We are just one week away from Netflix’s anticipated series Griselda, which hits the streaming platform on January 25. Coproduced and starring Sofía Vergara, it will be the first time the actress plays a dramatic role on screen. The subject of the series, Griselda Blanco, also known as the “Cocaine Godmother” or the “Black Widow,” was a notorious Colombian drug lord active during the 1970s and 1980s. Learn more about her story below.

©My Space, per El Pais

The “Cocaine Grandma’s” early life

Blanco was born in Santa Marta, Colombia, and moved to Medellín when she was three years old with her mother. She grew up during La Violencia, the Colombian civil war, and was exposed to a criminal lifestyle at an early age. The story goes that when she was 11, she allegedly kidnapped a child from an upscale area in Colombia. After attempting to ransom him, she killed him. She became a pickpocketer before she was 13 and ran away from home when she was 19 to escape abuse at the hands of her mom’s boyfriend.

Her lucrative drug trade

Blanco became a key figure in the Medellín Cartel, one of the most powerful drug cartels in history. She helped stabilize the cocaine trade between Colombia and American cities like Miami and New York and to dealers in California.

She illegally immigrated to the United States under an assumed name and with fake papers in 1964, making Queens, New York home base for her three children and first husband, José Darío Trujillo. She started a drug operation with many workers underneath her.

In April 1975, she was indicted on federal drug conspiracy charges along with her subordinates. She fled back to Colombia to avoid conviction but returned to the United States shortly after and moved her operation to Miami in the late 1970s.

Blanco was creative when it came to smuggling. One of her infamous schemes was an underwear factory in Colombia, which created underwear with secret compartments in the items to hide cocaine. The drug couriers would then smuggle cocaine into the United States as passengers on commercial flights. It was just one of her operations during the 1970s and 1980s. David Ovalle wrote in the Miami Herald that at her peak she shipped about 3,400 pounds of cocaine per month―worth millions of dollars―via boat and plane between Medellín, Miami, and New York.

Overlapping with her return came hundreds of homicides per year in the Miami area during the 1980s. Blanco is believed to be responsible for ordering 200 murders in Colombia, Florida, New York, and California, per Vice.

Blanco used motorized assassins on two wheels in Colombia and Miami, and police say she was responsible for turning Miami into the murder capital of the US during this time. In Miami, she was behind murders in broad daylight and would take down any rival drug lords.

Blanco also had the help of her children. Her oldest, Dixon Dario Trujillo-Blanco operated the family business in San Francisco, moving around 660 pounds of cocaine every month, per All That Interesting.

With the influx of cocaine into Miami, law enforcement created the CENTAC 26 (Central Tactical Unit), a joint operation between the Miami-Dade Police Department and the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) anti-drug operation.

Blance fled to California, and after trailing her for ten years, she was finally arrested by DEA agent Bob Palumbo.

Her time in prison

©Wikipedia

Blanco was found guilty in federal court of conspiring to manufacture, import, and distribute cocaine and sentenced to 15 years. While in prison, she was additionally charged with three counts of first-degree murder by the state of Florida.

Following a failed attempt to use the testimony of her trusted hitmen, Jorge Ayala, she pleaded guilty to three counts of second-degree murder in 1988 and was sentenced to 20 years in prison, to run concurrently.

After suffering a heart attack in 2002, she was granted compassionate release from prison and deported to Medellín in 2004. She lived a quiet life but was murdered in 2012 outside of a butcher shop while with her pregnant daughter-in-law. A motorcycle assassin shot her twice as she exited the car, using the same technique she was credited for introducing in Miami. She was 69 years old.

According to her son Michael, she became a born-again Christian, in her later years.

The “Black Widow” legend

There is no conclusive evidence that Blanco killed her husbands, but it is part of the legend. Her first husband, Trujillo is said to have died of complications related to hepatitis in 1970, per Jennie Erin Smith, author of Cocaine Cowgirl: The Outrageous Life and Mysterious Death of Griselda Blanco, the Godmother of Medellín, via Huffpost. However, people believe she had him killed.

She met Alberto Bravo, a cocaine dealer who converted garment factories into drug labs in Medellín, who became her second husband. Pablo Escobar is said to have ordered the death of Bravo in retaliation for a failed assassination attempt. He was killed in a Bogotá shootout, but Richard Luscombe reported in The Guardian that it was Blanco who killed Bravo in a gunfight after suspecting he had been stealing millions of dollars worth of her profits, although it is not 100% certain.

Her third husband was bank robber Darío Sepúlveda, who she moved to Miami to create a bigger drug ring. He kidnapped their son and left her in Miami, which is believed to be the reason he was murdered.

When she was deported in 2004 back to Medellín, she reportedly swore off men and was living with a woman in her hometown.