Griselda Blanco: The Dark History of Cocaine’s Queenpin
Before there was Pablo Escobar, there was Griselda Blanco, a woman who left the slums of Colombia to become a billionaire boss of the cocaine trade. If there's one thing Griselda knew, however, it's that the high couldn't last forever.
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SOURCES
Griselda Blanco: So Long and Thanks for All the Cocaine (vice.com)
Griselda Blanco: Escaping The Electric Chair - CBS Miami (cbsnews.com)
The True Story Behind Cocaine Godmother Griselda Blanco | Miami New Times
https://www.miamiherald.com/latest-news/article1942452.html
Searching For the Godmother of Crime - Maxim
Basuco: The Truth About Colombia’s Coca Paste | BHOPB (bhpalmbeach.com)
Griselda Blanco: Biography, Drug Trafficker, Godmother of Cocaine
Special Reports - Do The Math - Why The Illegal Business Is Thriving | Drug Wars | FRONTLINE | PBS
How Much Does Cocaine Cost in the US (businessinsider.com)
The Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) 1980-1985
[Deaths by homicide in Medellin, 1980-2007] - PubMed (nih.gov)
'Godmother of cocaine' shot dead in Colombia | Drugs trade | The Guardian
Griselda Blanco: The Cocaine Kingpin Who Killed All Her Husbands (vice.com)
The Black Widow: The Life and Crimes of Griselda Blanco, America’s First Billionaire Drug Smuggler by Hugo Clark
Cocaine Cowboys 1 (2006) and Cocaine Cowboys 2 (2008), Billy Corben
TRANSCRIPT
Monday, September 3, 2012.
It’s a beautiful day in Medellin, Colombia. 70 degrees f and sunny, a light breeze. The streets are busy, loud with the rumble of cars and motorbikes.
We’re in the center of the city, a nondescript neighborhood with a mix of residential and retail with street vendors setting up on the sidewalks. At the corner is a butcher shop, and in that butcher shop is a woman. Short, heavyset, late sixties—she makes small talk with the butcher while he wraps her cuts. The usual order. The usual price.
She pays and takes her purchases toward the door.
Outside, her pregnant daughter-in-law waits for her in the car. They’ll make the short drive back to El Poblado, also known as Las Manzanas de Oro or the Golden Apples, the ritzy enclave generations of wealthy Colombians have called home.
The old woman steps out into the sunshine. As she does a man hops off a motorbike and walks calmly toward her. He has a message for her, but whether or not he says anything, we don’t know. The message is what he’s fiddling with in his right hand. He raises a pistol and fires two shots into the woman’s head.
She collapses into the street, and he walks back to his bike and disappears into traffic.
The woman’s daughter-in-law rushes to her side, but there’s nothing to do. She was dead when she hit the pavement. The young woman reaches into the old woman’s coat and pulls out a worn leather Bible. She lays it on her chest and folds her hands across it. She doesn’t open it to Matthew 26:52, but it would be appropriate if she did.
To the untrained eye, it looks like someone's grandma just got murdered in broad daylight. But everyone around watching the scene knows better. They know who this woman is. A woman who was responsible for countless deaths in Columbia and America. Who maybe had ordered the death of someone they knew. The woman is La Madrina, the Cocaine Godmother, the Black Widow, Griselda Blanco Restrepo.
Listener discretion is advised
Welcome to heart starts pounding, a podcast of horrors, hauntings and mysteries. I’m your host, Kaelyn Moore.
Today’s episode fits into the horror category pretty perfectly. A real life horror. I want to run you through the life of one of the most terrifying women I’ve ever read about. At times, you may feel sympathetic for her, you might even feel bad for her. I mean, after all, Jennifer Lopez has wanted to play her in a movie since forever, and Sofia Vergara is playing her in a new Netflix show that comes out tomorrow. There’s a reason two very beautiful women want to play her. She’s complicated. At times, she sounds cool, even, dare I say, girlboss.
And this was in large part because Griselda was an anomaly. A woman in an overwhelmingly male dominated field. A boss of bosses. Cocaine trafficking was an industry where women were either low level mules or decorations, but Griselda was respected, feared—well mostly feared.
