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In a lot of respects, Rizal de Blanco really was the perfect sociopath.
She had lived her entire life outside the reach of the law. She had been a prostitute, a madam, a drug smuggler. She doesn't seem to have been possessed by any sense of morality or even any sense of fundamental decency. She should have been a specimen for Thomas Hobbes. The law played no role whatsoever in what she did, how she acted, how she ran her business. And as such, I mean, she was extremely violent.
She was vicious and she had a reputation. In the 1970s, Griselda Blanco rose to become the world's first female narco-terrorist.
She would kill you if you owed her money. She would kill you if you encroached on her territory. She would kill you if you personally insulted her. Sometimes she would just kill you for the fun of it. Every time police swooped in, she would vanish without a trace. We went from probably 80 to 100 murders a year to almost 300 to 400 murders in a year in the early 1980s. Not that Miami or South Florida was a sleepy community.
but it wasn't expecting this bombardment, I would call it, of criminality. DEA agents will have to go beyond the call of duty to bring her to justice. We would just find the bodies shot in cars or in their homes or restaurants or wherever it was. She really begins to emerge as this female Al Capone. These guys are the real deal. And this is Real Narcos. My name is John Cuban. In this episode of Real Narcos...
We follow the remarkable rise to power of one of history's most infamous drug lords, Griselda Blanco. Straight from the horse's mouth, this is the story of what actually happened according to the people who were there on the ground at the time, hunting down the woman who became known as the Black Widow. I joined the police department in May of 1980.
July 11th, 1979. At 2:25,
A white Ford Econoline delivery van rolls through the parking lot of the Dadeland shopping mall in Florida. The driver slowly crawls around the outskirts and pulls up in front of Crown's liquor store. Crudely stenciled in red ink on the side of the van are five words: "Happy Time Complete Party Supply." Underneath, a phone number, but the line is disconnected because Happy Time Complete Party Supply is a fake business.
This is not a delivery van. It's a death machine, lined with reinforced steel and windows that pop out so that those inside can easily shoot out of the vehicle. Inside the van, an arsenal of deadly high-tech weapons litter the floor. Shotguns, Uzis, a MAC-10 submachine gun, carbines, and revolvers. As the van comes to a standstill,
A white Mercedes sedan with black-tinted bulletproof windows enters the parking lot compound and parks up outside Crown's Liquor. A sharply dressed man steps out into the blistering summer's day heat. It's Jimenez Bonasso, one of Miami's top cocaine dealers. Bonasso enters the glass-fronted liquor store, his bodyguard Juan Carlos Hernandez close behind.
Within minutes, Pineso has placed several thousand dollars worth of Chivas Regal whiskey, rare cognac and vintage wine on the counter. Hernandez is so relaxed, he's left his 9mm Browning on the dashboard of the car. An unwritten rule for drug lords is that they should never keep a fixed routine. But for Pineso, visiting Crown's Liquors on a Wednesday afternoon has become a weekly activity. Outside in the parking lot, two males step out of the white van.
At 2:29 PM, the taller of the two men enters the store, lifts a Beretta, and shoots Pinesa four times in the head. As Hernandez and the store clerk turn to flee, a second assassin wildly empties the 30-round clip of his MAC-10 into their backs. The two gunmen calmly return to their idling van. Whilst walking, they fire 86 rounds of ammunition indiscriminately at passersby.
By the time police arrive, the scene is closer to a war zone than a shopping mall. Cars surrounding the mall are riddled with bullets, many leaking gas onto the tarmac below. Police carrying six-shot revolvers are no match for the heavily armed hitmen. Stepping inside, broken glass crunches underfoot. Amidst the smashed bottles, there are four bodies. Pineso and Hernandez lay in pools of blood. The two innocent store clerks are critically wounded.
Today, Nelson-Andrew is the chief of police with the West Miami Police Department. But in '79, he was just a rookie cop. I was a rookie policeman, shaking in my boots. There was the vehicle that they had abandoned, which was actually like a moving van that they had coated with bulletproof vests that was left there at the scene, something that we had never seen or heard of here in South Florida. The disregard
for human life. There could be potential here for dozens of innocent people to have been shot or killed. It was, you know, through the grace of God that that didn't happen. But the weapons, the type of weapons, the preparation that went into it, police officers were still using six-shot revolvers.
