‘From white liquor to white powder’

When George Johnston noticed his cows gathering around an odd, bright-blue object on the ground and giving it a sniff or two on the morning of Sept. 10, 1982, he decided to go check it out.

“The cows’ attention spiked George’s curiosity as to what they were seeing, so he went to see what was piquing their interest,” said Glenda Sue Johnson, Johnston’s niece and a retired clerk of Gilmer County Superior Court. “That’s when he discovered the canister that was dropped in his pasture.”

The canister contained 50 pounds of cocaine from the South American country of Columbia. Johnston called Sheriff Ferman Stanley, and soon law enforcement officials were swarming Johnston’s farm and the surrounding countryside off Roy Road. United Press International reported at the time over 500 pounds of cocaine dropped from an airplane were eventually recovered — worth half a billion dollars — packed in three duffel bags holding 18 fiberglass canisters.

John Cagle, who retired from the Georgia Bureau of Investigation 14 years ago, worked the case with fellow agents Fran Wiley, the late Charles King and Buddy Henry. Last week, he spoke at length about the biggest cocaine bust in Georgia history (up to that point) on the 40-year anniversary of the case that made national news and sent several local and regional men to prison.

Cagle, who now works with the Pickens County Sheriff’s Office, said the flight originated from the Gilmer County Airport and flew straight to Columbia.

“As I recall, this was a Queen Air twin engine and the way they configured it, they took all but the two pilots’ seats out and put in a bladder fuel tank because they had to have extra fuel to get down there and back,” he said. “They would refuel that bladder in Columbia, and put the canisters of cocaine on top of the fuel bladder so that by gravity they would empty the fuel.”

However, the drug-smuggling effort became somewhat of a comedy of errors, Cagle noted.

“The night of the cocaine drop they were supposed to land at Cherokee County, and the offload crew was in the woods with the aircraft seats,” he recalled. “Once they landed, they were to kick off the dope, get the seats and take off again. They had a radio where they communicated with the plane, and the plane (pilot) said we’re so many minutes out from landing. And in so many minutes, the plane landed, and the offload crew ran out onto the runway with the seats — and it wasn’t their plane.

“So they ran back into the woods and called the plane on the radio, and said something ain’t right, go to plan B. The only thing was, they didn’t have a plan B. So they fly up around Amicalola Falls and start circling, trying to figure out what plan B was.”

‘Had bad luck’

Cagle said it wasn’t the first time the smugglers’ plans had run afoul.

“That particular group of people that were involved had had bad luck in the past with loads (of drugs),” he said. “One time we watched them take off from the airport in Cherokee County — which at that time was very isolated — and they were supposed to fly down to Mantequilla, Columbia, and pick up some. The Columbians actually seized their aircraft from them, and just let them go.”

Sheriff Stanley notified the GBI after Johnston called him to report the canister. He had no idea how close to home the smuggling operation was about to get.

“So they fly up (Highway) 52, and one of the guys that was involved was Clay Stanley, who was the sheriff’s son,” said Cagle. “Clay lived out Roy Road, and so they thought let’s drop it near Clay’s house or out that way somewhere because Clay knows the area. So that’s when they flew out in that area and started dumping the dope out ... they kicked out that fuel bladder too and we recovered it.”

Since the area was heavily forested where most of the cocaine canisters were discovered, Cagle was asked if it was national forest land or a wildlife management area — and if smugglers may have been able to retrieve it if the cows hadn’t discovered it first. He also implied the canisters had broken free from the duffel bags.

“It’s hard to say that it would have gone completely under our radar, because most of it was dropped on private land,” he clarified. “Eventually somebody — not necessarily the ones involved — would have found it, because there were so many more canisters strewn around that area. We developed a search pattern. We’d go in one direction, find a canister, and then we’d find another one. We actually flew the area in which we were finding them and found some of them from the air.

“It was difficult terrain, especially when you find 50 pounds of cocaine (in one canister) and have to carry it out. I think it was a total of 543 pounds that we found.”

The Dalton-Jasper connection

Law enforcement authorities weren’t the only ones looking for the drugs, and it helped lead to arrests in the case.

“(The smugglers) threw it out the night before or in the early morning hours before daylight,” said Cagle. “One of the offload crew folks (in the airplane) was a private pilot — not the pilot of the plane that went south. After they kicked out the cocaine, they flew to Dalton and landed. The pilot on the offload crew rented a small aircraft, and after the first canister was found, we were out there and that small plane was circling, trying to find it. Then the small plane came to the Pickens airport and lands. We had alerted the local airports, and that plane was obviously looking for it. I got a call from Pickens airport that said a plane just landed fitting that description. I came down there and that’s when we made the first arrest of that guy — Dan Ayers.”

Although UPI reported Ayers as the pilot during the drop — he was fitted with a flak jacket at his first court appearance because authorities feared he might be taken out by his fellow drug traffickers — Cagle said that was incorrect.

“We just didn’t know,” Cagle detailed of their concerns. “I was the one that took him (to court), and we just didn’t know what would happen. There was another guy from Gilmer involved, Eddie Holt; he was convicted, and another guy called Bud Cochran. Now Bud was an older guy who had served a lot of federal time, and it was actually his connection. He was the guy that had the dope connection, so he was sorta the leader.

“There was another guy from Habersham County who was actually a pilot, Melvin Stevens, and he fled but was captured years later and ended up going to prison. There was an airline pilot out of North Carolina and I don’t recall his name, but he and Melvin are the ones that flew the load. They went to trial with several others and were convicted and sentenced. At the time, it was the biggest cocaine seizure in Georgia. Everybody was convicted.”

At his initial court appearance while heavily guarded, Justice of the Peace T. Vernon Dover, ordered Ayers held on $1 million bond.

National Guard activated

UPI reported that news of the drop caused widespread curiosity and people searching the woods, so much so that Gov. George Busbee called out the Georgia National Guard. Some U.S. Customs agents were armed with machine guns and shotguns because they were concerned smugglers might show up on the ground trying to find their lost load, UPI reported.

Cagle remembered, “We had to secure the whole area, we were concerned once we started finding the canisters. We didn’t want anybody just searching for a canister and then finding it and carrying it off. We had to have a presence in the area until we were satisfied we found it all.”

UPI reported the search for the canisters was called off on Sept. 18.

“We’ve gone several miles on both sides of our known drop zone,” said Roy Harris, the GBI’s agent-in-charge of the search at the time. “So we’re pretty confident we’ve covered things well.”

Cagle said the trafficking case was actually the first one brought under the Organized Crime Drug Enforcement Task Force that the federal government had begun, partially in response to tons of cocaine being trafficked out of South America.

“It was kind of a unique case because it involved the sheriff’s son,” he continued. “It was a long investigation, and we did some covert things during the investigation that helped up there. We tried the case in Atlanta for about a month.”

Cagle said authorities were startled by the size of the drug haul and its location. He noted the Peach State was becoming a destination for massive drug shipments after Florida was on the lookout for hauls.

“None of us ever thought we’d be carrying pounds and pounds of cocaine out of the woods in Ellijay on our backs,” he revealed. “We would find the stuff and just be amazed, never thinking anything like that would happen here. But air smuggling back then was very popular in south and north Georgia. They would land airplanes on some of those straight two-lane roads in south Georgia. A Lockheed Loadstar was seized at the Pickens airport back then, and a DC-3 was seized at the Blairsville airport with a load. So it was very common for that stuff to be happening at that time.

“One of the things we joked about at the time, because back in the ‘70s and ‘80s there was still white liquor being made in this area — we said it had gone from white liquor to white powder.”

The UPI also reported a bear died of an overdose after getting into one of the canisters.