The Wild True Story of Murderous Drug Lord Griselda Blanco, a.k.a. the Godmother of Cocaine

Griselda Blanco was so high on her status as the "Godmother of Cocaine," she named her youngest son Michael Corleone.

But overseeing a drug trafficking ring that at the height of its power was moving 3,400 pounds of cocaine per month by land, air and sea will earn a woman some lofty nicknames. And provide plenty of fodder for books, documentaries and scripted TV.

"As a woman, she fascinated me, because I knew these characters from Colombia," Sofía Vergara, who made history with her Emmy nomination for Outstanding Lead Actress in a Limited Series for her portrayal of Blanco in the Netflix series Griselda, told Deadline in June. "They were household names: Pablo Escobar, the Rodríguez Orejuela [brothers], who are the biggest narco guys in the world. But I never thought that there would be a woman who would be able to rise to the level of these guys."

Vergara, who hails from Colombia and is the first Latina ever nominated in her category at the Sept. 15 award show, admitted it was "tricky" at times playing the ruthless and callous yet undeniably clever and charming Blanco.

"Because I would find myself sometimes rooting for her, thinking, 'Wow, it's amazing that a woman was able to do that,'" the Modern Family alum explained, "and I had to check myself out of it, like, 'Listen, at the end of the day, this woman was a f--king serial killer, a sociopath, and she hurt many, many lives.'"

While the loftiest of lore put the number of murders Blanco ordered at 250, Assistant U.S. Attorney Stephen Schlessinger put the number in the dozens. (She was only ever charged in three killings, and the case never made it to trial.)

"We have no idea here [in the U.S.] how many murders she authorized in Colombia," Schlessinger, who prosecuted Blanco, told the Miami Herald after her death in 2012. "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."

At the same time, former Drug Enforcement Administration Agent Bob Palombo told the Herald, "She mesmerized people. She could woo you with her acumen and make you a loyal follower. There was also fear: Anybody working for her also knew she wouldn't ask anyone to do what she wouldn't do herself."

Vergara, meanwhile, spent 15 years trying to shepherd a Blanco project to the screen before landing at Netflix.

Though once she had the time to get it done (six years after Catherine Zeta-Jones played Blanco in the Lifetime movie Cocaine Godmother), the five-time Emmy nominee was nervous about everything, from pivoting to drama and acting in her native Spanish for the first time to wearing a prosthetic nose and physically transforming for the role.

Griselda ended up at the top of Netflix's global viewing chart, amassing 113.8 million hours viewed from a total of 20.6 million viewers during its first week out in January, according to the streamer.

"It's a risk to do something like this, because you never know," Vergara said. "To realize people actually love it, it's a gift."

But why the enduring fascination with Blanco, who Jennifer Lopez also once hoped to play? Let's just say, the action writes itself: 

How did Griselda Blanco get her start in the drug trade?

Blanco was born Feb. 15, 1943, in Cartagena, Colombia, but grew up primarily in Medellín, where notorious drug lord Pablo Escobar was born in 1949, ran his bloody business and died in a shootout with police in 1993.

Turning to crime as a kid to earn money, Blanco started as a pickpocket and then sold marijuana.

In 1964, she moved to Queens, New York, where there was a sizable Colombian community—finding marijuana not a very practical commodity to move in large quantities—found a booming market in cocaine.

At first she had a factory in Medellín produce corsets and other undergarments with hidden compartments for female smugglers to stash drugs on commercial flights to Miami, and eventually pilots themselves were on her payroll.

Her reputation for shrewdness and violence grew as, authorities said, she was raking in millions of dollars a year in the cocaine trade. 

"She would kill you if she owed you money and didn't want to pay you," former West Miami Police chief and homicide detective Nelson Andreu told Today.com in January. "And if you owed money and couldn’t pay her, she would kill you as well. It was a win-win for her and a lose-lose for everyone else."

As Vergara put it in a behind-the-scenes clip, "She was not as famous as someone like Pablo Escobar, but even he was scared of her at the time. She stood on her own."

