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 United States Drug Enforcement Administration.
The infamous drug ‘godmother’, who headed a Colombian cartel bringing a staggering 3,400lbs of cocaine into the country each month, thought she was meeting a money launderer.
In fact, the meeting was part of a plan to snare the ruthless Griselda, then 41 and in hiding after death threats from competing drug cartels, who was believed to be responsible for up to 250 murders, including the assassinations 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 the authorities for years.
‘She was dressed in a blonde wig, a cape and matching dress and high heels but she was recognisable by the cleft chin and dimples we’d seen in photographs,’ he says.
The real Black Widow, Griselda Blanco, in a police mugshot from 1985
‘We were euphoric because she was someone who was paranoid and constantly on the move and not a single law enforcement person in the United States had ever seen Griselda in person until that moment. My partner and I looked at each other and silently said: “Bingo!”’
Although Palombo and his fellow agent were so close to Griselda they could have grabbed her, they let 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 an attache case as Griselda handed over half a million dollars in drug money to be funnelled into the legitimate financial system.
‘She was probably responsible for most of the homicides in South Florida and New York in those years because this was a woman who relished killing and had no regard for human life, even for children,’ recalls Palombo. ‘We wanted to arrest her, but we were building a case and had to look at it from an evidentiary point of view, so we let her go.’
Now the nail-biting scene has been recreated in a Netflix series.
The six-episode drama, released yesterday, stars beautiful Colombian-American actress Sofia Vergara, best known as glamorous Gloria in Modern Family, who had to wear heavy make-up, prosthetics and wigs to recreate the murderous drug trafficker.
Griselda herself was assassinated in 2012 — more of which later — but her youngest son Michael Corleone Blanco, named after Al Pacino’s character in Griselda’s favourite film The Godfather, said she had been aware of Hollywood’s interest in her and was delighted.
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 movie Cocaine Godmother), Jennifer Lopez (in a film about Griselda’s life, still in the making) and Vergara herself had all read for movie projects while she was still alive.
‘My mother was aware of it,’ Michael, 45, says. ‘She was quite thrilled. My mother never understood the mechanics of Hollywood… But she was happy about these great stars of Hollywood showing interest in playing her.
‘A lot of people remark on certain pictures of my mother, in her mugshots, that she didn’t look as beautiful as these stars, but… my mother was quite beautiful. When she was young, she was so beautiful that they called her the porcelain doll.’
Despite her apparent delight in Hollywood’s interest, Michael is suing Vergara and Netflix on the grounds that he was himself developing a book and TV show based on his mother’s story and the family didn’t authorise use of their images.
Her story is certainly an extraordinary. Born in 1943, Griselda grew up in the coastal city of Cartagena amid abject poverty. Her mother was reportedly violent and unstable, and Griselda was sexually abused by her stepfather.
In 1955 the family moved to Medellin, Colombia’s second city — once dubbed ‘the most dangerous city on earth’ and later the base of drug lord Pablo Escobar.
Here Griselda launched her criminal career as a pickpocket, before graduating to housebreaking.
Then, still aged only 11, she and a gang of friends kidnapped the son of a wealthy local family, hoping to extort 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 forger who introduced her to organised crime. They had three sons Osvaldo, Uber and Dixon. However, the marriage fell apart, and it is believed Griselda had him killed in 1970.
Griselda’s second husband was a local gangster and small-time drug trafficker called Alberto Bravo, who kick-started her drug smuggling career. The pair would make trips to New York with cocaine stashed on their bodies and sell the drug for a profit.
Griselda was not content with this small-time operation, however. She had a shoemaker in Medellin produce footwear with fake soles and, after realising women were better drug mules than men, designed bras, panties and girdles with secret pockets that could conceal $10,000 worth of cocaine at a time.
Michael with his mother Griselda. He is suing Ms Vergara and Netflix on the grounds that he was himself developing a book and TV show based on his mother’s story and the family didn’t authorise use of their images
When the family moved to Queens, New York, in the early 1970s, savvy Griselda began to expand the business. She bought cocaine from multiple sources so her supply line would never run out and persuaded other traffickers to work with her. Her methods became the business model for modern-day cartels.
Soon, she and Bravo were earning millions and cutting into a cocaine market run by the Italian mafia. But the authorities were onto them.
Palombo’s first introduction to Griselda came as a young agent in 1975 when the DEA and New York police intercepted and confiscated 300lb of cocaine the couple planned to distribute.
The couple were indicted on drug charges, but fled to Colombia. Back home in Medellin, cracks in their relationship soon showed.
Bravo believed his wife’s increasing taste for brutality had contributed to their near miss with the law, while Griselda suspected her husband was secretly funnelling money out of the business.
There was a confrontation at a nightclub and Griselda shot her husband at close range in the face, a grisly killing that earned her the nickname the Black Widow.
Griselda continued to run the business from Colombia and in 1978 married her third husband, Dario Sepulveda, with whom she had her fourth son, Michael.
While her three older sons were dragged into their mother’s drug business, Griselda had grandiose plans for her ‘baby’; Michael would go to the best schools and be destined for better things.
