Sofia Vergara as Griselda Blanco in Netflix's Griselda Photo: Courtesy of Netflix
Miami's Drug War — A Battle for Control over cocaine in a south Florida town — was outspoken about the «Dadeland Mall Massacre,» a daytime shooting in July 1979 that killed two gunmen, wounded two civilians and scared a mall full of shoppers.
The shooting was directed by Griselda Blanco, a Colombian cocaine trafficker also known as the «Black Widow», «Cocaine Queen» and «La Madrina», also known as the «Godmother». Sofia Vergara now plays Blanco in the six-episode Netflix series Griselda.
Two men walked into a liquor store, killed a high-ranking cocaine boss and his bodyguard, and drove off in a van, spraying the parking lot with bullets through the back door.
The violent shooting in broad daylight sent a stark message to both authorities and the public about the extent of drug violence in Miami at the time. It really was a war, and Griselda Blanco, as bandit legend says, was one of the most bloodthirsty generals.
But it was only after the release of the Cocaine Cowboys documentaries in the late 2000s that her story became known. Now, 12 years after she was killed in a drive-by shooting (a murder method she invented), Blanco is a hot commodity among filmmakers and showrunners. Catherine Zeta-Jones played Blanco in the 2018 TV movie, and Jennifer Lopez was set to play her in the languid biopic.
The Netflix series has been Sofia Vergara's passion project for a decade. Produced by Narcos showrunner Eric Newman and director Andres Baiz—also a Narcos mainstay—Griselda paints a more sympathetic picture of the Godmother. She's a glamorous, smart, conscientious mother who is not only a drug queen, but also a sister who does it for herself. The Dadeland Mall massacre is framed as part of righteous feminist retribution — destroying the patriarchy by shooting thugs who won't do business with a smart woman.
For Eric Newman and Andres Buys, the show is an attempt to look at Blanco from a different angle. “Before our show, there was a very one-sided, anti-woman view that she was just a monster—an anomaly in the world of human trafficking, a bitch who had risen to the top,” Newman says. «We believe there was a time in the beginning when she was loved by people who relied on her and followed her.»
Their version of Blanco, Newman says, “is the most relatable, relatable and relatable drug addict we've ever seen [on the television series]. A woman who is disadvantaged, persecuted, undervalued and has three children to take care of.”
Those who knew Blanco might say otherwise. Steven Schlessinger, the assistant U.S. attorney who prosecuted Blanco, told the Miami Herald that she was a «complete sociopath.» Her main hitman and adviser Jorge «Rivi» Ayal-Rivera, who is now serving a life sentence for murder, said she succeeded in the carnage. “She liked to fight. Every day she said: “We need to get this and that.” She loved it.»
Bob Palombo, the DEA agent who had been tracking her for ten years, agreed. “Griselda loved murder,” he told The Independent last year. Indeed, she was linked to between 40 and 250-plus murders. “There will probably be dozens of them,” Schlesinger said. Her victims included at least two of her husbands—hence the nickname “Black Widow.”
Although even Palombo, the man who eventually arrested Blanco in 1985, admitted that he sympathized with her abusive childhood. «You almost, almost I say, and I don't say this often, you almost have to feel sorry for someone who never had a real chance.»
“She loved to kill”: the real Griselda after her arrest in 1997. Photo: IanDagnall Computers/Alamy
Godmother was born Griselda Blanco Restrepo in 1943. She grew up with an abusive, alcoholic mother in a mountain slum in Medellin, Colombia, which became home to the notorious Colombian drug cartel. Violence and death were common. This was the era of La Violencia in Colombia — a 10-year period of unrest and civil war. According to the documentary Cocaine Cowboys 2, children from the slums dug holes and threw corpses in them for fun. In another oft-told story, Blanco, who turned to crime as a child for food, helped kidnap a 10-year-old boy from a wealthier neighborhood.
His family did not pay the ransom, so young Griselda, who was only 11 years old at the time, shot the boy between the eyes. «There's no shortage of apocryphal stories and things that we don't think are true,» Newman says. Although he does believe one aspect of her backstory. “She was almost certainly a victim of men her entire life.”
Blanco entered prostitution at the age of 14 and later married a low-level gangster named Dario Pestañas Trujillo. Blanco and Trujillo had three sons — Uber, Dixon and Osvaldo. Trujillo created false identification documents, and Blanco got her first taste of human trafficking: smuggling illegal immigrants. At some point Trujillo died. Details about his death are sparse, although one story says he was killed by Blanco.