But I’m here to remind you she caused a lot of pain to a lot of people, and if you were a civilian in Columbia during her reign, she was definitely not cool.
If you’re listening to the Ad supported version of this show, thank you so much. Our sponsors make the show possible. And if you’re listening on patreon ad-free. You make it possible as well. This is one of the last chances to sign up for Patreon at the reduced rate and lock in your $3 membership. We’re raising the tier for new subscribers to $5 starting Feb 1, but if you’re in before then, you’ll stay at $3. Also, we’re adding another tier that’s going to include a new, after show called Footnotes, where I talk with my producer about the episode, share more research and interesting tidbits, chat theories. He did most of the research for this episode because there was a LOT that had to go into it, and I’m really excited to talk to him about it more.
Ok, we’re going to take a quick break, and when we get back, we’re going to dive into the life of Griselda Blanco Restreppo.
To understand who Griselda Blanco was requires two things: One is knowing the Colombia she grew up in. Two, is understanding the long-term effects of smoking what’s leftover on the bottom of cocaine barrels.
Let’s start with one.
Griselda was born on February 15, 1943 in Santa Marta, Colombia—a small town on the country’s Caribbean coast. Sometime in the first several years of her life she and her mother moved to Medellin, the second largest city and one that would become famous for all of the wrong reasons.
This was an especially tumultuous time in Colombia’s history which is saying something considering they had eight civil wars in the 20th century alone.
It was a period known as La Violencia, the Violence. Oligarchs owned all the land and resources, and the poor had NOTHING, I mean nothing. The Oligarchs stayed in power through violence and public executions. At the same time, the poor communists were trying to starts a violent revolution.
There was a glimmer of hope in 1948 that Jorge Gaitan—a socialist/communist candidate for president who was capable of uniting the working class but wanted peace versus violent uprising, might at some point be elected. Instead, he was murdered on the street by a lone gunman
La Violencia was a time where death squads from rival factions tortured and murdered their way through the cities and the countryside. It’s estimated more than 200,000 people were killed during these years—200,000 in a country of under 12 million. That would be equivalent to 200,000 deaths just in the LA area today.
And one of the most dangerous, desperate places during that time was the Medellin neighborhood where Griselda Blanco was raised.
Griselda’s mother was a sex worker and a severe alcoholic. From what we know Griselda was routinely abused. Her childhood memories must have been less than pleasant. The children of these slums would dig holes during the afternoon to bury the bodies they’d find the next morning. For Fun. there weren't like, public parks to go play in.
And the Violence was heavy and public. It was meant to strike fear into the hearts of opponents. It was the execution of an entire family in front of a father, children in front of parents. Public beatings of women. The Colombian necktie came from this era—a form of execution where the victim’s tongue is pulled through a slit in their throat and left dangling.
These are terrible things to even talk about, but they’re important to understand, if we’re going to talk about a woman who was raised in this environment.
At the age of 11, Griselda joined a gang of youths in her neighborhood. She was a petty thief—a pickpocket—she was a master at deceiving you with her big eyes and sweet smile, only to take the cash right out of your pocket without you noticing. It was an effective way to make some money, which her family needed. But this woke something up in her. An unquenchable thirst and It wasn’t long before Griselda started escalating her schemes.
One day, She and her friends came up with a plan—or maybe just mimicked a plan of the adults around them. Early one evening they left their neighborhood and headed into El Poblado, the rich area where Griselda would reside in her final years. Their target was the 10-year old son of a wealthy family.
They would kidnap and ransom him. Get the family to pay them more than they’d make in a year of picking pockets. Rinse, wash and repeat. Getting the boy shouldn’t be that hard considering they were kids themselves, and sure enough they did. They lured him over and took him back to their side of the tracks where they notified his family he’d been taken and the amount of the ransom.
But for some reason, the family didn’t pay. Did they know their son had been taken by kids and so didn’t take it seriously? Did they think if they paid, their son would be killed anyway? We don’t know. But the plan had failed. The gang could have released the boy and gone back to picking pockets, but instead someone handed 11-year old Griselda a gun.
She put the barrel to the young boy’s head and pulled the trigger.
