Griselda Blanco

Griselda Blanco (February 15, 1943 – September 3, 2012), known as La Madrina, the Black Widow, the Cocaine Godmother and the Queen of Narco-Trafficking, was a drug lord of the Medellín Cartel and a pioneer in the Miami-based cocaine drug trade and underworld during the 1970s and early 1980s.

 

She was an important member of the Medellin Cartel but developed a bad rapport with the Cartel when she had the niece of the Ochoa family of the Medellin Cartel, Marta Saldarriaga Ochoa, murdered in order to not pay for a shipment of cocaine delivered by Marta. Her plan was to say she never received the shipment and that the young lady disappeared with it. After the young woman's body was found on a rural south Florida road, it became open season on Griselda and she was subsequently "on the run".

 

Griselda bloodied the streets of Miami in a decades-long reign of terror that saw her become one of the most notorious drug lords in the Western hemisphere. Born in Colombia, she first got involved in the drugs trade aged 14. By the time she was 40, she was moving 300 kilos of cocaine a month, had around 20 aliases and had developed a reputation for ruthless brutality even among Colombia's most hardened criminals.  

Blanco was queen of bloody revenge attacks and was credited with the dubious honour of inventing the motorcycle ride-by killing in the 70s and 80s. She was responsible for a huge amount of gang-related murders; urban legend has it she left a body count upwards of 250 people in her wake, including at least three of her ex-husbands. In one infamous incident, she pulled out a Uzi submachine gun and killed her husband Alberto Bravo and six bodyguards in a Bogotá nightclub car park, in a row over missing profits from a cartel they built together.

 

She was eventually caught and served 19 years in a US jail for murder and racketeering (having avoided the death sentence on a technicality) before being deported to Colombia. There she reached a sticky end; she was gunned down in the street - ironically, by a killer on a motorcycle - as she left a butcher's shop in 2012. She was clutching $150 worth of meat and a bible at the time of her death.