Griselda Blanco and Miami's Drug Wars: Netflix's New Narcos
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Yep. Go to Carvana.com to finance your car the convenient way. It's the spring of 1975, and Griselda Blanco is not happy. She's recently learned that millions in profit from her drug empire are missing, and the person she blames for it? Her second husband and business partner, Alberto Bravo. Even though he's the one who allegedly got her into the trafficking game in the first place. It's still a few years before the narco queenpin will turn Miami into a shooting gallery and earn her fearsome and brutal reputation.

But she's still not someone to be messed with. Griselda had recently fled a massive drug bust in New York City, slipping out of Queens, New York, before the cops could get her. Now, she's setting up shop in Miami as a fugitive. But before she gets things really moving, she's got to head back to her home country of Colombia and meet with her husband to figure things out. It's not just Griselda that's pissed, though. Her husband is not happy with his wife. He thinks her recent nickname, The Godmother, and the lore surrounding her has gone to her head.

There's no happy wife, happy life here. And he wants to set her straight, which is a shame because together they've managed to build a multi-million dollar a month drug trafficking organization that employs already up to 1,500 people. But the tension between them is thick and Blanco is going to earn herself another darker nickname by the end of the day. Griselda touches down in her Learjet at the Bogota airport.

Only 32 years old, she's already got a private jet and a convoy of black limos filled with enforcers to meet her when she steps off the tarmac. From there, she and her crew arrive at the meeting spot. It's a parking lot outside a nightclub on the outskirts of Bogota. Now, this isn't the heyday of the Colombian cartels, but the country is already devolving into a war zone. As she gets out, she tucks a pistol into her boot. Her husband, Alberto, he's waiting for her, and he has his own crew of enforcers with him.

Look, if both you and your partner have your own crew of enforcers, it just doesn't bode well for a healthy, lasting marriage. Any marriage counselor will tell you that. He immediately confronts her about her ego, and they have it out. Shooters are tense and armed at the ready. In her rage, Griselda pulls out her gun and fires multiple shots at her husband, and he returns fire with an Uzi from his waistband. In the ensuing gunfight, six bodyguards are killed. Griselda is shot in the stomach and survives, but her husband takes a shot to the head and does not.

Mind you, she's already rumored to have had her previous husband killed. And her next husband, well, she has him killed as well. That day, Griselda is branded with a new nickname, the Black Widow. This is the Underworld Podcast. ♪♪

Welcome back to another episode of the Underworld Podcast, an audio storytelling experience about organized crime around the world and cautionary tales brought to you by two cautionary tales, myself, Danny Gold, and my co-host, proud Maori warrior, Sean Kingston-Williams, who has been busy working on something that people used to read called a magazine article.

Yeah, you're outdoing yourself with that. And I think I need to sack my enforcers and get some couples therapy instead. It's not really going how I want it to be. But yeah, courthouses are going unchecked. Corruption is soaring. But there is always somebody willing to send me to a remote island to report on cult leaders. So I'm going to say the media is in good shape, right?

Yeah, yeah, sure. Anyway, as always, there are bonus episodes for the low, low price of $5 a month that help keep us afloat that you can get on iTunes and patreon.com slash the underworld podcast. And you can even sign up for it now through Spotify. If you look at the banner on our Spotify page, you know, we also have the YouTube, Facebook, TikTok, Instagram, whatever, you know.

Just like a part of my soul dies every time I have to plug social media, but this is the life we chose. It's the life we chose, Sean. Could be worse. It could be a streaming about politics or something, I guess. Yeah. Griselda, not just a bunch of tough but lovable rappers from Buffalo.

There's also a Netflix show that's coming out about her this week, which is starring Sofia Vergara, who I think Sean briefly dated back in the early 2000s. You know, Hugh Grant had made bumbling English guys a really hot thing back then. But this is our attempt to capitalize off that and get some clicks. Netflix? Yeah, yeah. Netflix.

Netflix. Nothing gets Latin models hotter than Pacey's Teenage Londoners anyway, especially when they're wearing finished football shirts or wife beater vests. And that's exactly what I looked like when I was getting off with Sofia Vergara, which definitely happened. You know, every now and then, like someone leaves a comment that's like, the show's great, but the banter is terrible. And it's like, what? How could you not? How could you not like this? Like, what is going on with you? That you don't enjoy this. Come on.

But, yeah, Netflix did not pay us for this, but they should. And, yeah, shout out to Billy Corbin and the Co-King Cowboys guys because they're a great source for this material. And obviously, if you like our show, you should watch their documentary because it really, I think, brought her story to the forefront. But.