In April 1975, Blanco and more than 30 of her underlings were indicted in U.S. District Court in New York with conspiring to manufacture, import into the United States, and distribute cocaine, the result of the feds' Operation Banshee. Yet by the time the grand jury returned the indictment, the woman known as the "Godmother of Cocaine" (as well as "the Black Widow," "La Madrina," "Cocaine Queen" and "Queenpin") had fled to Colombia.

"We had her on drug conspiracy charges," Palombo recalled to Maxim in 2008, "but she was nowhere to be found.

Several years later, however, she set up shop in Miami.

Where did the term "Cocaine Cowboys" come from?

On July 11, 1979, Colombian cocaine dealer German Panesso-Jimenez and his bodyguard Juan Carlos Hernandez were gunned down by two men at Crown Liquors, by the Dadeland Mall in South Miami. Authorities quickly linked the carnage to more Medellín cartel violence.

The assassins had rolled up incognito in a truck painted with Happy Time Complete Party Supply on the side. Authorities dubbed it a "war wagon" because, former Dade County homicide detective Raul Diaz told Maxim, "its sides were covered by quarter-inch steel with gunports cut into them."

When a police officer referred to "cocaine cowboys" at the scene, per the Herald, the term caught fire as reports of drug dealers run amok in Miami drew comparisons to the wild West.

"Griselda Blanco was the catalyst for recognition by the U.S. government that Miami had a serious problem," Miami attorney Sam Burstyn told Maxim. "That we were really a Dodge City."

The Crown Liquor killings remained unsolved. Then, in 1983, Fernando Villega-Hernandez was sentenced to five years in prison on cocaine conspiracy and possession charges. He was convicted of similar charges the following year in a separate case. At his sentencing in May 1984, Special Assistant U.S. Attorney Lurana Snow implicated him as one of the gunmen in the liquor store shooting, quoting details from a government informant and alleging that fingerprints linked Villega to the scene.

At the time, U.S. District Judge Jose A. Gonzalez said in court it would be "improper, unconstitutional and, more important than any of that, unfair" to consider the murder allegations while sentencing Villega to another 15 years for drug smuggling.

The judge asked why prosecutors weren't presenting their case to a grand jury, to which Snow replied, "Hopefully, they will. We're just not ready yet."

DEA Agent Steve Georges told the Herald in 1984 that Villega was a cog in the cocaine-trafficking machine headed up by Blanco. And though a number of South Florida-based bosses worked for her, Georges explained, they often warred with each other as well.

One of those bosses, Carlos "Panello" Ramirez, "had ripped off Panesso on a 40-kilo coke deal with $3 million," Georges told the Herald, explaining the motive for Panesso's murder. To get rid of Panesso, he continued, Ramirez "joined forces with [Villega's boss Paco Sepulveda], because Paco's girlfriend was sleeping with Panesso."

Ramirez—identified by Snow in court as the other gunman—was killed in 1980 in Colombia, according to Georges, while by 1984 Sepulveda was serving a 27-year federal prison sentence in New York on drug charges.

Did Griselda Blanco ever go to prison?

On Feb. 17, 1985, federal authorities, including Palumbo of the DEA, arrested Blanco at her home in Irvine, Calif., on cocaine trafficking charges stemming from the 1975 indictment in New York. She was convicted and subsequently sentenced to 15 years in federal prison, serving 13.

She was then taken to Florida, where prosecutors were planning on charging her with capital murder for the 1982 deaths of three people: 2-year-old Johnny Castro, who was hit by a bullet authorities said was intended for his father, and Alfredo and Grizel Lorenzo, drug dealers who were killed at home while their three children were in the other room.

Jorge "Rivi" Ayala—Blanco's hitman turned informant—pleaded guilty to three counts of murder in 1993 and was sentenced to life in prison with the possibility of parole after 25 years. (Another hitman he pulled the jobs with, Miguel "Miguelito" Perez, was already in prison for a separate murder and—given the same sentence as Ayala—was released in 2008 after serving 25 years total.)

