On a sunny afternoon in May 1984, Griselda Blanco walked through the lobby of the Marriott Hotel in Newport Beach, California, unaware that she was being watched by investigators from the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration.
The notorious drug godfather who led a Colombian cartel bringing a staggering 3,400 pounds of cocaine into the country every month thought she was meeting a money launderer.
In fact, the meeting was part of a plan to capture the ruthless Griselda, then 41 years old, who had gone into hiding following death threats from rival drug cartels and was believed to be responsible for up to 250 murders, including the murders of all three of her Husbands .
Now Bob Palombo, the DEA agent who hunted her for over a decade, reveals exclusively to the Mail the day he came face to face with the woman who had eluded authorities for years.
“She wore a blonde wig, cape, matching dress and high heels, but she was recognizable by the cleft chin and dimples we had seen in photos,” he says.
The real Black Widow, Griselda Blanco, in a police mugshot from 1985
“We were ecstatic because she was someone who was paranoid and constantly on the move, and not a single law enforcement officer in the United States had ever seen Griselda in person until that moment.” My partner and I looked at each other and said silently, ” Bingo!”
Although Palombo and his fellow agent were so close to Griselda that they could have grabbed her, they had their informant greet America's first billionaire drug smuggler, who was with a loyal henchman.
The trio went to the informant's suite and Palombo and his partner listened via a recording device hidden in a briefcase as Griselda handed over half a million dollars in drug money that was funneled into the legitimate financial system.
“She was probably responsible for most of the murders in South Florida and New York during those years because she was a woman who loved killing and had no regard for human life, not even children,” Palombo recalls. “We wanted to arrest her, but we were working on a case and had to examine it from an evidentiary point of view, so we let her go.”
Now the exciting scene has been recreated in a Netflix series.
The six-episode drama, released yesterday, stars beautiful Colombian-American actress Sofia Vergara, best known as the glamorous Gloria on Modern Family. She had to wear heavy makeup, prosthetics and wigs to recreate the murderous drug dealer.
Griselda herself was murdered in 2012 – more on that later – but her youngest son Michael Corleone Blanco, named after Al Pacino's character in Griselda's favorite film, “The Godfather,” said she was aware of Hollywood's interest in her and was happy about it.
Actress Sofia Vergara wields a baseball bat as she plays the murderer in the Netflix series
Catherine Zeta-Jones (who played Griselda in the 2017 film Cocaine Godmother), Jennifer Lopez (in a film about Griselda's life that is still in progress), and Vergara herself had all read for film projects during their lifetime.
“My mother knew about it,” says Michael, 45. “She was really excited. My mother never understood the mechanics of Hollywood… But she was happy about the interest of these big stars of Hollywood in playing her.
“A lot of people notice in certain pictures of my mother in her mugshots that she didn't look as beautiful as those stars, but… my mother was quite beautiful.” When she was young, she was so beautiful that she was called a “porcelain doll.” “
Despite their apparent delight at Hollywood's interest, Michael is suing Vergara and Netflix, claiming that he himself developed a book and television show based on his mother's story and that the family did not authorize the use of her images.
Your story is certainly extraordinary. Griselda was born in 1943 and grew up amid abject poverty in the coastal city of Cartagena. Her mother was reportedly violent and unstable, and Griselda was sexually abused by her stepfather.
In 1955, the family moved to Medellín, Colombia's second largest city – once called the “most dangerous city in the world” and later the base of drug lord Pablo Escobar.
Here Griselda began her criminal career as a pickpocket before turning to burglary.
Then, still only 11 years old, she and a group of friends kidnapped the son of a wealthy local family in the hopes of extorting a ransom. When the family didn't pay, Griselda shot the child in the head, committing her first murder. As a teenager, she became a sex worker and married her pimp Carlos Trujillo, a counterfeiter who introduced her to organized crime. They had three sons, Osvaldo, Uber and Dixon. However, the marriage failed and it is believed that Griselda had him killed in 1970.
Griselda's second husband was a local gangster and small-time drug dealer named Alberto Bravo, who boosted her drug smuggling career. The couple traveled to New York with cocaine on their bodies and sold the drug for a profit.
However, Griselda was not satisfied with this small operation. She had artificial-soled shoes made by a shoemaker in Medellín and designed bras, panties and girdles with secret pockets that could hide $10,000 worth of cocaine each after realizing that women were better drug curers than men.
Michael with his mother Griselda. He is suing Ms. Vergara and Netflix, saying he himself developed a book and television show based on his mother's story and that the family did not authorize the use of her images
When the family moved to Queens, New York in the early 1970s, the clever Griselda began to expand the business. She bought cocaine from various sources so that her supply never ran out and persuaded other drug dealers to work with her. Their methods became the business model of modern cartels.
Soon she and Bravo were making millions and breaking into a cocaine market run by the Italian Mafia. But the authorities were on their trail.
Palombo's first encounter with Griselda came as a young agent in 1975, when the DEA and New York Police Department intercepted and seized 300 pounds of cocaine that the pair planned to distribute.
The couple were charged with drug offenses but fled to Colombia. Back home in Medellin, cracks soon began to appear in their relationship.
Bravo believed that his wife's increasing penchant for brutality had contributed to their narrow brush with the law, while Griselda suspected that her husband was secretly diverting money from the business.
An argument broke out at a nightclub and Griselda shot her husband point-blank in the face, a gruesome murder that earned her the nickname “Black Widow.”
