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Netflix’s newest hit show starring Sofia Vergara tells the story of Griselda Blanco, a crime boss who ruled the Florida drug trade for over three decades<\/p>\n
[\/et_pb_text][et_pb_image src=”https:\/\/flatplan-plus-content.s3.eu-west-1.amazonaws.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/3\/2024\/01\/Griselda_S1_E3_Native_00_15_59_01R-Medium.jpeg” title_text=”Griselda_S1_E3_(Native)_00_15_59_01R Medium” force_fullwidth=”on” _builder_version=”4.20.4″ _module_preset=”default” custom_margin=”||||false|false” hover_enabled=”0″ global_colors_info=”{}” theme_builder_area=”post_content” sticky_enabled=”0″][\/et_pb_image][et_pb_text module_class=”custom-gallery-caption” _builder_version=”4.20.4″ _module_preset=”default” text_font=”|600|||||||” text_text_color=”#FFFFFF” background_color=”#111111″ text_orientation=”center” custom_margin=”-2.75%||||false|false” custom_padding=”4px|8px|4px|8px|true|true” hover_enabled=”0″ global_colors_info=”{}” theme_builder_area=”post_content” sticky_enabled=”0″]<\/p>\n
Columbian born actress Sofia Vergara said she could relate to some aspects of Griselda’s life as a mother<\/p>\n
[\/et_pb_text][et_pb_text _builder_version=”4.20.4″ _module_preset=”default” hover_enabled=”0″ global_colors_info=”{}” theme_builder_area=”post_content” sticky_enabled=”0″]<\/p>\n
Having branded herself \u201cthe baddest bitch to ever take a breath\u201d, 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 \u201cLa Madrina\u201d was an ambitious, debauched and brutal Colombian cartel boss, who ruled the \u00a31.5billion 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\u2019s world.
Having committed her first murder at 11, and orchestrated the deaths of her three husbands, \u2028she claimed to be responsible for hundreds of contract killings in a bloody reign of terror across\u2028the Magic City \u2013 the youngest victim being just two years old \u2013 and had people murdered simply because she \u201cdidn\u2019t like the way they looked at her\u201d. \u201cPeople were so afraid of her and her reputation preceded her wherever she went \u2013 Griselda was worse than any of the men that were involved in [the drug trade],\u201d said former homicide detective Nelson Abreu. Now, as her life is dramatised in Netflix\u2019s new series Griselda \u2013 starring Sofia Vergara \u2013 we take a look back at her crimes.<\/p>\n
The daughter of an alcoholic sex worker, Blanco \u2013 who was born in a poverty-stricken neighbourhood \u2028in Cartagena, Colombia in 1943 \u2013 was exposed to an unsavoury lifestyle from an early age. She was \u2028just 11 when she kidnapped a young boy for ransom, shooting him dead when his wealthy parents didn\u2019t 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 \u2013 which served as a legit front for the illegal activities \u2013 would add secret compartments into the bras, knickers and corsets so that mules could smuggle the drugs into the US undetected.<\/p>\n
[\/et_pb_text][et_pb_image src=”https:\/\/flatplan-plus-content.s3.eu-west-1.amazonaws.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/3\/2024\/01\/TBAS5177_PNXzlz2f-scaled.jpg” title_text=”Griselda Special Advanced Screening” force_fullwidth=”on” _builder_version=”4.20.4″ _module_preset=”default” custom_margin=”||||false|false” hover_enabled=”0″ global_colors_info=”{}” theme_builder_area=”post_content” sticky_enabled=”0″][\/et_pb_image][et_pb_text module_class=”custom-gallery-caption” _builder_version=”4.20.4″ _module_preset=”default” text_font=”|600|||||||” text_text_color=”#FFFFFF” background_color=”#111111″ text_orientation=”center” custom_margin=”-2.75%||||false|false” custom_padding=”4px|8px|4px|8px|true|true” hover_enabled=”0″ global_colors_info=”{}” theme_builder_area=”post_content” sticky_enabled=”0″]<\/p>\n
Sofia became the highest paid TV actress in seminal comedy Modern Family<\/p>\n
[\/et_pb_text][et_pb_text _builder_version=”4.20.4″ _module_preset=”default” hover_enabled=”0″ global_colors_info=”{}” theme_builder_area=”post_content” sticky_enabled=”0″]<\/p>\n
Her successful operations established Blanco as a major player in the booming cocaine business of the 1970s and she became known as \u201cLa Madrina\u201d, or The Godmother. Partnered with Escobar\u2019s Medell\u00edn 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\u2019s 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 \u2028the 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 Dar\u00edo Sep\u00falveda. They married in 1978 and had son Michael Corleone Blanco, inspired by Al Pacino\u2019s mobster character in The Godfather. The family moved back to the States, this time settling in Miami. With her features changed due to her \u2028prolific addiction to basuco \u2013 a cocaine paste that has sometimes been known to contain ground-up human bones \u2013 she managed to slip past US authorities undetected.
