'Cocaine godmother' Griselda Blanco gunned down in Colombia
Griselda Blanco, the drug kingpin known for her blood-soaked style of street vengeance during Miami’s “cocaine cowboys” era of the ’70s and ’80s, was shot to death in Medellin by a motorcycle-riding assassin Monday.
Blanco, 69, spent nearly two decades behind bars in the United States for drug trafficking and three murders, including the 1982 slaying of a 2-year-old boy in Miami.
Called the “Godmother of Cocaine,” she was deported in 2004 to Colombia, where she maintained a low profile.
Colombia’s national police confirmed her slaying late Monday. According to Colombian press reports, two gunmen on motorcycles pulled up to Blanco as she walked out of a butcher shop in Medellin, her hometown. One man pumped two bullets into her head, according to El Colombiano newspaper. It was the sort of death many had predicted for her: Blanco has been credited with inventing the idea of the “motorcycle assassin” who rode by victims and sprayed them with bullets.
“It’s surprising to all of us that she had not been killed sooner because she made a lot of enemies,” former Miami homicide detective Nelson Andreu, who investigated her, said late Monday. “When you kill so many and hurt so many people like she did, it’s only a matter of time before they find you and try to even the score.”
The former kingpin was with a pregnant daughter-in-law, who was uninjured. According to El Colombiano, the woman told police that Blanco was no longer involved in organized crime and that she was hoping to live off the sales of several properties she owned.
Blanco came to epitomize the “cocaine cowboy” bloodshed of the 1980s, when rival drug dealers brazenly ambushed rivals in public.
Raised in the slums of Medellin, she began her criminal career as a pickpocket, eventually commanding an empire that reportedly shipped 3,400 pounds of cocaine per month, by boat and plane. She was considered a Colombian pioneer in drug smuggling to the United States, a precursor to the larger cartels that dominated in the 1980s. She even had a Medellin lingerie shop custom design bras and girdles with special pockets to hold cocaine, a tool used by her drug mules flying to Miami.
She ran the organization with her three of her four sons, two of whom were later assassinated in Colombia.
Blanco was known for her flamboyant lifestyle — one of her sons was named Michael Corleone, an homage to The Godfather movies. Three of her husbands also died in drug-related violence.
But it was her nasty temper and penchant for unyielding violence that drew the attention of law enforcement and the public.
Investigators linked her to the daytime 1979 submachine gun attack at Dadeland Mall that shocked Miami. Detectives conservatively estimated that she was behind about 40 homicides.
She was only convicted of three murders.
Two of them: Blanco arranged the slayings drug dealers Alfredo and Grizel Lorenzo in their South Miami house, as their three children watched television in another room. They had failed to pay $250,000 for five kilos of cocaine that Blanco had allegedly delivered to them.
She was also convicted of ordering a shooting that resulted in the death of 2-year-old Johnny Castro, shot twice in the head as he drove in a car with his father, Jesus “Chucho” Castro. Blanco was targeting Jesus Castro, a former enforcer for Blanco’s organization.
Detectives learned the intimate details of the hit from Jorge Ayala, the charismatic hitman who later testified against Blanco. He told police that Blanco wanted Castro killed because he kicked her son in the buttocks.
“At first she was real mad ’cause we missed the father,” Ayala told police. “But when she heard we had gotten the son by accident, she said she was glad, that they were even.”
She had been arrested in 1985 in a cocaine trafficking case in New York. Ultimately, she served 13 years in federal custody before she was handed over to Florida authorities.
Blanco seemed destined for Florida’s Death Row — but the prosecution’s murders case was dealt a severe blow.
The reason: Ayala — the case’s chief witness — engaged in phone sex with secretaries from the Miami-Dade State Attorney’s Office. After an investigation, three secretaries were fired and a veteran prosecutor resigned.
Special prosecutors from Orlando took over the case, and Blanco cut a plea deal in 1998.
Blanco was sentenced to three concurrent 20-year sentences, of which she had to serve only about one-third because of guidelines in effect at the time of the murders. Even on her return to Colombia, she was believed to have held onto immense wealth.
In recent years, younger Miamians were introduced to Blanco via two “Cocaine Cowboys” documentaries made by filmmakers Billy Corben and Alfred Spellman.
“This is classic live-by-the-sword, die-by-the-sword,” Corben said Monday. “Or in this case, live-by-the-motorcycle-assassin, die-by-the-motorcycle assassin.”
Griselda's grisly end: 'Godmother of cocaine' shot dead
in Colombia
She lived as the "godmother of cocaine", ruthlessly ordering scores of bloody murders and violent revenge attacks as she plotted the course of Miami's infamous drug wars.
So it seemed only fitting that the manner of Griselda Blanco's death on Monday reflected the brutality for which she became notorious - gunned down in the street by a killer on a motorcycle as she left a butcher's shop in her hometown of Medellin, Colombia.
Blanco, 69, was credited with inventing the motorcycle ride-by killing during her years controlling southern Florida's fledgling cocaine trade in the late 70s and early 80s, an era in which she pocketed billions of dollars before being convicted of three murders, including that of a two-year-old boy. Detectives suspected her of dozens more.
"It's some kind of poetic justice that she met an end that she delivered to so many others," said Professor Bruce Bagley, head of the University of Miami's department of international studies and author of the book Drug Trafficking in the Americas.
"Here is a woman who made a lot of enemies on her rise and was responsible for the deaths of untold numbers of people. 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 look. What goes around comes around."
Blanco, who was deported from the US in 2004 after serving almost two decades in jail in New York and Florida for racketeering and murder, became one of Miami's original drug gangsters as smuggled cocaine swept aside marijuana as the dealers' most profitable commodity.
She set up a distribution network across the US that netted her tens of millions of dollars a month, making shipments of more than 1500kg, and maintained her dominance by building an empire staffed with violent enforcers, who were well rewarded for following her orders to execute rivals, while leaving no witnesses.
She was also personally involved in developing creative methods to get cocaine into the US, even setting up a lingerie shop in Colombia that produced underwear for export with secret compartments.
Two of her three sons by her first husband were murdered after entering the family business.
Blanco became a widow three times, and remained under suspicion for the deaths of all three husbands. In one notorious episode in 1975 she confronted her husband and business partner Alberto Bravo in a Bogota nightclub car park over millions of dollars missing from the profits of the cartel they built together.
Blanco, then 32, pulled out a pistol, Bravo responded by producing an Uzi submachine gun and after a blazing gun battle he and six bodyguards lay dead. Blanco, who suffered only a minor gunshot wound to the stomach, recovered and soon afterwards moved to Miami, where her body count - and reputation for ruthlessness - continued to climb.
During her Florida reign of terror she was suspected of responsibility in at least 40 murders, possibly as many as 200, yet was convicted of only three - two drug dealers who crossed her and a two-year-old boy, Johnny Castro, the son of a former Blanco enforcer, who was shot twice in the head by hitmen as he travelled in his father's car.
Blanco's former lieutenant, Jorge Ayala, told police: "At first she was real mad because we missed the father, but when she heard we had gotten the son by accident, she said she was glad, that they were even."
She escaped the death penalty on a technicality when Ayala was discredited as a witness after being caught having phone sex with secretaries in the prosecutors' office.
Bagley said Blanco, who was shot twice in the head, was likely to become the subject of books or a Hollywood movie.
"She was a pioneer in the sense that she helped to forge and carve out the drugs trade in south Florida and used bloody tactics to do so," he said.
"The danger is she will be remembered not for her cold-heartedness and brutality but for being a woman entrepreneur in an emerging field dominated by men."
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