Chasing the Squirrel: The Pursuit of Notorious Drug Smuggler Wally Thrasher

By Ron Peterson, Jr.

CHASING THE SQUIRREL is the true story of notorious drug smuggler Wally Thrasher, whose investigation led to the biggest drug bust in Mid-Atlantic United States history in 1986.
Nicknamed, “The Squirrel” for his elusivenes, Thrasher was a daredevil pilot who made millions flying marijuana and cocaine from South America into the US in the 70s and 80s. With his beautiful Portuguese-born wife, Olga, he lived in a mountain estate near Virginia’s New River Valley. He owned oceanfront homes and yachts in Florida, spent weekends in the Caribbean and laundered money in Las Vegas, where he partied with Frank Sinatra’s entourage.
The Feds were hot on his tail in 1984 when word came that he had died in a plane crash in Belize, his body burnt to ashes. But investigators soon learned the crash was staged and the death certificate fake. Meanwhile, Olga became a federal informant assisting the DEA in an audacious undercover sting to infiltrate the highest levels of his smuggling ring. Thirteen international traffickers were indicted, including Bolivian drug lord Roberto Suarez-Gomez, known as the world’s “King of Cocaine.”
But Wally Thrasher was never caught. Authorities believe he has spent the past four decades living in some faraway tropical land. He was recently profiled on “America’s Most Wanted” as US Marshals chased leads around the globe in his pursuit.

• Language: English
• Publisher: iUniverse
• Release date: May 27, 2020
• ISBN: 9781532096204

Book preview

CHASING THE

SQUIRREL

The pursuit of notorious drug smuggler Wally Thrasher

RON PETERSON, JR.

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CHASING THE SQUIRREL

THE PURSUIT OF NOTORIOUS DRUG SMUGGLER WALLY THRASHER

Copyright © 2020 ron peterson, jr.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or by any information storage retrieval system without the written permission of the author except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

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ISBN: 978-1-5320-9619-8 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-5320-9620-4 (e)

iUniverse rev. date: 05/27/2020

CONTENTS

Chapter 1 Acapulco

Chapter 2 Incarceration

Chapter 3 Comeback

Chapter 4 Olga

Chapter 5 Proposal

Chapter 6 Colombia

Chapter 7 Caribbean

Chapter 8 Virginia

Chapter 9 King

Chapter 10 Belize

Chapter 11 Miracle

Chapter 12 Unannounced

Chapter 13 Dublin

Chapter 14 Jamaica

Chapter 15 Contempt

Chapter 16 Sheriff

Chapter 17 Daytona

Chapter 18 Queen

Chapter 19 Miami

Chapter 20 Panama

Chapter 21 Bolivia

Chapter 22 Trial

Chapter 23 Aftermath

Chapter 24 Alive?

Acknowledgments

CHAPTER 1

ACAPULCO

The sleek silver Beech 18 airplane was poised at the far end of the airstrip, ready for takeoff from a mountain valley near Acapulco, Mexico. Wally Thrasher was in the pilot seat, getting ready to do what he loved most: fly a plane.

It was September 4, 1974. Wally’s small cargo plane was loaded with 1,500 pounds of marijuana—a strain of Cannabis sativa called Acapulco Gold, cultivated exclusively in the Guerrero Mountains outside Acapulco. The weed had a distinctive greenish-gold color due to the way it was aged and dried by the gentle winds off the Pacific Ocean. It was connoisseur pot, a highly sought-after strain with an earthy smell reminiscent of pineapple.

Purchased straight off the farm in Mexico for forty dollars per kilo, the load of marijuana would accrue value on its way through the distribution chain and eventually be sold by US street dealers for twenty dollars an ounce. A 1,700 percent markup.

Circa 1974, Wally Thrasher was one of the highest-paid drug smuggling pilots in America. He did not set up the deals or actually touch the product. He simply flew the dope from point A to point B, a critical mission for which he was extremely well compensated.

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Wally Thrasher, 1977

(photo courtesy Montana Thrasher)

His going rate at this time—early in his career—was $80 per pound, so he would earn a cool $96,000 for this particular smuggle once the weed was safely off-loaded back in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. Yes, Wally was in the dope-running business for the money, but most significantly, he was in it for the thrill. He was a daredevil in the truest sense of the word.