And these guys had, you know, Uzi submachine guns with 30 and 60 round magazines. So the police department itself and the cities were not prepared for that. Again, why did this happen? Why was he targeted? We didn't know at the time. We didn't even know who the shooters were. The victims are Colombian drug dealers. So the police put out feelers in Miami's Colombian immigrant community.
But no one has the courage to speak out. Very, very difficult to get any type of information from these Colombians. They were very tight-lipped. And a lot of times what they were doing is they would bring in people to commit these murders. And then that afternoon or the next morning, they were on a plane back to Colombia.
We were getting people that were undocumented, people that had never been arrested here before. We would run fingerprints and they wouldn't match anybody's. So again, it was...
dealing with a whole new set of circumstances. It wasn't your typical homicide investigation, which were, you know, barroom brawls or husband and wife type of things. These were a new breed of homicide for the detectives to handle. The massacre is part of something much bigger. Stephen Schlesinger is an assistant U.S. attorney at the time.
E.C.'s a larger, sinister picture is becoming clear. I don't believe either of the victims were the intended targets, but the brazenness, the brutality of it really sort of came to symbolize the law enforcement problem that had been created in Miami by these drug factions. I mean, it was really a Wild West. It was a Wild West showdown here, and that was really sort of exhibit A, the Dadeland murders.
Gangland warfare has been raging unchecked across the city for three years. It was during that time that Miami saw dramatic changes in the homicide rate. We went from probably 80 to 100 murders a year to almost 300 to 400 murders in a year in the early 1980s. It was something that the city of Miami Police Department, Miami-Dade, Miami Beach, all the major police departments really weren't prepared for.
Overkill. You know, you can shoot a person one time in the head and they're gonna die, but they would make it a habit to shoot you five times, ten times. Miami used to be a quiet southern town. In the 1950s, the night shift for the Sheriff's Department had one police guard to patrol an area the size of Rhode Island. Now, it's seeing the worst violence in any U.S. city since the bloody era of Al Capone. 100,000 criminals.
350 rival Colombian and Cuban gangs slaughtering each other in their bid to control the cocaine trade. The U.S. Attorney's Office in the early '80s consisted of 12 prosecutors. Law enforcement at every level was overwhelmed. There weren't the cops, there weren't the agents, they didn't have the information, they didn't have the resources.
Cocaine was being imported by the ton, by boat, by plane, in cargo. I mean, there were no facilities available to stem this, and the distribution was extremely violent. There were wars between the gangs. There were turf battles. One day in South Dade in greater Miami, Preacher is giving a sermon on the evils of drugs. His voice rises as he warms to his theme. As those inside begin to pray,
Half a million dollars worth of cocaine in wrapped bundles comes crashing through the church roof and lands amidst the worshipers. The aircraft that was dropping it got chased off course by a customs plane. The Miami cops can't cope with the levels of drug-fueled violence. The same words are repeated on page after page of police paperwork. Open pending. Hundreds of unsolved murders, with more every day. The cops are desperate to get to the source of the violence.
to find out which kingpin is behind Dadeland and the countless other shootings taking place on the turnpikes and highways of the Miami area. Police officers pull in street corner dealers, grilling them for information about their suppliers. Threatened of jail time, the dealers start to talk, and they all whisper the same name. The crime boss orchestrating this rampant drug war is a woman named Griselda Blanco.
The picture started to come together on who these victims were that had been shot and who would have wanted them shot and who would have gone through that great of a planning to get to these people and that's when Griselda Blanco emerged. We realized everything that was taking place involving Griselda. I am of the opinion that she was the largest cocaine importer into the United States at the time.
She's known in cities across the US as the godmother for her mafia-like brutality. I think that Griselda was a woman
participating in a man's world as far as drug trafficking, she had to be worse than any man could be or she couldn't have been as successful as she was. People would have taken advantage of her. She really had to demonstrate that she was ruthless, that you didn't mess with her, that she would kill you. If she owed you money and didn't want to pay you to make some sort of a point, she'd kill you.
