Fly By Night

In Part 1 of "How Are You Still Alive?" you met pilot Billy Dekle of Florida, a flyer who cheated death more than once as he brought in tons of Colombian marijuana, not in large cargo planes, but in smaller singles and twins. In Part 2, his story continues with a tragic accident that cost a man his life, and with a flight that ended with a long glide back to a shore in Mexico after an engine failure. And then Billy Dekle's final arrest and the harsh mandatory sentences of the time that put him in prison for life. Along the way you meet his wife Kay who against great odds, keep their family together for the many years he was in prison, and the Florida lawman who arrested him, ending his years on the run. And you'll hear from his brother Bob who was serving as a prosecutor, including at the trial of America's most famous serial killer. And he was doing so while his younger brother was flying loads of pot into Florida. You''ll hear how the support of advocacy organizations and a presidential act of mercy returned his freedom. For a detailed history of those years, read Billy & Kay Dekle's book "Flying High With Gringo Billy, available on Amazon.   Thanks to Billy & Kay Dekle, Bob Dekle and Ed Hudson for sharing their stories in this episode. Retired police officer Ed Hudson has also written a book about his arrest of Billy's partner, the late Freddie Crow, and how he later befriended Crow after Crow was released from prison. You'll find Ed Hudson's book "As The Crow Flies: The Redemption of an International Drug Smuggler" available on Amazon.

There are pilots who made millions smuggling and then walked away from the danger and the risk. Some invested their wealth in legitimate businesses and real estate; others blew it on expensive toys and partying. We will never know how many got away with it...because most of those pilots have kept their stories to themselves.   But there are some who have shared their stories for all to hear, and in this episode (the first of two on his story), you'll hear how Billy Dekle made his millions and lost them. You'll hear how he survived flights that others didn't, and when his career as a smuggler came crashing down, Billy went to prison for life. Billy's story continues in Episode 12 How Are You Still Alive? Part 2. For a detailed account of his life as a smuggler, and how that affected his family, check out "Flying High With Gringo Billy" written by Billy and his wife Kay, available here on Amazon.    

Most drug smuggling pilots were eventually caught. Many went to prison, and when they did, they often lost everything they had. But then again, most didn't start with the wealth and connections of a Palm Beach pilot-the rich kid who made a fortune flying drugs into the United states, and then got away. When pilot George Williams followed his wealthy father to a new home in Palm Beach, what appeared to be a chance encounter at a local airport proved to be a life-changing moment. That's the day he decided to become an international drug smuggler. Later, another apparent chance encounter on a dusty airport in Honduras would eventually provide his "get out of jail free card". With his piloting skills and his openness to adventure, George Williams has led a charmed life. It's a life story he tells  (under his assumed name) in his book "Snow on the Palms". "Snow on the Palms" is available on Amazon.

From the body of a parachutist found in a driveway in Tennessee, to the body of a black bear found in the woods of Georgia, the long strange tale of a narcotics cop turned narcotics smuggling pilot lives on nearly thirty eight years since his death. In this episode, Fly By Night returns to the story we told in our first four episodes to provide additional information from those who knew Drew Thornton (seen here with his younger brother Tim). If you are not already familiar with the fascinating story of Thornton, take some time to listen to the first four episodes of this podcast. In this episode you'll hear from Rab Hagin, a childhood friend of Drew Thornton who witnessed the beginnings of Thornton's impressive transformation, and in an exclusive interview, you'll hear from Drexel Neal, a retired Lexington police detective who saw a side of Thornton that differs greatly from the myth. And, you'll hear from Robert Palumbo, the producer and director of  a network documentary that tells the real story not told in the 2023 movie, Cocaine Bear.

In the 1960's, 70's and 80's, a group of Southern Californians turned to smuggling to finance and build a counter culture community. But they hadn't started out as enlightened hippies. Before one long strange night of transformation, they had been petty criminals, more interested in stealing than in peace and love. After their 180 degree change, they became known as the "Brotherhood of Eternal Love" and were known for selling hash from Afghanistan, and for practically giving away hundreds of thousands of tabs of "Orange Sunshine" LSD, even dropping thousands of tabs from a Cessna flying over a festival. They had communal homes in California and later in Hawaii, and in the waning years of the Brotherhood's smuggling operations, that's where DEA Agent Kelly Snyder first encountered a pilot named Randy Garrett. By coincidence, their paths would later cross in Louisville, Kentucky, and their story has an unusual end. The second story in this episode is that of Wally Thrasher of Virginia, a charismatic pilot whose skills were much in demand, and who was living a good life until everything came apart when someone else crashed a plane he owned, and law enforcement agents began to close in on him. Thrasher's attempts to recover from the loss of a great deal of money and drugs that burned in the crash would led to his own mysterious disappearance, with theories of his death in another crash, possible murder, and even a well-financed change of identity and a life on the run. To tell his story, we have a special guest presenter, three-time national aerobatic champion and member of the National Aviation Hall of Fame, Patty Wagstaff.