As he says: ‘She would always tell me, “Everything’s warfare, including business, but you don’t have to conduct business like we did, you don’t have to do this business.” She always wanted me to be a lawyer, a doctor or in movies.’ He recalls how his ‘gordita’ [an affectionate term for a fat person] was a mix of fearsome and funny, but says: ‘With me she was heart-warming, she would cuddle me.’
In 1979, Griselda established a new operation in Miami. At the time, South Florida was a sleepy retirement community and popular winter destination for family holidays. But its network of waterways and landing spots for small planes made it hugely attractive to drug smugglers. The tropical paradise became a war zone. ‘There were homicides right and left every day,’ recalls Palombo, who was posted there in 1983. ‘It was commonplace to have one Colombian shooting another Colombian, and innocent bystanders would get caught in the crossfire.’
Sofia Vergara as Griselda and Christian Tappan as her accountant Arturo in the Netflix series
Scared residents left as the violence escalated and holidaymakers cancelled trips, prompting Time magazine to call the state a ‘paradise lost’.
Nelson Andrieu, a detective on Miami’s homicide unit at the time, says in 1982 there were 621 murders. Authorities were forced to bring in refrigerated units because there was no room in the morgues.
After one gruesome Griselda-ordered shooting, Andrieu said a coroner described the victim’s body as ‘being like Swiss cheese’. ‘She was a woman in a man’s world, so she had to prove herself,’ the 69-year-old retired detective says.
‘If you owed her money, she’d kill you and if she owed you money and didn’t want to pay you, she’d kill you.’
Griselda was bringing in around $80 million a month and lived lavishly. She owned a fleet of luxury vehicles, multiple properties and travelled by private jet. She threw debauched parties. But her moods became increasingly unstable because she smoked basuco, a potent form of cocaine that caused extreme paranoia.
Son Michael says stories about her are ‘70-30’ true. ‘The truth is my mother couldn’t orchestrate half of the things she has been blamed for without the help of others… more violent than she was.’
But Palombo is adamant: Griselda liked to kill people. ‘They weren’t just plain shootings — the woman was a psychopath.’
He cites the example of a murder that took place when a rival dealer was shot dead at a 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 because they fell out of favour with Griselda were assassinated by gunmen on motorcycles — a style of execution she invented and that became commonplace.
In 1983, Griselda’s third husband walked out on her, taking Michael back to Colombia. Desperate to get her fourth child back, Griselda put out a contract on Sepulveda and he was shot dead in front of five-year-old Michael, who screamed in horror. The little boy was then returned to his mother.
After pleading guilty to drug conspiracy charges, Griselda was hauled off to jail for 15 years
While Michael won’t go into the details of his father’s death, he admits being exposed to ‘a lot of murder, mayhem and violence’ in childhood, even though his mother and brothers tried to shield him.
Palombo, now a genial 77-year-old who lives in Florida, says the DEA relentlessly pursued Griselda over the course of 11 years until he finally arrested her in February 1985, nine months after that first encounter in the hotel.
After her meeting with the ‘money launderer’, Griselda once again disappeared. The DEA eventually discovered her living in Irvine, California, by tracking her pager number with payphones she used in those pre-mobile days.
On February 17 1985, Palombo and five agents stormed her house. ‘She’d used the payphone near her house, and we followed her back to where she was living,’ remembers Palombo. ‘We waited until little Michael left the house with a nanny. We were afraid Griselda would go for a gun and we didn’t want to traumatise him if we had to shoot his mother.
‘She was sitting on top of her bed reading the Bible. There was a gun on her bedside table, but she didn’t go for it. I think she was probably grateful it was law enforcement and not one of the assassins looking to kill her.’
Pleading guilty to drug conspiracy charges, Griselda was hauled off to jail for 15 years.
While serving her sentence, prosecutors put together multiple murder charges but bungled the case after the state’s key witness — Griselda’s favourite hitman Jorge Ayala — became embroiled in a sex scandal with a secretary in the state attorney’s office.
Griselda struck a deal, pleaded guilty to three second degree murders, and just three years were added to her sentence.
‘She served only 18 years for all those murders and drug deals,’ observes Palombo. ‘She could have got the electric chair.’
Her sons Uber and Osvaldo also served jail terms and were assassinated as soon as they were deported to Medellin. Dixon became a drug addict and is believed to have died.
Most people assumed the same fate awaited Griselda when she was released in 2004.
‘When she was freed from prison, I encouraged her to stay in the U.S. 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 eight years in her old neighbourhood until 2012, when, aged 69, she was shot twice at a butcher’s shop, by two men on a motorcycle — the style of execution she had perfected.
Son Michael, who himself has drug convictions, is now a married father of two and lives in Florida. He has appeared on a reality TV show, runs a clothing business and is soon to release a memoir called My Mother, The Godmother, And The Real Life Story Of Michael Corleone Blanco.
But while Michael’s memories of his mother are softened by love, Palombo is unequivocal: ‘I came across a lot of crazy, homicidal men and vicious females in my career, and none of them compared to Griselda. She was a lunatic. I hope we never see her like again.’
Griselda is out now on Netflix