(CNN Spanish) – The life of Griselda Blanco, known as “The Godmother” of drugs, will be told in a Netflix miniseries starting January 25, starring Barranquilla native Sofía Vergara.
His nickname is not for nothing. The US Department of Justice notes that in 1984 she was the head of a large and violent organization in Miami: “She loved the power given to her as the matriarch of a cocaine “family,” and she modeled her organization on that Mafia family , depicted in the film “The Godfather.” Such was his fixation that even one of his four children was named Michael Corleone.
Blanco joins the list of drug traffickers whose story is used in films, series and books. These are mostly men, among whom the name Pablo Escobar stands out, who, according to the book “The Life and Death of Griselda Blanco” by the journalist Martha Soto, would have admitted to having entered the drug trade to follow her example consequences.
From poverty to forming a drug trafficking empire
Ana Griselda Blanco Restrepo was born on February 15, 1943 in Cartagena, Colombia. There is another version that says she was born in Santa Marta, the place where she was baptized.
In 1955 he moved with his mother to Medellín, where he began a life of crime in the slums. At the age of 12, he led a gang of pickpockets and would have committed his first kidnapping and murder, according to the book “Cocaine Cowgirl,” an investigation by journalist Jennie Erin Smith. Her next move was to marry Carlos Trujillo, a human trafficking document forger, when she was just 13, the investigation says. She moved to Queens, New York and had her first three children: Dixon, Uber and Osvaldo. Years later, Trujillo supposedly died of liver cirrhosis, but the death is attributed to him in the book Drugs in American Society: An Encyclopedia of History, Politics, Culture, and the Law by Nancy E. Marion and Willard M. Oliver. to her.
She later married Alberto Bravo, a smuggler who, according to the book Cocaine Cowgirl, would have linked her to the cocaine trade. Smith says Blanco started out as a “mule,” meaning she illegally transported substances using the few security filters that existed for women at airports at the time. “These then-innovative tactics gave rise to the cartel concept,” says page 56 of a compilation by the U.S. Department of Justice’s National Institute of Justice.
She is also known for having tracked down some of the routes that other famous cartels would later use.
In addition, Blanco was responsible for the death of her second husband and continued to run the business alone, according to the specialist portal InSight Crime. After Bravo's death, she entered into a third marriage with Darío Sepúlveda, with whom she had her fourth child, Michael Corleone. According to the same Justice Department document, Griselda ordered Sepúlveda killed for taking her son Michael to Colombia against his will. For this reason it was also called the “Black Widow”.
In late 1970 he settled in Miami, where he expanded his drug business and unleashed a wave of violence on the streets. “Griselda loved murder. Because of their feuds, bodies lined the streets of Miami,” the report details on page 56, dedicated to the drug trafficker.
Furthermore, it is revealed that “La Madrina” was the one who began mutilation practices with “the gunmen,” her group of henchmen, to prove that they had actually been killed, resulting in a registered trademark of the Medellín Cartel and The Dadeland massacre, which took place in a Miami mall in 1979, dates back to the time of Griselda Blanco.
Due to competition in Miami, Blanco moved his organization to the state of California, where he lived in prosperity, according to the report.
Griselda Blanco founded an empire of illegal drug trafficking from Colombia to the United States in the 1970s and 1980s, earning her another nickname: “The Queen of Cocaine.” The portal Celebrity Networth places her in fourth place in its ranking of the 50 richest criminals in the world, ahead of the famous American gangster Al Capone, who takes ninth place. According to the book “The Patron Saint of Pablo Escobar. Life and death of Griselda Blanco. The Black Widow, the Woman Who Shaped Him” by journalist José Guanizo, Griselda's fortune was estimated at $2,000 million.
According to the New York Times archives, federal prosecutors in the case, Michael Q. Carey and Peter Bloch, said that between 1972 and 1974, the Colombian organization distributed more than 9 kilograms of cocaine per week in the United States, with a street value of 2, $5 million per week.
Encounter with justice
In April 1975, the government filed charges against Blanco and 37 others in federal court for the Southern District of New York. According to a compilation by the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC), they were accused of conspiring to manufacture, import and distribute cocaine into this country.
In May of the same year, the Federal Court issued an arrest warrant for Griselda. The prosecution relied heavily on the testimony of Carmen Cabán, a former human trafficker turned government witness. Cabán testified about the cocaine importation network operations between 1972 and 1975 in which Blanco was allegedly involved. However, the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) was not able to arrest Blanco until 1985 in Irvine, California, UNODC notes. Blanco gave the arresting officer a false name and carried false identification documents.
The New York court sentenced “The Godmother” to 15 years in prison and fined him $25,000. However, she would also have been convicted of conspiring to distribute cocaine in Miami, according to page 56 of the National Institute of Justice report The US Department of Justice. According to a biography of Griselda Blanco from the Encyclopedia Britannica, the Colombian was accused of ordering three murders in the Miami area in 1994, and four years later she pleaded guilty and received a reduced sentence.
His paradoxical death
After serving her sentence in a US prison, Blanco was deported to Colombia and returned to Medellín, where she presumably wanted to stay away from the drug trade. However, on September 3, 2012, he died at the age of 69 after being shot twice from a motorcycle outside a butcher shop.
According to Medellín police spokesman Diego Chavarría, witnesses to the murder heard the typical sound of a motorcycle and two gunshots on Monday afternoon. Griselda Blanco was murdered at close range, a similar crime to the one authorities say she committed in the '70s and '80s.