The underworld is full of shameless braggarts, but when Griselda Blanco claimed she was ‘the baddest b**** to ever take a breath of life’, she, at least, couldn’t be accused of exaggerating.
She was just 11 when she killed her first victim, another child, and she never looked back, earning a dire reputation as the most bloodthirsty drug lord — male or female — in history.
The Colombian ‘queenpin’ went from slum-bred poverty to carve out an empire that stretched from her country’s cocaine capital of Medellin to Miami and New York. The matronly mother of four was linked to some 250 murders.
Her favourite possessions included a bone-china tea set that once belonged to the Queen and an altogether less regal gold-plated, emerald-studded submachinegun.
Griselda Blanco was a barely 5ft tall Colombian cocaine ‘queenpin’ linked to 250 murders with an empire stretching from Medellin to Miami and New York
Dubbed the ‘Godmother of Cocaine’ and the ‘Black Widow’ (she killed her three husbands), the debauched, flashy and utterly brutal billionaire murdered without compunction — at least when she wasn’t holding bisexual orgies, forcing men and women to have sex at gunpoint, and helping to inspire the hit TV series Miami Vice.
Now, eight years after her enemies gunned her down while she was out shopping, her story is to be made into a new feature film starring Jennifer Lopez.
The actress and singer, who may also direct The Godmother and who recently played a New York stripper who robs her rich Wall Street clients in Hustlers, says she’s been ‘forever fascinated’ by the story of the ‘notorious, ambitious, conniving, chilling’ Blanco.
Hustlers, similarly based on a true story, was hailed as a lurid tribute to female empowerment and Blanco, barely 5ft tall, was also a woman in a man’s world.
Griselda was a sociopathic monster who, according to one of her prosecutors, had people murdered ‘at the drop of a hat’
However, barring a major rewriting of history, it would be hard to imagine viewers wanting to root for the Black Widow. For Griselda maintained her place at the top with ruthless efficiency and devilish ingenuity.
She was the first to put hitmen on the back of motorcycles so that they could spray their victims with bullets and easily flee — a tactic copied by criminals across the world.
She was also the first to realise that women made better drug mules than men, as police were less likely to stop them, creating her own range of multi-pocketed lingerie so women could hide huge amounts of cocaine on smuggling runs.
A sociopathic monster who — according to one of her prosecutors — had people murdered ‘at the drop of a hat’, she ordered her band of hired assassins, a particularly vicious gang known as Los Pistoleros, never to kill anyone without taking a body part such as a finger or ear as a trophy.
‘She would kill anybody who displeased her — because of a debt, because they screwed up on a shipment, or she didn’t like the way they looked at her,’ said Assistant U.S. Attorney Stephen Schlessinger.
Admittedly, she had a tough start in life. Born in a Colombian shanty town in 1943, she was raised in a Medellin slum by her mother, an alcoholic prostitute who beat her savagely.
The country was racked by a brutal civil war, and Blanco and other children would entertain themselves digging holes to bury the dead.
Jennifer Lopez will play Griselda in an up-coming Hollywood biopic The Godmother and possible direct the feature film as well
She became a pickpocket and a killer when, aged just 11, she helped kidnap a ten-year-old boy from a wealthy family.
When they didn’t pay the ransom, she shot him dead.
A year later she became a prostitute and soon met her first husband, a petty forger named Carlos Trujillo. They had three sons but later divorced, the Black Widow having him murdered over a business dispute.
Her second husband, Alberto Bravo, was a cocaine dealer and in the late 1960s, they moved (illegally) to Queens, New York, where they set up a smuggling business under cover of Bravo’s clothing import company.
The business manufactured the special range of drug mule lingerie she devised — corsets, bras and knickers fitted with dozens of pockets that allowed a woman to carry as much as 7lb of cocaine in a single corset.
Able to undercut the Italian Mafia thanks to their connections with Colombia, one of the world’s main sources of cocaine, they soon became multi-millionaires when they started flying huge consignments into the U.S. in their own planes, employing some 1,500 dealers to sell it.
Blanco revelled in her new life as a drugs baron. She lapped up Hollywood gangster films, especially The Godfather, which inspired her to dub herself The Godmother and call her fourth child Michael Corleone after the mobster played by Al Pacino.
Back then, cocaine was rare and expensive — largely the preserve of the rich, including film stars and sportsmen. But those ‘privileged’ users also included Griselda herself, who became hooked on ‘basuco’, a highly-addictive raw form of smokeable cocaine.
It made her so paranoid that she kept a private jet, fuelled and crewed, on continual standby in case she needed to make a quick getaway. In 1975, it actually proved useful when she got a whiff that U.S. investigators were preparing to arrest her.
