9 Crazy Facts About Griselda Blanco, Miami's Merciless Cocaine Queenpin

Cocaine war queenpin Griselda Blanco ran her smuggling enterprise with an iron fist. Born in Colombia in 1943, she grew up in Medellin and became famous for her vengeful murderous exploits during the Miami cocaine wars in the late 1970s and early 1980s.

Facts about Griselda Blanco focus on the many murders she ordered and the methods that she invented to help smuggle cocaine out of Colombia and into the United States. Blanco took cocaine war crime to an entirely new level, and before her arrest in 1985, supposedly earned $80 million a month through her Medellin cartel. She spent 19 years in prison in the United States, and fled to Colombia upon her release in 2004. Blanco was murdered in 2012 in Medellin, leaving behind decades full of crimes and brutality. 

Blanco's life of crime reportedly began when she was 11 years old. She kidnapped a local boy in Medellin, Colombia, and held him for ransom. The boy was from one of the more upscale neighborhoods, and she figured they would pay to get him back. This didn't go according to plan, as his family refused to cough up the ransom amount. A few days later, after their negotiations completely broke down, she shot the boy in his head and left his body in the street. 

Blanco earned her nickname "The Godmother" due to her predilection to have people murdered. If someone double-crossed her, annoyed her, or was a member of a rival cartel or smuggling business, she had them bumped off. At one point, her bloody exploits filled the Miami morgue with so many bodies that the coroner had to rent a refrigerated 40-foot trailer from a nearby Burger King to hold them all. Authorities predict she had anywhere from 40 to 200 people killed. 

Although she ordered all of those hits, the justice system was only able to pin three murders directly to her. Blanco pled guilty to three murder charges in 1994 while she was serving time for drug conspiracy. 

After moving to Miami, FL, in the late 1970s, Blanco turned herself into the Cocaine Queen of the city. Federal agents quickly caught on to their pattern of having drug mules haul cocaine in their suitcases on trips from Colombia to the U.S., so Blanco came up with a plan - she opened a lingerie store in Miami that sold special underwear with secret compartments. Those compartments were designed to hold drugs, making it easier - for a while at least - for her drug mules to slip in and out of the country. 

Miami in the late 1970s and '80s was not a fun place to be - unless you were a powerful drug lord. The city was known for its "cocaine wars" conducted between the various cartels and their drug smuggling efforts. Blanco and her Medellin cartel were right in the middle of this, and were one of the orchestrators of this crime-ridden, blood-soaked era. Federal authorities believe Blanco was responsible for mass amounts of drugs coming into the Miami area, and dozens of murders and shootings. 

Blanco wanted out of her prison sentence so badly that she plotted to kidnap John F. Kennedy Jr., and hold him for ransom in exchange for her own freedom. During her 19 years in federal prison, she communicated with her people on the outside, planning this audacious crime. She felt that once her people had JFK Jr. held captive, then the authorities would have no choice but to let her out of prison early. Thankfully, someone leaked word of her plan to the FBI before it was set into motion. 

Blanco met her first husband, Carlos Trujillo, when she was 13. Together, they started a business of falsifying immigration documents for people who wanted to move to the United States. The couple later had three children:  Dixon, Uber, and Osvaldo. However, they divorced in the late 1960s, and she had him brutally murdered in the 1970s when a business deal when south. 

Blanco's second husband, Aberto Bravo, was her partner in the cocaine "import" business. However, the marriage was short lived, as he died in 1975 in a hail of bullets. Blanco confronted him in the parking lot of a Bogota nightclub about missing money, accusing him of embezzling millions from their cartel. As the story goes, she pulled out a pistol, he whipped out a submachine gun, their employees got involved, and he and six bodyguards wound up dead. 

Blanco had her youngest son, the appropriately named Michael Corleone Blanco (a nod to the movie Godfather), with her third husband, Dario Sepulveda. After she and Sepulveda separated, they got into a custody dispute that led to him kidnapping Michael and taking him to Colombia. Rather than go through the court system to get him back, Blanco simply hired a hit man to take out Sepulveda. Her son was returned to her in Miami. 

Prior to Blanco's rise to power, cartels and similar groups found ways to dispose of people they didn't like, or those who ran rival businesses. However, none of them came up with the idea for the motorcycle assassin. That was Blanco's invention. The method of taking out someone involved two men and two motorcycles, both armed with plenty of firepower. They would ride up, take aim, shoot, and then zoom off before anyone realized what happened. Ironically, this is the way that Blanco herself died in 2012. 

The original Scarface came out in 1932 with a plot loosely based on mafia don Al Capone. However, the remake, which featured Tony Montana and his drug cartel, was partly inspired by the murderous and vindictive actions of Griselda Blanco.  Her only surviving son said he didn't think the movie or Montana were similar depictions of his mother, adding that the movie made him "depressed." 

Blanco was in federal prison from 1985 to 2004. Her initial sentence was based on drug conspiracy charges, and an additional ten years was tacked on when she pled guilty to three murders-for-hire. However, during the 19 years that she was locked up, she found a way to run her cartel's cocaine business from the inside. Nothing was going to stop her.