At thirty-four, Wallace Samuel Thrasher had a bold spirit and the dashing good looks to go with it. He was criminally handsome, blessed with the prettiest blue eyes most women had ever seen. A charismatic southern gentleman raised in the hills of Pulaski County, in Southwest Virginia’s New River Valley, Wally had a Hollywood smile, a stylish mane of prematurely grey hair, and an aura of confidence that turned heads everywhere he went. When he traveled through commercial airports, he was routinely mistaken for a celebrity—Merle Haggard or Burt Bacharach, among others.

Wally gave the gauges on the instrument panel a final preflight scan in the cockpit of the Beech 18, a classic plane that happened to be the same type of aircraft in which Ingrid Bergman flew away from Humphrey Bogart in Casablanca. He looked down the dirt runway and revved the twin engines. This bird was ready to fly. Along with his copilot, another American named Lewis Jones, Wally returned the thumbs-up sign to the Mexican men in charge of the ground operation standing beside the plane on the airstrip. He roared the engines to full power and released the brakes. Like a rocket, the Twin Beech barreled down the primitive, pockmarked airfield as the thrust pushed both pilots against the backs of their seats. Wally’s adrenaline was flowing; this would be another dicey takeoff.

Most airplane crashes happened on final approach and landing, but in the drug smuggling business, the most dangerous part of a flight was the takeoff. This plane was about 300 pounds over its maximum allowable gross weight—over the gross, in aviation lingo. Besides the 1,500 pounds of weed, there were two 100-gallon auxiliary fuel tanks in the cabin: these thick rubber pillow tanks resembled waterbeds and weighed 600 pounds each when full. They would give the plane longer legs, enabling it to go all the way to Lauderdale without stopping to refuel. But because the plane was overweight, its performance was diminished—it would climb slower and stall easier. Flying way outside the box of safety regulations meant the handling characteristics would range from bad to awful. Anyone who ever flew with Wally said he was the best pilot they had ever seen, and he’d have to be to fly a bird this obese. He was now essentially a test pilot, a role he relished.

Potholes hammered the overladen plane as it bounced down the runway with the engines screaming at max power. It took two thousand feet of the three-thousand-foot airstrip for the aircraft to finally reach the target takeoff speed of one hundred miles per hour. With the end of the strip only a hundred feet away, the wheels finally lifted up. They were airborne, but just barely, as it was impossible to climb and gain altitude without the overloaded plane stalling and falling back to the ground. So as usual, Wally improvised. He flew through the valley at only a few hundred feet, slaloming between the mountain ridges as the plane climbed gradually. Treetop flyin’, he called it.

Five minutes later, he and Jones were able to breathe a slight sigh of relief as the plane finally reached one thousand feet. But if they encountered turbulence—not to mention a storm—the bloated aircraft would go down like a ton of bricks. If the crash itself didn’t kill the two pilots, the fire would, as they would be wearing the several hundred gallons of fuel from the auxiliary tanks.

Wally proceeded on a northwest heading up the Mexican coast. The plane gradually gained more altitude over the next half hour as he savored the view of the turquoise Pacific Ocean to his left and the rugged green Guerrero mountain range to his right. Despite being overweight, the plane was performing well, cruising at two hundred miles per hour as it approached an altitude of ten thousand feet. The twin-engine Beech 18 had a reputation among aviators as a fire-breathing dragon—a challenging plane for mere mortals to fly. But more accomplished pilots like Wally loved the handling characteristics and performance.

One hundred and fifty miles into the northwesterly flight path, Wally reached the first waypoint, taking a right turn as the sleepy fishing town of Zihuatanejo appeared on the horizon. Zihuatanejo would later be made famous as the oceanfront paradise that Andy Dufresne dreamed of and eventually escaped to in The Shawshank Redemption.