For a time, pilot Jim Thurman lived a double life: corporate and charter pilot by day, and sometimes at night, a drug smuggler. After quickly working his way through the certificates and ratings he needed as a young pilot in the Atlanta area, Thurman began to fly larger, cargo sized aircraft hauling legitimate loads like auto parts. On the charter side, he even flew a well-known U. S. senator on his way to a meeting with a Central American dictator. After buying his own DC-4 and rebuilding it, he hauled freight from South Florida airports to the south, and it was during this time that he met other pilots who flew clandestine loads with their lure of quick money in greater amounts than could be earned on the legal side of flying. That led Thurman to several crashes and one dramatic escape.

Flying an airplane loaded with drugs into the United States in the seventies and eighties often meant running a gauntlet of radar and surveillance aircraft. As the years went by, and as smuggling pilots and those who hired them became more creative in evading capture, drug interdiction agents in the air and on the ground became better at catching them. It was a never-ending game of aerial cat and mouse, with the greatest risk in the game falling upon the pilots and, by extension, the organizations that had purchased the planes and bought the drugs packed into those aircraft.   Since most smugglers of that era keep their secrets, it’s impossible to say how many pilots were freelancers running their own operations, and how many flew as a hired hand. But it’s fair to assume that for many, it was a just a job they were paid to do. In this episode, we’ll meet Marty Raulins and Derry Ferris, two smugglers who hired those pilots. Marty Raulins entertaining stories on his exploits as a smuggler are told in the book "Flying High: The Great Cannabis Caper" by author Jim Kitchens, available on Amazon.

On the hot summer night of August 3rd, 1975, just hours after an incredibly short and rough strip had been carved out of a tree covered hillside, and with that strip outlined by strings of Christmas tree lights, a pilot somehow landed a DC-4 loaded with marijuana on the side of Treat Mountain, Georgia. The pilot, pot and plane survived. But with the bad luck of being mistaken for moonshiners as they drove away in trucks packed with pot, almost all of the members of the smuggling crew were arrested that night. And that was just the beginning of an incredible tale that could only have been born of an era where pilots were eager and willing to trade safety for adventure and the hope of wealth. By the time this story ended, the DC-4 had become a tourist attraction, and was later flown off the side of the mountain so that it could star in a truly bad film loosely based on the smuggling flight and its aftermath.

This is the final episode in the story of the life and death of Drew Thornton, and the fallout from his ill-fated parachute jump on the night of September 10, 1985. When his body was identified, the news quickly traveled back to Lexington, and from that day, the myth of Drew Thornton as a corrupt cop turned drug smuggling ninja pilot began to grow. Just weeks after Thornton’s fall to his death into the driveway of a Knoxville home, alleged co-conspirator David “Cowboy” Williams died in the crash of jump plane at a Georgia skydiving operation, leading to theories of sabotage. Episode Four features an interview with retired DEA Agent/Pilot Rick Sanders, and the FBI statement of a member of Thornton’s ground crew on the night of Thornton’s fatal jump.   It also touches on the sad tale of an unfortunate black bear that stumbled upon cocaine that fell from the sky into a national forest. Now that bear, nicknamed “Pablo Escobear” resides in the Kentucky for Kentucky gift shop in Lexington.

Episode Three of Fly By Night focuses on several deaths and disappearances surrounding pilot Drew Thornton and his fellow smugglers. There is the the still-unsolved disappearance of Melanie Flynn, a young woman who may have become too close to “The Company”. With little evidence to go on, and with possibilities that never panned out, the investigation into the story of the vanished aspiring performer has been dormant for decades, though the summer of 2019 saw the possibility of new leads. There is the story of Bonnie Kelly, a small-town, small-crime woman from the Lexington area who became the assassin of a Florida State Attorney in a failed attempt to free her husband from serving years in prison, and the irony of her eventual fate. It includes the near last-minute efforts of then FBI Special Agent Jim Huggins to beat a fast-approaching statue of limitations deadline that would have forever left a co-conspirator walking free, and how the stunning discovery of the long lost gun used in the murder helped convict a member of Kentucky’s political hierarchy. Featured interview with retired FBI Special Agent Jim Huggins.