If you owed her money and you couldn't pay her or didn't want to pay her for whatever reason, she'd kill you. So she made this aura around her that don't mess with Griselda Blanco because she'll kill you. And she had to do that, I think, in my opinion, because otherwise people would have not respected her, would have taken advantage of her, and she would have lost the power and control that she had.
To trace Blanco's transformation into the violent, bloodthirsty woman who will earn the nickname "The Black Widow", you have to go back over 25 years. 1943. Griselda Blanco is born in Cartagena, on Colombia's Caribbean coast. At a young age, she and her family move to Medellin, Colombia's second largest city. She spends the 1940s and 50s growing up as a slum kid.
Her community of Barrio Antioquia is home to gangsters, prostitutes, and murderers for hire.
Jenny Smith is an author and biographer of Blanco. Until later in life when she developed an almost perfect facade of society matron, Griselda Blanco had always been on the fringes. She lived in a neighborhood that was so uniquely criminal that it had been designated a tolerance zone, which is to say a red light district, by the city. Things that were illegal elsewhere were legal in that little neighborhood.
So she grew up quite apart from the normal moors of society. She was sort of a born criminal, I would think. Why her? There were many, many girls like her at that time, even in that neighborhood. None of them went on to become mass murderers. Griselda related a story about being violently raped when she was really young.
Many times, it's very hard to tell what was true and what was a lie because she lied so easily and so constantly. But even that experience, to me, can't explain why she would have been the avenging angel that she became. Whatever the root causes, Griselda begins her life of crime young. As a pickpocket, she soon steps it up.
Legend has it that at the tender age of 11, she kidnaps a boy her own age from an upscale neighborhood. She holds him for ransom. His parents don't take her threat seriously. Without a second thought, she takes his life. A cold-blooded killer, even before she hits her teens. Throughout her life, she'll be prepared to do whatever it takes to get what she wants. Anybody in those worlds would be quick to make threats or would be quick to kill an enemy.
for business purposes, but not all her killing was for business purposes. And in fact, in the end, I think it was her killing that undid her business. There were a lot of people of that generation in Miami, a lot of people. They sold cocaine.
That's what they did. They didn't open fire on, you know, in a public parking lot in order to get two enemies who happened to be in a liquor store. They didn't kill people because they embarrassed or insulted her teenage son, you know? So this was another level of killing that cannot be explained by anything I think in her background. I think it's something in her soul. Griselda is part of a generation of Colombian drug traffickers that grows up during La Violencia, the violence.
It's a bloody civil war that nearly tears Colombia apart. La violencia rages through Griselda's childhood. Kids like her on the streets of Medellin see dead bodies from the conflict on a daily basis. A corpse doesn't have any shock value, it's just another kind of garbage littering the street. And on top of this, Griselda's mother is a violent alcoholic. Violence couldn't be any more commonplace to this young girl.
The night Griselda leaves home becomes the stuff of legend to our fellow drug dealers in years to come. The story goes that one night her mother is administering a particularly brutal beating. As her mother pauses for breath, Griselda manages to stagger to her feet. Her mother grabs her by the shirt. Griselda struggles like a wild animal. She wrenches herself free, tearing her shirt in two as her attacker clings to the fabric.
Griselda sprints off into the night and into the trees of the Medean hills. From this point on, she lives hand to mouth, eking out a living as a prostitute. Then, at 13, Griselda gets a boyfriend, much older Carlos Trujillo. He's a Colombian people trafficker. Over five years, he teaches Griselda the art of passport forgery. She becomes an expert in creating fake identities,
Together they organize the illegal smuggling of thousands of people into the United States. By the time she's 19, Griselda and Carlos Trujillo are married with three sons: Dixon, Huber, and Osvaldo. The family divide their time between Columbia and New York. In 1970, Trujillo dies suddenly of liver failure. Griselda takes center stage. At 27, Griselda should be a grieving widow.
But Trujillo has served his purpose, and she has already lined up his replacement, another gangster named Alberto Bravo. Elaine Carey is a historian and expert on Griselda. She was from a poor family, but she was also very attractive. She's very gregarious, charismatic. But she's also a product of a time where there's unbelievable violence in Colombia. Being
From a working class background and a poor family, being in many ways rejected by her family, she relies on herself from a very young age. And so she becomes rather street smart and savvy. And also she forges relationships with men early on that are beneficial. Unlike Blanco's first husband, Bravo doesn't smuggle people. He smuggles cocaine. There's serious money to be made.