At 11-years old she took her first life on the streets of Medellin. 58 years later she would be shot dead on those same streets.
She began and ended her criminal career in the span of a few blocks, but in the years between, well…a lot happened.
At 14, Griselda took up her mother’s trade. She was, according to most reports, both criminal and sex worker, though she denies the latter. Regardless, it was in a Medellin brothel at the age of 18 or 19 where she met her first husband, Carlos Trujilla. Carlos led a group of small-time criminals in Medellin—car thefts, robberies, kidnappings. Griselda became a part of the crew and got her first taste of organized crime. It was low level, but it quenched a small piece of that insatiable thirst she had. Carlos was a businessman, there was a system to his dealings. So long to pickpocketing and failed ransom jobs. Griselda now knew she could make a life out of this.
Over the next several years, their operation grew, as did their family—they had three sons together. Dixon, Uber and Osvaldo. But this wasn’t an entirely happy criminal family unit—by the end of the 1960s, the marriage had fallen apart and Carlos was dead. As with many things in Griselda’s life there are different stories around his death—he was sick and didn’t get better, he was gunned down by a rival crew because he’d gotten too powerful, or, as is sometimes claimed, his murder was ordered by his wife who wanted more power for herself. Regardless, he was out of the picture and Griselda and the boys were on their own.
To this point, Griselda’s criminal career had been confined to Medellin, but her next husband would broaden her horizons. That next husband was Alberto Bravo. Bravo ran a more sophisticated criminal organization, and when Griselda met him she had stars in her eyes. Carlos was small potatoes, compared to Alberto, who was getting into a new burgeoning business. This was the early 1970s, the beginning of the flood of cocaine into the United States from Colombia.
This was before Pablo Escobar who started his operation in 1976. It was before the US had formed the DEA or Drug Enforcement Administration, and it was long before the war on drugs and the crack epidemic.
This was an era where the new York times was referring to cocaine as the “champagne of drugs” and it was—an expensive party drug for the elite. Not considered especially dangerous to use recreationally and if the backend profit from its sale hadn’t financed governments the US considered hostile at the time, well, who knows.
What’s important for our story is that Alberto Bravo introduced Griselda Blanco to cocaine trafficking, the most lucrative business she had ever partaken in. Pickpocketing was penny stocks. Cocaine was Apple. Cocaine was designer bags, a bigger house for her kids, the nicest car in her neighborhood. But just like everything Griselda ever touched, the business lost it’s excitement, quickly. The generational wealth she was making wasn’t enough, she wanted more. Not satisfied by the profit potential as distributors in Colombia, they moved to New York and began personally smuggling cocaine into the city around 1972.
Picture with me, an airport in the 1970’s. I hardly remember it, but my mother who has worked at an airport for 40 years has told me stories about pre 9-11 flying. There’s no drug dogs, there’s no scanners. People who don’t even have a flight can just walk right up to the gate! It’s a lawless place, and to Griselda, this means if you can hide it, you can have it. And Griselda was an innovator at hiding.
She’d clop clop through airports in her designer suits with her custom made heels.
She had taken cocaine to a cobbler in Medellin and had him build the shoes around the product. When she landed in New York, she’d go to her destination, kick off her heels and smash them on the ground until they came apart. This was money like she had never seen before. And it was EASY.
The cost to produce a kilo of cocaine in Columbia was somewhere between $500 and $1500. In the US, that same kilo could be worth $50,000.
for a ticket price of hundreds of dollars and an initial investment of a few thousand dollars, you could make hundreds of thousands in a few days. That’s not inflation adjusted by the way. In today’s money, multiply by 7.
After a few months of smuggling cocaine into New York, Alberto and Griselda were millionaires. But this felt small time to Griselda, and she never thought small time. given the profit potential she didn’t have to. She and Alberto were gaining market share from the Italian crime families who found it difficult to compete with Colombians who controlled 80% of the supply chain at the source. And she needed to expand operations to keep up with demand. So Griselda got to work.
She set up garment shops to produce womens-wear designs specifically for smuggling—this went beyond just sewing cocaine into the lining of jackets which was popular at the time. She was taking advantage of being a woman—creating underwear where cocaine could go into the seams, knowing airport security would be hesitant at the time to go digging around in a woman’s crevices.
