GARY Bezner was a family man in the 1970s when he disappeared without a trace leading police to believe he committed suicide.
He joined Pablo Escobar, the notorious Colombian drug lord, while simultaneously working for the CIA.
Gary Betzner’s wife, Sally, was inconsolable when she learned her husband had died when he apparently jumped from the White River Bridge in Arkansas.
All that was found near the bridge was Betzner’s clothes, but the police never found a body.
What ensued was something akin to a movie as Betzner plotted to disappear and lived under various aliases as he moved around the country.
He faked his death to leave a double life as a member of Pablo Escobar’s drug cartel.
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A new HBO Max docuseries, The Invisible Pilot, explores the steps Betzner took to become an invisible man.
Betzner grew up with an abusive father and a mother who left when he was just a boy.
He later joined the US Navy, becoming a pilot and learning to fly undetected.
He eventually settled down in Arkansas where he and his wife had two children and he left briefly to head for Alaska where he hoped to make money in the oil industry.
Instead what he found was financial gains in smuggling marijuana and a year later, in 1977, he was arrested on narcotics charges in Miami, Florida.
When he returned to Arkansas, Betzner and his wife allegedly knew he would spend the rest of his life in prison and so they made a plan for his escape.
He fled to Hawaii under a different name and his family visited periodically, but he set off on the run once again when authorities were alerted to his presence.
It was at that time he disappeared from view, even from his wife and children, traveling the US and using a different name in each locale.
Betzner began flying planes when he signed a contract to fly Pablo Escobar.
“Escobar and him seemed to have a mutual respect,” said Ari Mark, who co-directed The Invisible Pilot.
In a 1988 interview with The Washington Post, Betzner said, “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.”
As Betzner worked with Escobar, he was contacted by the CIA to arm anti-communist rebels in Nicaragua during a black ops mission.
“That tension is messed up,” Mark told the New York Post. “You’re dealing with these two kinds of superpowers playing them off each other in some kind of way.
“I think for him, … he is so incredibly good at shapeshifting — at rolling with whatever the situation is and making it work.”
Betzner was allegedly promised immunity from jail by the CIA but when he was captured for smuggling Escobar’s cocaine in Florida, he was sentenced to 27 years in jail.
He turned the case around to implicate the government by testifying against the government for their hand in alleged drug smuggling, however, when he realized it would implicate Escobar he quietly served out his sentence.
“(Escobar) knew where I was from, my children, that I ‘committed suicide,’” Betzner says in the docuseries. “Apparently he hired somebody (in the US) to investigate who I was as, like, insurance.”
“There was this implication of collateral, the collateral being his family,” Mark said. “There was this sort of unspoken surveillance that Escobar and his people made very clear to Gary.”
Betzner was sentenced to 27 years and two months in prison.
Upon his release, he returned to live a quiet life in Arkansas with his children and his third wife.
Mark and his co-director Phil Lott sat down with Betzner while creating The Invisible Pilot to get a bigger picture of Betzner’s journey into drug trafficking.
“Gary tells a great story of purchasing planes and he created Pablo Escobar’s air force. And it was several planes, big planes, not just single engines or twin engines — these were jets,” Lott said.
“He tells several stories about spending time flying planes to Chile and just flying around looking for great valleys and beautiful vistas with Pablo Escobar.”
According to the docuseries, Betzner lives with a degree of remorse for who he was and the things he did.
“His family has clearly had its struggles and I think Gary has and will continue to admit he regrets that,” Mark said. “He really embraces, ‘This is who he is’ and ‘This is the way it is.’”
The docuseries will air on April 4, 2022, at 9pm ET.
Viewers can watch season one exclusively on HBO Max.
The Invisible Pilot will be a three-part series and according to HBO’s website, it “is a tale of a charismatic, daredevil husband and father who unexpectedly jumped off a bridge in 1977, despite a seemingly happy home life and a lucrative career as a pilot.
“… Years later, a mysterious story emerges involving hypnosis, secret identities, and a double life of dangerous missions and law-breaking.
“And that’s just the beginning.”
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