Okay, Kyle, tell me what you know about the connection between R. E. O. Speedwagon, the Superband from the '70s and '80s, and Pablo Escobar, the drug kingpin.

It's a story that revolves around a little town in North Carolina on the Coast. Fishing village, really. Town of about 300 people. Very small.

This is my friend Kyle McGlachlin, 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.

Really a little town that time has forgotten. Nobody goes there. Turns out a substantial portion of the people share the same last name, which is Varnum. And the name of the town is Varnumtown.

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. I've worked as a war reporter covering conflicts in Iraq and Libya, Colombia. And I've written about people in challenging circumstances. And Kyle is drawn to odd things, too. What does Ario Speedwagon and Pablo Escobar have to do with this town?

Well, sometime in the early '80s, Ario Speedwagon's airplane made an unannounced middle-of-the-night landing just outside of Varnumtown. And it wasn't a small plane. This was A Lockheed Loatstar, World War II, prop plane, cargo plane. Huge. And it had the ARIO Speedwagon logo emblazoned on the side of the plane. But here's the weird part. The pilot didn't seem to know how to fly the plane. In fact, he overshot the runway, so he pulled back up again. So the plane seemed out of control because it turns out there were actually two pilots in the cockpit, and they were having a fist fight over the control of the plane.

Wait, the pilots were punching each other? Yes. What were they fighting about?

Well, the story goes, one of the pilots didn't believe that the other pilot could actually land a plane. Okay. And was struggling to rest controls from the pilot who was trying to land a plane.

They had like a fist fight in the cockpit.

They had a fist fight in the cockpit. The pilot who actually knew how to land it. He manages to land the plane. He jumps out of the plane, runs into the forest. The other pilot sees the engines are running, leaves them running, and takes off himself.Leaving the plane?Leaving the plane.Okay.Completely abandoned.

Was Ario Speedwagon on the plane?No.

No, they had sold the plane, but they forgot to take their logo off.Oh.

That's funny.Yeah. What was on the plane?

What was on the plane was copious amounts of drugs.

So where was this plane coming from?

Flight tracker said coming in from South America, specifically Barranquilla. Okay. Full of quayludes, marijuana, records. Don't mention any cocaine.

But it's coming from Colombia. But it's coming from Colombia. In the early '80s. In the early '80s. So this drug plane is like flying routes from Columbia to this middle of nowhere place called Varnumtown with the logo, Ario Speedwagon still on it.

It's a great cover, right? Ario Speedwagon on the side of the plane?

I don't know if it's a very good cover.

Well, it's better than Pablo Escobar's logo on the side of the plane. I mean, I always thought maybe Pablo Escobar loved the band Ario Speedwagon.

That's interesting. That's interesting. This would be a new detail to the Pablo Escobar biography. Okay, but why would this plane choose this particular spot?

So this was the perfect place, actually, to land a plane, a sleepy little town, nobody around, nobody expecting this plane to come from South America. And I think it just so happened to be the right amount of distance that they were traveling from South America. So this was the furthest that they could go.

You mean with the Lockheed Loadstar, this was the furthest range of the plane? Correct.

So back in the '80s, the The E. A. Was cracking down on Miami, and supposedly Pablo Escobar went looking for other spots, quiet, out-of-the-way places to bring in his cocaine. And the story is that he did a deal with this little town in North Carolina and converted it into a major transhipment site.

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. I knew I'd hook you. Josh, how did you hear about Varnumtown?

You told me about it. This is your story. It's nice that you're listening. I'm just along for the ride. How did you hear about it?

Well, it started with an organic soap type tycoon.

An organic soap tycoon?

An organic soap tycoon. I love the word tycoon, named Lynn Betz. I met her through a friend of a friend. She had built this enormous business in Pittsburgh, sold the company, and she went looking for a place to retire basically. Just a beautiful, quiet, out-of-the-way little backwater, and she fell in love with Varnum town.

