Sofia Vergara has become the latest actress to tackle an on-screen portrayal of Griselda Blanco, the feared matriarch of the cocaine dealers in 1970s Miami. But who is Griselda Blanco – and how did she become one of the most vicious and mythologized kingpins in all of the drug cartel's history?
Griselda was born in 1943 and at the age of three moved to Medellin, Colombia with her mother where she soon began a life of crime; reports allege that by the age of 11 she had already been accused of kidnapping, random and gun violence. She became involved in the drug trade between South America, Miami and New York, and at the age of 21 – with her husband Carlos Trujillo and their three children – she illegally moved to New York City, where she began her own reign, overseeing a drug operation for several years that had pilots flying in mass quantities of the drug directly from Colombia.
She had Carlos killed over a business dispute, and later married Alberto Bravo, her then-business partner, but in 1975 she was indicted on federal drug conspiracy charges and she escaped back to Colombia to avoid conviction, meeting Alberto as she landed back in Medellin where she shot him in the head as she had begun to suspect he was siphoning money from their organization for himself.
By the late 1970s however, Griselda had returned to the United States and set up her business in Miami, where her empire began to expand quickly.
There are few pictures of Griselda outside of her mugshots, but one, taken in what appears to be the early 1980s, shows her as a woman with a bold sense of style who wasn't afraid to stand out, wearing a red fedora and black and white striped dress.
Shows like Miami Vice and movies such as Scarface glorified the city and it's drug-fuelled reputation, but by the early-1980s Griselda was the face of the horrifying truth of the city, as she stood accused of ordering at least 250 killings – including the death of rival dealers to ensure she had a chokehold on the city and the murder of a two-year-old simply to "upset the father"– and she had earned the nickname 'Black Widow' for reportedly killing off husbands (her third husband, Darío Sepúlveda and the father of her youngest son, was killed over a custody dispute).
"Griselda loved killings. Bodies lined the streets of Miami as a result of her feuds. She gathered around her a group of henchmen known as the Pistoleros. Initiation into the group was earned by killing someone and cutting off a body part as proof of the deed. It is said that one of the Pistoleros assassinated a rival by riding up to him on a motorcycle and shooting him point-blank," the Drug Enforcement Agency wrote in 1993 in an internal magazine.
“She not only killed rivals and wayward lovers, but used murder as a means of canceling debts she didn’t want to pay. A particularly bloody massacre that took place in July 1979 in a Miami shopping center became known as the Dadeland Massacre.”
Those in the cartels knew her as La Madrina (the Godmother), and it was reported she had a German Shepherd named Hitler, but although it was said she thrived on her reign of terror, threats against her own life – her three eldest sons had all been murdered – soon saw her moving to California in 1984 where she lived with her son Michael and her mother Anna.
And it was here that after years of searching Drug Enforcement Administration Special Agent Bob Palambo finally caught her.
"Hola, Griselda. We finally meet," he reportedly said before kissing her on the cheek as he handcuffed her, fulfilling a promise he had long made to his colleagues.
“She was pretty tough and standoffish, a typical Colombian move I would say, nonchalant, not really showing any real emotion, but when we put her in the car, I was in the backseat with her, and the other agent was driving. We drove up to Los Angeles, and when we got close to the courthouse is when she became visibly shaken,” Palombo once recalled.
Griselda pled guilty for a 20-year sentence in a low-security prison for female offenders but she continued to run her drug operation from inside, until 1994 when her most trusted advisor Jorge “Rivi” Ayala turned against her.
She struck another deal in 1997, pleading guilty to three second-degree murder charges and due to scandal within the case by 2004 she had been released and deported back to Medellin – where it was expected she would soon be murdered herself by scorned former business partners or rivals.
However, in 2007 pictures emerged of Griselda at an airport, looking a world away from her heyday but safe and sound.
"She has tons of money squirreled away in different bank accounts that were never recovered,” Palambo told Maxim in 2008, "and no one is going out of their way to look for her, because 20 years have passed since she last made any real enemies."
Five years later, however, her actions caught up to her as she was murdered, as she exited a butcher's shop in Medellin with her daughter-in-law, via a drive-by motorcycle shooting… the same style she herself had been credited with introducing to Miami all those decades before.
Griselda is streaming on Netflix now