And that money is in the United States. At this time, Bravo's drug business is small time. Just a few smugglers trafficking trivial amounts of coke.
But Griselda Blanco thinks much bigger than that. Her ambition is to completely overhaul the drugs trade, to build an empire in America. Bravo and Blanco are this, you know, they're this perfect partnership that emerged at a perfect time. And they were both involved in human trafficking. They had a network already established in the United States.
and as that their services were less needed for forgery and movement of people, they moved into cocaine. And they're in the right place at the right time with the right product. It's time to fully commit. They move their headquarters from Medellin, Colombia to the Big Apple, setting up shop in Queens. Griselda already has a network of Colombian criminals operating within the United States. From her people smuggling days, this is a ready-made distribution network.
But first things first: they need a supply chain. Bravo buys cocaine in Bolivia and Peru. It's straightforward enough to transport it into Colombia. The borders are virtually unguarded. The drugs get repackaged in Blanco's hometown of Medellin. Kilo upon kilo of high-grade Bolivian marching powder is good to go. Now Griselda needs to come up with a way to import the product into the US in mass quantities.
As a woman in a man's world, her masterstroke is to devise a new way of smuggling cocaine, stashed where no one would think to look. Customs agents are trained to be not only looking through your bags, but also looking at your person.
They would notice maybe bulges and they would talk about this in their testimony, a bulge that was in a place where it normally wouldn't have been. Or that a particular person seemed to be wearing more clothing or something like that. There would be something that they would look for. And this is how they begin to find it, is obviously they're noticing these bulges or something like that and then they will search the person. And they were finding cocaine.
It wasn't just coming in on people's bodies. It was also coming in
you know, false backs and suitcases and dog crates, but they were also creating garments that would facilitate this, such as specialized brassieres and girdles and things like that, where they could put more drugs, where they could actually enhance the female figure for women to, you know, essentially bring it in on their person and not be so easily identified because
These garments would allow for the drugs to be more smooth around the body and it would just look like a woman's natural figure. The drugs are stashed front and center, right where the border guard's eyes are immediately drawn. That's the genius of it. Griselda carefully selects Colombian women she can trust as her mules. She trains them to flaunt their sexuality.
No one's going to suspect that a young woman who's very nicely dressed is going to be wearing a, you know, girdle or bra padded with cocaine. They dress attractively, flirting their way through customs and immigration. Any suspicions are dispelled by a seductive smile.
These are just especially voluptuous women. She encouraged the women to use these particular undergarments to enhance the feminine figure, to dress very attractively, to be flirtatious with customs agents and immigration agents. The drug mules waltz straight onto flights bound for the U.S. Each bra holds a kilo of coke.
$10,000 in net profit. - There's a historical pattern of using women. What makes her, I think, exceptional is she actively recruited them. - Five and a half hours later, they touch down in New York. Griselda's underground network of distributors lies waiting. Within hours, the drugs hit the streets of Manhattan. New York City is soon awash with cocaine. And pretty soon, Griselda and Alberto have wrestled control over NYC's cocaine trade from the five families of the Italian mafia.
They have a weekly income of around a cool $10 million. This doesn't go unnoticed by the police department or the Drug Enforcement Administration. More and more mugshots are taken of dealers. More lineups assembled. More white powder swiped off the streets and stashed in police storerooms up and down the five boroughs. They set up an undercover operation to hunt down the source. Operation Banshee.
One of their finest agents is Robert Nieves, a Puerto Rican-American born and raised in Brooklyn, New York, and recruited by the DEA. There were long days. Often they'd begin around 12 noon and they would end about 12 midnight. And so at the end of the day, you'd be putting in a 60-hour week, a 70-hour week sometimes. And if things were really hot on a major investigative effort, you might put in 100 hours a week.
but you were loving it. It's like playing baseball. You know, you're doing something that nobody else is doing. His partner is Bob Palambo, a Spanish-speaking narcotics expert who's been investigating the Colombian drug trade for three years. If you want to get the rat, you have to get into the sewer. And so in those days, if you were working undercover in lower Manhattan, you'd be out there early. I would be out there early.
working on the street, usually with an informant, being introduced to drug traffickers in that neighborhood and looking to buy heroin, cocaine, LSD, marijuana in bulk, whatever the case, wherever the case may take us. More often than not, most of my day was involved in surveillance, watching people that we had targeted for investigation. Essentially, boring. Occasionally, you get a day where your heart raced.
