Griselda Blanco

Griselda Blanco Restrepo was born in Cartagena on the country's north coast. She and her mother, Ana Blanco,[7] moved to Medellín when she was three years old. Upon arriving there, she adopted a criminal lifestyle. Blanco's former lover, Charles Cosby, recounted that at the age of 11 she allegedly kidnapped, attempted to ransom and eventually shot a child from an upscale flatland neighborhood near her own neighborhood.[1][8][9] Blanco had become a pickpocket before she even turned 13. To escape the sexual assaults of her mother's boyfriend, she ran away from home at the age of 19 and resorted to looting in Medellín until the age of 20.[1][8]

Blanco was a figure in the drug trade from Colombia to Miami, New York and California.

In the mid-1970s, she illegally immigrated to the United States with false passports and settled in Queens, New York. She established a sizable cocaine business there and in April 1975, she was indicted on federal drug conspiracy charges along with 30 of her subordinates. She fled to Colombia before she could be arrested, but returned to the United States and settled in Miami in the late 1980s.

Her return more or less coincided with the beginning of very public violent conflicts that involved hundreds of murders and killings yearly which were associated with the high crime epidemic that swept the City of Miami in the 1980s. The struggle by law enforcement to put an end to the influx of cocaine into Miami led to the creation of CENTAC 26 (Central Tactical Unit), a joint operation between the Miami-Dade Police Department and the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) anti-drug operation.[10][11]

Blanco was involved in the drug-related violence known as the Miami Drug War or the Cocaine Cowboy Wars that plagued Miami in the late 1970s and early 1980s. This was a time when cocaine was trafficked more than cannabis.[12]

The distribution network, which spanned the United States, earned $80 million per month.[1]

In 1984, Blanco's willingness to use violence towards anyone who displeased her led her rivals to make repeated attempts to assassinate her. In an attempt to escape the hits that were called on her, she fled to California. Drug barons in Colombia allowed her access to killers then she would be given orders to tell the killers to murder a particular rival. She commonly told them that everyone in a dwelling where the target was located should be killed; at times she demanded that any living entity (cats, dogs, goldfish, etc.) were also to be killed. Thus, several innocent people, even children, were killed along with the cartel's intended victim. These extra murders caused Miami to become the murder capital of America for years.

On February 17, 1985 Blanco was arrested in her home by the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) and charged with conspiring to manufacture, import, and distribute cocaine. The case went to trial in federal court in New York City where she was found guilty and sentenced to 15 years.[13]

While serving her sentence, she was charged with three counts of first-degree murder by the state of Florida. The prosecution made a deal with one of Blanco's most trusted hitmen, Jorge Ayala, who agreed to testify against her. However, the case collapsed due to technicalities relating to a phone sex scandal between Ayala and two female secretaries who worked in the state attorney’s office.[14] Blanco pleaded guilty in 1998 and was sentenced to 20 years in prison.[15] In 2002, Blanco suffered a heart attack in prison.[16]

In 2004, she was released and deported to Medellín.[1] Before her murder in 2012, she was last seen in May 2007 at Bogotá Airport.[1]