Barry Cooper, the colorful former police officer turned scourge of crooked cops, couldn’t attend the screening of a fresh film about him at the Hot
Barry Cooper, the colorful former police officer turned scourge of crooked cops, couldn’t attend the screening of a fresh film about him at the Hot Springs Documentary Film Festival in Arkansas. He was in Mexico. Or maybe the Philippines. Or perhaps Brazil or Venezuela.
“Where is he now? We don’t know where he is,” David Anthony Ngo, who co-created the documentary Never Get Busted! with Erin Williams-Weir, said at a Q&A following the Hot Springs screening. The married filmmakers said their best guess currently puts him in Mexico.
The fact is, Cooper has lived in exile from the U.S. for well over a decade, an unlikely turn of events for a man once hailed by a law enforcement superior as possibly the best narcotics officer in Texas and maybe even the whole country. Cooper was responsible for 500 misdemeanor arrests and 300 felony drug arrests, not to mention seizing millions of dollars in cash and ill-gotten assets. He even personally trained his own drug detection dogs, sniffing out the proper canines for the job based on their degree of hyperactivity.
Barry Cooper with one of the drug-sniffing dogs he trained.
NeverGetBusted.com
As the film explores, Cooper experienced a radical change of heart about his line of work after taking part in a drug bust at a home where newborn children were present. The brigade of heavily armed cops terrified the kids, causing Cooper to take stock of police tactics deployed in service of nabbing people who might be no more than casual pot smokers.
He quit law enforcement, turned preacher in his own church for a while, then became the active host of the Never Get Busted YouTube channel, which purveyed useful tips to people wishing to avoid arrest on drug charges. Stuff like storing animal urine in your car to throw off drug-sniffing dogs.
Filmmakers David Anthony Ngo and Erin Williams-Weir attend the ‘Never Get Busted!‘ Sundance premiere on January 28, 2025 in Park City, Utah.
Arturo Holmes/Getty Images
“We discovered Barry over six and a half years ago,” Williams-Weir explained. “We saw a short video of Barry online… He was very charismatic, very gregarious, and we are like, how has no one told this story before with Matthew McConaughey or Woody Harrelson doing a scripted version of this? We did over a year of researching Barry and his story.”
When Ngo and Williams-Weir approached Cooper about taking part in a documentary, it didn’t require a lot of arm twisting.
“When we got on a phone call with him,” Ngo recounted, “and said, ‘Hey, we’d be interested in doing a story about your life,’ he basically said, ‘I’ve been waiting for this call.’”
Cooper traveled from the Philippines, where he was then living, to Australia to sit down for interviews with the filmmakers. He shed airy on his earlier career as a police officer, which saw him cross train with elite agents and then go on joint operations with ATF, DEA, FBI, the U.S. Military and Border Patrol. He also had boxes of videos tucked in locations around the world which he shared with Ngo and Williams-Weir.
“We had over 350 hours with his own personal archive to go through,” said Williams-Weir.
“He had one [box] with him in the Philippines. He had a box that was left with his parents, and he had another box that another filmmaker had as well,” added Ngo. “So, we suddenly received these giant boxes in Australia that had every video format known to man.”
The videos in those boxes contained much more than just his Never Get Busted highlight reel. Cooper also created a series of online videos called KopBusters which exposed police misconduct. Busting cops did not endear him to his former colleagues in blue, not surprisingly.
“He’s definitely not a favorite son of certain police officers,” Ngo noted.
Cooper later took his crusade to another level to support a newborn woman imprisoned on false drug charges. To show how police could easily railroad someone, Cooper set up an elaborate sting at a purported “grow house” and waited for officers to bust in without a warrant (what the gung-ho officers discovered growing in the house wasn’t pot plants but bogus mini Christmas trees).
“It wasn’t like we got into a story, and we thought, oh, let’s do a police bashing story or something like that,” Ngo told the Hot Springs audience. “It really was driven by, wow, this is just a very unique and wild tale.”
Never Get Busted! is an acquisition title. Submarine and Blue Ant Media are representing the documentary for sales. The filmmakers self-financed the project, then got it in front of some high-powered talent – Oscar nominee John Battsek (Bobi Wine: The People’s President, Listen To Me Marlon) and multiple Emmy winner Chris Smith (American Movie, Tiger King, 100 Foot Wave), who joined as executive producers.
Ngo and Williams-Weir shot in Australia, the Philippines, Mexico, and nine U.S. states, including Texas. Never Get Busted! comes replete with a host of indelible personalities — chief among them Barry Cooper.
“In all stories you’re looking for a great character and a great arc and a story that really moves and changes and has a lot of different aspects to it,” Ngo observed. “And [Barry] had all of that, and we found also it wasn’t just him, but so many people we met along the way. They were all just so natural, just great storytellers. And that really is the goal that you want crafting a film.”
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