I love it that you know an organic soap tycoon. Do you get discounts on soap? Yes. Well, I have a million questions. I, as a journalist, my first instinct would be to call her.

Yeah, let's talk to her.We.

Can call her?Yeah.Okay.Absolutely. You have her number?I do.Speedial?

Hi, Kyle.

How are you? I am so good. It's so nice to hear your voice. After the hellos, Josh starts asking questions.

Kyle and I were just talking about the idea that you built a soap business, and yet here we are digging into the dirt.

Yeah, I had never thought about it that way, Josh, but that is very interesting.

You need the dirt, otherwise, nobody needs to buy soap. Exactly. I decided to ask point blank about the biggest question. Kyle has been telling me that there is a connection between this town, Varnum town, and Pablo Escobar. Have you heard that?

Absolutely, I've heard it. And what I understand is, is that through people in Varnum town, there was a connection to Pablo Escobar back in the '80s.

And what was the connection? What was the deal?

The deal was that Pablo Escobar could bring drugs into Varnum town, and they would be expedited to the cities from that location because of its particular... It was isolated. It was rural. It weren't many people there. You had to access it through a number of inlets, so it was hidden.

Lynn, if we were to come out there, do you think you could introduce us to anybody who knew about this connection to Pablo Escobar?

I sure could. I sure could.

Well, this is crazy. You take a tiny town of people who seemingly have known each other forever, and suddenly you turn on a fire hose of money and cocaine. What happens to the town? What happens to the relationships, the friendships, the families?

All legitimate questions. And we don't know any of the answers because this story wasn't covered back then.

I did a record search.Yeah. And there were some very serious DEA and state agencies who were operating in the area. They did a ton of arrests. There were a lot of undercover operations. But nobody was talking about what was going on under the surface. No one talks about Varnumtown. So what happened?

I would love to find out. This fantastic show is brought to you I better help.

So, Kyle, it's 2024, as we all know. I think you know that.

Yeah, 2024, and I am ready.

The thing that's been on my mind is what we've been doing right in our lives that we want to emphasize and grow Because there's always a lot of talk about, Oh, I want to change this. I want to change this about myself. But we often don't take enough time to say, I'm doing these things well. Let's keep doing those. Let's do more of that. And therapy is a way of focusing on the things you're doing right.

I think that's a great Way to start. I think oftentimes we let the negative overwhelm us, and that becomes the main focus of what we're not able to do or what we're not doing well. And we forget to give ourselves a pat on the back occasionally. Hey, these things are actually going right.

This This is what better help does. They match you with a therapist who can help you focus on your strengths and build those strengths.

If there's things that you want to work on, they'll talk you through those as well.

If you're thinking about starting therapy, give better help a try. It's entirely online, designed to be convenient, flexible, and suited to your schedule. Just fill out a brief questionnaire to get matched with a licensed therapist and switch therapists anytime for no additional charge. Celebrate the progress you've already made. Visit betterhelp. Com/town to get 10% off your first month. That's betterhelp, h-e-l-p. Com/town. Kyle and I decided to fly to North Carolina to see if we could find out more about Varnumtown. Did they really do a deal with Pablo Escobar? It's interesting that the soap queen of the organic soap queen of Pittsburgh would retire to rural North Carolina, which is where we are currently driving. Yes. Lots of miniature golf. Maybe she likes miniature golf. Have you asked her that?

I didn't ask her about miniature golf.

There we go. Another mini golf. Two mini golfs in the space of a quarter mile.

So this is a community that-That really values miniature golf.Miniature.

Golf.yeah. Look at this. It's idyllic, and there's There's an Isalia Festival. That's the town this is. That's exactly. They celebrate miniature golf and flowers.

Isn't that always the way, though? It's the unexpected, right? You think this is... On the surface, it looks like this buccolic community, place you come to retire, sleepy. And yet underneath that, there's this, Okay, we're going to turn right here. This is Varnumtown Road, Southwest.

