Having branded herself “the baddest bitch to ever take a breath”, Griselda Blanco certainly carved out an intimidating reputation throughout her life. And now her story has been made into a sensational new Netflix drama starring Sofia Vergara.
Despite being barely 5ft tall, the diminutive “La Madrina” was an ambitious, debauched and brutal Colombian cartel boss, who ruled the £1.5billion drug trade in Florida for over three decades. Her lethal blend of charm and savagery helped her navigate between family and business, and she became notorious for her capacity for violence as she made her mark as a woman in a man’s world.
Having committed her first murder at 11, and orchestrated the deaths of her three husbands, 
she claimed to be responsible for hundreds of contract killings in a bloody reign of terror across
the Magic City – the youngest victim being just two years old – and had people murdered simply because she “didn’t like the way they looked at her”. “People were so afraid of her and her reputation preceded her wherever she went – Griselda was worse than any of the men that were involved in [the drug trade],” said former homicide detective Nelson Abreu. Now, as her life is dramatised in Netflix’s new series Griselda – starring Sofia Vergara – we take a look back at her crimes.

The daughter of an alcoholic sex worker, Blanco – who was born in a poverty-stricken neighbourhood 
in Cartagena, Colombia in 1943 – was exposed to an unsavoury lifestyle from an early age. She was 
just 11 when she kidnapped a young boy for ransom, shooting him dead when his wealthy parents didn’t take her threat seriously. This ruthlessness carried her through the years. Some accounts say she became a sex worker and pickpocket at the age of 12, and left home the following year to live with pimp Carlos Trujillo. They married and had three sons by the time she was 21, but when their romance soured over business, the pitiless Blanco had him killed.
She soon married cocaine trafficker Alberto Bravo and the couple moved from Colombia to Queens, New York, in the late 1960s. Husband and wife went into business together, importing drugs and setting up a lucrative smuggling operation from Colombia to the US with the help of her friend, cartel boss Pablo Escobar. Blanco thought that using female couriers would create less suspicion, and her Colombian underwear factory – which served as a legit front for the illegal activities – would add secret compartments into the bras, knickers and corsets so that mules could smuggle the drugs into the US undetected.

Her successful operations established Blanco as a major player in the booming cocaine business of the 1970s and she became known as “La Madrina”, or The Godmother. Partnered with Escobar’s Medellín cartel, Bravo and Blanco had around 1,500 dealers working for them and soon wiped out their Italian rivals. In 1975, she made a quick getaway from America to Colombia on her private plane after learning that she was on the FBI’s radar and was about to be busted by a joint NYPD/DEA sting called Operation Banshee. A few months later, she accused Bravo of double-crossing her and stealing millions from the business, so she shot him with a gun hidden in one of her ostrich-skin boots. He managed to retaliate, with one bullet from his machine gun striking her in 
the stomach before he died. But she survived and his death meant she now took full control of the empire.
Blanco, who had gained a reputation as a Black Widow following the murders of her ex-husbands, stayed in Colombia for three years, where she met robber and killer Darío Sepúlveda. They married in 1978 and had son Michael Corleone Blanco, inspired by Al Pacino’s mobster character in The Godfather. The family moved back to the States, this time settling in Miami. With her features changed due to her 
prolific addiction to basuco – a cocaine paste that has sometimes been known to contain ground-up human bones – she managed to slip past US authorities undetected.
Blanco was back in her element, as she and Sepúlveda dominated the cocaine market in the burgeoning drugs capital. At her peak in the early 1980s, she was smuggling around 3,400lbs of coke 
into America per month, raking in $63million per load. With a reported fortune of $1.5billion, she earned the nickname the “Queen of Cocaine”. 
She lived flamboyantly with her riches, buying a mansion in California and a penthouse in Florida, where she lived with a German Shepherd named Hitler. She wore diamonds once owned by Argentinian First Lady Eva Perón, drank from a fine bone China set used by the Queen, and a gold-plated, emerald-studded sub machine gun was among her prized possessions.
But as their fortunes rose rapidly, so did the body count. Miami became a bloody battleground, as the turf wars between rival drug lords intensified. Blanco’s list of enemies also grew. 
“La Madrina was merciless. She liked to be at war,” her most trusted hitman Jorge “Rivi” Ayala testified in court. “If you did not pay on time, you and your family were eliminated. If she did not want to pay you, you were assassinated. If she perceived that you had slighted her, you were bumped off.” Assistant 
US attorney Stephen Schlessinger added, “She would kill anybody who displeased her – because of a debt, because they screwed up on a shipment, or just because she didn’t like the way they looked at her.”
Blanco became even more callous, with her foot soldiers opening fire in broad daylight, catching innocent bystanders in the crossfire. She even ordered her hired assassins, known as “cocaine cowboys”, to murder child witnesses. At one stage, a refrigerated van had to be hired to deal with all the bodies. There were 75 murders in the first five months of 1980, which rose to 169 by the end of the year. By 1981, Miami was not only the murder capital of America, but the whole world. But as her business went from strength to strength, her marriage took a hit. Blanco ordered eight strippers to be killed because she suspected they had slept with Sepúlveda. He left her with their young son in 1983 and went back to Colombia. It was a decision that would cost him his life – Sepúlveda was executed as he sat in his car next to Michael, and Blanco was reunited with her son.

