Netflix has a way of bringing some of the most real-life stories to life in some of the most immaculate ways, and its recently released drama miniseries Griselda was no exception to this.
Starring Sofia Vergara in the lead as the titular character, the show shared the story of the shrewd and ambitious Blanco, a Columbian businesswoman who makes one of the most beneficial cartels in history.
But the real-time story on which this entire series is based is even more terrifying as the real Blanco, who earned the title of the “Cocaine Godmother” through all her crimes, was all the more merciless than what fans saw in the show.
Not only did she go to extremes with her cartel business, but Griselda Blanco was even accused of multiple cold-blooded murders, including those of all her husbands as well.
All The Worst Crimes Committed By Griselda Blanco
While Sofia Vergara nailed her performance as the Cocaine Godmother for the screens, the horrors she committed didn’t quite encompass all of the worst crimes by the real Griselda Blanco aka the ruthless queen-pin of cocaine for almost five decades in Columbia.
Referred to as “just a violent person” by former DEA agent Bob Palombo with no justification for this claim except the way that she was brought up (as per Maxim, 2008), the cartel leader was even allegedly feared by Pablo Escobar, the infamous founder and leader of the Medellin Cartel (via BBC).
In fact, Blanco’s misadventures as a merciless person started way back in the mid-1950s when she kidnapped a boy at only 11 years of age, only to kill him when his parents refused to pay the ransom. Two years later, she apparently turned into a pickpocketer cum prostitute and got married to Carlos Trujillo, who was allegedly nothing short of a pimp and document forger (per Vice).
However, despite having three kids from their marriage, the pair couldn’t stay together for long and soon ended up in a divorce following disagreements over their criminal empire, with Trujillo soon facing his death at the end of his wife’s hitmen.
The 1960s saw her tying the knot with Alberto Bravo, a clothing import company owner who disguised his cocaine trafficking through this very occupation, and moving to Queens, New York with her family. It was during this period that Griselda Blanco opened her own lingerie factory in Columbia which manufactured lingeries with pockets for women to smuggle narcotics and drugs.
A little over a decade later, the cocaine power couple seemingly faced the end of their reign after they got arrested for their illegal work through “the biggest Colombian narcotics organization ever uncovered,” along with 150 other people, as per The New York Times.
But the pair managed to flee from that situation and returned to Columbia, only to get involved in a gunfight where Bravo was shot dead by his wife while Blanco survived with a bullet to her stomach and acquired complete control over the entire thriving cocaine organization that came to be known as “the Alberto Bravo organization,” according to Maxim.
Then came her third husband in the picture, Darío Sepúlveda, whom she reportedly married in 1978 and had a son named Michael Corleone Blanco with (Yes, it was indeed inspired by The Godfather). However, within half a decade, Sepúlveda also faced his death at the hands of one of his wife’s hitmen in 1983 following what has been cited as infidelity and custody disagreement.
Yet, the worst of it all was the 1979 gun battle that took place at the Dadeland Mall, which saw German Jimenez Panesso, yet another drug trafficker in Columbia, getting shot dead along with his bodyguard in a cold-blooded murder by two of Griselda Blanco’s gunmen, all the while injuring multiple others at the place.
Even then, these are only the murders that were investigated and proved to have been done by Blanco, and there might have been more, for all we know, as Assistant U.S. Attorney Stephen Schlessinger and Griselda Blanco’s prosecutor told The Miami Herald:
“She was a complete sociopath. She murdered people at the drop of a hat. She would kill anybody who displeased her, because of a debt, because they screwed up on a shipment, or she didn’t like the way they looked at her.”
In fact, had it not been for her assassination, no one knows how many more people would have suffered at the merciless cartel leader’s hands.
Griselda Blanco’s Victims Were Done Justice With Her Assassination
In February 1985, Griselda Blanco was finally arrested in Irvine, California, and sentenced to a prison term of 15 years along with a $25,000 fine by the jury. She was further charged with three counts of first-degree murder as she served her sentence in New York, as per the United Nations on Drugs and Crime website.
Then in 1999, special prosecutors in Orlando sentenced her to 20 years of prison after Blanco pled guilty to two murders, the term for which she had to serve concurrently with her federal sentence of 15 years, according to The New York Post. Finally, in 2004, she was released from prison and spent the rest of her life in Columbia after being deported there.
Eight years later, in September 2012, Griselda Blanco was finally laid to rest at the age of 69 after being assassinated outside of a butcher shop in Medellín, Colombia by a masked man on a motorcycle who gunned her down, and all her victims throughout her infamously mercilessly led life were finally done justice to.
All in all, the “Cocaine Godmother” was one of the biggest drug traffickers ever, who did anything and everything to continue a successful cocaine business.