Griselda continued to run the company from Colombia and married her third husband, Dario Sepulveda, in 1978, with whom she had her fourth son, Michael.
While her three older sons were drawn into their mother's drug business, Griselda had grandiose plans for her “baby”; Michael would attend the best schools and be destined for better things.
As he says: “She always told me, 'Everything is warfare, even business, but you don't have to do business like we do, you don't have to do this business.' She always wanted me to be a lawyer, a doctor or in the movies. ' He remembers how his “Gordita” [an affectionate term for a fat person] was a mix of scary and funny, but says: “For me she was heartwarming, she gave me cuddles.”
In 1979, Griselda established a new operation in Miami. At the time, South Florida was a sleepy retirement town and a popular winter family vacation destination. But its network of waterways and landing pads for small aircraft made it extremely attractive to drug smugglers. The tropical paradise became a war zone. “There were murders left and right every day,” recalls Palombo, who was stationed there in 1983. “It was commonplace for a Colombian to shoot another Colombian, and innocent bystanders were caught in the crossfire.”
Sofia Vergara as Griselda and Christian Tappan as her accountant Arturo in the Netflix series
Frightened residents fled the country as violence escalated and vacationers canceled their trips, prompting Time magazine to dub the state a “paradise lost.”
Nelson Andrieu, then a Miami homicide detective, says there were 621 murders in 1982. Authorities were forced to use refrigeration units because there was no space in morgues.
After a gruesome shooting ordered by Griselda, Andrieu said a medical examiner described the victim's body as “like Swiss cheese.” “She was a woman in a man’s world, so she had to prove herself,” said the 69-year-old retired detective.
“If you owe her money, she’ll kill you, and if she owes you money and won’t pay you, she’ll kill you.”
Griselda earned around $80 million a month and lived lavishly. She owned a fleet of luxury vehicles, several properties and traveled on a private jet. She threw lavish parties. But her mood became increasingly unstable because she smoked basuco, a powerful form of cocaine that caused extreme paranoia.
Son Michael says the stories about her in her 70s and 30s are true. “The truth is that my mother couldn't have done half of the things she was blamed for without the help of others…more violent than her.”
But Palombo remains adamant: Griselda liked killing people. “It wasn’t just simple shootings – the woman was a psychopath.”
He gives the example of a murder in which a rival dealer was shot at the wake for his six-year-old son who had drowned in the family pool, and a three-year-old child was killed because he was sitting next to the target.
Many of the people who paid the price for falling out of favor with Griselda were murdered by gunmen on motorcycles – a form of execution she invented and which became commonplace.
In 1983, Griselda's third husband left her and took Michael back to Colombia. Desperate to get her fourth child back, Griselda made a contract with Sepulveda and he was shot dead in front of five-year-old Michael, who screamed in terror. The little boy was then returned to his mother.
After pleading guilty to drug conspiracy charges, Griselda was sent to prison for 15 years
Although Michael doesn't go into the details of his father's death, he admits he was exposed to “a lot of murder, mayhem and violence” in his childhood, even though his mother and brothers tried to protect him.
Palombo, now a mild-mannered 77-year-old living in Florida, says the DEA relentlessly pursued Griselda for 11 years until he finally arrested her in February 1985, nine months after that first hotel encounter.
After her meeting with the “money launderer,” Griselda disappeared again. The DEA eventually discovered that she was living in Irvine, California, by tracing her pager number to payphones she used in those days before the advent of cell phones.
On February 17, 1985, Palombo and five agents stormed her home. “She used the pay phone near her house and we followed her back to where she lived,” Palombo recalls. “We waited until little Michael left the house with a nanny. We were afraid that Griselda would resort to the gun and we didn't want to traumatize him if we had to shoot his mother.
“She was sitting on her bed reading the Bible. There was a gun on her nightstand, but she didn't try. I think she was probably grateful that it was the police and not one of the assassins who wanted to kill her.”
Griselda pleaded guilty to drug conspiracy and was sent to prison for 15 years.
While she was serving her sentence, prosecutors filed several murder charges, but botched the case after the state's star witness – Griselda's favorite hit man, Jorge Ayala – became involved in a sex scandal with a prosecutor's secretary.
Griselda took a deal, pleaded guilty to three counts of second-degree murder, and only had three years added to her sentence.
“For all those murders and drug deals, she only served 18 years in prison,” Palombo notes. “She could have gotten the electric chair.”
Her sons Uber and Osvaldo also served prison sentences and were murdered immediately after their deportation to Medellin. Dixon became addicted to drugs and is believed to have died.
Most people assumed that Griselda faced the same fate when she was released in 2004.
“When she got out of prison, I encouraged her to stay in the US because I thought she would be safer here.” But she went back [to Medellin] for family reasons,” says attorney Nathan Diamond, who represented Griselda in the 1990s.
In fact, the Black Widow was able to live in her old neighborhood for eight years until 2012, at the age of 69, when she was shot twice in a butcher shop by two men on a motorcycle – the execution style she had perfected.
Son Michael, who himself has a criminal record for drug abuse, is now married, the father of two children and lives in Florida. He has appeared on a reality TV show, runs a clothing store and will soon publish his memoir, My Mother, The Godmother, And The Real Life Story Of Michael Corleone Blanco.
But while Michael's memories of his mother are tempered by love, Palombo is clear: “I have met many crazy, murderous men and evil women in my career, and none of them compare to Griselda.” She was a madwoman. I hope we never see her like this again.'
Griselda is now available on Netflix