Soon after receiving the nickname “Black Widow,” she married a wealthy criminal, Alberto Bravo. It was Bravo who introduced Blanco to cocaine smuggling. Together they transported cocaine to New York, and Blanco showed a penchant for criminal cunning. She bought a lingerie factory and personally designed bras and girdles with compartments for drug smuggling (an innovation seen in the Netflix series). Working with 1,500 traffickers, smugglers and security forces, they reportedly used women as drug couriers. Each carried up to $10,000 worth of cocaine in their underwear.
Chasing the American Dream fueled by coke, Blanco and Bravo moved to New York and took over a large portion of the New York cocaine trade from the Five Families of the Mafia.
Land of Opportunity: Cocaine transport in Miami, circa 1980s. Photo: Cinematic/Alamy
“They literally became millionaires in a matter of months,” Charles Cosby, a reformed coke dealer, said in the documentary “Cocaine Cowboys 2.” Cosby sought Blanco's drug dealing advice while she was behind bars and later became her confidante and lover. According to Cosby, «Godmother» was making $10 million a week at the time. While Bravo made return trips to Colombia to oversee the completion of production, Blanco spent lavishly, especially on her sons. But their relationship became like any other cartel partnership in the movies: it collapsed due to suspicion, paranoia and money. According to Hugo Clarke's well-researched book Black Widow, they were driven apart by Blanco's violent tendencies, as well as her lavish spending habits.
The NYPD and DEA targeted Blanco and Bravo's organization as part of Operation Banshee. “But we never saw her,” Palombo told The Independent. “Her voice never emerged from the wiretapping investigation. Or a lot of anything. Palombo also called her a «chameleon», capable of changing her appearance and avoiding detection (also aided by her knowledge of fake ID documents). Blanco was charged with drug trafficking after cocaine shipments were seized in the United States, but she disappeared. The following year, 12 Colombians were convicted. Both Bravo and Blanco were named as the leaders of the operation.
But, according to cartel legend, by that time Bravo was already dead. In April 1975, Blanco went to meet her husband in Colombia, ostensibly to iron out their differences. The husband and wife arrived accompanied by armed guards. The summit quickly turned into a shootout. Blanco shot her husband, but he wounded her in the stomach with a shot from his Uzi. Six bodyguards were allegedly killed in the shootout.
This incident — or a version of it — is the starting point for the Netflix series following Blanco's move to Miami in the late 1970s.
Godmother changed the tide of the Miami drug trade by fighting Cuban dealers and other Colombians. It was not just about the struggle for power. “She killed people in the blink of an eye,” Schlessinger told the Miami Herald. «She would kill anyone she didn't like, because of a debt, because they screwed up a supply, or because she didn't like the way they looked at her.»
According to some reports, she ordered her security forces to kill the entire family, including women and children. Reavie's chief enforcer later recounted how he carried out the attack on her behalf, killing one target while their children watched television in the next room.
Earning $80 million a month in Miami, Blanco lived in ludicrous luxury reminiscent of Scarface. She threw wild parties filled with drugs. Among the guests at the party was Pablo Escobar, head of the Colombian drug cartel and Narcos subject. Some sources claim that Escobar was actually Blanco's protégé. Of course, the DEA credited Blanco with creating the cartel plan.
Unimaginable Luxury: Griselda used her empire to finance a luxurious lifestyle. Photo: AJ Pics/Alamy Stock Photo
The 1979 Dadeland Mall massacre was a revelation about the seriousness of the drug war—to put it mildly—but far from over. As reported in Gerald Posner's book «Miami Babylon», the number of murders in Miami breaks records every year — 349 murders in 1979, 569 in 1980, 621 in 1981. Fifty percent of murders were drug related. There were so many bodies that the medical examiner's office could not physically store them. To store them, we had to rent a refrigerated trailer from Burger King. Miami was often compared to the Wild West at the time. Time magazine published an article about Miami's troubles in 1981 called «Paradise Lost.» This issue makes a cameo appearance in the Netflix series Griselda.
The series charts Blanco's rise to godmotherhood as she takes what she believes is rightfully hers and fights back against men who have abused or underestimated her. “In the beginning, she uses her wit, imagination and ideas to fight the men, who fight with violence and the usual tactics of brute force,” Baise says. “We love that about her.”
Her worst impulses are depicted—as is often the case in the gangster genre—as the result of losing herself in violence and drugs (the real Godmother is addicted to paranoia-inducing basuko, raw cocaine paste and a byproduct of cocaine production). process).