The sweeping right turn to the starboard side put the aircraft on a heading due east, a direct path toward the Gulf of Mexico, about 350 miles away, and beyond that, Florida. As the plane gradually burned fuel and became lighter, Wally was able to climb to a comfortable cruising altitude of twenty-four thousand feet, above the mountains of the Mexican state of Michoacán. As planned, he would fly well north of Mexico City, wisely avoiding the airspace of North America’s most populated metropolis.

We’re on the home stretch now, Squirrel, Jones said with a grin.

Wally laughed. Squirrel was his old high school nickname, coined at Virginia’s Pulaski High in the late 1950s. Wally had earned the nickname from his football teammates for his scampering running style on the gridiron. While piloting planes filled with weed in the 1970s, he repeatedly demonstrated this similar squirrel-like ability to outrun law enforcement authorities. It went well with his abnormal tolerance for risk.

Wally was an adrenaline junkie years before that term was coined. He was like a cat with nine lives; friends described him as a guy who would never back down from a dare, no matter how dangerous.

Take a particular outing in 1970, for example. Wally and several friends in Virginia were at the Roanoke County Fair on a hot Saturday night in August. The feature attraction was a traveling show called Noell’s Ark Gorilla Fighting. Inside a caged boxing ring was the biggest, meanest-looking gorilla anyone had ever seen—almost six feet tall and at least four hundred pounds with menacing eyes that stared right through anyone who looked at him.

A banner read, If you can last three minutes in the ring with the gorilla, you win $100. The fair had been open all day, and no one had been brave enough to try.

When the Squirrel and his friends walked past the gorilla fighting booth, a buddy dared Wally to fight the massive ape. True to his reputation, Wally accepted the challenge. He introduced himself to the gorilla’s owner, Robert Noell, who happened to be missing two fingers of his right hand. A few years earlier, the savage ape had bitten them off in a training incident.

Keep your hands away from his mouth, Noell said.

Noell then asked Wally to sign a waiver releasing Noell from liability and handed Wally a football helmet.

Trust me; you’ll need it, he said.

What happened next would become an often-told tale in Southwest Virginia. Although there are several different versions of the story, all of them agree on several points. Wally managed to last about two and a half minutes in the ring. For the first two minutes, he held his own against the gorilla, peppering him with punches and jabs as the animal sized Wally up, growing increasingly angry. The great ape then suddenly became the aggressor, savagely charging Wally and knocking his helmet off with a powerful roundhouse. He began beating Wally in the head repeatedly with the helmet. The gorilla ended the fight by picking Wally up and throwing him about twenty feet into the surrounding crowd.

Catch meee! Wally yelled as he flew through the air. They didn’t. His friends took him to the hospital, where he was treated for a concussion and given a couple dozen stiches for his various lacerations.

Growing up in the pastoral setting of 1950s Pulaski County, Wally had an upbringing as wholesome as the iconic Leave It to Beaver. He had a strong father who was always home in time for dinner and a loving mother who doted on her children. Just as his counterpart did in the TV show, Wally always learned a lesson by the end of each day.

His father, James L. Thrasher, was a kindhearted man who worked as the parts manager at Bushong Motor Company. His mother worked at Singer Sewing Machine but was a consistent presence at home, providing a supportive environment for Wally and his two brothers, John and Fred. Wally’s grandmother, Aline Lena Darst—of the prominent Darst family who settled Pulaski in the frontier-era 1800s—was also a strong presence in the Thrasher household. Wally’s two brothers went on to live their lives on the straight and narrow, John as a traveling salesman for MacGregor Sporting Goods and Fred as an operations manager for Virginia Maid.

The Thrasher family home was in the actual town of Pulaski, the seat of the county of the same name. With a population of only about ten thousand at the time, Pulaski was a veritable Mayberry. A very wholesome small town to grow up in, Pulaski was a place where pot was something you cooked in, coke was cola, and a joint was a bad place to be.

Wally displayed venturesome tendencies from an early age. His old boyhood pals from the MacGill Village neighborhood still shake their heads as they recall him as the kid who continuously engaged in risky activities—impulsively climbing to the tops of tall pine trees, scaling treacherously steep cliffs, and swimming across icy lakes and rivers, always with little thought to the possible consequences.