Blanco was back in her element, as she and Sep\u00falveda dominated the cocaine market in the burgeoning drugs capital. At her peak in the early 1980s, she was smuggling around 3,400lbs of coke \u2028into America per month, raking in $63million per load. With a reported fortune of $1.5billion, she earned the nickname the \u201cQueen of Cocaine\u201d. \u2028She 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 Per\u00f3n, 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\u2019s list of enemies also grew. \u2028\u201cLa Madrina was merciless. She liked to be at war,\u201d her most trusted hitman Jorge \u201cRivi\u201d Ayala testified in court. \u201cIf 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.\u201d Assistant \u2028US attorney Stephen Schlessinger added, \u201cShe would kill anybody who displeased her \u2013 because of a debt, because they screwed up on a shipment, or just because she didn\u2019t like the way they looked at her.\u201d
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 \u201ccocaine cowboys\u201d, 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 Sep\u00falveda. He left her with their young son in 1983 and went back to Colombia. It was a decision that would cost him his life \u2013 Sep\u00falveda was executed as he sat in his car next to Michael, and Blanco was reunited with her son.<\/p>\n
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Martin Rodriguez stars as her trusted hitman Jorge ‘Rivi’ Ayala<\/p>\n
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By 1984, the net began to close in on Blanco. As she lost her grip on the drugs trade, with a \u00a33.5million 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 \u2028in bed. \u201cNo, my name is Betty,\u201d 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. \u201cShe didn\u2019t kiss me \u2013 I can only think what she would have liked to do,\u201d he said. Agent Palombo revealed that Blanco, then aged 42, was \u201cnonchalant\u201d about her arrest until they approached the courthouse in New York. \u201cShe was shaking and she grabbed my arm and threw up on my shoulder. She knew the proverbial shit had hit the fan,\u201d 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. <\/p>\n
[\/et_pb_text][et_pb_image src=”https:\/\/flatplan-plus-content.s3.eu-west-1.amazonaws.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/3\/2024\/01\/GRISELDA_104_Unit_02109RC-scaled.jpg” title_text=”GRISELDA_104_Unit_02109RC” force_fullwidth=”on” _builder_version=”4.20.4″ _module_preset=”default” custom_margin=”||||false|false” hover_enabled=”0″ global_colors_info=”{}” theme_builder_area=”post_content” sticky_enabled=”0″][\/et_pb_image][et_pb_text module_class=”custom-gallery-caption” _builder_version=”4.20.4″ _module_preset=”default” text_font=”|600|||||||” text_text_color=”#FFFFFF” background_color=”#111111″ text_orientation=”center” custom_margin=”-2.75%||||false|false” custom_padding=”3px|8px|3px|8px|true|true” hover_enabled=”0″ global_colors_info=”{}” theme_builder_area=”post_content” sticky_enabled=”0″]<\/p>\n
Blanco was released in 2004, at the end of her sentence, and was deported to Colombia<\/p>\n
[\/et_pb_text][et_pb_text _builder_version=”4.20.4″ _module_preset=”default” hover_enabled=”0″ global_colors_info=”{}” theme_builder_area=”post_content” sticky_enabled=”0″]<\/p>\n
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 Medell\u00edn 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\u2019s shop by a hitman on a motorbike, the same murder method she had pioneered \u2028in Miami during her reign of terror.\u201cIt\u2019s some kind of poetic justice that she met an end that she delivered to so many others,\u201d said professor Bruce Bagley, author of Drug Trafficking In The Americas. \u201cShe might have retired to Colombia and wasn\u2019t 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.\u201d
Blanco\u2019s life has previously been portrayed on screen, with Catherine Zeta-Jones playing her in Lifetime\u2019s 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\u2019s six-part drama series Griselda. \u201cGriselda 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,\u201d she said. \u201cThe intention is not to show drug trafficking, it is to show the story. And that was what we tried to do with Griselda \u2013 portray the woman within such a horrible business and how it transformed her.\u201d
Former Narcos showrunner Eric Newman, who produced Griselda, said, \u201cThere 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.\u201d He added, \u201cGriselda is a rise-and-fall story like none we have ever seen before. It\u2019s thrilling, emotional, funny, scary and tragic. Griselda is an antihero of the highest order and a series of contradictions at odds with herself.\u201d
Watch Griselda is on Netflix\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n
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Netflix<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":12,"featured_media":2003,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_et_pb_use_builder":"on","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","_lmt_disableupdate":"","_lmt_disable":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[13],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2000","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-real-life"],"acf":[],"modified_by":"closermag","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/flatplanplus.io\/closer\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2000","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/flatplanplus.io\/closer\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/flatplanplus.io\/closer\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/flatplanplus.io\/closer\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/12"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/flatplanplus.io\/closer\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2000"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/flatplanplus.io\/closer\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2000\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2009,"href":"https:\/\/flatplanplus.io\/closer\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2000\/revisions\/2009"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/flatplanplus.io\/closer\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2003"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/flatplanplus.io\/closer\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2000"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/flatplanplus.io\/closer\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2000"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/flatplanplus.io\/closer\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2000"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}Read 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