With two A-list adaptations in the pipeline, we reveal the true story of Griselda Blanco – the woman who became Colombia’s cartel queen
It was a quiet Monday afternoon in a suburb of Medellín, Colombia, when a man on a motorcycle pulled up outside Cardiso butchers. Engine still running, he went inside and walked up to a frail-looking elderly woman sitting on a bench after collecting her weekly meat order.
The man fired twice point-blank at the woman’s temple, before making his motorbike getaway from the scene.
As people scattered from the shop, the 69-year-old victim’s daughter-in-law Yesica Trujillo, who’d been paying for the order at the counter, knelt by the dying woman. To a passer-by, it may have looked like a robbery gone wrong, but Yesica knew the truth – it was an assassination. The dying woman was no innocent – she was the notorious “Godmother of cocaine”, Griselda Blanco.
So infamous was her life that just seven months before her murder in September 2012, Blanco made a deal with a Hollywood production company to tell her story. Called Cocaine Godmother, with Catherine Zeta-Jones playing the lead, it’s set to air early next year on Lifetime.
“I’ve tried not to homogenise her or find a sympathetic quality, because I don’t think she had one,” said Catherine at a press conference for the movie in Cannes last month. “There’s something fantastic about how she was the boss in a dangerous man’s world. You gotta give it to her.”
Talking about her transformation to play the 5ft-nothing cocaine queen, the actress added: “I gained weight, I was hunched over. If I had balls, I’d have grabbed them from time to time. I wanted to let it all hang out. She thought she was beautiful. She was the movie star starring in her own movie. She didn’t give a s**t.”
Such is the drama of Blanco’s rise and fall that there is another (as yet untitled) high-profile biopic in the pipeline from heavyweight channel HBO – this time starring Jennifer Lopez as the drug baroness.
“I’ve been fascinated by the life of this corrupt and complicated woman for many years,” the singer revealed when the project was announced last year.
The very nature of her murder – a motorcycle assassination – mimicked Blanco’s calling card during her death-and-dealing reign in ‘80s Miami, when her far-reaching drug cartel netted £60million every month in cocaine trafficking.
“Some people thought that Blanco felt she had to be more violent because she was a woman in a man’s world, but I don’t,” says Al Singleton, a retired Miami police detective who was part of the federal task force that targeted the drug queen when she was at her most powerful. “I’ve been told by people who were close to her that this was just Griselda Blanco’s nature.”
Born in extreme poverty in Colombia, she grew up in Barrio Trinidad – one of the most notorious hillside slums outside Medellín – before running away from home aged just 14.
Desperate to escape the physical abuse of her mother’s boyfriends, she lived on the streets, pickpocketing, looting and – when things got really desperate – selling her body for sex.
In her late 20s, Blanco met Alberto Bravo, a known cocaine trafficker for the Medellín Cartel – the world’s biggest and most notorious drug runners and the current subject of hit Netflix series Narcos.
Bravo employed her to buy unrefined cocaine for him, which he would process in empty garment factories that he’d converted into labs, and the pair soon fell in love.
Between them, the couple quickly established a successful drugs operation and lived well on the profits of their fledgling business. However, both Blanco and Bravo knew that to make any serious money they needed to be in New York, where the cocaine market was worth millions.
“They emigrated to Queens and got married,” says Professor Bruce Bagley, author of Drug Trafficking In The Americas. “There, the couple masqueraded as clothes importers, knowing that with their Colombian connections they could capture a huge market share by undercutting the Italian Mafia, who at that time controlled distribution in the city.”
It didn’t take long, and in 1971, along with her husband, Blanco became the first Colombian drug lord to export the Medellín Cartel’s product to the United States, years before Pablo Escobar would follow in her footsteps.
And it wasn’t the only way Blanco was blazing a trail. She notoriously pioneered the use of young women as drug mules, preying on street hustlers who’d jump at the opportunity to make some money and work for La Madrina (“The Godmother”), the moniker she was given by the hundreds of criminals she employed.
“She was quite the innovator,” adds Bruce. “Blanco came up with the idea of creating customised bras and girdles with hidden pockets to hold cocaine. She also established a specialist lingerie shop in Medellín, the sole purpose of which was to tailor-make drug-smuggling underwear so that her army of mules could get the cartel’s product into the US.”
In 1971, one of her infamous cocaine corsets was discovered abandoned in a women’s bathroom at Miami International Airport. It contained almost 7lb of the drug, which had been sewn into 58 separate compartments.
Fake breasts were filled with two large packets of coke.
A year later one of Blanco’s mules, 33-year-old Mariela Zapata, was caught by customs officials at the same airport with 41/2lb of pure cocaine in her underwear – with a street value of over £300,000.
Even though Zapata was charged with unlawful importation of cocaine and deported to a Colombian prison, she refused to reveal her boss, such was the loyalty that Blanco instilled in her mules.
However, for every mule that was caught, it was estimated that up to 10 slipped under the noses of US customs agents. At its peak in the early ‘70s, Blanco and Bravo’s business was shipping as much as 11/2 tons of cocaine into America every month. The couple’s enterprise became so successful that it was agreed Bravo should return to Colombia to restructure and operate the business from Medellín, while Blanco stayed in New York to expand the empire and keep competition to a minimum.
