Have you watched Netflix’s dramatized series Griselda, about Colombian drug kingpin Griselda Blanco? Several murders are recreated in the show as they happened in history, but just how many people did “the cocaine godmother” kill in real life?
Blanco, played by Sofia Vergara in the Netflix show, was a player in the cocaine drug trade in the U.S. in the 1970s and 1980s, linked with the Medellín Cartel founded by the infamous druglord Pablo Escobar. Blanco ended up in jail, where she had a heart attack. In 2004, she was deported to Colombia, where she was assassinated in 2012.
In the end, murder was crucial to bringing Blanco down in 1998 when her former hitman, close associate, and rumored lover, Jorge “Rivi” Ayala, flipped on her, agreeing to testify that several murders he committed were Blanco’s orders. After a phone sex and bribery scandal, however, Ayala’s testimony fell apart.
That same year, though, when she was already behind bars on drug charges, Blanco pleaded guilty to those three counts of second-degree murder, anyway, adding 20 years to her sentence.
Blanco’s three husbands were murdered
Blanco had many nicknames in her infamous career, including the “Cocaine Godmother” and the “Black Widow.” The latter stems from the fact that all three of Blanco’s husbands were killed. In the `70s, Blanco ordered her first husband, Carlos Trujillo, murdered, while her second husband, Albert Bravo, died in a gunfight, and Blanco later confirmed she pulled the trigger.
According to Blanco’s associate, Max Mermelstein, speaking with the South Florida Sun Sentinel in 1989, Blanco told him she “reached over, stuck the muzzle of her gun in his mouth and pulled the trigger. Just like that. And I believe her.”
Meanwhile, Blanco also ordered her third and final husband, Darío Sepúlveda, shot and killed in 1983. She was never charged in connection with any of her husband’s deaths.
The second-degree murder guilty pleas
Other murders figuring prominently in the story of Griselda Blanco, both in history and in the Netflix show, are the three second-degree murders she pleaded guilty to in 1989. In that case, Blanco ordered the murder of three members of her inner circle, including her trusted bodyguard, Jesus “Chucho” Castro. Castro’s young son was shot and killed in the crossfire. Those three killings are the only deaths Blanco ever served time in prison for.
Otherwise, no one knows for sure just how many people Blanco ordered dead, with some estimates as low as 40, while others place her ultimate death count in the hundreds. Besides her three second-degree murder pleas and the fact a close associate said she admitted to killing her second husband, it’s also said that at the age of 11, Blanco shot and killed a young boy she kidnapped and held for ransom in Colombia.
We may never know for sure how many people Blanco killed, but she is without a doubt one of the most brutal crimelords in history.