The farmer who faked his own death to work for Pablo Escobar — and the CIA
nypost.comHBO Max docuseries, “The Invisible Pilot,” premiering Monday, April 4 at 9 p.m. The three-part, eye-opening tale covers Betzner’s unlikely transition from family man to drug maven, wrangling covert US government operations in Central America.“We see him as this sort of ‘Forrest Gump’ character, he’s everywhere,” Ari Mark, who co-directs with Phil Lott told The Post of Betzner, who is still alive and is now in his 80s.
The docuseries, executive produced by Adam McKay who is known for wild anti-establishment stories like “The Big Short,” was “a dream come true” collaboration for the directors.Even the directors, who sat down with Betzner a number of times through the course of the project, say it’s hard to pin down who he really is.He grew up in the South, with an abusive father who left his mother when Gary was young.
Years later, he joined the Navy, where he served in a communications branch. Betzner also says he was trained as a pilot, learning how to fly undetected with precious cargo.“He is as cagey about [his military service] as he is about anything and we desperately tried to get his records from the Navy,” Lott said. “Whether it was piloting or he was in communications, he definitely picked up something [about evading radar] there.”After starting a family in Arkansas, the crop duster moved briefly to Alaska in 1976, in the hopes of working in the state’s booming oil industry.
It was there he started dabbling in small-time pot smuggling. A year later, Betzner — an anti-establishment hippie whose love of substances was not limited to marijuana — was busted in Miami on narcotics charges.
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