The murder case against Blanco hit a snag, however, when Ayala was found to have had phone sex with secretaries in the Miami-Dade State Attorney's Office. Three secretaries were fired and a prosecutor resigned in the wake of the scandal, according to the Herald. (One secretary was later cleared and rehired, per the Orlando Sentinel.)

Orlando prosecutors reassigned to the case cut a deal with Blanco in which she pleaded guilty to second-degree murder and was sentenced in 1998 to three concurrent terms of 20 years. She served seven due to sentencing guidelines in place at the time and was deported to Colombia in 2004.

Ahead of a 2013 hearing on Ayala's request for a reduced sentence in light of his cooperation with law enforcement, his attorney told the Herald, "Hopefully, the State Attorney will forget about the foolishness with the phone calls and the secretaries and do the right thing and give him credit for what he’s done."

A judge denied the request and Ayala, now 67, remains in prison.

How did Griselda Blanco die?

Multiple accounts of Blanco's life credit her with coming up with the idea of the motorcycle assassin, i.e. a motorcycle-riding hitman who pulls up, fires and speeds away. 

And on Sept. 3, 2012, Blanco had just left the Cardiso butcher shop in Medellín after buying $150 worth of meat when two men on motorcycles pulled up. One shot the 69-year-old twice in the head, climbed back onto his bike and the pair rode off.

Blanco's pregnant daughter-in-law had been waiting for her in the car, El Colombiano reported at the time, and got out to place a Bible on her mother-in-law's chest.

Blanco was buried in Jardines de Montesacro cemetery in Medellin, the same final resting place of Pablo Escobar. No one has ever been prosecuted for her murder.

"It's surprising to all of us that she had not been killed sooner because she made a lot of enemies," former Miami cop Andreu told the Herald in 2012. "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."

But Schlessinger, the Florida prosecutor on her case, was shocked by the news.

"I was really surprised when I heard she was killed," he told the paper. "We presumed her dead years ago."

Did Griselda Blanco have a family?

Blanco was married three times—husbands Carlos Trujillo, Alberto Bravo and Dario Sepúlveda all predeceased her, and it's widely assumed that was intentional on her part—and she had four sons.

"This innocuous-looking woman was raising four kids while building this insane, brutal empire," Vergara told the New York Times ahead of Griselda's premiere.

Blanco's eldest three boys all went into the family business and ended up dead in Colombia. In the series, Griselda is seen finding out while she's in prison that three of her sons have been killed in separate hits—a dramatization of events.

In real life, Blanco is survived by her youngest son, Michael Corleone Blanco, who appeared on the VH1 reality series Cartel Crew from 2019 to 2021.

He's also co-founder of the clothing company Pure Blanco, which is billed on its website as a "Billionaire Cartel Lifestyle Brand."

In addition to referring to Michael as "the Proud son of Griselda Blanco 'The Cocaine GodMother,'" the site offers a quote attributed to his late mother: "Weak is dangerous."

How accurate is Netflix's Griselda?

"They’re not going to portray her as she really was," Andreu predicted to Today.com. "They never do in movies. They make what they think is going to sell and what people are going to like. Very close to the truth, but not the truth."

But the makers of Griselda said they strived to make their creative liberties feel as authentic as possible.

They were going for "emotional truth," executive producer and co-showrunner Doug Miro explained in Netflix press notes. "When I say 'truth,' what we want is the essence of who the characters are emotionally, what their experience was, what it’s like to put on their shoes. To do that, you need to go past what's written, past what's published."

But telling the story was personal on multiple levels for Vergara—whose older brother Rafael, as she told the New York Times, "was part of this business" and got killed in Bogotá in the 1990s—and many of the Latin actors and crew members who worked on the show, including fellow Colombian Karol G.

"The world understands the story of Griselda Blanco as something that is fiction, but we as Colombians see that story in a different way," the singer, who made her acting debut in Griselda playing the drug lord's confidante Carla, told the Times. "In every family there is a story about someone who passed away because of Pablo Escobar or Griselda Blanco."

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