Griselda didn’t know it, but This is a kind of nostalgic golden era of cocaine trafficking. There was almost unlimited money with little violence. But the high can’t last forever, and Griselda knew that. She had a sixth sense for violence, being raised in it her entire life. She knew it was coming. And she was going to be ready.
By this point Griselda and Alberto were making millions every week from 1972 to 1975. It’s estimated their net worth was as high as $500 million. But, more money, more problems. Alberto was spending most of his time in Colombia working with suppliers, and the couple wasn’t getting along. Disputes over spending, disputes over how to run the business. Alberto was the one who introduced his wife to the business, but her appetite and ambition was becoming too much for him. He saw it start to turn her into something else. She had recently seen the Godfather, you know, the american movie about the Corleone family? Well she really saw something of herself reflected back in Marlon Brando’s portrayal of a mafia boss. Intimidating, powerful, self made from tragedy. She decided to rename herself The Godmother as an homage to the film.
But her reign as the Godmother in New York wouldnt be for long. in April of 1975 a long running US federal investigation entitled Operation Banshee filed indictments against the cocaine ring including Griselda and Alberto who were both named in the suit.
And It's during this time that Alberto stops returning Griselda’s calls.
Griselda is NOT happy so she flies down to Medellin with her entourage to confront her husband. As the story goes, it’s late at night when Griselda and company arrive outside the club where Alberto and his crew have been enjoying the evening. He comes outside to meet his wife, but the meeting isn’t amicable. The two immediately get into a shouting match in the parking lot with their posses standing by. They move closer, and as they do Griselda draws a concealed pistol. Alberto reaches for his own gun, but it’s too late. He fires, but Griselda has already shot him in the face. By the time he hits the pavement he’s dead. Griselda is hit in the stomach. Her men drag her into the car and get her to a hospital. She has to go under, but she survives, and now The power couple is just her.
It could have been there in that parking lot, holding her guts in with her own hands, knowing she could never return to new york because of the indictments that she could have called it quits. Could have retired to have a quiet life with her children.
But no, Griselda had Vito Corelone’s blood and premium product flowing through her veins. And the previous highs weren’t going to cut it now. She wanted more, and she was going to get it, this time on a different coastline. the cocaine godmother was heading to Miami.
The Florida coastline is long, and going back through its history as a smuggling route for pirates, it was mostly unguarded. In the 1970s, it was essentially a 1350 mile dock for drugs. The city of Miami before then wasn’t the city we think of today. It didn’t have the skyline, it didn’t have the glitz and the glamor, it didn’t have the models and the champagne—it got those after it got cocaine. Right around the time Griselda got there
This was the place Griselda chose to make her home when she returned to the United States—still a wanted woman from her New York indictment. in her palatial home, visitors would rub the bronze bust she’d had made of herself, for luck and as a sign of respect. You could call this the end of the golden era of drug trafficking, you know, the nostalgic part I described earlier? And that is in no small part because of Griselda Blanco.
Remember, I said there was a second thing to know about Griselda—the long term effects of smoking the bottom of a cocaine barrel. That wasn’t a joke. When cocaine is processed, a layer of scum is left on the bottom of the barrels. It’s known as basuco which basically means trash coke. It’s a paste, it’s highly toxic, but also gives a certain kind of high, different and more intense than cocaine. It’s rolled and smoked or more often smoked from a pvc pipe just in case you felt the need for more harmful chemicals. And it’s this type of cocaine that Griselda was addicted to. Side effects include anxiety and extreme paranoia. She was becoming something that less Godfather, and more Scarface.
At this time, it was generally agreed it was good business to keep body counts down, and only use violence when absolutely necessary.
But the drug trade was changing. Billions of dollars were at stake now which attracted more and more competition from gangs and criminal organizations and more and more attention from the public and law enforcement. A small, informal network of often backwoods and homegrown operations, was becoming a multinational industry.
