Drug trafficking
Beautiful, paranoid and infinitely cruel: Griselda Blanco was the queen of cocaine
As a young woman, Griselda Blanco was very attractive. Next to it: Catherine Zeta-Jones as a drug baroness.
Pablo Escobar was her student; she executed her own husband in a fit of rage. Griselda Blanco’s brutality and cruelty were legendary. The life of the “Black Widow” was also filmed.
Her cruelty and her hatred and her irrepressible anger brought Griselda Blanco from the very bottom to the top of the world. The “Reina de la Cocaina” was considered the most powerful and richest woman of her era, her life story was filmed twice. Catherine Zeta-Jones and Jennifer Lopez played the godmother from Colombia. But probably no film adaptation does justice to the furor that accompanied Griselda through her life. One to one her biography would simply not be filmable.
Already notorious as a teenager
Griselda Blanco was born in a suburb of Medellin in 1943. Followed by the stalking of her abusive mother’s men, she spent her childhood on the streets. Her first known act was already a glimpse of what was to come: Griselda and her gang kidnapped an eleven-year-old child in order to extort a ransom. When the parents refused to pay, Griselda killed the boy without further ado with a shot between the eyes.
That gave them a name, even as a quinceanera she was a terrifying woman. The most violent men wanted her. Griselda Blanco led the wild life of a lawless and precocious pin-up girl. Later, however, her nickname was “potato”. She was short and got downright fat as she got older. A round head was enthroned on the thick neck. But her appetite for men was almost as great as her propensity for violence.
Amount of cocaine trafficking
She emigrated to the United States with her first husband, where she rose to the highest levels in the drug trade. “El Tiempo” wrote that Pablo Escobar had been an apprentice to her, and later he fought his godmother. In the USA, more than 200 people are said to be responsible, countless of whom the “Reina de la Cocaina” killed itself. The Blanco also went down in the history of global crime. Their innovation: execution from a motorcycle. Their gang was called the “Cocaine Cowboys”. The way of killing is still as popular today as the execution by car bomb, which the Mafia had developed ten years earlier. Her own death was a bow to her favorite murder method: As an old woman, Blanco was struck down by two motorcycle killers in 2012.
At the same time, Blanco had the idea of using penniless young women from the street as drug couriers. Blanco began designing bespoke bras and belts with hidden pockets for the cocaine. In Medellín, she set up a lingerie shop that made drug smuggling underwear made to measure. In a corset and bra, a girl could carry about four kilograms. At times Blanco was considered the richest and most powerful woman in the world.
The men of the “black widow”
Her three husbands paid for their love for Blanco with their lives. Most famous was the death of husband number 2, Alberto Bravo. The couple met in a parking lot. Blanco had discovered that her lover was working against her with Pablo Escobar, and he had diverted millions of dollars from the joint business. When Alberto made fun of her title “The Godmother”, Griselda Blanco got very angry. She is said to have pulled a pistol out of her boot, Bravo could still reach for his Uzi, but by then Blanco had already put a bullet through his head. Even badly injured, she escaped in her car. Six bodyguards were left dead in the parking lot. After her fighters later told her about the death of her husband, the godmother is said to have smiled blissfully. She didn’t stop at children either. When Griselda Blanco tried to get the killer Jesús Castro out of the way in 1982, her men did not meet Castro. In order to be able to show anything to the boss, they shot his two-year-old son without further ado. Blanco was delighted to have humiliated Jesus Castro in this way.
The couple named the son she had with her third husband, Dario Sepulveda, Michael Corleone Blanco. A tribute to the role of Al Pacino in the “The Godfather” films. The handsome Dario Sepulveda is said to have been the great love of the “Black Widow” – another of Blanco’s nicknames. But at the age of five, the child Michael Corleone witnessed his father being shot by the mother’s killers. Sepulveda had previously fallen out with Griselda and kidnapped the boy to Colombia. Although he was a murderer himself, he is said to have not endured that the child lived with the increasingly paranoid mother. During this time Griselda Blanco is said to have continuously smoked a cocaine mixture called “Bazooka”. The stuff is said to have made her even wilder and more suspicious than she was by nature. Instead of going to court to argue for custody, Blanco preferred the quick fix. After the father’s death, the boy came back to her.
The real nature
The DEA arrested Griselda Blanco in 1984 while she was reading the Bible on her bed. She was sentenced to 20 years in prison and deported to Colombia in 2004. There she lived in seclusion from the rest of her fortune. Until eight years later someone wanted to settle an outstanding bill. Of her children, only Michael Corleone survived her. “A lot of people say Blanco had to be violent because she wanted to assert herself as a woman in a man’s world, but I don’t think so,” said Al Singleton, a retired Miami police officer investigating the drug queen, in a documentary. “I know from people close to you that this cruelty was Griselda Blancos’ true nature.”
background:
Documentary: “Cocaine Cowboys – The Real Story Behind Scarface and Miami Vice”
Griselda Blanco: The Cocaine Queen, Henri Dauber