Why have you become such an expert in the dark underbelly of small town I grew up in a small town myself in Eastern Washington.

And from the surface, everything was perfect and beautiful. But there are stories, certain things that happened there that were absolutely shocking. Okay, we can make a right.Right here?

Here. Really? Yes. Just 15-mile-an-hour road?

Yeah, with gravel.Oh.

Off road?Yeah. Okay, I'm glad we got this Jeep.

We're going to be safe. Okay.

Lynn Betz, the soap tycoon, arranges for us to meet a drug runner from the area, he says he's going to use his nickname to protect his identity.

Okay, my name is Lefty.

Why do they call you Lefty?

Well, actually, I'm left-handed.

Well, that's a surprise. Well, maybe you can tell us who you are and where you're from.

Well, my name is Lefty. Where are you from? Wait, I'm Lefty, aren't I? Just trick me.

For the record, I wasn't trying to trick him. You want to do it over? Okay. Yeah, so who are you and where are you from?

Okay, my name is Lefty. Almost it again.

Leftie, once he manages to stick to his nickname, tells us that he was active in the Varnum town drug trade for decades, and that it basically pulled everybody in the town into its orbit like a black hole. But there was one person who was more responsible than anyone else, according to Leftie.

Dale Varnum. He was Jackass TV way before Jackass TV.

Leftie says that this guy, Dale Varnum, he made a deal with the devil.

But now me and him also were tight, and I would go by there and not think make anything of it. I went by there and he said, Come here, look at this. They'd shot his house up.

Who shot his house up?

I have no idea. But yeah, there were bullet holes all in the house.

What did it feel like?

Well, when there's a negative force around you or feeling, it's just a dark place.

Lefty saw the cocaine money start to flow into this tiny town in the early '80s.

Did people build new houses?

Well, again, Dale. Yeah, he was shining about hiring anybody around here, I think.

How did he dress?

Yeah, he went Miami Vice all the way. Don Johnson ruined him, I guess. Silk shirts, no T-shirt and gold chains and driving shoes and you name it. It was just that.

Lynn Betts has also heard the stories about Dale Varnum.

Dale made quite a few trips to Miami. He would go to the Playboy Club, which were very popular, and he got to know some of the Playboy bunnies there, and he invited invited them to his home here in Varnum town. And on numerous occasions, they came, and he would have them mow the grass in their Playboy Bunny outfits.

Dale would have the Playboy bunnies mow his lawn in their outfits?

In their outfits, yes.

So Lefty remembers Dale built a massive compound in town, and he called it Fort Apache. It was surrounded by high walls walls, and it was set in a forest, and like a castle. Leftie knew that the wealth and the sudden changes in his town were due to Dale Varnum's deal with one man.

I mean, that sounds like a death sentence to me.

Who was it?

Pablo Escobar. But I'm saying that sounds like a death sentence to me.

The operation running out of this tiny town was amazing. They had planes and large motherships coming in from South America, though it took some trial and error to figure out how to offload the ships.

There was at one point that they loved to use ocean racers, which was a huge, flipping mistake. You can hear them 10 miles away. I mean, in the ocean, it's like, wow, like shooting a gun out there. I want to tell you something else, too, about the mother's shoe. I've forgotten this part. But there was a guy on there, and they called him the Artist. And this is crucial, to be honest with you. When a boat goes out and moors up onto a mother ship, it can scratch the paint on the steel hole. And it's a fresh rust. It doesn't look like old rust. It's a difference in the rust. And the guy on there had a ladder who would come over the side, and you had a mixed paint to look old and would paint those scratches off because the Coast Guard could come in and look at those ships and tell if something had been tied to them. And they'd come after them and say, Oh, that's Dale Varner.

Eventually, it seems to Lefty like everyone in town is a drug dealer. He remembers a funeral at the time. It was for someone who had died under suspicious circumstances.

