The Invisible Pilot is about a pilot the way Tiger King was about a fellow who just enjoyed being around big cats.
Meaning, the fairly unassuming title does not prepare you for the outlandish, stranger-than-fiction events that unfold.
In September 1977, Gary Betzner was driving across the White River Bridge in Hazen, Ark., with his wife, Sally, and their young daughter Sara Lee when the 36-year-old pulled the car over, got out and proceeded to jump off the bridge into the water below.
Sally Betzner was so distraught she was hospitalized for a few days. Gary's daughter Polly, from his first marriage, got the news on her 6th birthday and was understandably devastated.
Polly could've been saved the tears, though, because her father wasn't dead. And Sally wasn't actually distraught.
Rather, she was in on the plan with Betzner, a Navy pilot turned daredevil crop duster who was active in his community (Mason, Shriner, onetime county chairman for the governor of Arkansas), to fake his own death so he could avoid the long arm of the law and continue his work as a drug smuggler, unencumbered by his old life.
Dragging the river, authorities found clothes but no body.
At the figurative height of his illegal exploits, Betzner ended up based in Florida, where he went primarily by Lucas Harmony and transported drugs, including—so he claims in The Invisible Pilot—for Colombian cartel leader Pablo Escobar.
Testifying before a Senate Foreign Relations subcommittee on terrorism, narcotics and international operations in 1988—two years into a 27-year prison sentence for importing cocaine into the U.S.—Betzner claimed to have made 50 undetected flights, earning $40,000 for each one, over the course of 18 months.
Citing his Navy training and day job as a crop duster as the perfect training and cover for his illicit trade, Betzner explained, "I made it a science. All you needed to do was to be able to fly below the horizon, below the radars and come up in the blind spots between the radars."
An invisible pilot, indeed.
The three-part HBO Max series, executive produced by complicated-crime enthusiast Adam McKay, features interviews with Betzner, now 81, and family members. In the trailer, Sally is seen acknowledging their "double life."
"Every flight he brought in, he felt like he was being a patriot," Phil Lott, who directed the series with Ari Mark, told the New York Post. "That's a twisted world view that, in his mind, is absolutely 100 percent correct."
According to Betzner's 1988 testimony, as reported on by the Washington Post, he tried to retire at one point, afraid that he was on authorities' radar.
He left his home in Florida for Hawaii, but three months later went back when his friend George Morales, who was also smuggling drugs, got arrested. Morales testified before the same committee that Contra officials who claimed to be CIA operatives offered him a plea deal. He then entreated Betzner to help fly arms to the Contra rebels fighting the communist Sandanista government in Nicaragua.
Betzner testified that he made two weapons runs from the U.S. to the home of an American contractor in Costa Rica—and then brought cocaine back to the States on his return flights.
"I didn't want to do it, but I love and trusted George," Betzner testified. "He took me in when I was, well, like an orphan." Morales, who was serving a 16-year federal prison sentence for cocaine trafficking, called Betzner "the best" pilot around.
Of course, not everyone who knew what Betzner did would use the term "best."
"I don't think he deserves to have a movie made about him," former Arkansas sheriff Mike Grady told the San Diego Union-Tribune ahead of The Invisible Pilot's April 4 premiere.
As the documentary relays, while briefly living in Alaska in 1976, Betzner started smuggling small amounts of marijuana. The following year he was arrested on drug possession charges in Miami. He went back to Arkansas while awaiting trial and was arrested again for possession. Facing serious prison time, he and Sally concocted the plot to fake his death.
Sally spent a year playing the grieving widow, then she and the children, Sara Lee and her little brother Trevor, started visiting Betzner in Hawaii. After yet another arrest, however, he went off even his kids' radar, moving to Florida to lead his riskiest life yet. His day jobs included working in real estate and as a car salesman while he flew for the cartel starting in 1981.
Talking to the NY Post, director Marks called Betzner "incredibly good at shape-shifting."
Betzner was convicted of drug trafficking following his 1984 arrest, Drug Enforcement Administration agents waiting for him on the runway upon his arrival in Lake City, Fla., after one of his flights from South America, according to the South Florida Sun-Sentinel. However, the newspaper reported, Betzner actually evaded the agents, only to be arrested first for auto theft after stealing a preacher's truck from outside a nearby church to attempt an escape.
"He was always smiling like he was invisible," his former attorney Sheldon Yavitz recalled to the Sun-Sentinel in 1993, describing Betzner as a buttoned-up conservative who turned into a hippie and got really into alternative forms of spirituality. "He felt his Indian guru would protect him, until I lost the case and he got 30 years."
Initially hoping to avoid spending almost three decades behind bars, Betzner agreed to testify about his activities, including what he knew about the Latin American drug trade's route to the United States. (The Contras denied being involved in drug smuggling and the CIA denied sanctioning any transportation of drugs into the U.S.) Betzner gave the aforementioned evidence to Congress in 1988, but fearing Escobar's wrath, he accepted his prison sentence.
The notorious drug lord "knew where I was from, my children, that I 'committed suicide,'" Betzner says in The Invisible Pilot. "Apparently he hired somebody to investigate who I was as, like, insurance." (Still, he also calls Escobar "a legend, and rightly so.")
However, he did reportedly testify in 1990 for the prosecution in a federal conspiracy trial against a man accused of running a warehouse as part of a trafficking ring. Explaining his own background while on the stand, Betzner said, "I'm a pilot, so I did what I did best. I flew drugs."
Sometimes, however, he would bring shoes or cheese or other hard-to-get items to indigenous Colombians on his flights, Betzner testified, calling it "just good public relations."
Escobar was gunned down in 1993.
Upon Betzner's release from prison, he returned to Arkansas, where he has been living relatively uneventfully with his third wife. He also reconnected with his grown children.
"His family has clearly had its struggles," Ari Mark told the NY Post, "and I think Gary has and will continue to admit he regrets that."
But that's the simple version of his story. The Invisible Pilot premieres April 4 at 9 p.m. on HBO and HBO Max.