The Black Widow |
She was known as La Madrina, the Black Widow, and
the Queen of Narco-trafficking, but her name was Griselda Blanco. She was born
in Columbia and grew up in the infamous city of Medellin, once considered the
most violent city in the world. The city's name is most recognizable as the home of Pablo Escobar, the leader of the Medellin Drug Cartel.
One former lover claimed that Griselda was only eleven
years old when she kidnapped a child from a wealthy neighborhood not far from
her own home and attempted to ransom the child. She was a pickpocket, a
prostitute and a drug dealer. Though she was openly bi-sexual, at age twenty
she married her first husband and bore three sons.
Blanco brought her violence and drug-running to
the U.S. in the mid 1970’s. She operated in New York, California, and Miami. Griselda had a fourth son by a Columbian lover while in Miami and named him Michael
Corleone Blanco. By 2012, he was under house arrest for distribution of cocaine
and his three half-brothers had been assassinated in drug related wars.
Griselda Blanco was a violent woman with an explosive
temper. She had her lover, the father of Michael, murdered when he argued with
her about who would raise their son. While in Miami, one of her enforcers, Chucho
Castro, fell into disfavor with Griselda because of a dispute with her son during
which he embarrassed the son by kicking him in the rear-end. She
ordered that Chucho be murdered, but the assassins fired on Castro while he was
driving with a two-year old son, Johnny Castro, missing the target and
murdering the child.
One of the assassins, who later testified against
Blanco, said at first she was angry that they had failed to kill the elder
Castro, but upon learning they had killed the two-year old son, she was happy.
She declared that she was now even with Chucho Castro. Charged with only three murders, law enforcement estimated that she was responsible for as
many as forty. She is sometimes credited as the person who invented the
motorcycle drive-by shooting in the late ‘70’s as she used such murders to strike fear into her competitors and to control
her cocaine empire in Florida.
After a plea agreement on the murder charges,
Griselda spent time in U.S. prisons before being deported back to
Columbia. She had hundreds of enemies, some legitimate citizens such as law
enforcement and others rival criminals who knew that she was an unrepentant murderer
who would kill a person for nothing more than an insult.
At the age of sixty-nine, as she walked out of a
meat market in her hometown of Medellin with her pregnant daughter-in-law, she
was gunned down. A motorcycle riding assassin, no doubt exacting revenge for
one of her many exhibits of bad behavior, double-cross, or thievery,
accomplished the task by shooting her twice in the head. And so ended the life of one of the most despicable
women in world history.
Ah, such a fitting end for such a bad girl.
ReplyDelete