Deep Dive
Shownotes Transcript
Okay, Kyle, tell me what you know about the connection between REO Speedwagon, the super band from the 70s and 80s, and Pablo Escobar, the drug kingpin. ♪
Well, sometime in the early 80s, REO Speedwagon's airplane made an unannounced middle-of-the-night landing. This is my friend Kyle McLaughlin, the star of Twin Peaks. And he's telling me about how he discovered a real-life Twin Peaks in rural North Carolina, not far from where he filmed Blue Velvet. What was on the plane was copious amounts of drugs coming in from South America.
Supposedly, Pablo Escobar went looking for other spots, quiet, out-of-the-way places to bring in his cocaine. Okay, hold on. You're saying that a town of 300 people, en masse, did a deal with Pablo Escobar? Yes, that's what I heard. My name is Joshua Davis, and I'm an investigative reporter. Kyle and I talk all the time about the strange things we come across, but nothing was quite as strange as what we found in Varnumtown, North Carolina.
And here we are. We've arrived. It looks like a carnival horror show. 100%. It's like you don't want to walk in there. And there's a giant bus that says the Crackhead Express. It was pretty much remote, farm town was. I thought I'd died and gone to heaven. It was always sort of laid back till...
Oldest other stuff started coming in here. Well, when you've seen a house go up, you think they sure have got a lot of money. Where's it coming from? This is the biggest smuggling operation on the East Coast. There ain't nothing you can do about it. And you fixing to get in serious trouble coming down here. The road is starting to deteriorate. And there's a dead end here. This is a little scary, actually. This thing here where the road just ends, there's a barricade.
I had so much money between you and me, I didn't know what to do. First time I ever met Pablo Escobar, I seen like body parts, tongues, and those tongues was people that talked too much. And then I looked over there, ears, human ears in jars, they were people that heard too much. It made a big difference in the way people looked at one another. It changed the entire community.
In this season of Varnumtown, we're going to encounter giant plastic sharks, a huge replica town that's almost as big as the town itself. We'll meet DEA agents, the future governor of North Carolina, and a woman who did her laundry with cocaine instead of laundry detergent. There's crooked cops, brother against brother. Everyone's got a story to tell, but does the truth even exist? Welcome to Varnumtown.