individual who had massive wounds from impacting the ground. What we found was what appeared to be very minor, superficial injuries. We weren’t sure why it was such a small amount of injuries in this individual.”

The officers expected to see a much greater amount of blood. His wounds didn’t seem consistent with a violent fall to the ground. There was a cut underneath the chin, the mouth was bleeding, the nose had been bleeding, and the teeth were rearranged as if the jaw had been impacted with something very hard. But beyond that, there were no other outside physical injuries. The officers suspected the victim wasn’t from Knoxville. He was wearing very expensive jump clothing, which appeared to be things that we would say were high-dollar, which you don’t normally find on most area skydivers. He was carrying several thousand in cash.

“We started looking for ID. We found his wallet and inside the wallet we found a driver’s license to an Andrew Thornton out of Kentucky. But only to find behind that another Kentucky driver’s license with his picture but with another name. The other name was Andrew Bourbon.”

Officers had no way of knowing which name, if either, was real. But it was the next discovery that stunned Knoxville police. Inside a large black duffel bag strapped to the victim, investigators found small parcels, each containing what appeared to be a kilo of unprocessed cocaine. From the markings on the drugs, investigators deduced they were packaged outside the US. Neighbors were drawn to the scene but couldn’t give the officers any information. No one had seen or heard anything suspicious that morning or the night before.

The officers took the evidence found on the body back to headquarters to examine it. They were looking for additional clues to the parachutist’s identity. The man was carrying various handguns.

“We start through the backpack to find a fully loaded semi-automatic 9mm plus the derringer, which is the type of a weapon that’s going to be used by someone who is either working in a deep-cover operation or is a survivalist—someone who’s going to have a backup weapon, which a lot of police officers carry.”

The guns were sent to the lab for testing. A pair of night vision goggles were even more puzzling. They were only available to the military. There was no serial number to use to trace the goggles’ origin.

“He had all kinds of evidence that showed that this was a really bad actor, someone who meant to survive whatever situation he found himself in.”

A notebook contained names and odd groupings of numbers. It appeared to be some kind of numeric code, though Detective Day was unsure of its meaning. Inside the bag, investigators also found South African gold Krugerrands. They suspected the man carried gold so he could flee to another country and easily convert the untraceable Krugerrands to local currency. Most disturbing to the officers, however, was the discovery of Teflon-coated bullets.

“Teflon-coated ammunition that is Teflon-coated and is only used to penetrate body armor, which normally is worn by law enforcement officers. These bullets are normally called cop killers, and individuals who are dead set on not being captured will use that type of ammunition.”

Detectives scrutinized the two Kentucky licenses. They placed calls to authorities there to determine if either was legitimate.

“There was no idea by anyone in the investigative area as to who he really was. Once we found the passport, driver’s license, we started trying to pull everything together to make a positive identification.”

They also found a membership card to an exclusive resort in Miami. In the dead man’s pocket, investigators found a key with some strange numbers on it.

“That’s a weird looking key.”

“Look at that, I’ve never seen one like that.”

“Yeah, that’s a tail number off of an aircraft. That’s an aircraft key.”

Detectives weighed the stash of cocaine.

“We normally come in contact with 34 kilos of coke, over 80 lbs, at one time. Occasionally we would get involved with cases with pounds, but nothing of this magnitude.”

The street value of the cocaine was almost $20 million, too much for a small police department to protect. Fearing their precinct could be targeted by criminals desperate to get their hands on that much cocaine, they called for help.

“We contacted the Drug Enforcement Administration and told them what we had. We told them we had a large quantity of over 70 pounds of cocaine and that we didn’t want to keep it in our facility.”

The DEA had a vault that could secure it.

The victim’s main parachute hadn’t been deployed, but his backup shoot was open. Forensic technicians examined the dead man’s equipment. They were looking for signs of sabotage, but the equipment appeared to be in perfect working order. It was unclear why the victim’s primary shoot hadn’t deployed.

“He appeared to be an individual who knew exactly what he was doing, which made the parachute accident seem somewhat strange to us.”

The officers would have to rely on other evidence to determine how and why the man died.

But the aircraft in pursuit was larger and gaining fast. Knoxville, Tennessee police detective Jerry Day explained the theory.

“We surmise that Andrew and his accomplice had thought they had picked up an air tail either from the Drug Enforcement Administration, the FBI, or customs. He had become very paranoid. We know that later on through the investigation he was a very paranoid individual, and he probably thought he was being followed.”

For Thornton, there was no choice.

“Give me the headphones.”

He couldn’t afford to be caught. He radioed Rachel, who was awaiting his arrival in Knoxville.

“Rachel. Rachel, do you read me?”

“Rachel, do you read me?”

When interviewed by the DEA, Rachel refused to identify Thornton’s accomplice or divulge many details. She confirmed that Thornton sounded panicked.

“Spoke of the chase plane.”

“What about our cargo?”

“And the need to bail out.”

Then he signed off for the last time. Rachel Gant never gave investigators any more information.

“Rachel Gant was very loyal, protected him right up to the end, and refused to testify for a grand jury in Knoxville, which resulted in her indictment. But to this day, I don’t think she’s ever betrayed his confidence. Pretty hardcore individual in my opinion.”

The men jumped at night, a dangerous prospect even for someone as seasoned as Thornton.

“Don’t worry, you’re going to be fine.”

According to Gant, the pilot had never jumped before. His was a leap of faith. But Thornton welcomed the danger. Some said he thought he was invincible. But Thornton was not invincible. In fact, none of the gang escaped capture or prosecution.

“Trần trụi mà nói, họ là một nhóm bạn thân thiết gắn bó với nhau, và tôi nghĩ rằng họ đã nuôi dưỡng lẫn nhau từ những cuộc phiêu lưu và những hành vi sai trái của mình. Thực tế, tôi nghĩ họ gần như đã dung túng cho tội ác của nhau. Sự thật là họ đều có mối liên hệ mật thiết với nhau, việc họ bằng cách nào đó đã dính líu đến các vụ ám sát cả một thẩm phán liên bang và một công tố viên liên bang, tôi nghĩ điều đó nói lên rất nhiều điều về việc họ nghĩ rằng mình không thể bị chạm tới. Họ nghĩ rằng mình có khả năng làm bất cứ điều gì, thử bất cứ điều gì và trốn thoát khỏi bất cứ điều gì, và họ đã từng làm vậy.”

But when indictments and various trials were finally handed down, the company turned on its own—friend testifying against friend. Frank and John Barkley, Mike and Bonnie Kelly, and Harvey Walker were all found guilty on a variety of charges from murder to conspiracy. Only Mike Kelly’s drug conviction was reversed on appeal.

What happened to Drew Thornton, however, is still not entirely clear. The Knoxville, Tennessee Medical Examiner eventually declared his death an accident, the mysterious injuries most likely caused by a duffel bag battering him all the way down, or he may have struck the wing of his own plane when he jumped. But how such an experienced jumper could make such a mistake is unclear.

“He impacted something as he was exiting the aircraft. The wound to the bottom of his chin made it very evident that something had impacted his head. What we surmised was that it rendered him unconscious to the point that he was falling, and then once he regained consciousness, he immediately pulled his emergency shoot because he wasn’t sure how far from the ground he was. But it was too late.”

The emergency shoot jerked Thornton onto his back. Everyone that knew Drew liked him personally, but there was always this dark side. It was that dark side that drove Thornton into a world of crime, drugs, and guns. And it was that dark side that ultimately killed him.