However, left to her own devices, Blanco’s personal drug use began to increase, and she started smoking large quantities of unrefined cocaine called “bazooka”.
Her burgeoning addiction quickly fuelled a paranoia that not only was her husband cheating on her in their relationship and business, but also that her enterprise was under surveillance. In the grip of paranoia, Blanco prepared an escape plan that involved a fully fuelled private jet on 24-hour standby at Miami International Airport.
But her fears became reality in 1975, when a joint NYPD/Drug Enforcement Administration investigation called Operation Banshee – due to the number of female mules under surveillance – came knocking.
It was the biggest cocaine case in history, however the feds were too late – Blanco’s Miami jet had left for the Colombian capital Bogotá days before.
By the time she arrived back in her home country, Blanco was sure that her husband had begun plotting against her with the up-and-coming Pablo Escobar. Such was her distrust that, rather than meet privately as husband and wife, they arranged to do it in public, flanked with bodyguards, in a nightclub car park in Bogotá.
Stepping from her car, Blanco was mocked by her husband over her Godmother title. Incensed, she grabbed a pistol from her boot and shot her husband. A gunfight ensued, which left Bravo dead.
His cold-blooded murder earned Blanco a new nickname: the “Black Widow”. With no one left to stand in her way, she wasted no time in taking full control of the cocaine empire they’d built and ran the business from Colombia, where she was safe from US prosecution.
“Her position of power was bolstered even more when she married again in 1978,” explains Bruce, referring to her wedding to bank robber Dario Sepulveda, whose brother worked as one of her gun men. That year, the couple had a son, Michael Corleone Blanco, named in honour of Al Pacino’s character in the Godfather movies.
With husband and son in tow, Blanco finally returned to Miami via Mexico on a Venezuelan passport courtesy of the full-time document forger on her payroll. But what also made her entry easier was the change in her appearance from years of cocaine abuse. Although still only in her 30s, her bloated face left her looking far older than her years.
In Miami, Blanco rarely left her luxury six-bedroom penthouse in the exclusive Biscayne Bay area. But she still managed to orchestrate a deadly campaign of violence, using an army of Colombian and Cuban hitmen to rid her of any competition for control of the city.
From an early age, Michael saw first-hand his mother’s ruthless nature, even witnessing an assassination by one of Blanco’s henchman Jorge “Rivi” Ayala when he was just three.
But worse was to come – in 1983, aged just five years old, his father was murdered right in front of him. Little did he know that it was his mother who had ordered the hit, after her marriage to Sepulveda had broken down a year earlier and he’d kidnapped Michael, taking him back to Colombia.
Desperate to get her son back, Blanco’s hit squad dressed as police officers and pulled Sepulveda over as he drove home. Michael was in the back of the car, screaming at them to stop as they fired bullets into his father. He was immediately smuggled back into Miami to be reunited with his mother.
With her business still thriving, Blanco had become renowned for coke-fuelled orgies at her penthouse, where she also kept her growing collection of random drug-money purchases. These included pearls that once belonged to former Argentinian First Lady Eva Perón, a tea set of Queen Elizabeth’s, and a MAC-10 machine gun inlaid with gold and emeralds.
However, her reign as the Godmother of cocaine came to a sudden halt in February 1985, when she was finally arrested on drug charges in her Californian home.
“She was propped up in bed reading the Bible,” Detective Bob Palombo, one of the arresting DEA agents, said in an interview at the time, adding: “She looked up at first in a bit of a shock.”
While Blanco was handed a 15-year sentence for drug trafficking charges, the DEA was desperate to make her pay for her homicidal history, too, so set to work revisiting cases for evidence.
By 1994, when she’d been in prison for almost a decade, they managed to indict Blanco for three first-degree murders.
“When we explained to her that each charge carried a possible death sentence, she threw up,” remembers Detective Singleton. “There was nothing defiant about her – she really appeared to be just a pathetic old woman.”
Destined for Florida’s Death Row, Blanco cheated death once more thanks to a technicality. The state’s star witness – and her former hitman – Jorge “Rivi” Ayala was revealed to have engaged in phone sex with secretaries from the Miami-Dade State Attorney’s Office from behind bars. In the end, she was given an additional 20-year sentence, of which she served nine.
The 61-year-old Godmother was finally released from prison in June 2004 and deported back to Colombia, where one of the last-known pictures of her was taken at Bogotá Airport in a simple shirt and jeans.
By then, Blanco’s drug business had moved on without her and was now in the hands of younger, hungrier and more ambitious gangs. Instead, she was left to spend her remaining years living off the profits from several properties in and around Medellín that she had owned for decades. Her beloved son Michael stayed in the US, capitalising on the Blanco name and reputation – it’s believed he was one of the driving forces behind selling the rights deal for Cocaine Godmother.
“In the end, her power and money were gone and she had legions of enemies waiting for her,” says Bruce.
And it was one of those enemies who walked into the butchers that September day in 2012. Griselda Blanco would never get to see her notorious life immortalised on screen.
- Photography: Shutterstock, All Star, Scope, Charles Cosby