Before we get into her story, we first have to paint this picture of what Miami was at the time before it started really, you know, snowing over there. And I think we're going to try to refer, you know, we always get like dinged by algorithms and YouTube and all this for the words that we use like cocaine and fentanyl and murder all the time and the cartel. So we'll try to...

you know, switch out cocaine for snow and other slain, but, uh, we won't say, we won't say cocaine and fentanyl and cartels. We'll say something else. We're going to slow it down or try to, I don't know, man, it's hard. We've talked about Miami before, I think in a bunch of episodes, whether it was the Santo Tropicante stuff, uh,

you know, about the corporation in New York, the Cuban mafia, basically, or the club kings of New York City with Chris Paciello. I think that was the late 90s era. But I'm going to run through it really quick just to catch up on back up to speed. You know, Miami before the drug game really took off there in the 70s, it was a pretty laid back town. It wasn't really that developed and there wasn't a wild party scene like there is now. Yeah, I actually looked at some stats from back in the day because I could imagine that Miami was tiny and its population was 1960, right?

So 1960 was just a quarter of a million. That's behind Honolulu, Omaha, Norfolk, Virginia. Like, is that part of DC or something? Toledo, Akron. There's like half a dozen Ohio cities that would never even made the list nowadays. I mean,

Ohio must have got absolutely smashed to pieces. But yeah, it was tiny. No, I think what happened was people realized they were in Ohio after a generation or two and were like, I need to get out. I don't even think the industry has anything to do with it. I think we just lost about 200 Patreon subscribers there. There was a lot of elderly people in Miami Beach, obviously, still are at the time, but came to Florida to retire for the nice weather. You know, Del Boca Vista and whatnot.

It had some things going on, but it was more of a sleepy vacation beach town, basically. Not that crazy developed. There's a reason Traficante, who ran Florida, basically, was first based out of Tampa Bay, not South Florida. And more importantly for a story is that it was wide open for drug traffickers. There's 1,200 miles of coastline, much of it remote and undeveloped, especially at the time. Numerous bays and rivers, obviously swamplands, ton of islands just off its coast, which historically...

It's always been a good spot for smuggling. Going back to the 1700s where pirates used to operate out of the area. And after that, during the Civil War, there were gun runners who would break the Union blockade from the Bahamas. And finally, during Prohibition, obviously, you had the rum runners who would use the same technique. And then, of course, you know, the mafia did have some action down there, especially during Havana's heyday in the 1940s and 1950s. I mean, I know I'm supposed to read every book about American history, but I had no idea...

That the Union blockaded the Confederates via the Bahamas? Like, what? That's crazy. I had no idea that happened at all. I think they were just trying to make sure, I don't know if it was by the Bahamas, but they were just trying to make sure no weapons came in from anywhere else into Florida, you know, because there's...

I don't even know. I don't know my my Civil War history very well. No. But I tried to watch that Ken Burns documentary, dude. But I'm on. I can't sit through nine hours of that. I come on. Yeah, I get it. The picture, the picture, it spins around. It's amazing. Revolutionary. But, uh.

So basically, yeah, going back, it was basically a smuggler's paradise, and that's why it was an ideal spot for drug traffickers to set up shop. And after the Cuban Revolution, it was his headquarters for the anti-Castro operations, which we discussed a little bit in both the Corporation episode and the Trafficante episode and a few others.

But yeah, so, you know, there was military training going on for paramilitary groups, for Cuban refugees, a few dozen miles southwest of Miami in the Everglades. And those operations, you know, you had people there who branched out into sort of illegality, mafia stuff, just, you know, a real underworld developing. And after those operations really ceased a few years after the Bay of Pigs, a lot of those dudes actually became fishermen.

And they did quite well until in 1975, Bahamas law made it illegal for them to fish lobster off the coast of the Bahamas. So, you know, you had these dudes with boats and military training who needed new careers. And they soon started acting as middlemen in the weed smuggling business where they would transport weed from the mothership operated by Colombian smugglers to the speedboats to bring weed ashore.

The exchange would happen in the waters between Miami and the Bahamas. You know, and the border was pretty much defenseless because there were so many boats in general and the authorities were just, they were just overwhelmed. The fishermen, you know, they would just chuck the weed overboard if the authorities got too close. Big bales would sometimes wash up on shore or just be randomly floating in the ocean. You know, these bales of weed would be named the square grouper. I think...

What's it called now? There's that thing in Central America with cocaine bricks washing up, which I think... Do they call that White Lobster? No, I think that's a B-52 song. Going back to Ohio. Yeah. That song rules. But no, it's something. It might be called Square Grouper as well, too. But it was a big thing, right? The last 10 years, all the cocaine that's washing up on these beaches and...

And, um, and I think Central America, maybe Mexico too. I feel like we've talked about it. It's just slipping my memory. Yeah. You know, it's just making me want to tell people to watch a bloodline as well, which is a great show. You know, I tried it. I didn't get super into it. Is it, is it really, is it really good?

