 The legend of Griselda Blanco was Born on a warm spring day in 1975, when her Learjet touched down at the Bogotá airport after a 2½-hour flight from Miami. A convoy of long black limousines manned by a crew of enforcers met the plane on the tarmac and whisked the 32-year-old over dusty roads toward the Colombian capital. Blanco was back in her native country to meet with her husband and business partner, Alberto Bravo, with whom she’d built a cartel that moved hundreds of kilos of cocaine in the U.S. and employed nearly 1,500 dealers.
Standing barely five feet tall and weighing 165 pounds, with a wide, oval face and cleft chin, Blanco was no drug lord’s fantasy chica, even if her growing reputation with street dealers and law enforcement had earned her the nickname “the Godmother.” She’d returned to Colombia because she was unsatisfied with her relationship with Bravo, and his stewardship of their vast enterprise. Millions in profits had gone missing, and Blanco blamed her husband. So when she and her enforcers pulled into the parking lot of a nightclub outside Bogotá, she tucked a pistol into her ostrich-skin boot. After all, this was Colombia, where cocaine, and the mountains of money that came with it, was stronger than any loyalty, a fact proved by the fresh corpses dumped outside rivals’ doorsteps every morning. Stepping out of her limo, Blanco strode toward Bravo, who was waiting impatiently for her across the lot, backed by his own team of glowering goons. Sensing his wife’s rage, Bravo lashed out, accusing her of allowing the “Godmother” talk to go to her head. According to lore, a furious Blanco drew out her pistol and fired several shots point-blank at her husband. He responded by pulling an Uzi out of his waistband. In the melee, six bodyguards were killed. Blanco was struck in the stomach but would ultimately recovered from her wounds. Her husband, shot in the face, was not so lucky.
In that moment, Blanco had eliminated not only her spouse but also one of the most feared players in the Colombian cocaine business. It was a major step in Blanco’s improbable rise from impoverished street urchin to perhaps the wealthiest self-made woman in the world, a cold-blooded crime lord whose trail of bloodshed reads like pulp fiction. And on that day in the dusty Bogotá parking lot, she earned another fearsome nickname: the Black Widow.
* * *For a woman whose crime reign is unprecedented in American history, Griselda Blanco has long been shrouded in mystery. That is starting to change. In 2006, Miami-based director Billy Corben and his production partner, Alfred Spellman, released the acclaimed documentary Cocaine Cowboys, which offered most viewers their first glimpse of the Godmother and helped turn her into an unlikely hero of sorts for the Scarface set. This month they return with a Cocaine Cowboys sequel—Hustlin’ With the Godmother—that should only burnish her legend.
Increasingly, Blanco is taking her place as one of the most mythologized drug lords in history, and certainly the most ruthless. Credit her propensity for violence (she’s suspected of ordering at least 250 killings) and a stature in the cocaine trade that dwarfs even that of Pablo Escobar. Indeed, when Escobar met Blanco in Miami in the late 1970s he was just a lowly car thief from Medellín looking for entrée into the business. Much of her life seems born from the wild imagination of a 15-year-old kid with a Scarface T-shirt: the trail of dead husbands; the son she named Michael Corleone (the Godmother had a serious Godfather fetish); the diamonds she purchased from First Lady of Argentina Eva Peron; the bronze sculpture she commissioned of herself that other drug lords would rub for good luck when visiting her Miami mansion. “Griselda Blanco was the catalyst for recognition by the U.S. government that Miami had a serious problem. That we were really a Dodge City,” according to Miami attorney Sam Burstyn. “She was our John Gotti.”
But the mystery surrounding this remarkable woman persists—about her bloody rise to the summit of the drug trade, about her ability to consistently evade her pursuers, and especially about what happened to the Black Widow after she was deported back to Colombia in 2004. It’s a story whose facts are just beginning to emerge, one that’s stranger than fiction and rife with sex, intrigue, and violence on a scale that defies belief.
