Griselda Blanco was said to order death in the way others might order a pizza. Dubbed the Cocaine Godmother, she may have had a cute dimple in her chin and once borne a passing resemblance to Betty Boop. But make no mistake. She was a monster.
The five-foot widow was the queenpin among kingpins in the Colombian Medellin drug cartel of the 70s and 80s.
Heading a near-unrivalled campaign of violence, she was a trailblazer for women entrepreneurs the world over – for all the worst reasons.
A forerunner and rival to Pablo Escobar, the three-times married mother-of-four boasted a Malibu mansion, a bronze sculpture of herself, a tea-set once owned by the Queen and a gold-plated sub-machine gun embedded with emeralds.
She had killer style and is said to have raked in £60million a month at her peak.
This landed her a £1.5billion fortune, surely making her the first female billionaire drug boss.
A lust for murder, the bloodier the better, was key to her success.
She is believed to have invented the point-blank motorcycle drive-by killings for which she became notorious.
Some say she had 200 deaths to her name. Others estimate up to 2,000.
Among killings definitely ordered by her was the shooting of a boy of two.
Indeed all three of her husbands met brutal ends, too – with none other than Griselda under suspicion.
They were to earn her another name... the black widow.
Full of such horror and drama, it’s no surprise Griselda’s story is coming to our screens in more than one version.
Cocaine Godmother, starring Catherine Zeta-Jones, began streaming on Paramount+ last week.
Sofia Vergara is shooting a Netflix series, Griselda, and Jennifer Lopez’s long-touted version, The Godmother, is in development.
Former Miami homicide detective Nelson Abreu said Griselda was worse than any of the men involved in the drug trade.
He added: “People were so afraid of her that her reputation preceded her wherever she went.”
Another drugs expert cut to the heart of her cold-bloodedness when he remarked: “Other criminals killed with intent.
“They would check before they killed. Blanco would kill first and
then say ‘Well, he was innocent. That’s too bad but he’s dead now’.”
There’s no denying the chilling story of this heinous femme fatale is fascinating and seductive by turns.
But the reality is sickening in the very extreme.
Arguably, Griselda didn’t have the best start in life. Born in Cartagena, Colombia, in 1943, she was abandoned by her father and moved to the drugs capital of Medellin when she was young.
Her mother, said to be an alcoholic and a prostitute, is reported to have beaten her.
Unsurprisingly, the youngster turned to crime. It is believed she picked pockets.
Some claim that at 11 she was involved in the kidnap of a 10-year-old boy and helped kill him when a ransom demanded wasn’t met.
She encountered her first husband on the grim streets as a teen.
Carlos Trujillo was a small-time forger of documents and a boozer.
They went to New York together in the 1960s, using their own false passports, and once there a business faking IDs migrated to dabbling in marijuana.
Their three sons, Osvaldo, Dixon and Uber, were eventually to follow their mum into the drugs trade and ultimately lose their lives to it.
Griselda and Carlos divorced, although he was later murdered, reportedly because of a business dispute with his ex-wife. One down.
Amid the 1970s cocaine boom Griselda sniffed out real business opportunity with the help of her second husband.
Alberto Bravo was a trafficker for the Medellin cartel and it was he who introduced her to the world she was to take by storm. Perhaps this is where women’s intuition came in.
In a unique move, she bought an underwear business in Colombia and began making bras and girdles with secret compartments.
Then she recruited female couriers to smuggle cocaine in them.
In 1971, before Escobar came along, she and her husband became the first cartel to import from Colombia into the United States.
Bravo returned home to Colombia to run the operation there. Griselda remained in New York, always managing to elude capture, most notably during Operation Banshee in 1974, one of the first major stings by the Drug Enforcement Agency.
She managed to flee before the authorities even laid eyes on her.
Griselda went back to Colombia, still the chameleon queen of the image change, and with wigs galore she continued to evade investigators.
It was here in 1975 her second husband met his grisly end, leaving her free to take the reins. Griselda is believed to have confronted him in a Bogota nightclub car park over millions missing from profits of the cartel.
She drew a pistol, he a sub-machine gun, but in the end it was he and his bodyguards who lay dead.
Griselda walked away with a stomach wound and a seemingly renewed gusto for trade.
Before long she was flooding Miami and California with cocaine as well
as New York.
Her distribution network across the US brought in tens of millions of dollars a month as she trafficked more than a ton and a half at a time.
Business boomed and Griselda made her name through violence and utter fear. As rivals increased and feuds gathered pace, bodies racked up.
She was at the centre of the “Cocaine Cowboys” in Miami where she kept a luxury penthouse.
The lawlessness included a particularly bloody mall shoot-out in 1979.
A refrigerated truck had to be rented from Burger King to cope with all the bodies. But it was her attitude to the killings which elevated her from even her most monstrous peers. Not least her preferred means of murder – using henchmen to shoot at point-blank range from motorcycles.
A Drugs Enforcement Agency officer said: “Griselda loved killings. Bodies lined the streets of Miami as a result of her feuds. She gathered around her a group of henchmen known as the Pistoleros.
“Initiation into the group was earned by killing someone and cutting off a body part as proof of the deed.”
And the killings were personal, too.
“She not only killed rivals and wayward lovers but also used murder as a means of cancelling debts she didn’t want to pay.”
She found time to marry her third husband, drug trafficker Dario Sepulveda and had a fourth son, Michael Corleone Blanco.
But Dario was also later killed. Perhaps he should have known what was coming. This time a car ambush was the method.
Griselda, meanwhile, dodged capture for years.
Rumours every so often that she had been shot proved unfounded.
Finally she was tracked down in California and arrested in 1985.
Reportedly she was visibly shaking – a rare glimpse of the woman behind the monstrosity and the legend.
Her youngest son, just six at the time, was brought up by his grandmother and guardians, dodging various assassination attempts himself and needing armed bodyguards.
Somehow, today, he is still alive. “I lived the life of a teenage capo,” Michael explained. “I wasn’t allowed to be a kid. I had to risk my life every single day I left the house for being a Blanco.”
Griselda, meanwhile, was sentenced to 13 years, initially for drugs offences.
It was only in 1994 she was finally convicted for three first-degree murders, including that of the two-year-old son of a rival shot in the head travelling in his dad’s car.
But the case, which depended on the evidence of one of her former hitmen, collapsed and she ultimately pleaded guilty and received just 20 years.
In June 2004, having dodged the electric chair, she was freed and returned home.
She is said to have discovered Christianity but no amount of Bible reading was to save her in the end.
In 2012, aged 69, she was shot dead in a motorcycle drive-by killing of the kind she had once eagerly engineered.
She was leaving a butcher’s shop carrying a bag of meat. The assassin sped away.
Cocaine Godmother is currently streaming on Paramount+.