Oh man, it's incredible. Yeah, it was so, so good. One of the best things out. What, 10 years ago? Jesus Christ, it's depressing. Yeah, there was another one too, I think, that came out. I think it's a Spanish show about a community where all these cocaine bricks wash up. I forget what it's called. It might have came out a year or two ago on Netflix. But I've just been watching the...

the new season of uh sabora or the the offshoot you ever watch that about the uh oh no no that's supposed to be amazing it's so good i mean it's not as good as gamora but it's so good it's rome rome mafia clans um one of which is uh i don't know like they call them gypsies in the show we're not are we not supposed to say that traveler you know it's travelers are the irish country and yeah i think it's it's uh anyway they say in the show um

If the mafia says it, then it's woke. No, they call themselves... Whatever, man. Anyway, South Florida... Maybe the banter is the problem. Anyway, South Florida quickly becomes the drug-smuggling capital of the U.S. by a clear margin. And when the Colombian drug lords would send their pot, they would also include at that point a little bit of snow just to test the market. This is still the 70s. It's not... I guess the early 70s

late 60s maybe, it's not huge yet. It didn't become a big thing until like a decade later. Eventually, due to the abundance of people smuggling weed, the price, it drops a lot. And some of the smugglers, they shift to smuggling blow where they can make the same amount of money for 1,000 pounds compared to like 40,000 pounds of weed, obviously. And this was when it was starting to get way more popular in the 1970s with the glitterati and the rich people. And it was just becoming super fashionable.

So weed and blow, so people don't know what that is. And we can say snow, but we can't say other words. I'm just trying to figure out the rules of the game. I can't figure out the algorithms. I'm trying to... We're trying to, you know, we're trying to get paid here. The, um...

I guess our topics don't really lend itself towards not being... I was going to say, we might be on a losing streak already. Yeah, I don't think there's like a conspiracy against us. I think it's just like advertisers are like, I don't want to be... I don't want my deodorant company showing up next to guys talking about murdering people for cocaine and cartel torture, which is understandable. It is what it is. The...

The Colombian drug lords, they're starting to get big and they soon realize they're giving up a lot of the profit by letting the Cubans handle some of the smuggling and like and all of the basically distribution when they get to the US. So their next move is going to be to cut them out and take over. And then they're going to try to cut each other out, which is a shame because it really seems like, you know, there's enough money to go around. But, you know, maybe Sean, that type of thinking. That's why I'll never be the kingpin.

Oh, you'll always be the kingpin in my heart, I think. But it's kind of just like, come on, guys. Like, you know, get along. You're making so much. Like, why? Why fight? You know, I just I. Yeah, that's definitely why you won't. Yeah. Yeah. Anyway, this is the setting where Griselda's Miami story begins. So Griselda Blanco.

aka the snow godmother aka the black widow uh aka the inspiration for all buffalo rappers is born in 1943 in cartagena columbia in a dirt poor shantytown in the mountains and when she's three she moves with her mom to medellin or uh medellin as sean likes to say actually your pronunciation is usually pretty good i'm the one who's who's terrible at that

Some of this reporting about our early life, it comes from a Maxim article, which is a throwback to a better time when magazines actually were a thing and published cool things like that.

Well, I mean, first of all, magazines do still publish cool things. But secondly, yeah, I mean, I really wish I knew what Shannon Elizabeth thinks about the Iraq war. I mean, that was that was a real high point for journalists. Wow. Throwback. Shannon Elizabeth. No, but that was I mean, those days we didn't have to know what every Instagram model thought about every political situation. It was a thing of beauty, you know.

Poe is in the back of a Cadillac wearing a handkerchief and that's all we needed in society and things were okay. That's what you did. Yeah. Ruth Griselda, as with a lot of narcos and mafia figures that have found their way to the forefront of pop culture, there's a lot of lore surrounding her. So it's hard to say how accurate some of these early stories are. And some of them obviously contradict each other.

but we will do our best as we always do. Her first serious entry into the criminal world is when she's 11. Her and her little hoodlum friends, they descend from sort of the poor, you know, hillside part of the town into the wealthier flatlands, and they kidnap a 10-year-old boy from a wealthy family.

They hold the kid hostage. They try to extort the family. But when the family refuses to play ball, the other kids, they hand her a gun and they dare her to shoot the kid. And allegedly, she does it. She kills the young boy, becoming a murderer before her bat mitzvah age, which is, Sean, 12 for girls, 13 for boys, just so you know. Thanks for the info. I mean, you know, I'm a new father. Today, I screamed at my son, no, for nearly bringing the TV down on his head. And then he cried and I felt really bad. But

What if he kidnaps and murders someone at the age of, what, 12, 13? I mean, what do you do then? Is it naughty step? I don't know. TikTok? No TikTok for a day? Maybe no ice cream after dinner? I'm really, it's a tough world out there.

