In both cases, Sharp/Stone was able to maintain his daylily farm while in prison. Stone, meanwhile, fully accepted responsibility in the film. After being arrested, Sharp pleaded guilty to the charges but attempted to avoid actual jail time by offering to pay his fine by growing Hawaiian Papayas for the US government. While Stone's arrest in The Mule was quite dramatic (for obvious reasons), Sharp's arrest happened practically the same way, being caught on an interstate highway while driving a Lincoln pickup truck. Leo was released from prison in 2015 because he was terminally ill, and he died in 2016 at the age of 92.Ĭooper's Agent Bates is based on real-life DEA Special Agent Jeff Moore, who caught Sharp in 2011. In the end, he was arrested by the DEA and sentenced to three years in prison, of which he served one.

But when that business started to fall by the wayside, too, he was recruited into drug trafficking and was so good at it that he became somewhat of a myth within the cartel. Sharp was an aging World War II veteran who became a pioneering horticulturist after his airline business failed, particularly working with daylilies. In The Mule, Eastwood's Earl Stone is based on Leo Sharp, who was known within the Sinaloa Cartel as El Tata.