Two years into the operation, Nieves and Palambo get a break. They arrest a small-time dealer. Threatened with 30 years in prison, he sees no option but to talk. A police officer, a federal agent investigating narcotics, his greatest tool is his informant. Generally speaking, those informants were working off a nut. What we mean by that when we say working off a nut is he's facing serious prison time and he doesn't want to go to jail.
and so he agrees to cooperate with the government and to introduce people undercover into the organization that he worked in. That means he takes me out in the street in the morning, he brings me to a location where his connection is located. We'll meet, we'll have a conversation. In a place like New York City, early 1970s, when life imprisonment was possible,
In the state court, for many people, especially if they were a second or third offender, they were almost guaranteed of going away for life. And so it wasn't that difficult to flip somebody. This dealer says his supplier is a woman called Lila Parada. She worked within the organization, and she was a distributor. Running some quick background checks, Nieves and Palambo realize Parada is not a big fish, but she's another piece in the distribution jigsaw.
she could reveal vital information on the True Mastermind's distribution network. So, they get a warrant to wire her apartment. Don't forget, now we're talking about the early 70s. Technical devices were not really used a lot in those days. Did we have wires? Yes, but they were literally wires. Nowadays, the wires they use are...
Technically, wonderful. It makes the job a thousand times easier. And so when you've got a pen that can capture voice from everybody in this room and is totally undetectable, you've got quite the listening device. In those days, we didn't have that luxury. Meaning that you had to run a hard wire up a pole, go into the pairs,
work with the phone company and have that call directed to your observation post. And it was all very cumbersome, labor intensive, and so on. So during the course of the investigation, we were listening to conversations real time on targeted telephones. We didn't have sophisticated software. That didn't exist. The software was a pen and paper, and there were log books, and a record was kept of every conversation.
Making sense of what they hear is not as simple as it seems. Not only do the detectives listening to the wiretaps have to speak fluent Spanish, the Spanish is all in code. Often those conversations were guarded. They were often in a slang unique to Medellín, Colombia, or even to neighborhoods within Medellín, Colombia. And so it was often a while before the investigator's ear could be tuned.
to that particular slang and to where he'd begin to understand based on activities that took place afterwards, what exactly was taking place. In other words, if the guy said I'm gonna drop off the kids, well, that's a no brainer. You know he's probably gonna make a delivery. But let's say he's talking about the bread was not that good. And so now you're going, hmm, the bread was not that good. What the hell is he talking about?
And so you might later learn through an informant to something, well, when they were cooking up a batch in Colombia, some of the ingredients got mixed up and it was not a good production run. And therefore, the shipment won't be coming this week because there wasn't a decent production run. The agent had to tune his ear to it. And after a while, he'd become adept at that and he would know more or less what they were talking about.
Women would talk about dropping off dresses at the cleaner and men would talk about dropping off shirts at the cleaners. They had certain codes. Somebody has left the funeral. This might mean that cocaine was en route to New York. You know, that's not something you're going to pick up maybe in a couple weeks. So it takes them a long time and they have to listen and they have to figure out, okay, when this is said, this means a load is on its way to JFK.
Worse still, all the names the suspects use are fake. Now the Columbians then, as now, always operated with aliases. You never knew who you had in custody. Nobody would ever use their real name. They had very good false ID, from driver's licenses to passports to...
multiple names associated with those documents. You never knew who you had. The only true proof was the fingerprint and the photograph. Unfortunately, Griselda had never been arrested in this city, and it wasn't until years later that we would know exactly who she was. - But in the transcripts, two code names appear more than others. The DEA identifies them as Carmen and Gloria Caban, their sisters, already serving time for cocaine trafficking.