You should start a parenting podcast along with this one. I should. We do numbers. I should. If I, I mean, if I make it clear that I hit them, I'll probably do really well on TikTok and YouTube. This is, so this is the first of her many, many victims, though usually she, she's the one ordering the hits, not doing them. And in Colombia at this time, from 1947 to around 1960, there's a civil war going on that's mostly fought in the countryside. It's called La Violencia, which Sean, that's Spanish for the violence. Right.

Yeah, thank you. Yeah. I mean, us colonizers say be all in, but you know, whatever. I'm sure this comment is going to tee up some kind of hideous mass murder where hundreds of thousands of people would have killed, right? Yeah, something like 200,000 people are killed. So there's just death and murder everywhere.

savagery happening all around her as she's growing up and you know obviously this is you can guess the effect this has on her and all the other little kind of colombian traffickers who grew up around this time surrounded by death and violence people are generally products of their circumstances so that's what it's going to do to people what it does to her her mother also used to beat her pretty violently but i mean it's the 1950s and i guess that's pretty much a par for the course

um from that point on you know she's a pickpocket she's on the street she's a prostitute in the slums until the age of 13 where she meets her first husband uh carlos trujillo trujillo is a sometimes customer of blanco's and also a criminal who specializes in false immigration papers and helping people immigrate illegally into the states he's a documents forger he's a human smuggler i've seen traffic or two but again um

It sounds more like smuggling because these are people who wanted to go and weren't lied to or forced to. So I think smuggler is more accurate. She learns these forgery skills from him and they help her in the future when she's coming and going from Colombia to the States. Yeah, I mean, all this is making me think about these columns about polyamory and consensual non-monogamy. I mean,

Guys, these days, you really, really do have it good. This is a different world. Yeah. They soon get married. They have three children. And his forgery skills, they help them illegally sneak into the U.S. and move to Queens in 1964. Though some sources do say she was back and forth between New York City and Columbia with her first husband and didn't settle in Queens officially until her second.

Either way, she soon divorces him in the late 1960s. In the early 1970s, she has him killed over a business dispute, poisoning him, although another source, again, says it was a dispute about the children. Like I said, contradictory sources, so if you're a superfan, just, you know, calm down.

Soon after dispensing with her first husband, she meets and marries the guy from the cold open Alberto Bravo, who is in the snow business. He saved up about $26,000 from the business and they decide to make it in the Big Apple, which, you know, it's kind of amazing that all you needed back then was 26K and a dream.

They moved to New York City. They opened up Shopping Queens and they start out small by having female drug couriers bring small amounts of the commercial on commercial planes as mules. They use like hidden pockets and lingerie, which is an ingenious method that that she came up with. But they soon graduate. You know, they rise so, so quickly that they're having their own pilots bringing in millions of dollars a product a month.

And they really benefit from having a direct connection back home in Columbia. And they come through quite well in the drug game in New York City. The forgery skills that she learns from her first husband, they help her meet a lot of sketchy movers and shakers between Columbia and the US. And those connections really help the business get going. Her clients, they soon include A-listers and athletes, presumably because she had like the really good stuff straight off the plane. But

But with millions of dollars in play and famous clients, they start getting attention in the wrong circles. And then there's a joint NYPD DEA operation dubbed Operation Banshee. They take down a 150 kilo shipment headed for her and indict her and 30 of her crew on federal drug charges. This is in April 1975.

At the time, it's actually one of the biggest drug cases in U.S. history, I think, when it comes to snow. But she flees back to Colombia before she gets arrested. And then as she's returned to Colombia, she notices millions of dollars are missing. She goes to meet her husband. And that's when we have that nasty confrontation scene in the beginning of the episode. Wait, so is she... At this point, was she kind of like a private drug valet to the stars? Was she personally supplying Hollywood or something? Or...

How were clients or the kind of A-listers? She was in New York City, but she was importing and distributing. So she was tied in. And I'm sure the celebrities and that sort of stuff, when you meet the top dog. So I don't think she was making house calls that often, but I think she was basically like, occasionally she'd cross paths with them and they knew that she was like the top dog basically.

Yeah, she's not the kind of person I'd want just like sitting on my couch watching people play FIFA like my old weed dealer. I mean, she sounds like a pretty crazy person. Yeah, they were good days. Some guys just wanted to hang out and be like, this is not, no. Does that still happen? We need to hear from listeners. I have some friends that do delivery not for weed or for snow.

And I think they are mostly in and out, but I think some people, people themselves occasionally want to hang out. I don't think they do because it makes their, you know, it's a, it's a tough job. You've got to be on the move. So.