Wallace made a habit of doing dangerous things when we were kids, recalled childhood friend Lanny Harris. He had no fear of failure. He never thought about the possible consequences of hazardous activities.

Harris also recalled Wally having grandiose dreams as a youngster.

He would direct our neighborhood games of cowboys and indians like it was the set of a western movie or something. He insisted that everyone play their roles to a T. What would ordinarily be just casual became something very serious when Wallace was involved.

Wally joined the Boy Scouts when he turned eleven and established himself as one of the highest achievers in his troop, making Eagle Scout by age fifteen. He approached camping trips with great enthusiasm, his mom telling friends and neighbors, Wallace would rather sleep outside than inside.

In the 1950s, youth sports leagues as we now know them did not exist, so instead Wally played loosely organized sandlot games of football and baseball, as well as playground basketball.

Not only was Wally the most athletic kid, he was also the most competitive and most physically tough, Harris notes. In those sandlot games, I cannot recall him ever being on the losing side.

When he reached high school, Wally and his competitive spirit found a worthy outlet on Pulaski High’s football field, where his speed and elusiveness earned him the Squirrel moniker. At five foot eleven and 175 pounds, he was an outstanding lineman, playing both as a hard-hitting guard on offense and a ball-hawking end on defense. In the springtime, he was on the track team, where he was a great sprinter but excelled most in distance events.

School friends note that while most high school boys inevitably go through an awkward stage, that was never the case with Wally. He never had an awkward day in his life, Harris recalled. From day one in school, Wallace had this very self-assured demeanor; he was handsome, athletic, outgoing, and confident. He never had to try hard to be popular.

One high school classmate perhaps put it best: All the guys wanted to be like him, and all the girls wanted to be with him.

While Wally took full advantage of his popularity, dating more than his fair share of girls, his true passions were the outdoors and hunting. During deer season he would hunt every day if given the opportunity. On days when no one else wanted to go, he would routinely set out on his own, hiking for miles to hunt on secluded land. Often it was private property, and according to one friend, He could care less about who owned the land or lived nearby.

An old classmate had quite the hunting story about Wally.

"Wally often skipped school to go hunting and one time went out by himself on foot, exploring some country land way out in the middle of nowhere. He hunted all day and then came across a farm and a barn and decided to sleep there and spend the night, without telling the farm’s owner. The next morning, crack of dawn, the farmer finds Wally in his barn and confronts him, angrier than hell. ‘What the hell are you doing in my barn?’

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Wally Squirrel Thrasher, 1958

(photo courtesy Montana Thrasher)

"Well, Wally uses his charm, establishes a rapport with the farmer, and is invited to have breakfast with him and his family. Eventually, the farmer takes such a liking to Wally that he invites him to come hunt there anytime he wants, gives him an open invitation to stay in their spare bedroom and have meals with ’em and everything.

The really funny thing was that when Wally finally went back to school, he was expelled for truancy. Wally was tickled to death, ’cause that gave him another couple days to go back and hunt on the farmer’s land and stay there as the family’s guest.

Wally graduated from high school on June 14, 1958, and entered the navy ten days later. While most of his friends opted to go to college or took jobs at one of Pulaski’s furniture factories, Wally saw the navy as an opportunity to see the world.

He served three years as a sailor, his tours of duty taking him to ports of call in the Canary Islands, France, Portugal, and Spain, which whet his appetite for visits to foreign lands.

Wally received an honorable discharge in March of 1961, returning home to Pulaski worldlier and a bit wiser. He took a job selling funeral plots at a local cemetery, Highland Memory Gardens in Dublin. He proved to be a natural salesman, earning more money during his stint there than his friends did in conventional jobs.

Not wanting to miss out on his college education via the G.I. Bill, Wally then enrolled at Virginia Tech (VPI, as it was called then) in nearby Blacksburg in the fall of 1961. He was a straight D student, an academic record made somewhat more impressive by the fact that friends insisted he never once cracked a book or set foot in the library. He found college boring, not seeing any practical application for freshman-level general ed classes. Wally chose not to return to VPI after the spring of 1962, confident he could blaze his own unconventional path to success in life without a college education.

Wally’s self-assurance was obvious to anyone who ever knew him.

