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Finally, the Ozzy Osbourne and Donna Summer duet has been released: "Flying Hot Stuff"

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 Finally, the Ozzy Osbourne and Donna Summer duet has been released: "Flying Hot Stuff"

Jen kocher

Jen Kocher

Crime & Courts

With George Thorogood’s “Bad to the Bone” blaring from the cockpit tape deck, Richard Pitt maneuvered the Cessna 404 onto the paved runway in the small southern Mexican border town.

He’d done this many times before, navigating mountain passes and perilous jungle runways, all the while on the lookout for police, guerrillas and bandits wanting to steal his cargo. This load, however, was the most he’s ever carried at 600 kilos of cocaine valued at more than $27 million.

It was the heyday of drug smuggling in the 1980s, and Pitt was right in the middle of it. 

How did a kid from Thermopolis, Wyoming, and a Vietnam veteran, who had worked his tail off to become a commercial airline pilot end up smuggling for Pablo Escobar?

Well, that’s the part of his story Pitt is still working out for himself as he looks back on his life all these years later.

Some memories are more dramatic than most, Pitt told Cowboy State Daily, in his first-ever media interview. And in a life lived on the edge, that

Even before Pitt put the plane down on the runway in Palenque, Mexico, that day in 1982, he’d already had a bad feeling.

This was accelerated when he tapped the brakes and heard a popping sound that sounded a lot like a brake line. With his heart racing, Pitt fluttered the remaining brake while pulling back on the right rudder, eventually stopping at the edge of the runway as he stared down at the 12-foot drop he’d almost plummeted into.

As his hired ground crew drove up to meet him, he knew something was off. He’d soon learn that his instincts were dead on when he saw two pickups filled with Mexican military there to greet them.

“They got us,” he said. “There was no way out of it.”

Loads this size were unheard of at that time.

Pitt knew he was taking a great risk hauling so much cocaine, but his Colombian sources had thousands of kilos sitting off the north coast of Colombia that needed to be moved. They called Pitt, and he’s not a guy who declines an offer.

“I never refused anyone in need of help,” he 

 or at least thought it through more thoroughly.”

 jungle fatigues with rifles slung over their shoulders took Pitt, his two passengers and two ground crew members into custody. Dirty bags were slung over their heads as hoods as they were carted off to a Mexican army garrison, where guards took turns beating and torturing them.

Even today, Pitt has vivid flashbacks to the beatings, including being put on a block of ice where they electro-shocked his genitals.

They wanted to know the source of the cocaine, but Pitt and crew didn’t give up name

The Mexican authorities regardless hailed it a victory, declaring it the largest cocaine bust in history as they paraded the badly bruised Americans in front of the press while sensationalizing details, including adding a shootout that never happened and declaring them members of some unnamed mafia of which none were affiliated.

The Associated Press quoted the Mexican army’s statement, describing the “narco-traffickers” firing “high-powered weapons against the Mexican army, who repelled the attack.”

 were unarmed and surrendered peacefully.

Nonetheless, the headlines were also picked up by media outlets back home

where Pitt’s mom, Nora, happened to be sitting on a couch in her daughter’s home in Washington in front of the television. 

“Is that Richard?” she asked her daughter, Mary Dell.

Nora had just been to Florida to visit Pitt, his wife and young granddaughter and had been impressed by his fancy yacht and movie studio. She figured one of his movies must have made it big.

Mary Dell squinted at the screen in disbelief.

“Mom, I don’t think that has anything to do with Richard’s movie business,” she said.

This was Nora’s first inkling that her son was more than just a commercial airline pilot and movie producer.

Pitt was told this story when he returned to the states less than three months after escaping the Mexican prison. He and two other men had gotten the guards and other inmates stinking drunk on whiskey, then scaled the wall and fled about 100 miles on foot through a snake-infested jungle.

He’d keep that story to himself as he attempted to steel up the nerve to face his mother. Even today all these years later, Pitt remembers how terrified he’d been to walk into his sister’s house that day.