I think that they get invited in, they'll hang out, but they tend not to want to hang out. When the smoke clears from that, she is now the sole boss of their crew. So she returns to Miami and she really sets up shop. She's no slouch either, right? She's quite innovative in the business. This is from a 1989 South Florida Sun Sentinel article. Quote, Griselda Blanco was the first to use multiple sources of supply so that she could always keep the snow pipeline full, says DEA agent Steve Georges. If one source dried up, another opened.

She also was the first to pull the shipments and consolidate the loads. This was how the Colombian cartel evolved. By sharing distributors in the United States, they could afford to pay pilots between $100,000 and $250,000 a shipment. Griselda would sell the dope first within her own organization. Then, when her distributors couldn't handle any more, she would sell to her competitors. So yeah, she is...

about that business. Like we mentioned, she was super connected in Medellin. Some sources put her in the cartel, others that she operated independently. The cartel itself wasn't super organized like the Cali cartel was. It was almost more like Sinaloa where there's this independence and almost like a federation. So it's hard to specify.

By this point, she has four sons and her youngest, she names, I mean, this is just incredible, Michael Corleone, which like, come on, it's just, it's corny, you know, like be better. But she gets into freebasing too, which is again, another similarity towards Sean. And it's just like a general, general sociopath. She has a level of ruthlessness that's only really ever matched by some of the most deranged Mexican cartel leaders we have discussed in other episodes. Right.

Some law enforcement officials, they think that she was so ruthless because it was a male dominated field and she thought she had to stand out in her like savage behavior. And there's a there's you know, there's a D.I. joke there somewhere, but it's low hanging fruit and I'm not going to take it. Yeah, I mean, guys, is it like woke to poison your husband to smash the patriarchy? What's going on? I think it's I think it's just girl bossing, you know.

One of her top enforcers slash hitmen, that's what we mean by enforcers, is a guy nicknamed Rivie, who is prominently featured in the documentary that we mentioned earlier. And he talks about a hit she set up when he first meets her. And it's a hit of two people in a nightclub. And when Rivie brings up the fact that there's six people sitting at the table and she only wants to hit two of them, so why would the plan be to spray the entire table? She tells him that, you know, this is how she does things. She'll kill all six to get to the two.

And that's about when we get to the sort of cocaine cowboys period. Miami's coke wars, they kick off on July 11th, 1979. That's generally the accepted date when a bunch of well-armed hitmen working for Griselda shoot up a busy outdoor shopping mall at two in the afternoon. There's, you know, dozens of bullets flying every which way. Two people are killed.

One is a big player in the drug market, and the other is his bodyguard. Several others are wounded, and a van used by the hitmen is found in the shopping center parking lot that is just loaded with guns and bulletproof vests and ammunition. This is according to a local NBC affiliate in South Florida at the time. And they dub the van the War Wagon, the cops do. And it's marked on the side with, quote, happy time, complete party supply, which, you know, great little, great detail. Yeah.

At the scene, a police officer coins the phrase cocaine cowboys and this sort of like daylight brazen shootouts with dozens of rounds being sprayed. It sends shockwaves through South Florida. But unfortunately, it's really just the opening round. I mean, this cop, he saw a van with happy time, complete party supplier, and his go to was cocaine cowboys like crazy.

I don't know, man. I think I need to run a police pump workshop or something. That really sucks. I think it's pretty good, man. I think it describes the situation very accurately. You know, Wild West and all that. Shootouts. And yeah, that's what happens. They have just endless shootouts by recently arrived Colombians all over the streets of Miami. And it's just utter madness. You have people opening up with machine guns.

All sorts of places, all times of the day, highways, malls, crowded public places. It just didn't matter. And Griselda is leading the charge and responsible for ordering allegedly hundreds of the murders in South Florida between 1978 and 1982. They'll kill anyone in sight just to try to get their targets, even if it's kids, random civilians, criminals.

Solving the cases is also extremely hard because many of the people involved in the trade at that time, they're there illegally. They carry multiple fake identities. So one detective, he makes this point in the documentary and he says, it's really hard to solve a case when you don't even know who the victim is.

Then in 1980, we have the Mario Boliv that occurs where you have 100,000 Cubans who come to Florida after Castro says anyone who wants to leave can. And, you know, you guys know Scarface and all that. As we always like to say, you got to be so sad, not Tony. But while a lot of good normal people come, a lot of ruthless criminal psychopaths that Castro releases from prison also come and they soon find work, you know, as shooters or in the drug game, hit man and all that.

Yeah, that's pretty effective asymmetrical warfare there. Like, I think that's happening in Europe, although that might be a conspiracy theory. So let's keep that one on the down low.

