Planes with cocaine, Playboy bunnies and Pablo Escobar: NC town’s wild brush with fame

At the height of his drug-smuggling insanity, “Crazy Dale” Varnam bought a small Caribbean island from Pablo Escobar, shared lobster dinners with Manuel Noriega and built a helicopter pad in his yard for midnight cocaine drops — all, the story goes, from an obscure NC fishing town.

He drove to Miami in one of several Corvettes and came back with Playboy bunnies he’d met at Hugh Hefner’s club, and he talked them into following him home to mow his grass in full costume.

This sort of behavior would raise eyebrows in any other middle-of-nowhere North Carolina crabbing hamlet. But in Varnamtown, pop. 300, virtually every citizen got roped into a secret drug life — all of them working for crazy Dale, who paid fat stacks of cash.

“If you dance with the devil, you got to pay the piper,” said Varnam, chastened by 10 years in prison, pointing to the sky. “God’s the only reason I’m here today.”

The saga of a far-flung Brunswick County village using its fish houses and crab shacks for international drug traffic in the 1980s unwinds in “Varnamtown,” a new eight-episode podcast narrated by Kyle MacLachlan. As the star of “Twin Peaks,” the actor knows much about small-town intrigue, and as the star of “Blue Velvet,” he knows about weird doings in rural North Carolina.

Planes with cocaine, boats full of dope

Now in its fifth chapter, the story starts with a Lockheed Lodestar formerly owned by REO Speedwagon crash-landing on a runway outside of town, and the two pilots fleeing into the woods leaving bales of cocaine onboard.

It continues as a 50-foot trawler, the Captain Tom, runs aground in shallow water outside Varnamtown with 18 tons of marijuana on-board. A concerned citizen tows it to shore, accompanied by a sheriff who is secretly in league with the smugglers, and then the town buries the dope at the landfill and lights it on fire. For weeks, rogue pot-hunters raid the landfill at night with shovels.

The podcast continues in this hard-to-believe vein as a Varnamtown resident who identifies himself only as “Lefty” describes Crazy Dale going “Miami Vice all the way,” his house shot to pieces.

“I think the initial question is, ‘Is it possible Pablo Escobar did a deal with the whole town?” said Joshua Davis, investigative journalist and co-narrator of the podcast, in an interview with The N&O. “How did you do it? What are the logistics? Was there a Town Hall meeting?”

Crackhead Express

Those twisted details unspool even further in a book about the Varnamtown escapade: “My Right Hand to Goodness: The Life and Times of Crazy Dale Varnam.”

Lynn Betz spent nine years writing it after she and her husband Thom moved south from Pennsylvania in 2011, having just sold their organic soap company. They settled on the Lockwood Folly River, where they could see the shrimp boats moving with the tides past Varnamtown, and they soon heard whispers about the days when those boats carried more profitable cargo.

“Many people did not want to talk about it,” she said. “It was a closely held secret. And here I am this Northern woman snooping around.”

Her interest intensified when she passed Fort Apache on Stone Chimney Road, a roadside attraction impossible to ignore. From the outside, she saw a wall built from a surreal collection of junk: mannequins, toilet bowls, an old burlesque sign and three crosses ringed with Christmas lights.

Hand-painted signs everywhere warn of the ruin that comes from drugs and drink, and inviting all comers through the gates of Heaven. Parked next to the Fort Apache sign was a bus painted “Crackhead Express, Stay Off the Rock.”

“I had to meet the mind behind this place,” she told The N&O.

Inside Betz found Crazy Dale Varnam, 10 years out of prison, lording over his junkyard kingdom, which sprawled over 20-plus acres. He showed her the helipad site, and slowly, they became friends. For the next decade, he would recount his days as Scarface wannabe turned government informant.

Through her business connections, she met MacLachlan and his wife, Desiree Gruber, who produced “Project Runway,” arranging for a Varnamtown tour. Suddenly, the actor who played FBI Agent Dale Cooper was rubbing shoulders with real feds in retirement, and hanging out with the 72-year-old ex-kingpin.

As he showed off his hometown, Varnam gave Davis and the “Twin Peaks” star each a plastic cockroach, as he does everyone. Fake bugs serve as Varnam’s calling card, and he leaves them all over town.

“Known to be crazy,” said Betz. “Proud to be crazy. If you would have said I was going to come down here and spend 13 years with a drug kingpin who was in prison 10 years, I would have said ‘You are out of your mind.’ “

‘Here’s $20,000’

In 1988, Varnamtown had no police force, no fire department, no Town Hall.

“The sign that marks the town’s western boundary was formed crudely from planks and a can of black paint, then tacked high on a telephone pole,” wrote The Associated Press in 1988.

Little has changed since then, though the town did incorporate to keep out developers, and it did build a small government office. But along the waterfront, the signs all advertise crabmeat, scallops, fresh shrimp — retail and wholesale, not for sit-down dining.

All day long, lifelong residents back pickup trucks down the ramp and climb into vessels not much larger than a jon boat from Bass Pro, out to collect a dozen oysters for the local pastor.

In 1980s in this community, where nearly everyone has the last name Varnam, quick cash proved a big temptation.

“God-fearing Southern folks who made their living fishing, shrimping and oystering, and most of them were poor,” said Betz. “Here was this opportunity to make money like they’d never seen. They would unload boats. There were only 300 people then, 500 now. Dale might say to some fish house proprietor, ‘Leave your door open this weekend. Here’s $20,000.’ “

Did Crazy Dale actually meet Escobar? Betz found two witnesses who saw the drug lord in town.

Did Noriega really appear in Varnamtown? Varnam insists, and drug boats pulling into Beaufort Inlet in 1982 definitely led to the Panamanian dictator’s arrest.

Varnamtown is just remote enough to hide the world’s most notorious men.

The sheriff is busted

But that 50-foot trawler caught the attention of Roger Morton — a rare citizen uninvolved in the drug trade — who is finally forced to write President Reagan for help after local law enforcement urges him to back off.

And that REO Speedwagon plane that crashed-landed? On the same night, Brunswick County Sheriff Herman Strong was up in the air at 2 a.m., later explaining to the DEA that he was out looking for safe-crackers with acetylene torches.

“They were out there doing doughnuts,” MacLachlan jokes on the podcast.

Strong would soon spend four years in federal prison for protecting drug smugglers and taking bribes, and Crazy Dale would boast about keeping the sheriff in his pocket.

But around this time, Varnam felt the dragnet closing in. Soon, a pair of federal agents approached him with a deal.

“They said, ‘Dale, the train’s leaving,’ “ he told The N&O. “You’re either going with us or you’re going away for life.”

‘Betrayed hundreds of people’

He chose the agents. Varnam’s undercover work and testimony for the government led to more than 80 indictments stretching from Miami to Nicaragua.

“He basically turns in his entire hometown,” Davis said on the podcast.

“I always thought somebody wanted to kill him,” said the interviewee identified as “Lefty.” “He had to have betrayed hundreds of people. Everybody went to jail.”

And so did Varnam, but not right away.

Given probation for his undercover work, he ran afoul of the law only a few years later when investigators took five truckloads of stolen goods out of his home. Having violated his deal with the government, he got hit with 35 years, of which he served 10.

Nobody did kill him. In fact, Betz learned that when Varnam got out of prison, his friends put toilets around street corners — a nod to his strange collection at Fort Apache.

Varnam would later explain that his fascination with commodes as home decor springs for seeing so much “crap” in Brunswick County. But after 40 years, he remains a Varnamtown character — very much alive.

“All is forgiven,” he said.