Fleeing to Colombia, the 32-year-old Black Widow claimed another mate. Suspecting that Alberto Bravo was cheating on her and stealing millions from their business, she summoned him to a meeting in a car park.
Pulling out a pistol tucked into her ostrich-skin boot, she shot him dead — but not before he’d hit her in the stomach with a burst of fire from his Uzi submachinegun.
She survived and in one version of the story (and with Griselda, there are always several), she grabbed his gun and proceeded to mow down his six bodyguards.
Griselda married third husband Dario Sepulveda in 1978, a killer with whom she had her youngest child, Michael Corleone Blanco. Pictured: Griselda with her son Michael Blanco
By 1978, she married third husband Dario Sepulveda, a killer with whom she had her youngest child, Michael Corleone Blanco. They moved to Miami — Griselda escaping detection because her face had been so ravaged by cocaine that she was unrecognisable from old photos.
Miami was awash with drugs money but in the grip of a vicious narcotics war in which Griselda — who was played by Catherine Zeta-Jones in a 2018 made-for-TV film, Cocaine Godmother — triumphed thanks to her unmatched capacity for violence.
Police armed with nothing more than revolvers found themselves facing Griselda’s thugs armed with an arsenal of assault rifles and machine guns, and no qualms about spraying bullets everywhere.
In her first outrage, in 1979, she had her hitmen drive an armoured, gun-filled van with the words ‘Happy Time Complete Party Supply’ on the sides to a local shopping mall where they indiscriminately opened fire with machine guns on a store. Two rival gangsters were killed and four innocent bystanders injured.
Police called the bullet-spraying killers ‘Cocaine Cowboys’.
Miami rapidly became the most violent city in the U.S., with so many people dying that the coroner’s office had to rent a refrigerated truck from Burger King so that they had enough space for all the bodies.
Griselda’s empire was making $80 million a month smuggling 3,400lb of cocaine for the Medellin cartel of her old friend Pablo Escobar at its height in the 1980s
Griselda did some of the killings herself, nicknaming herself ‘La Compasiva’ (The Compassionate One) after she accepted the desperate pleas of a victim not to slice him up with a machete but to shoot him instead.
Yet ‘compassionate’ couldn’t have been a less appropriate moniker for a sadistic, homicidal maniac who was able to murder virtually anyone on a whim.
Those unfortunate enough to be with a target when her gunmen arrived were killed, including children as young as four.
She was also ferociously jealous, and had eight strippers murdered when she suspected them of sleeping with her husband. When one of her boys was dumped by a girlfriend, she had the girl’s father killed.
None of this distracted her from building up an empire, which, at its height in the 1980s, was making $80 million a month smuggling 3,400lb of cocaine for the Medellin cartel of Griselda’s old friend Pablo Escobar. And she spent it with relish.
Flamboyant and self-indulgent, the luxury-loving Griselda had a fleet of expensive cars and wore jewellery that had once belonged to Argentine actress and first lady Eva Peron.
By the time she was released from prison in 2004, two of her sons had been killed by rivals in Colombia, and Griselda was deported there as an illegal U. S. immigrant. Pictured: Griselda with her son Michael
She was openly bisexual and held cocaine-fuelled lesbian and bisexual orgies in a mirrored room at her opulent Miami mansion where she lived with a German Shepherd she named Hitler.
Visiting cocaine criminals would rub a bronze bust of her head at the mansion entrance for luck.
By 1983 Sepulveda left her, returning to Colombia and kidnapping their son Michael. Needless to say, she had Husband No 3 assassinated, the gunmen shooting him in his car as Michael sat next to him.
A year later, in 1984, with a $4 million bounty on her head, she fled to California where she laid low in a modest suburban bungalow.
Although she was an expert at disguise, federal agents finally found her there, arresting her in 1985 as she sat in bed reading a Bible. Her family insisted she’d become a Born Again Christian.
She was tried for only three murders and spent more than a decade behind bars, still managing to run her business through her children.
By the time she was released in 2004, two of her sons had been killed by rivals in Colombia, and Griselda was deported there as an illegal U. S. immigrant.
Officials expected her enemies to kill her within days but astonishingly she survived for eight years, living without bodyguards in a quiet Medellin suburb.
In September 2012, she was leaving a local butcher’s when a middle-aged man got off a motorbike and shot her twice in the head before calmly leaving.
As she lay dying, her niece put a Bible in her hands.
Some have tried to make excuses for Blanco, (and perhaps Jennifer Lopez will, too), saying she was a victim of her circumstances or that she was trying to prove herself in Colombia’s notoriously macho underworld. And Hollywood has a poor track record when it comes to glamorising violent criminals.
But if anyone doesn’t deserve such a makeover, it’s the Black Widow.