All right. Take it easy, Rogan. I don't even know what that is, but I'll talk to you about it after. So murders, which are already skyrocketing, they just go higher and higher. Violent crime soars well. Florida is just extremely volatile. It gets deadlier. It gets crazier. Dade County, where Miami is located, has 560 murders in 1980 and has branded the murder capital of the U.S. The population is only like 1.5, 1.6 million. It's a pretty high rate in the U.S. for a big city.

right? A bunch of regular citizens, they start buying guns to protect themselves. And you have a pretty crazy wild West scenario happening. So much so that Time Magazine has Florida on the cover with the headline Paradise Lost and tourism continues to dry up because its reputation as just a deadly city is total chaos. And I think this might've been from the 90s and it might've been when Miami was going through another tough period. I think probably the crack wars. But I remember this newspaper cartoon of a bunch of like

troops in like a transport truck and it's like like the first column or the first picture is like all right guys keep and I think it was during the Gulf War but it's like all right keep your heads down you know if they fire fire back blah blah blah and then you see like a sign to the side in the next panel that says welcome to Miami I don't know why that always stuck with me that's a good that's a good cartoon

I didn't have you down as a political cartoon lover, but...

is when a restaurant owner in South Beach gives her a problem when she's out to dinner, in retaliation, she has her goons come back the next day and just shoot up the entire line of people waiting to get in just to ruin his business. And like, look, I hate a stuck-up Mater D or a bouncer as much as the next guy, but it still seems like, you know, a little excessive. That's just how lawless Miami was back then, though. You could just get away with stuff like that.

Yeah, this is making Vice City seem like an actual documentary. Shout out to the Griselda superfans, by the way. They're really picking the right horse there. She sounds great. Another example is that in A Hit Gone Wrong, where the target is one of her enforcers turned enemies, the guy's three-year-old child was killed by mistake, and her reaction is, F it, at least we got him.

Even the cartel guys back in Columbia at this point, they're starting to think like she's just out of control. And they soon start thinking they want her out of Miami, just not because, you know, she's screwing everything up for the business with the insane amount of violence. There's so many of these incidents, but one more, three of her enforcers, including Rivie, who we mentioned earlier, they're sent to kill someone who didn't pay their drug debt after taking kilos on consignment after killing the man and his wife.

One of the hitmen goes to get rid of the kids, telling Rivi that Griselda said she would give him extra money if he got rid of the three children as well. Jeez. But he's had enough at this point, and he just stops the guy. So one of the big reasons she probably had to kill a lot of people is that she went heavy on consignment, which is generally only for live men and not freshmen. Just giving out kilos with no upfront pay because she thought no one would be stupid enough to rip her off, what with her rep and everything. But you know,

Dope dealers aren't the most disciplined people to do business with, and they're not the most disciplined people in general.

so she does end up having to kill a lot of people because they just can't pay her back she does have to kill a lot of people i mean i i mean i'm starting to think this woman isn't the patriarchy smashing hero the culture wars need but no i might be getting a bit hasty no definitely not and it's just it's honestly just a bad way to conduct business like these are people who seem like they really enjoy murdering more than making money which uh

Yeah. If you can't, if you kill these people, you can't collect any of the money. It's just simple mathematics, Sean. So yeah, don't kill someone who owes you money. But these Colombian traffickers and especially Griselda, they weren't the sharpest in this regard. They were just like, you know, complete savages with snow and guns. Rivie said that she liked, she just liked to be at war. And every day she would talk about all the various people they needed to hit. And

And I hate to keep bringing it up, but the similarities between her and Sean are just like, it's uncanny. I mean, have you ever heard of the concept of projection? She was just, she was so out of control that a big distributor who was working with the Colombians at this time period was consistently shocked that she always got a pass for doing some of the crazy stuff that interfered with business. The Colombian traffickers are not exactly sane people, but she just took it to a whole other level. And there's, as I mentioned, sort of like the Sinaloa cartel,

They were a loose alliance of various traffickers, like the Ochoa brothers, Pablo Escobar, obviously, at the top. So it's hard to say if she was officially in or not, if that even matters. Her main supplier, though, is a guy named Rafa Salazar, who in the documentary said he was the highest ranking person for a Medellinian in the States, whereas a 1987 LA Times article refers to him just as a high ranking member of the cartel. Numbers put her organization as making $80 million per month at its peak,

But, you know, they're never clear on whether or not that's revenue or profit. So I think either way, she's doing good, doing real good. Yeah.

And the documentary Cowboys gets into specific details about money that we don't always hear about of, you know, what type of payments some people in the operation make. So the smugglers, they would take it from Columbia and then hand it off to the distributors. And that was their own job. They getting just getting the drugs from Columbia to Florida. They were paid three thousand bucks a kilo. So if you're doing a 400 kilo trip, it's one point two million minus expenses. So solid money for a solid effort.