Wally just had this aura about him, said an old friend. Not only was he this great-looking guy, but he was very charismatic, with a magnetic sort of personality. He could meet someone for the first time and have them leave the conversation feeling like he was their best friend. He was extremely confident, but somehow it was short of being arrogant. Anyone that met Wally fell in love with the guy.

Wally found the working world to be a breeze, taking a sales job that gave him freedom and an opportunity to travel. He sold a line of men’s clothing, representing the manufacturer at the wholesale level and calling on retail stores and chains. He also worked for Airheart-Kirk, a clothing retailer owned by his uncle Bill Kesler’s family near Roanoke. His natural likeability again made it easy for him to excel as a salesman.

Pictures from this time show his movie star looks, which soon led to a series of modeling gigs with a New York company that made designer clothing. The hours were short and the money good, with Wally taking full advantage of the biggest fringe benefit that came along with the job: attractive women.

In early 1963, Wally became smitten with a young woman who locals still say was the prettiest girl in Southwest Virginia, a young Radford resident named Mary Jo Bishop. They married on October 21, 1963. Wally was twenty-three and Mary Jo twenty-two.

Within about a year, Mary Jo was pregnant. She gave birth to a daughter, Kimberly Darst Thrasher, on August 23, 1965. Acquaintances recall that Wally still had a lot of tomcat in him and spent a lot of time away from home, going out socially with his buddies. Wally being Wally, he also kept company with plenty of women. This was even brought to light by the Southwest Times, which ran a photo in July 1966 of Wally at the Claytor Lake State Park beach with a bathing-suit-clad young woman on each shoulder, Charles Atlas–style. One could only imagine his bride’s humiliation.

Contemporaries viewed these dalliances as inappropriate for a married man with a wife and young daughter at home. Before long, Wally and Mary Jo had separated, and on June 27, 1968, their divorce was official.

Wally’s entrepreneurial spirit shined through in the late 1960s, when he opened a trendy clothing store in downtown Radford called the Hydraulic Buffalo, located at 1033 Norwood Street. Many longtime residents of the New River Valley remember the store well, as it sold hippie clothing for both men and women. The store was a gathering spot for the New River Valley’s hipsters, Wally serving as their host.

A display case in the back was well stocked with marijuana-smoking paraphernalia like bongs, pipes, rolling papers, and roach clips, and this was perhaps where Wally first became aware of the market for cannabis. This was the peak of the hippie era—Woodstock was in 1969, counterculture was widespread, and drug use was common.

Squirrel was always more of just a bourbon-drinking kind of guy, noted Rodney Carter, a friend from that time. I do not recall him partaking in marijuana or other drugs. He always seemed content just sipping on a glass of bourbon.

Around 1970, about the same time Wally fought the gorilla at the county fair, his thrill-seeking spirit drove him on another adventure. On a whim, he signed up for airplane flying lessons in Roanoke. Wally showed up for his first lesson, and he was hooked on flying before the plane’s wheels ever left the ground. He later said, It was like a magical door opened for me, and I could see the rest of my life through it.

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Wally Thrasher, 1966

(photo courtesy Southwest Times)

His aviation instructor marveled at Wally’s natural instincts for flying, his kinesthetic awareness and ability to think clearly in a hectic environment. Just as a musician’s ability to play by ear was a most desirable trait, Wally had a similar innate ability to fly a plane by feel. And rather than just rely on this natural ability, Wally worked extremely hard at expanding his aviation skills, reading instructional manuals for hours at a time. For once in his life, he was sacrificing other pursuits to work on something that was truly important to him. Flying lessons were prohibitively expensive for most people, but Wally devoted every spare dollar he had to buy flying time, going on training flights four or five times a week. In record time, inside of six months, he earned his Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) private pilot certificate. The Squirrel had become the Flying Squirrel.

I think Wally’s motivation to become a pilot was not only for the thrill of flying, but also to one-up the rest of us, recalled a friend. While we were driving down the road in our hot rod cars, there was Wally flying a plane above us doing loop-the-loops.

