In 1977, the city of Hazen, Arkansas, was distraught to listen to that Gary Betzner, an area crop duster with three younger kids had plunged to his dying off the steep White River Bridge.
A pastor broke the somber information to Polly, Betzner’s oldest daughter from his first marriage on her sixth birthday. She, like his different two kids, was grief-stricken and confused.
However no one took it worse than his second spouse, Sally, who grew to become so inconsolable she was detained in a psych ward of a close-by hospital for days.
Your entire city was dumbfounded as to why a seemingly comfortable, financially secure 30-something man would leap to his dying in broad daylight — particularly the authorities, who solely ever recovered garments and sneakers, however no physique.
That’s as a result of there was no physique to be discovered.
Betzner faked his dying to reside a harmful double life — as a multimillionaire, worldwide drug smuggler for Pablo Escobar, whereas additionally mounting a covert CIA struggle nearly concurrently.
His fascinating, stranger-than-fiction story is the topic of a brand new HBO Max docuseries, “The Invisible Pilot,” premiering Monday, April 4 at 9 p.m. The three-part, eye-opening story covers Betzner’s unlikely transition from household man to drug maven, wrangling covert US authorities operations in Central America.
“We see him as this kind of ‘Forrest Gump’ character, he’s in all places,” Ari Mark, who co-directs with Phil Lott advised The Put up of Betzner, who remains to be alive and is now in his 80s.
The docuseries, govt produced by Adam McKay who is understood for wild anti-establishment tales like “The Massive Brief,” was “a dream come true” collaboration for the administrators.
An actual thriller man
Even the administrators, who sat down with Betzner a variety of occasions by way of the course of the mission, say it’s laborious to pin down who he actually is.
He grew up within the South, with an abusive father who left his mom when Gary was younger. Years later, he joined the Navy, the place he served in a communications department. Betzner additionally says he was skilled as a pilot, studying the right way to fly undetected with valuable cargo.
“He's as cagey about [his military service] as he's about something and we desperately tried to get his data from the Navy,” Lott stated. “Whether or not it was piloting or he was in communications, he undoubtedly picked up one thing [about evading radar] there.”
After beginning a household in Arkansas, the crop duster moved briefly to Alaska in 1976, within the hopes of working within the state’s booming oil business. It was there he began dabbling in small-time pot smuggling. A yr later, Betzner — an anti-establishment hippie whose love of gear was not restricted to marijuana — was busted in Miami on narcotics expenses.
He returned to Arkansas, however was picked up for possession a second time there. His alternative was easy: spend half his life in jail or disappear.
Telling not a soul however his spouse, Sally, the 2 hatched the plan to pretend Betzner’s dying. She threw his garments within the river and advised authorities that he jumped off the bridge exterior their hometown.
Sally was so sport that she even took hypnosis courses along with her husband to ship her yearslong efficiency because the grieving widow to the townsfolk. Her nervous breakdown, in response to Sally within the documentary, was a part of the act.
Illusive identities
After a yr of being presumed useless, Betzner was hiding out in Hawaii below a pretend identify and would have his household come go to periodically.
However then he bought busted but once more in his new, tropical locale. Once more, Betzner needed to go on the run to keep away from a life in jail — solely this time, he upped the ante and have become actually invisible, even to his family members.
Untethered, Betzner entered the underworld of high-profile, worldwide drug smuggling.
By 1980, Gary had moved across the US below a number of aliases as he started his work as a smuggler for varied teams and cartels — placing his crop-dusting abilities and navy expertise to good use. He traveled from place to position below the guise of a chiropractor, a automobile salesman, an actual property dealer and lots of different trades, all of the whereas flying planes for his bosses. Fittingly, all of it went down throughout the top of President Ronald Reagan’s struggle on medicine.
“He’s a shapeshifter … and he pulled [multiple lives] off,” Mark stated.
Betzner, who retired his delivery identify for his most often used moniker Lucas Concord, rapidly accrued an “astronomical” fortune from his newfound profession whereas residing in South Florida, in response to Mark.
“Phil and I spent numerous time with him within the Miami and Coconut Grove space retracing steps. ‘That man owes me 50 million, these folks owe me 100 million’ and also you’re like, ‘OK!’” he added. “He has all types of tales about buying and selling automobiles and giving items, he was truly a reasonably beneficiant man. He gave numerous it away.”
His motivation for the death-defying runs — the place Betzner stated he was as soon as chased by Cuban MiG fighter jets for flying of their airspace — wasn’t truly about earning money, the administrators stated.
“Each flight he introduced in, he felt like he was being a patriot. That’s a twisted world view that, in his thoughts, is totally 100% appropriate,” Lott stated. “I feel Gary desires to be extraordinary. It’s such a quintessentially American concept, proper? It’s like: ‘I’m a small city crop duster, however … I’m a very good pilot, I’m actually good at what I do, boy, I can do higher than [crop dusting] and I can preserve ascending,’” Mark stated.
Escobar’s fly man
Within the early Nineteen Eighties, Betzner made a brand new contact to fly for — the infamous Colombian drug lord Pablo Escobar.
“Escobar and him appeared to have a mutual respect,” Mark stated.
“Gary tells an ideal story of buying planes and he created Pablo Escobar’s air drive. And it was a number of planes, large planes, not simply single engines or twin engines — these have been jets,” Lott added. “And he tells a number of tales about spending time flying planes to Chile and simply flying round in search of nice valleys and exquisite vistas with Pablo Escobar.”
Across the similar time, Betzner discovered one other new employer in america authorities.
After catching sensible to his unlawful dealings, the CIA leveraged Betzner to do their soiled work of arming anti-communist, Contra rebels in Nicaragua throughout a black ops mission. To keep away from jail time, Betzner agreed to fly weapons and explosives to the ranch of John Hull, an American contractor in Costa Rica who labored with the CIA.
Particularly, he twice hauled M-16 rifles, mines, and C-4 explosives all the way down to the property, bringing again a close to 500 kilograms (1,100 kilos) of cocaine, in response to an Related Press report.
“That stress is tousled. You’re coping with these two form of superpowers enjoying them off one another in some form of method,” Mark stated of Betzner’s unlikely employers. “I feel for him, and I’ve skilled this firsthand, he's so extremely good at shapeshifting — at rolling with regardless of the state of affairs is and making it work.”
Betzner’s unbelievable run got here to an abrupt finish in 1984, when he was busted in Florida for smuggling Escobar’s cocaine. After being sentenced to 27 years in jail, Betzner spited the CIA — who he says had assured him immunity from jail — by testifying to the false flag mission and lots of extra secrets and techniques of government-known drug smuggling.
He did so publicly in 1988 to a Senate Committee led by John Kerry, the place he even pointed to the precise runway he landed on in Costa Rica.
However Betzner’s policy-altering testimony additionally put him vulnerable to pissing off his different boss.
“[Escobar] knew the place I used to be from, my kids, that I ‘dedicated suicide,'” Betzner says within the sequence. “Apparently he employed anyone [in the US] to research who I used to be as, like, insurance coverage.”
“There was this implication of collateral, the collateral being his household,” Mark stated. “There was this kind of unstated surveillance that Escobar and his folks made very clear to Gary.”
In the end, Betzner served his full sentence, and Escobar left his household alone. He reconnected together with his children and now lives humbly together with his third spouse, and no traces of the numerous tens of millions that have been seized by the feds on the top of his drug trafficking profession.
He admits he lives with a level of regret.
“His household has clearly had its struggles and I feel Gary has and can proceed to confess he regrets that,” Mark stated. “He actually embraces, ‘That is who he's’ and ‘That is the best way it's.'”
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