One route they had was to land on their own airstrips in the southwest Florida near Tampa, load up a car, just put shocks on it so the car didn't weigh down, and then tow the car on a tow truck into Miami. Another was to airdrop the packages with beacons into the ocean between the Bahamas and Miami and have the boats come pick it up and drive it right into the harbor and then tow the boat to a warehouse. But

You know, the glory days, they never last. In 1981, Ronald Reagan, who was Sean's favorite American president ever, and I think even his favorite politician of all time, is elected. And that's when the heat really starts coming down on these traffickers, especially with all the national media attention South Florida is getting because it turns into a national issue. Yeah, God bless. I knew the jipper had seen those marks tumbling off that libtard Nixon left them off the hook. Is it the jipper? Yo, I always read it as the gipper. Is it the jipper?

Is it a Gipper? Do you know what? I was looking it up. I was like, shit, what is his nickname? Is it a Gipper or the Gipper? Dude, I always thought it was the Gipper, but I'm always wrong about pronunciation. That's so lame. I don't want to find out. I'm just going to play it as it is. Oh, God, yeah. But either way, you know Big Ron. He was big on the drug war, just say no and all that. The reality, though, is the violence, that was the driving factor in South Florida getting a crackdown. And, of course, Griselda is...

Probably the main driver of that. So with a ton of heat of Colombian traffickers in Miami, she smartly leaves and moves to the Communist Republic of California in 1984. Her main problem with that move, though, is that Rafa, who we mentioned just a minute ago, didn't want to send product to California.

So, you know, it wasn't like now where you I guess it was different in terms of like the we've talked about how the routes change between the Bahamas to Mexico, Central America, all that. I guess he didn't have that route already established. So it's probably a pain for him to do that probably cost him a lot more.

So she, in turn, starts a relationship with Marta Ochoa to get her supply. Marta's either the first cousin of the Ochoa brothers, you know, who were major, major traffickers in Colombia, or one of their sisters or a niece. There's three sources with three different answers. Either way, she's clearly a close family member of the Ochoa family, which is one of, if not the most powerful family in the Medellin cartel at the time.

Shortly after starting up this business relationship, though, she's high in her own supply and reputation. She refuses to pay for 1,500 kilos, and she decides she's going to kill Marta with the thinking being that if she's dead, they won't know if she gave her the money or not, which is just real high-level thinking there. I don't know. I guess they assume they wouldn't know that she killed her, but…

Martha is kidnapped, murdered, found on the side of the road. It's just to me a wild and unexplained move. It's like going after one of Chappell's relatives 10 years ago. It's one thing for another top cartel got to do it, but for a US-based distributor, it's just reckless and stupid. I mean, it's just like, why would you go into business with this woman given her reputation at this point? I mean, your intelligence just isn't good.

Well, I think when you're that high up, not as high up as her, as high up as Theo Cho, is like you assume no one's stupid enough to pull something like that. But she clearly was. She is. And Rafa, who up to now is one of her closest associates in the cartel world, he flips on her. And so did – not to the government, to the cartel. So does the rest of the cartel, and they put a big price on her head. But before she pays the price with the cartel –

uh paying the price there i guess means getting murdered she's luckily for her arrested in february of 1985 i mean that's the thing too like we hype these people get hyped up as like heroes and one out it's like the scarface thing too and they they literally have like five or six years tops at the top and it's like that's not the people who get away like myer lansky is the one you admire you know the guys who get away with it or what's his name the one uh

The Gambino who never spent like a day in prison. Like that's the people you should admire. The ones who don't end up going down after like five years of being on top. Otherwise, what's the point? Cops tell the local news. So I'm just offended. Is that what we get demonetized for? I don't know. Cops tell the local news that she might have been responsible for up to 200 murders in South Florida. Some other sources think it's up to nearly 250, which by all accounts is

does not exactly sound like an exaggeration. It's hard to pinpoint the exact number, but it is a whole lot. And Rivie, her enforcer, he's also arrested. And then he flips on Griselda to the government, becoming an informant. She's charged with three murders. He somehow gets caught in a phone sex scandal with the secretaries of the prosecutor's office, which I mean, you know, well done, buddy. And the DA gets embarrassed and drops him as a witness. Well, I mean, we're skipping over that. So he is...

He is speaking to the DA as an informant and he ends up having phone sex with the secretary. That's...

I mean, that's the most impressive thing that's happened on this episode by a mile. It's called Game. Maybe the entire show. Game, man. It's called Game. It's called Game, is it? Yeah. All right. Yeah. Okay. The DA actually ends up offering her a plea deal because they want the case to just go away at that point. She gets a 20-year sentence in Miami for secondary murder and a 15-year sentence in New York for trafficking...