“It was the scariest thing I’ve ever done in my life,” he told Cowboy State Daily. “Worse than any torture.”

Pitt’s mom proceeded to glare at her son, telling him that he was probably the dumbest person she’d ever met in her life for attempting to take on the Mexican military in a shootout.

Didn’t he realize that would just have made them madder, she told him.

That it hadn’t occurred seemed beyond the point as she continued to chastise him.

 maybe he ought to step back and think about what he was doing with his life.

, Pitt has spent a lot of years thinking about his life.

Most of those years were in federal prison in Pennsylvania where he spent 28 years. He’s been out for five years

and now lives a quiet life in Denver near his daughter, where he continues trying to repair their badly damaged relationship.

but instead has a commercial driver’s license and works intermittently as a truck driver.

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"textStyle"}],"text":"He also does a lot of writing."}]

In prison, he wrote a three-part spy trilogy starring protagonist Yancy Lightfoot

 based on his own exploits. Now, he’s at work on a memoir, after a prompting from his daughter who had asked him on a prison visit why he had missed out on all those years of her life and his grandchildren.

It’s safe to say that Pitt has no shortage of material.

In fact, his own life reads like a spy novel on steroids, where it’s impossible not to periodically stop him and ask him to repeat himself.

There’s a reason that his close friends call him “the most interesting person they know.”

In fact, while in prison, a former FAA inspector and self-published writer

stole Pitt’s story and wrote a book under Pitt’s name, even using Pitt’s photo on the front cover. A fellow inmate told him about it

 at which point Pitt’s lawyer sent the plagiarist a cease-and-desist letter to shut it down.

Even Pitt seems caught off guard by his stories from time to time, which he shared over a course of several phone calls.

“To think I’m just a dumb guy from Podunk, Wyoming,” he said.

Pitt grew up in Thermopolis, a town he still reveres and even wrote a guidebook about when he was in prison.

Born to alcoholic and drug-addicted parents, Pitt said he spent the first four months of his life being left in a car while his parents were in the bar drinking. When he came down with pneumonia at 

 months, his birth dad’s brother, Milo, and his wife, Nora, stepped in to adopt him.

In his memoir, Pitt writes about being grateful that his parents gave him up.

“This is where luck stepped into my life and hit a home

His adoptive parents worked and ranched, and he grew up herding cattle and doing other ranch chores like many Wyoming kids. He writes longingly about all the lessons learned from his father out on the range, 40 miles from home.

From a young age, Pitt knew he wanted to be a pilot and didn’t consider doing anything else.

It all started with his first flight over the tiny town of Greybull, which he said he still remembers clearly to this day. It had been a generous gift from Mary Dell for his sixth birthday.

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"textStyle"}],"text":"From that moment he was hooked, Pitt said."}]

It wasn’t the views from 1,000 feet up above that captured Pitt’s imagination, but rather the mechanics of flight itself and what the pilot was doing to keep them suspended in air.

He was so mesmerized by the gauges and nobs that the pilot had to remind Pitt to look down out of the window. 

Years later in prison, Pitt would tease Mary Dell that she’d provided him with the gateway drug to smuggling.

“I think she wanted to beat me senseless, Pitt said. “But truthfully, there’s nothing I could have done to change the direction that I was going. I was addicted to adrenaline. It was my drug above all else.”

Pitt was a poor kid with a penchant for a rich man’s hobby and occupation. He had to work his way up from the bottom.

At 11, he landed a job snagging golf balls at the new driving range next to the airport where he longingly watched planes come and go. One day, he walked over and asked pilot, Mel 

, if he needed any help washing his plane.

“He must have seen my enthusiasm, because he offered me a job doing odd jobs around the airport,” he said.

In lieu of payment, Pitt asked for flying time. Eventually, he started helping other pilots with basic maintenance work, which he enjoyed, taking home airplane manuals and studying how every part fit together.

Here he also came into contact with pipeline pilots whose job it was to fly low over the buried oil pipelines running from Montana to central Wyoming to look for leaks and ruptures.

