Just a few miles off the Thailand coast, the island of Kothau looks like a postcard.

I'd underneath the surface lies something sinister.

In the last 20 years dozens of tourists have died mysteriously on the island.

A dark cloud who's come over the island, death, mystery and danger.

Listen to Death Island every Wednesday on the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.

Murder and Miami is a production of I Heart Radio.

In the early 80s, cocaine was having an impact on many more places in the United States than Miami.

CB Hackworth was a young newspaper reporter in northern Georgia at the time.

In September of 1982, we had the first and biggest case of cocaine literally dropping from the sky.

It was almost 600 pounds of uncut cocaine worth an estimated half a billion dollars.

It was a big story and that's not the case that the movie Cocaine Bear is based on.

That came several years later.

As it turned out, it was more like climate change, your time out cocaine falling out of this guy on a continual basis.

It wasn't just one case or two cases.

It took us a minute to figure it out, but the driving force behind this new phenomenon was that North Georgia with its flea shade quiet little communities.

Up in the mountains is as far as you can get from South America or the Bahamas to the United States with a large shipment of drugs in a plane that is modified to carry extra fuel as well as the drugs.

The first case in Gilmer County seemingly would not necessarily be directly related to the March Esther.

Nevertheless, in retrospect, to look at an old article of mine and see that that far back before I'd ever even heard of Lamar Chester, Roy Harris, the agent in charge of the Georgia Bureau investigations field office in Atlanta,

told me that they felt like there was a mastermind behind this and other cocaine cases we were experiencing in North Georgia.

And the phenomenon of cocaine falling from the sky seemingly inspired certain sorts to seek out the woods of northern Georgia.

There was a noticeable increase in the number of people going up to Gilmer County and exploring the outdoors.

I think both we as journalists and law enforcement were concerned that people were coming to North Georgia on weekends recreationally who had not ever previously been inspired to enjoy our beautiful.

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