3½ Things You Should Probably Know About “Cocaine Godmother” Griselda Blanco

Griselda Blanco was one bad-ass broad

This past Monday, notorious cocaine kingpin Griselda Blanco was assassinated on the streets of Medellin, Colombia. She was known for her brutal violence while running a drug empire that brought in an average of $8 million per month.

To say that she was the original H.B.I.C. (Head Bitch In Charge) would be an understatement.

Three and a half things you should probably know about “Cocaine Godmother”:

Mmmm… Cartel kingpins never looked this good

1. Griselda Blanco was a cold-blooded killer. You don’t build a distribution network that spanned the East Coast of the United States all the way to Colombia by making a ton of friends. Instead, you probably have to chop up a lot of bodies. And this is what Griselda Blanco was known for — an unprejudiced appetite for killing anyone in her way. Colombian authorities suspect that Blanco ordered an minimum of 250 hits. And if you thought King Henry VIII was bad, you never met Griselda Blanco who routinely killed her husbands, baby daddies, partners, and basically any one who gave her a stank eye.

Mamacita!

2. Griselda Blanco started her criminal career young. Growing up poor in the slums is hard enough. Growing up poor in the slums and in an abusive household is even harder. So, it shouldn’t come as a surprise that Griselda Blanco started her career as a hardened criminal at the age of 11 — by kidnapping and killing another child. After that baptism by fire, Griselda Blanco went into prostitution and pickpocketing before moving to New York in the ’70s. By then she had three children and a burgeoning cocaine enterprise. By the ’80s, Griselda Blanco established a distribution network that brought in millions. Pablo Escobar was still flying his own cocaine-filled planes by then.

Griselda Blanco probably had sex whenever she wanted

3. Tony Montana got nothing on the “Cocaine Godmother”. Griselda Blanco was appropriately nicknamed the “Cocaine Godmother” and was one of the earliest pioneers of cocaine trafficking in the United States. After murdering her first husband and business partner, Blanco showcased her criminal brilliance by successfully maneuvering around the legal system before being forced to run her empire from behind bars for 10 years. Luckily for her no extra time was tacked on since police secretaries assigned to her case were found to be engaging in phone sex with her top Buttonman. And while she was indeed a ruthless drug lord, she did seem to have a great sense of awareness — naming her youngest son after Godfather character Michael Corleone. And that sort of meta irony makes her death kind of poetic after she was assassinated by motorcycle hitmen — a tactic she has been credited with inventing. Ironic? Definitely.

3½. Cocaine is one helluva drug.

First come the bricks

Then come the eight balls

Then come the strippers

And then you get rid of the bodies