Newman and Baze acknowledge that the series is not a slave to real events. Rather, he uses various incidents to support the episodes. “Our fence posts,” Newman says, “we hang history on.” There is some creative license between the two. “That's what we believe is behind some of her actions,” Newman adds. «Why did she do what she did.»
However, much of what is seen in the series is based on facts: Blanco buys her third husband, Dario Sepulveda, a gold-plated MAC-10 machine gun; bisexual orgies and forcing people to have sex at gunpoint; descent into drug-induced paranoia; and her gang of hitmen called the Pistoleros. According to the DEA, initiation into Pistoleros could be achieved by killing a target and then cutting off a body part as evidence.
Cruelty: Griselda had a personal interest in killing her enemies. Photo: Netflix
Most of it looks like science fiction — stuff straight out of the gangster genre. “You'll be surprised how real the absurdity of the show is,” says Baise.
Like real-life mobsters who watched The Sopranos and talked about whether the show was based on them, Griselda knew the genre very well. She named her fourth son Michael Corleone, after Al Pacino's character in The Godfather. (Blanco actually loves the names of famous villains. She also had a German shepherd named Hitler.)
Another real-life incident depicted in the series is the murder of a two-year-old boy. Reavie was sent to kill former cartel gunman Jesus «Chucho» Castro, but he accidentally shot and killed Castro's son, Johnny. In the series, guilt weighs heavily on Griselda. But the real Reavie told a different story. “She got really angry at first because we missed our dad,” Reavey told police about the shooting. “But when she heard that we had a son by accident, she said she was glad they were even.”
Newman says he refused to consult the real Reevey. “We thought about it. In my experience — six seasons of Narcos and ten years of working on it — once you fall into the hands of criminals, they have a very specific story to tell you. And the point is not what they did, but what was done to them. Rivi is a master manipulator. I can only imagine what he would say. Once you hear their story and dismiss their story because it's probably f*cked up, you'll be in a relationship with someone you don't want to be in a relationship with.»
However, they consulted June Hawkins, a former Miami police officer who had investigated Blanco's case. Hawkins is played by Juliana Aiden Martinez in the series. She is the mirror image of Griselda, a smart woman trying to make it in a man's world.
In real life, Blanco killed her third husband, Dario Sepulveda, after he eloped with Michael Corleone. According to gangster legend, Sepulveda was shot dead in front of the boy.
Revenge: Griselda's crimes eventually caught up with her
The attack was one of several incidents that turned other Colombian cartel members against Blanco. Her second husband's nephew was also hunting her — revenge for the murder of his uncle several years earlier. Bob Palombo later recounted how the DEA was forced to suspend the investigation and take Bravo's nephew off the streets to prevent him from killing Blanco and wasting a 10-year investigation.
Blanco moved to California and was finally arrested in 1985. Palombo promised the other agents that he would seal her arrest with a kiss. When he entered her house, he actually kissed the Godmother. “Hello, Griselda. We finally met.»
She was initially convicted on drug charges, but not murder charges. But in 1994, Reavie — by then serving a life sentence — agreed to testify about the murders he committed on behalf of the Godmother. “Reavie has enough dirt on me to bury me 10 times,” she told Cosby.
According to Cosby, Blanco had one last attempt at freedom: She hatched a plot to kidnap John F. Kennedy Jr. and demand safe passage from prison to Columbia. A four-man Colombian kidnapping crew landed in New York and approached Kennedy, but were scared off by an NYPD patrol car.
The case against Blanco has reached a dead end. It turned out that Reavie had phone sex with the secretaries of the state attorney. He was found to be an unreliable witness. (The show portrays this as a deliberate ploy by Reavie to get the godmother off the hook.) Blanco, who was potentially facing the electric chair, pleaded guilty to three charges of second-degree murder.
Blanco was released in 2004 and returned to Medellin. On September 3, 2012, she was shot and killed by a drive-by killer as she left a butcher shop. As Blanco lay dying, her pregnant daughter-in-law placed a Bible on her chest. The godmother was 69 years old.
Palombo wondered if she had become an informant, since she had been living publicly for eight years. Otherwise, why would she suddenly be killed? Or perhaps, as one witness told the Miami Herald, it was «revenge for the past.»
The Netflix series humanizes and sympathizes with Griselda Blanco to some extent, but her ruthlessness is undeniable. “She likes violence,” Reavie said in “Cocaine Cowboys 2.” “She just wanted to be in charge. That's why they called her Godmother.»
Griselda will be available on Netflix on January 25
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