September 5, 2012
by The Atomic Yeti
Griselda Blanco, known as the “godmother of cocaine” among those in the narcotics trade, was fatally shot by an assassin on a motorcycle outside a butcher shop in Medellín, Colombia yesterday. Blanco was 69 years old.
Blanco was born in a slum on the outskirts of the northern Colombian city of Cartagena. According to Time, she began her string of criminal activity at the age of 11, when she kidnapped and murdered the son of a wealthy family. By 14, she was picking pockets and “turning tricks”.
After getting her start in cocaine trafficking in New York, Blanco became one of the key players in Miami’s booming cocaine trade in the 1970s and early 1980s.
In an industry that is predominately run by male figures, Blanco had a reputation as a cunning yet ferocious leader. Many credit her as the creator of some of the most ruthless, ingenious tactics in the drug trade — from using lingerie shops to smuggle cocaine in secret compartments, to the highly efficient motorcycle assassination. “She mesmerized people,” Bob Palombo, a former DEA agent who helped bring her down, told the Miami Herald. “She could woo you with her acumen and make you a loyal follower.”
Blanco was married — and widowed — three times, but was also was rumored to have killed all of her previous spouses. She even named one of her sons “Michael Corleone” to give credence to her image as a drug kingpin.
It took a ten year investigation, but Blanco was finally arrested in 1985 in Irvine, California. By the time Blanco was captured, she was moving around 300 kilograms of cocaine a month and the DEA considered her in the same class of criminals as notorious drug lords Pablo Escobar and Jorge Ochoa.
Blanco was staring at the possibility of a life sentence, maybe even the death penalty. She spent the next 13 years in federal prison on drug charges, after which she was sent to Florida where she was charged for murder.
But Blanco caught a lucky break. She was only convicted on three counts of murder (the DEA suspected that she was involved in over 40), but the Miami-Dade District Attorney’s office became embroiled in a scandal involving three secretaries in the office and one of Blanco’s top lieutenants. So instead of handing her a death sentence, the prosecutor handed in his resignation, and Blanco cut a deal to serve three concurrent 20 year sentences. After serving her sentence she was deported back to Colombia in 2004 where she spent the rest of her days.
“It’s some kind of poetic justice that she met an end that she delivered to so many others,” professor Bruce Bagley, the head of the University of Miami’s department of international studies, told the Guardian. After pioneering so many tactics in the drug trade, it was only fitting that she die at the hands of her own — the motorcycle drive-by killing.
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