Completely eaten up with the flying bug, Wally connected with an old friend named Don Holiday, who worked in public relations for Piedmont Aviation. Holiday helped Wally land a job selling airplanes in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. The job was a perfect fit, combining Wally’s newfound love for aviation with his natural gifts as a salesman. His clientele, wealthy businessmen, all took a shine to Wally, and he quickly became the company’s top sales rep. A side benefit of the job was that he gleaned a great deal of knowledge about the technical aspects of aircraft, their weight capacities, flying speeds, landing strip requirements, and even engine design and maintenance. This would later prove invaluable.

Flying every day, Wally continued his formal aviation training and within a year earned an FAA commercial pilot certification. In 1971, eager to become a commercial pilot, he made the move to Florida, where jobs in aviation were abundant. Wally settled in New Smyrna Beach, which offered a vibrant lifestyle more suitable to his personality than rural southwest Virginia. Located on Florida’s Atlantic coast, just south of Daytona, New Smyrna was rated one of the country’s top beach towns by Surfer magazine. It was a place where all the cool guys and pretty girls hung out—in other words, it had his name written all over it. He learned to surf and took full advantage of bachelor life; his dates were an impressive showing of both quantity and quality, according to old acquaintances.

A friend recalled, "New Smyrna Beach was a hopping little oceanfront town in the early 1970s. There were bars and nightclubs all along A1A, the main drag that went through town. On the ocean side of the road were surf bars, where the beach crowd hung out and surf bands played. The other side of A1A was more of a country-western, honky-tonk scene, like the movie Urban Cowboy. Wally was the only guy I knew who frequented the night spots on both sides of the street. The guy had friends everywhere he went."

One of the Squirrel’s first paid gigs as a pilot in Florida was taking skydivers up to ten thousand feet to bail out of a jump plane. On a busy day it was not uncommon for him to fly twenty or more loads of skydivers. Each flight, he would promise a case of beer to any skydiver who could beat his plane back down to the ground—a bet he never lost.

Wally also worked as a crop duster for Williams Air Service in Fort Pierce, flying a small plane equipped to spray pesticides and herbicides on the large inland farms and orange groves of Saint Lucie County. He thrived on the task, honing his low-altitude flying skills, swooping insanely low to the ground and dodging power lines to douse acres of shoulder-high corn. He perfected the art of tight, sharply banked turns as good as any barnstorming air show pilot, performing an aerial ballet at 140 miles per hour. The crop-dusting service’s owner, Harold Williams, swore that Wally was the best he’d ever seen at the dangerous task. It was excellent experience, as the skills he developed would serve him well in his future endeavors.

In late 1971, looking to expand his horizons, Wally found a very well-paying niche as a charter pilot, flying tourists to and from the Caribbean for an air taxi service out of Fort Pierce and Fort Lauderdale. He became the charter pilot of choice for an affluent clientele who enjoyed Wally’s professionalism and magnetic personality. In no time at all, he had all the charter business he could handle, shuttling tourists to the islands. The money was good, and by mid-1972, Wally had saved up enough to buy his own airplane, the twin-engine Beech 18 that he would later fly—full of marijuana—over Mexico.

As he flew through Mexican airspace, Wally passed the time making small talk with copilot Lewis Jones, his good friend and frequent partner in crime. Jones owned a Central Florida cattle ranch and listed his legal occupation as rancher. It was Jones who had first introduced Wally to drug smuggling a few years earlier. They became acquainted at a Fort Lauderdale restaurant/bar called Frankie & Johnny’s, a popular watering hole for local pilots. Rumored to be a mobbed-up joint, it was owned by a group of guys from Jersey with Italian surnames who sat together at a back table, perpetually watching horse races on satellite TV.

Like most people Wally met, Jones took an immediate liking to him. The Squirrel’s reputation preceded him such that when they were introduced, Jones loudly remarked, So you’re that hotshot, lady-killin’ son of a bitch I’ve heard about…I hear you’re one hell of a pilot!

The pair hit it off right away, spending the rest of the night buying each other drinks and swapping stories of high-flying adventure and travel through the Caribbean. As the liquor flowed, Jones spoke freely—as usual, much too freely—about his exploits running dope. Wally’s curiosity was piqued;