Everybody there was a drug dealer. Everybody that was a pallbearer was a drug dealer. I was a pallbearer. Dale was a pallbearer. And a car goes by the funeral. We're right by the road at the funeral and backfires, and we all run into each other, and you can hear guns, clank, clank, clang, clang, clang, clang, clang, clang. It was almost like... And everybody looked at each other like... But it was a car. It wasn't anything but a car. But we thought, Well, they've taken us out.

Luckily, you weren't holding the casket at that time.

I know, right?

Might have dropped it. Here's a question for you, Kyle. You've made a decision to sit down and eat dinner around the table with your family on a regular basis, but you don't have the time to prepare anything. What do you do?

You call Hello Fresh.

That's what you do. You like calling people.

I do, particularly if it involves food. And farm fresh food. And it's pre-proportioned. And these recipes are delivered right to your doorstep. So you don't have to go out and figure it out at the grocery store. It just comes to you right to your door. You tell them how many people who are going to be eating, and they do the math.

And if you want more, you can actually just lie and say there's an extra two people, and then you could just eat that. That's what I would do. Go to hellofresh. Com/varnumtownfree and use the code Varnumtown Free for free breakfast for life. One breakfast item per box while subscription is active. That's free breakfast for life at hellofresh. Com/varnumtownfree with the code Varnumtown free. Hellofresh, America's number one meal kit.

There's one other thing that Leftie says that catches our attention. At the height of Dale's power, when his alleged deal with Pablo Escobar has transformed his little town, Dale does the unthinkable. He turns state's witness and names over 300 people as conspirators in the drug trade, the trade that he was responsible for setting up.

And this is in a town of 300 people. So he basically turns in his entire hometown. Did it occur to you that somebody would want to kill him?

Well, I always thought somebody wanted to kill him, especially with the Escobar claim. I just thought time was limited.

I mean, it's like a double trouble because on the one hand, you have Escobar. On the other hand, you have now betrayed the a better part of your community.

Well, he had to have betrayed hundreds of people. And everybody went to jail. But I mean, yeah, it's amazing to me. I don't know.

But then, Lefty says something that shocks us.

Well, he's dead. He just doesn't know it yet.

After meeting Lefty, Kyle and I talked about what we'd learned. So you've played an FBI agent on television, right? I have. Are there particular techniques and procedures that you developed as Agent Cooper that we could apply here?

Well, I could always set up a bottle on a stump and throw rocks at it, which is one of the things that I did in episode 2 of Twin Peaks. That's very helpful. The question is, what's going on in the mind of Dale Varnum? How does he balance this decision to turn in his entire community?

How does he build up a booming business and then undercut it, betray everybody? I mean, the thing is, he's still alive. We could go knock on his door. Is it safe?

I guess we're going to try.

As an FBI agent on television, you are armed, right?

Sometimes.

Sometimes, yes. And so you have handled weapons. I just want us to be aware of safety.

Most of the time, the guns that I've used, they're not real. They're rubber guns.

Rubber?

Yeah, made to look real.

Are you saying that when I'm watching you on television, you have a rubber gun? I don't know that I can keep going You can't look at me the same way. Yeah, I don't know if we're going to-I can always hit you across the head with a rubber gun, and you would feel it.

Believe me. Okay. It might even leave a mark.

Next time on Varnumtown, a drug mothership runs aground in front of the house of the one guy trying to stop the flow of cocaine into the area. So what's our plan? I think we really need to understand what happened here before we go knocking on Dale Varnum's door.

How many layers does this town have? Well, in this season, we're going to encounter a tidal wave of toilets, a huge replica town that's almost as big as the town itself. And eventually, over the course of the season, 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. Stick with us after the credits for a behind-the-scenes peak at what Josh and I were up to during the production of Varnumtown.

Varnumtown is produced by Epik magazine, Picture Perfect Federation, and Full Picture.

Special thanks go out to the residents of Varnumtown for telling their story.