By 1984, the net began to close in on Blanco. As she lost her grip on the drugs trade, with a £3.5million bounty on her head from a rival gang, she fled to Irvine, California, swapping her mansions for a modest bungalow in a residential area. But, despite being a master of disguise and attempting to lay low, authorities were continuing to search for her.
When FBI agents swooped on her home in 1985, they found the diminutive woman reading the Bible 
in bed. “No, my name is Betty,” she told officers, adding that it must have been a case of mistaken identity. However, DEA lead agent Bob Palombo, who had been hunting her for over ten years, knew they had their woman. He was so thrilled about finding Blanco that he kissed her cheek before arresting her and charging her with conspiring to manufacture, import and distribute cocaine. “She didn’t kiss me – I can only think what she would have liked to do,” he said. Agent Palombo revealed that Blanco, then aged 42, was “nonchalant” about her arrest until they approached the courthouse in New York. “She was shaking and she grabbed my arm and threw up on my shoulder. She knew the proverbial shit had hit the fan,” he said.
In 1986, Blanco was found guilty and sentenced to 15 years. Despite calling herself a born-again Christian in prison, she continued running her drugs empire through her children and alleged crack dealer and lover Charles Crosby. During her sentence, she was charged for three counts of murder by the state of Florida and in 1998, she pleaded guilty to second-degree murder, receiving an additional 20 years to run concurrently to her sentence.

Blanco was released in 2004, at the end of her sentence, and was deported to Colombia. Two of her sons had been killed by rivals in Colombia, including one who was murdered by Escobar. By then in her sixties, she lived a quiet life in Medellín for eight years, but it was only a matter of time before her enemies sought revenge. On 3 September 2012, aged 69, Blanco was shot twice in the head outside a butcher’s shop by a hitman on a motorbike, the same murder method she had pioneered 
in Miami during her reign of terror.“It’s some kind of poetic justice that she met an end that she delivered to so many others,” said professor Bruce Bagley, author of Drug Trafficking In The Americas. “She might have retired to Colombia and wasn’t anything like the kind of player she was in her early days, but she had lingering enemies almost everywhere you looked. What goes around comes around.”
Blanco’s life has previously been portrayed on screen, with Catherine Zeta-Jones playing her in Lifetime’s Cocaine Godmother in 2018, and Jennifer Lopez linked to a Hollywood film. Now, Colombian actress and Modern Family star Sofia Vergara, 51, will be portraying the queenpin in Netflix’s six-part drama series Griselda. “Griselda Blanco was a larger-than-life character whose ruthless but ingenious tactics allowed her to rule a billion-dollar empire years before many of the most notorious male kingpins we know so much about,” she said. “The intention is not to show drug trafficking, it is to show the story. And that was what we tried to do with Griselda – portray the woman within such a horrible business and how it transformed her.”
Former Narcos showrunner Eric Newman, who produced Griselda, said, “There has never been a woman who came close to achieving the power, wealth and respect Griselda did. And no trafficker, woman or man, ever elicited the same level of fear.” He added, “Griselda is a rise-and-fall story like none we have ever seen before. It’s thrilling, emotional, funny, scary and tragic. Griselda is an antihero of the highest order and a series of contradictions at odds with herself.”
Watch Griselda is on Netflix