This growth makes Griselda the first female drug billionaire. With a B. But, along with copious amounts of trash cocaine, also makes her a paranoid, volatile, loose canon who decides that the best solution to most of her problems is murder. And not a quiet sleep with the fishes kind of murder. A loud, motorbike with an uzi in broad daylight kind of murder. According to authorities at the time, “If you took from drugs from Griselda Blanco and didn’t pay, she would have you killed. If she took drugs from you and didn’t want to pay, she would have you killed.” It was this attitude that ushered in the next era of the business.
It's July 11th, 1979. Just before 2:30pm. This is the moment many people point to as the beginning of the Cocaine Cowboy era—the wild, violent, lawless period that took over the front pages of papers across America well into the 1980s.
It’s a Wednesday. Summer. School is out, families are out, the parking lot of the Dadeland Mall in South Miami is full. Two men walk into the Crown Liquor’s shop, just outside the mall. Shortly after they enter, two other men exit a van outside the store and make their way to the door. Once inside, they open fire, wildly, gunning down the two men who had entered before them and wounding two of the store’s employees. Then they walk out, hop in the van and leave, and critically, abandon the van at the edge of the parking lot.
The two men inside the store, German Jimenez Panesso and his bodyguard, Juan Carlos Hernandez, were involved in the drug trade, and it’s believed Griselda ordered their assassination. These weren’t the first bullet riddled bodies that had been found that year—in fact it was already the bloodiest start to a year in south florida history—but it was the first shootout in public and it was what the police found in the van that worried them most. And it was a sign of what was to come for the next decade.
The van had ‘Happy Time Complete Party Supply’ printed on the side, but police described it as a war wagon. The panels were thick metal, bulletproof. There were gun ports on the side that could be opened for driveby fire, and inside was an enormous weapons cache, include semi-automatic rifles and shotguns. This was at a time when police on the street were still carrying six shooter revolvers like they were ready for a showdown at the OK Coral, they were not prepared for this level of violence.
It was a wakeup call, but it wouldn’t really matter. Over the next several years, the body count would only grow, in Miami and in Medellin.
Miami hit a high of 621 murders in a single year. In 1981 it was the most dangerous city in America by a mile with a murder rate something like 40% higher than Chicago today.
25% of the bodies in the morgue were riddled with bullet holes from automatic weapons. And there were long stretches of time where the bodies wouldn’t even fit in the morgue. The city had to rent refrigerated trucks from a fast food franchise.
During this time it’s thought Griselda was responsible directly or indirectly for the murder of 250 or more people in Miami. That’s around 40% of all murders in the area.
The only thing that grew faster than the body count was Griselda’s wealth.
At her peak, she employed more than 1500 people and brought in tens of millions of dollars a week.
But all the money and power turned her into a sort of parody of a drug kingpin. Like I said, She was Scarface before Scarface. She wanted to be that. According to those closest to her, by which I mean, her hitmen, since those were the only people around her who survived her reign of terror—she liked the violence. She liked being at war. It was the devil she knew.
She remarried after murdering her second husband and had a fourth son—what do you think she named him? she named her son Michael Corleone, after the youngest son in her favorite movie. I told you, she loved the Godfather.
And she was really losing it at this point. She had a german shepherd named Hitler. She ordered a hit on a man arriving at the Miami airport but insisted it be carried out with a bayonet inside the terminal. she once murdered eight strippers because she thought her latest husband had slept with them.
And what happened to that husband? Well, the relationship got rocky and they had a custody dispute over Michael Corleone. Her husband thought his son would be better off away from his cocaine paste smoking mother, so he kidnapped him back to Colombia. Griselda hired hit men to find them. They did, and one afternoon, they went up beside the car and gunned the father to death with Michael right there. They took the child and left the father to bleed out in the street.
Of course the Colombian higher ups weren’t thrilled with Griselda’s tactics, at least not on the US side. It was unwanted, chaotic. She would order the execution of whole families, women, children, no survivors—tactics of La Violencia, the era she was born into. She would kill for business, for pleasure, for a perceived slight. One of the most infamous was when she ordered the assassination of one of her former enforcers because he treated Michael Corleone badly. The man left his home one day in a van and unbeknownst to the hitmen, his 2 year old son was in the passenger seat. The hit men pulled up beside him on the street and sprayed the vehicle. They got in a high speed chase, but the man managed to out maneuver them and get to the highway. Only when he did, he realized his boy had been struck and killed. He took the body of the child home and put it in an ice bath and he and his wife sat there all night. When Griselda heard what had happened, she laughed. She said it was perfect—the man had mistreated her son so his son died. I told you, you’re going to remember to not be sympathetic towards her.