The Epik team includes Harry Spitzer, Josh Levine, Frank Sludisco, MaLice Touserre, Dan O'Sullivan, and Lila Tuline.

Additional reporting by Keijin Higashibaba.

The Picture Perfect Federation team includes Patrick Waxberger, Ashley Stern, Tyler Nell, and Samena Martin.

The full picture squad is Desiree Gruber and Ann Walsh. Frank Reina supported me during production. Original music composed by Jonna Bechtolt and Rob Kiesweater. Additional music provided by American production music, Epidemic Sound, and Premium Beats. Studio recordings took place at Silver Lake Recording Studios.

Hey, thanks for sticking with us. I thought it would be interesting to talk a little bit, Kyle, about what you were doing as we moved into production on this show on Varnumtown, what I was doing. I was actually commuting from Mexico City to Varnumtown. I don't think many people do that.

Was there a direct flight by any chance?

No direct flights. I stopped a lot of times until I got to Wilmington.

What were you working on there?

I was making a movie with Egenio Derbez, the great Mexican star, huge film star, which is a story about the smartest math student in Mexico who turns out as a 12-year-old girl who lives in a garbage dump on the border. Oh my God.

That's a story. It is. How did you find that? What was the track for that?

I got a tip about 10 years ago about this story. It had been in the Mexican press as a story of the day, a story of the week, and then it fated. Somebody called me and said, Hey, there was this extraordinary 12-year-old young girl who placed at the top of the national math exam, and we don't know much about her. We don't know if there was a teacher involved. What was the story? And that's my job.

Yeah, investigative reporter. There you go. Investigative reporter, Josh Davis.

Yeah. I got on a plane I flew to Brownsville, Texas, and I crossed the border into Matamoros, Mexico. Okay. Which at the time, and to some extent, still is a somewhat dangerous place. If you hear news about Matamoros, it is often about cartel-related violence. Yeah.

Anything on the border, I think. You think of Juárez, and that's obviously the same situation, but this is quite a distance.

This is further south. It's at the very, very tip of Texas.

Yeah, Brownsville is all the way at the bottom.

When I When I got there, I had been warned about the danger. At that time, I had come out of Libya. I had just gotten back from Libya covering the revolution there. And that was very dangerous.

It's like what was going from the pot to the frying pan to the fire. Is that what it says? Yeah.

Well, in Libya, I had left just days before the attack on the US consulate in Bengali when ambassador Stevens was killed. Yes. I was there that week and got out and decided that I should go to Matamoros and check out this story that was a very different story about hope and optimism. And and something beautiful that was happening in Matamoros. I really felt compelled to do it because you don't see a lot of hopeful stories in Matamoros. This was true, this was happening, and it needed to be reported and cold. So I went there and I stayed in this hotel in the square in Matamoros. And I remember at night, you could see the military was all over the place, guys with huge machine guns, squads all over the place. There was a real tension in the town. This is a town of about half a million people, so relatively small town. And I at night would barricade my door. I pushed all the furniture in the hotel room up against the door. I had multiple escape plans.

Just in case?

Just in case. And then I published that story, and it was about the girl, Paloma, but also about the teacher, Sergio Juarez, who discovered the girl and had changed the way he taught. He abandoned the traditional curriculum and said, Listen, the way we've been teaching for the past hundred years is outdated. It hasn't really evolved. We're force-feeding kids, like listen to what the teacher says. Kids have to just write it down, repeat it, memorize it. That's not how humans are living these days. We have phones to remember everything, right? We need to be creative. We need to be open-minded. We need to do what humans do best, which is bring things, bring ideas together. And so he just did that in his classroom and threw out the traditional curriculum because nobody was paying attention. He was on the edge of Matamoros. Matamoros is a town that doesn't get a lot of attention. This particular school really didn't get a lot of attention. And so in a way, he was free to do whatever he wanted.

Yeah, no one was paying any attention.