* * * Griselda Blanco was born in the impoverished shanty‑towns surrounding Cartagena, Colombia on February 15, 1943. In this ghetto choked with ramshackle huts with corrugated tin roofs, murder was so rampant that kids would amuse themselves by digging holes in the ground to bury the bodies that littered the city’s filthy streets, and would resort to petty crime to make ends meet. Or not so petty: At age 11, Blanco and a ragtag group of children reportedly descended from the hills surrounding Medellín to the well-to-do flatlands, where they kidnapped a 10-year-old boy from a wealthy Colombian family. Secreting the boy back to their hillside slums, Blanco and her cohorts held him hostage as they attempted to shake down his family. Unfortunately for the boy, his family was not forthcoming. The group of children handed Blanco a gun, daring her to shoot him between the eyes. Perhaps, living in an environment so rife with violence, the 11-year-old Blanco was
inured to the idea of bloodshed. Perhaps it was simply her nature. Either way, Blanco put the gun to the young boy’s head and pulled the trigger. He was her first in a long, long line of victims.
According to former DEA agent Bob Palombo, who pursued Blanco for decades—Ahab to Blanco’s White Whale—the future Black Widow was destined for a life of aberrant crime: “I don’t think the fact that she was a female trying to prove something had anything to do with her violent behavior; I just think it was inherent to Griselda Blanco. This goes back to her life, the way she was brought up. She was just a violent person.” By her preteens, Blanco had picked pockets and prostituted herself for cash in the Medellín slums. At age 13 she met Carlos Trujillo, a sometime John and street hustler who specialized in creating false immigration documents and importing illegal immigrants into the United States. Blanco was smitten by Trujillo’s criminal savvy. They soon married and had three children. But by the late 1960s, Blanco had divorced Trujillo and then, in the early 1970s, had him killed over a business dispute. It was an act that would reverberate throughout Blanco’s life. Soon after, she met—then married—yet another hustler, Alberto Bravo. Instead of illegal immigrants, Bravo moved cocaine, and by the early 1970s he’d saved $26,000, an impressive sum in Medellín.
So Bravo and Blanco, like so many before them, decided to pursue the American dream. In Queens, New York, they established a cocaine business that quickly took off as the Big Apple began a decades-long love affair with the drug. In a city where narcotics were controlled by the deep-rooted five families of the Mafia, a pair of Colombians with a direct connection to the source had a leg up. At first Blanco had female couriers hide small amounts of cocaine in their suitcases; by the mid 1970s, her pilots flew in mass quantities of the drug directly from Colombia, bringing her millions of dollars a month. But with a client roster that included movie stars and major athletes, Blanco’s burgeoning organization drew scrutiny: A joint NYPD/DEA investigation dubbed Operation Banshee resulted in the indictment of Blanco and more than 30 of her subordinates on federal drug conspiracy charges in April 1975. At the time it was the biggest cocaine case in history.
Yet when a federal grand jury handed down the indictment, Blanco vanished. “We had her on drug conspiracy charges,” remembers Palombo, who was a central player in Operation Banshee, “but she was nowhere to be found.” Unbeknownst to the Feds, Blanco had slipped out of the country to Colombia—where she killed Bravo in that dramatic gunfight. In the late 1970s, now the undisputed head of her operation, Blanco set up shop in Miami. The timing of her arrival in Miami was fortuitous in another respect: The local cocaine trade was thriving thanks to a network of recently arrived Cuban refugees and a few renegade American players. Miami in the ’70s was a “Virgin City”—the gateway to Latin America and a magnet for the criminal underworld. It was a violent, gaudy universe soon to be glorified in movies like Scarface and television shows like Miami Vice, but Crockett and Tubbs would be little match for the real ne’er-do-wells turning South Florida into their own private playground. Blanco, however, wasn’t satisfied to simply share in the profits of the drug game—she wanted to own it. So in the late 1970s, along with a group of thugs led by her enforcer, Jorge “Rivi” Ayala, she embarked on a killing spree of rival dealers designed to eliminate all competition.
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