As veteran drug mules, they must know key players in the Colombian cocaine network. Agent Nieves pays a visit to the older sister, Carmen Caban. But even from a secure prison cell, Caban refuses to talk. When the girls first began to speak about her, it was clear that they were afraid of this woman.
If I could compare their fear, it would be the kind of fear that the first informant who talked about Al Capone felt. These girls just mentioning her name, on one occasion they trembled. So Nieves makes her an offer, placement in witness protection and the chance of seeing her family again. I don't know how many years the Caban sisters were facing in state court, but it was something approaching life for a 20-something woman.
One of them had children in Colombia and brothers and sisters, and she wanted to see them. And under the circumstances that she was in at that point in time, the likelihood of her seeing family members was not likely at all. Apart from that, she was abandoned in many ways by the criminal people that she thought she was protecting.
And what I mean by that is, you know, there's this notion that when you get arrested, the organization's going to put up the best lawyers that they can. They're going to put up all the money you need for the appropriate defense and so forth. They didn't feel that they had gotten that. And that's often the case with any good informant that comes along. They often get abandoned by the criminal organization. Self-preservation comes into play there, and they begin to think of themselves rather than the people that put them there.
Caban reveals the names of 37 Colombians dealing drugs in New York alone. The Caban sisters told us, for example, that many of the people we were targeting had formerly been pickpockets and involved in what we would consider petty crime. We wouldn't even take a look at them for that. But that's how they started out in their younger days, and many of them in New York City. Then she finally delivers the name of the ruthless criminal mastermind behind it all.
And so the Caban sisters proved to be the core body of intelligence about this criminal organization. The notion that a woman could wield that kind of power and influence in a criminal organization was surprising. But it became clear after a while that she was a powerful woman in her own right and so someone to be reckoned with who was running a criminal organization
engaged on the violent end of the business, in other words, the Al Capone side of the business. In other words, the person who resolved everything with a gun, whatever dispute it was. And even where there wasn't a dispute, if she didn't want to pay a debt, she killed the person she owed the money to. It's the breakthrough Nieves and Palambo have worked for two years to achieve. Now they have enough evidence to indict Blanco and her henchmen with mass-scale drug trafficking. There's only one problem.
They have no idea what Griselda looks like. When the Caban sisters started talking about Griselda Blanco, we didn't have a photograph, and nor could we find one. As the investigation continued, we couldn't find a photograph of Griselda Blanco. So she was just a name.
And she was not on the scene. She was not coming up in our surveillances. She was not coming up on the wiretaps. And so while we knew that she was relevant and important, she became less of a priority because she was not on the scene and she was a fugitive. And she will continue to be a fugitive throughout the '70s. For us, she was a name on the organizational chart. But since she wasn't in custody, she didn't get our full attention at that point.
Blanco makes use of every trick her dead first husband Trujillo, the passport forger, taught her. She comes and goes to America using a different fake identity every time. She's practically untraceable. How are you going to arrest somebody who is moving in and out of the country, moving with false documents, has multiple aliases and identities?
and you don't even have an image of that person because you haven't been able to identify what are all the aliases. And she was always using those aliases. When she gets word that the DEA are closing in on her criminal game, she goes underground and completely disappears. This is a woman who had evaded arrest for 10 years. She would be in the wind. She might be back in Columbia. I don't think there was any hope that they would ever be able to find her again.
In Colombia, she's out of reach and near impossible to trace. It's a major defeat for the DEA. But what Nieves and Palambo don't know is they're not the only ones gunning for Griselda Blanco. Next time on Real Narcos. A domestic dispute between Griselda and her husband snowballs into a shootout in a nightclub parking lot.
In Miami, rookie cop Nelson Andrew is called to a grisly homicide that bears all the hallmarks of a godmother hit. Assistant U.S. Attorney Stephen Schlesinger plants an informant at the heart of Griselda's family network, and DEA agents will come face-to-face with the godmother herself. Real Narcos is a Noiser podcast and World Media Rights co-production hosted by me, John Cuban. ♪
The series is created by Pascal Hughes, produced by Joel Duddle. It's been edited by James Tindall. Music by Oliver Baines from Fly Brigade. The sound mixer is Tom Pink. If you have a moment, please leave us a review on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