No one was paying any attention. And the result was this explosion of accomplishment amongst his students. Right. Real flourishing. A real flourishing, a renaissance. That movie, by the way, is coming out November of this year, November 2023.

Congratulations.

Yeah. It'sgiving. Right with the release of Varnumtown.

Another small town with a story to tell.

But what's interesting to me about it, having done this back and forth, going from Mexico to Varnumtown and thinking about Matamoros and what this teacher was able to do in his classroom and what was happening in Varnum town, there is a parallel, which is that in Matamoros, the reason this teacher was able to do so much was that nobody was paying attention. He was unfettered. He was free. There was no large bureaucracy controlling what he did. I mean, they were trying to, but nobody was stopping him from innovating. I feel like something like that is happening also here in Varnum town, where people are not paying attention to Varnum town. And so the town is free to do what it wants, invent its own stories, not follow the rules, not follow the laws, make its own laws.

But don't you feel that the difference between the two stories might be there's a light, in a very general term, the light and the dark.

Well, I don't know about that. I don't know about that because, yes, you could argue that what is happening here in Varnum town is a darkness, and we're hearing reporting that. At the same time, it's possible, and I'm interested to see where this leads, it's possible that this brought something good into the town.

Well, it certainly brought money into the town. I mean, this is the thing. And I think that it provided work, as we remember, the industry at that particular time, the fishing industry, not only a difficult industry, but at that particular time, it was suffering and in a depression. And I think this was an opportunity for people to actually make a living. Regardless of how they did it, they had an opportunity, and they took advantage of it. And I think it helped the town.

Well, I agree with you, but I wonder if there's something even deeper going on there. Yes, money. But is there something about hope and fun and excitement? This idea in this quiet, sleepy town, a guy comes in and says, Hey, I've met Pablo Escobar, and I'm I'm going to put Varnum town on the map. It makes everybody feel important. I agree.

I mean, look, people were watching Miami Vice at that time, and it was a top show, right? It was exciting and all this action. And if you have a little bit of that brought to your hometown, in real life. Yeah. Who wouldn't want that? I can't disagree with you.

I think that there's something about small town America or small towns anywhere where they feel like they're on the outskirts of culture. They're on the edge of the a map where nobody cares or pays attention. And all of a sudden, if they can say, Hey, guess what? We have a deal with the largest narco trafficker in the world. It puts them in the center of the map. Yeah, it does. So while I was going back and forth from Mexico to Varnum town, you were coming out of Australia, actually, working on another story that dealt with small town America, the story of Joe Exotic and Carol Baskin.

Yeah, the Tiger King. The Tiger King had come and had been right during COVID, in fact, and it was a huge success.

And in this case, Joe Exotic was coming out of Windwood, Oklahoma, which is a town of 1900 people, tiny little town. And he's this massive outsize personality. Huge personality. Windwood could not contain him.

No, it couldn't contain him. And he was just always looking for a fight. And he found it in Carol Baskin, who had a Tiger rescue site in Florida. I played Carol's husband, Howard, who was a lovely guy, actually, just supports his wife to the end of the Earth, really believes in her and believes in her mission.

And Kate McKinnon played.

Kate McKinnon played Carol, and she did just a beautiful job.

So here's a story about a guy running an exotic animal park in a tiny town and picking a fight with this woman in Florida, Carol Baskin, and you played the husband. What do you make of these conflicts in small towns? How does conflict bubble up?

I think you mentioned about the idea if you're in a small town, you can do stuff that you might not be able to do in a larger city. And I think a lot of that is just, as you said, no one is really looking, no one's going to stop you. And in fact, I think in the case of both of these characters, I think they provided a little bit of excitement to these small towns and a little bit of what are they going to do next? And they fed off of that and it continued to escalate.

Well, stick with us for the next episode of Varnumtown. We're going to meet a fisherman named Roger Morton, who single-handedly goes up against the drug runners in Varnumtown.