He asked if he could come along, and with his parents’ approval spent long days twisting and turning through the Bighorn Basin at 50 to 150 feet above the ground.

After high school, Pitt moved to Seattle in August 1967 to work as a flightline mechanic for Boeing. Two years later, he joined the U.S. Air Force

 where he flew C-130s and other large cargo planes in Vietnam and also became an instructor.

At 27, he finally realized his dream of becoming a commercial airline pilot for United.

His good friend and mentor David Guinn was a United pilot at the time. The two had met at a skydiving club in Maryland and became good friends. When a job opened training other pilots to fly DC-8s and 727s, he encouraged Pitt to apply.

“Richard was really the person that when he picked up a book to study something, he didn't put it down until he knew everything in it, and so I encouraged him to put in an application,” Guinn told Cowboy State Daily from his home in Texas.

He suggested Pitt send it in a brightly colored manilla envelope so it would stand out among the hundreds of other applicants.

is anybody’s guess, but Pitt got the job

. Later, Pitt also became a qualified crew member on the Boeing 727 flying passenger routes across the United States.

“He had lots of opportunities to be a good pilot, but he chose to leave the airlines,” Guinn said. “He wanted a more exciting life, I think.”

Pitt would agree with that, he said, and for him it became all about chasing the next adrenaline rush. Plus, the routine commercial flights bored him when compared to his worldwide travel in the Air Force.

At the time, Pitt was going through a divorce from his first wife, and he needed a down payment for a lake property he had his eye on 

As a new pilot still on probation, his salary was about $900 a month. At the time, he was also flying for the Air Force Reserves. He ran into a crew chief he’d known from years 

The two had been together on a flight to Laz Paz, Bolivia, they’d stopped to refuel. Pitt saw him sneak something into one of the cargo bins but looked the other way after the guy asked him not to tell anyone.

Later, the guy showed up at his place with an envelope full of 

On a chance encounter, he ran into the guy months later when they’d both landed and talked over coffee. Pitt told him about his impending divorce and need for down payment. One thing led to another, and the guy introduced him to some people.

On his first run, Pitt made almost the entire down payment for the house.

“If I hadn’t stopped for coffee, who knows where I’d be today,” he said.

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"textStyle"},{"type":"bold"}],"text":"Meeting Escobar"}]

Mostly Pitt worked through his cartel-affiliated contacts and middleman until one day he was called in by Pablo Escobar, the notorious “King of Cocaine” and founder of the Medellin Cartel in Colombia, who monopolized the cocaine trade in the U

Pitt had no idea why he’d be summoned but waited in line as men walked in and out of Escobar’s office assembly-line style.

When it was his turn, he sat down in the still-warm, plush green leather chair where Escobar stared at him over his desk. Men lined the back wall while others watched him from in front of the window.

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"textStyle"}],"text":"Pitt shook Escobar’s hand."}]

He’d been called in, Escobar explained, because 

 had embarrassed him in front of one of his employees. Escobar was referring to Pitt’s storming into his middleman Caesar’s house to demand the $40,000 he owed him from the last load of cocaine.

Escobar wanted to know why Pitt didn’t reach out to him directly.

“I’m sorry, Don Pablo,” Pitt had said, “but I didn’t have your phone number to call you down here. Or God knows, I certainly would have.”

 except Escobar, whose right cheek barely twitched in an almost-smile. From then on, Pitt was to contact Escobar directly if he had any issues and was promised $4,000 per kilo hauled.

It was then he realized that Caesar had been skimming off the top all along and cheating him. Pitt never saw Caesar again.

Pablo Escobar composite 5 11 25

<title>🚧 Richard Pitt: Wyoming Pilot Who Smuggled Drugs For Pablo Escobar | Cowboy State Daily</title>

Richard Pitt grew up in Thermopolis and lived a life straight out of 1980s drug-running movies like “Scarface.” Decades later, he’s coming clean while also divulging details of his sordid career smuggling for the likes of Pablo Escobar.

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