It's honestly surprising to me that someone didn’t have her taken out, this level of violence was not working for anyone, not even her own business. It seems they were close several times. Perhaps it was the combination of things that kept her alive so long. Her effectiveness—she was after all moving a lot of product. Her paranoia that made her a difficult target—her employment of some of the best assassins—and the fact that the man in charge of US operations for the Colombians in Florida—a man named Rafa—was a childhood friend. But eventually, she did go too far.
Marta Ochoa was a niece of the Ochoa family—heads of the Medellin Cartel. Griselda owed her something like $1.8 million for a shipment of coke which she in turn owed in Colombia, but she decided, well, if I kill her I can just say hey, I paid her the money, I don’t know what she did with it.
So she did. She had her picked up, murdered and thrown her out of a car on the side of the road.
That brazen act, along with increased heat from federal authorities after the escalating public violence, finally drove Griselda from Miami by the end of 1984. Remember, she’d been a wanted woman for a decade, and the government had been trying to build a case against her much of the time. So did she flee the country? Buy the biggest house El Poblado o and retire at the age of 42? No. She attempted to set up shop in California.
Within a year she was arrested and sentenced to more than 15 years on drug trafficking charges. But the feds never stopped trying to get her for murder. Finally they got their chance. In 1994, she was extradited to Miami after one of her closest hitmen turned against her. She was awaiting trial for 25 or so murder charges that would have put her away for life and then some, but it turns out that same hitman had been having phone sex with the lead government prosecutor’s secretaries. And since he was the state’s key witness—the only one with direct testimony of Griselda ordering all of these murders—the case began to fall apart. Griselda pleaded guilty to 3 murders in exchange for a 10 year sentence. That sentence ended in 2004, after which she was shipped back to Colombia and never heard from again. until her death in Medellin in 2012.
On the day that Griselda was shot point blank, I said that it would have been appropriate to open the bible up to Matthew 26:52. That passage says ‘for all them that take the sword shall perish with the sword.’ Griselda ultimately was killed not very far from where she was raised, slain by the same violence that she had become desensitized to. She died how she lived, and to her, it was all the same. There was no difference between pick pocketing and screwing someone out of a million dollars. No difference between kidnapping a neighborhood kid and a billionaires son. If she could get what she wanted the ends were worth the means, and my last little story about her I think proves that.
It’s 1995. Tribeca, New York. A trendy neighborhood for trendy people with plenty of money. A handsome man in his mid-30s who fits that description leaves his loft to take his dog for a walk. As they head down the sidewalk a group of men approach, casually. They slowly spread out around him as one of them comes up to give the dog a pat on the head.
As they close in, a police car pulls down the street and the men dissolve away. The man and his dog continue on. The man is a 35 year old John F. Kennedy Jr. The four men are Colombians who have been paid by Griselda to kidnap him. They’re to take him out of the country at which point they’ll make contact with the Kennedy family and demand Griselda’s release from prison in exchange for his life. The plan never came to fruition. Soon after the failed attempt, Griselda was transferred to Miami and a more secure facility to face the murder charges that she mostly dodged. Her first criminal scheme was also her last. Kidnapping JFK Jr was to her, no different than kidnapping any rich kid. Griselda may have left Medellin but she never left La Violencia.
This has been heart starts pounding. This episode was written and produced by Kaelyn Moore and Matt brown. Sound design by Peachtree sound. Special thanks to travis, grayson WME, ben jaffe. Want to sign up for our monthly newsletter? You can do so on our website heart starts pounding.com. Have a heart pounding story or case request? You can submit on the website as well. Patreons will be thanked by name in the monthly newsletter, and I’m not kidding, now is seriously the best time to join before the prices go up so come on over, we have fun there! Alright, until next time.