In that case that she had ducked back in the day, both sentences are supposed to run concurrently, which still kind of seems like, you know, some Euro style slap on the wrist for all the damage that she did. Some sources actually say she kept running things while behind bars. But if she was, she wasn't running them like she used to. She had made a lot of enemies during her reign of terror back in Colombia. And both of her adult children are eventually gunned down. Well, not both. Two of her adult children are eventually gunned down there during her imprisonment.

And during her prison sentence, there's a local Oakland drug dealer named Charles Crosby who writes her a fan letter. And she ends up calling him and forming a friendship that eventually turns into a romantic relationship, according to Crosby. His story's covered in the second part of that documentary, Snow Cowboys 2, but...

A bunch of his claims just seem like pretty big exaggerations and some outright fabrication, so I'm not going to spend a lot of time on him since, or any time really, since he's really the only source for these stories. Yeah, that seems like a case of Crosby, Shills, and Cash. Oh, nicely, nicely done. Wow.

There we go.

where she, by all accounts, leads like a quiet life. And according to her son, Michael Corleone, becomes a born-again Christian. But Jesus cannot save her. And in 2012, she's gunned down in Colombia by a hitman on a motorcycle, which is a fitting end. I'm going to just jump in to say that it hasn't struck me until now to actually look at a picture of Griselda Blanco, because she's supposed to be some femme fatale. And, uh...

The Google images of her next to Sofia Vicar are not

And not the most flattering I've ever seen. Although I wouldn't worry about that Griselda was a bit of a looker in her day, but, uh, yeah, those photos, she's got a real pit bull look to her, not pit bull, Dalai pit bull, but like an actual pit bull. I don't mean to be disrespectful, but you know, she's a psychopathic murderer. I think we can be, uh, but I don't know. I don't know what the recollections of, I didn't, I didn't look into it enough to see younger photos of her, but, uh,

Yeah, I mean, this one has Sofia Vicar and basically Danny DeVito looking next to each other. Yeah, yeah, essentially, that's kind of what it is. So back to the lands of Eleven and Pitbull.

The Miami economy, it skyrockets during this boom in the 80s with the drugs being brought in because you had a bunch of people in the drug trade with seemingly unending cash and they needed things to do with it. So when that dirty drug money flows in, you have a bunch of sectors that boom. People will tell you Miami was literally built on cocaine money.

The nightlife scene with the bars, the restaurants, the clubs, you know, even though it got kind of decreased in the 90s a bit and fell off, it's pretty popular to this day because people just had a ton of money to party with and people were yipped up all night long. So they partied all night long.

Oh, God. Yeah. Should we do a Miami Underworld live show or something? It sounds awesome. A lot of these clubs were in hotels that also boomed during this time. And one commentator described it as like a prostitute heaven because the amount of disposable money people in the drug trade had. One hotel would turn over rooms every five hours. And you had luxury goods like Rolex and fancy cars booming. And of course, you had a lot of people who were in the drug trade.

There was a huge real estate boom because if you're a longtime listener, you know, one of our favorite things to point out is that pretty much any gangster trying to go legit or hide his money gets into real estate. Yeah. I mean, that's one of your sayings. Apparently I'm into freebasing drugs, sociopathy and getting maths equations wrong, but I'm not butthurt. It's been a really good episode. I really enjoyed it. And also Ronald Reagan. And Ronald Reagan. Don't forget the jipper or gipper.

Another thing is banks obviously opened up like crazy in the 80s for obvious reasons and so much money floating to them that needed to be washed. So yeah, the city built on cocaine money back then. When the drug lords start getting arrested in the mid 80s with the national task forces and all, a lot of the businesses that supported the drug trade did actually shut down from certain clubs to banks, luxury car dealerships, all that. And the construction agency, it also, I forgot to mention it boomed then too. And you just had so much building and development.

Drug money just really helped propel Miami into what it is today. But things did get cleaned up, I think, briefly. Seven years after the infamous Time Magazine headline, Paradise Lost, it was on the cover of Newsweek, this time with the title America's Casablanca. Beautiful. Round it off.

Yeah, I mean, I particularly enjoyed how much I was mentioned in this show. You should do it a bit more next time. Yeah, I don't, it just worked. You know, I just kind of felt like throwing some throwing some asides at you and you're a good sport about it. But

As always, patreon.com slash the underworld podcast, Spotify. Sean has started doing, fuck, I should have mentioned this at the beginning. Sean has started doing these weekly updates, 10, 15 minutes of what's happening in the crime world all over the world. And we're going to be putting those up on the Patreon and everywhere else. So do that. Yeah.

And if you have a ton of cocaine money, why not become one of our top subscribers? Do the $100 a month option. Why not? We'll do it that way. Or just give it to us. Or give us heroin. Or kill someone. I don't know. Get us demonetized. Settle, settle, settle. Anyway, until next week. ... ... ...

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