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Griselda Blanco and her lover Alberto Bravo are in hiding from the DEA in a secret lair in Colombia. From here they are free to head up their $8 million a month cocaine smuggling business. But it's so successful, everyone wants a piece of the action. My name is John Cuban and this is Real Narcos. Griselda may be able to evade the American authorities in Colombia, but down here she's not the biggest fish in the pond.
She can't have it all her own way. The ruthless head of a growing cocaine cartel begins to muscle in on her territory in Medellin, Pablo Escobar. He poses a much greater threat than any of her previous rivals. Jenny Smith is an author and biographer of Blanco. Griselda was a pioneer in the cocaine trade in Medellin, Colombia.
But she was fairly quickly eclipsed by Pablo Escobar, who was not from her neighborhood, but had no problem making inroads and buying up processing factories and trying to take a share of her business at the airport, which was very important to her to have people paid off at the airport to get cocaine on planes. Pablo wanted very badly to surpass her. He wasn't afraid of her. Everyone else was, but he wasn't.
Already by about 1975, she and Pablo were fighting, literally trying to kill one another. Each had his or her team of assassins after the other. Escobar will become known as the King of Cocaine, one of the wealthiest criminals in history, responsible for transforming Colombia into the world's cocaine capital. But first, he has to deal with this upstart, Griselda. Blanco realizes if she's to defend her vast cocaine empire against serious competition...
She needs to ramp up her violent tactics in a show of force. On the streets of Medellin, Blanco develops what becomes her signature method of assassination: the motorcycle drive-by shooting. Griselda and Escobar are locked in a battle for the streets of Medellin. At the same time, her relationship with Alberto Bravo starts to sour. For six years, they've made an invincible team. But now there are rumors he's been skimming profits and conducting a clandestine affair.
They used to be joined at the hip. Now the power couple of the drug trafficking world are estranged, and it seems pretty irreconcilable. They may have fallen out of love, but their business interests are still entwined. So Griselda flies to Bogota to sort this all out once and for all. Touchdown in Colombia's capital city. A convoy of limousines speed through the streets, carrying the godmother and her bodyguards. They pull up outside a nightclub, tires crunched to a halt on the gravel.
Griselda and her crew get out, the limo's engine still idling. The back door to the club opens, letting out a chink of light. A man steps out, his long thin shadow stretching across the car park. It's Alberto, and he's not alone. A retinue of armed men follow him outside. Griselda and her husband stand at opposite ends of the lot facing each other, eyes locked. Their posses of guards stand behind them, fingers resting on triggers, ready to draw.
Usually lawyers, not armed assassins, oversee divorce settlements. The couple starts to negotiate. Before long, marital tensions have risen to the surface, overriding any business concerns. This is personal. Their voices get louder and louder. A high stakes domestic dispute. She draws her gun, he draws his. Two lovers unloading magazines at each other, willing bullets to hit flesh.
At the end of the shootout, it's Bravo who's dead. Griselda's been wounded by a bullet to the stomach, but she'll survive. Killing Bravo earns Griselda a new nickname. She was like the Black Widow. She mated and then she killed her mate. Bravo won't be the last man to feel the Black Widow's sting. A year later, she marries another drug trafficker, Dario Sepulveda. Griselda has a baby, another boy. She loves all her children.
This son is the apple of her eye. And what does she name her favorite progeny? Michael Corleone, after the son in the Godfather movies. But being the father of the godmother's favorite won't save Dario. He'll end up gunned down in Colombia after a custody dispute over Michael. Griselda's reputation is now guaranteed for the ages. But a name alone won't get Pablo Escobar out of her way. He now has more than just a foothold in her territory.
Medellin airport has been key to the Black Widow's operation. It's a vital point for distribution. But with superior firepower, wealth, and influence, Escobar is able to kill the police and bribe the officials necessary to secure the airport as his own. He's strangling her business.
In the mid to late 70s, Pablo Escobar made it impossible for her to be in Medellin. He was much stronger than she was. He had more people behind him. He was meaner and he had better cocaine routes than she ever had. He made her life impossible. On the run from the DEA in New York and muscled out of her Colombian hometown by rival Pablo Escobar, Griselda Blanco, the mistress of disguise, once again vanishes into thin air.
Three years into Operation Banshee, and the DEA's search for the Black Widow in New York has gone stone cold. They wonder if she's gotten out of the cocaine business for good, or maybe been killed. But as the 1970s go on, events a thousand miles away in Florida give agents a brand new set of leads. As organized crime sweeps through Florida's haven of sun and sand, Miami, the DEA begins to think the Black Widow may no longer be on the run, but back on U.S. soil.
The Dadeland Mall shooting confirms these suspicions. The disregard for human life, the potential here for dozens of innocent people to have been shot and/or killed, it was, you know, through the grace of God that that didn't happen. Under pressure from the cops, facing lengthy jail time, informants reveal her aliases to customs officials. At last, the DEA can put a face to the name "Black Widow."
Now, Florida police are pretty sure she set up her headquarters in Miami. Stephen Schlesinger is an assistant U.S. attorney at the time. She had achieved a certain notoriety here in Miami.
based upon the violence of her methods. And it was known that she was really sort of the author of this infamous shootout that occurred at a big shopping mall. She left behind in the course of that assault what was known as a war wagon, which was essentially an armored car that was outfitted with a huge arsenal of weapons.
And really sort of, I mean, that sort of came to symbolize the lawlessness of what was going on in Miami. It really embodied the deterioration of law and order and the overwhelming impact that drug dealing was having, you know, on the city. So she really ascended to the top of the most wanted lists very, very quickly.
A portion of Griselda's cocaine money finds its way into legitimate businesses and infrastructure in Miami. At a time of national economic difficulty, this city is flying. The cocaine economy. It's recession-proof. Car dealerships and real estate agents are doing a roaring trade. There's so many construction cranes they can almost block out the sun. But this boom comes at a price. The Miami police are swamped with violent crime. There's so many murders that the morgues are overflowing.
The cops have to store dead bodies on ice in refrigerated vans. Law enforcement at every level was overwhelmed. There were wars between the gangs, there were turf battles. Could have been the Wild West. Griselda holds court at her luxury Miami Beach mansion. In the entrance hall sits a bronze statue of her likeness, a bust of her face. Arriving at the house for an audience with the godmother, even the most hardened drug barons are known to rub the statue for good luck.
While she parties in her lavish villa, the streets of Miami are becoming like the streets of Medellin in Griselda's youth. The head of the city's police benevolent association warns that the criminal justice system has crumbled to such an extent, the safety of civilians cannot be guaranteed. He advises everyday citizens to tool up. Gun shops see a huge spike in sales. Miami has become Dodge City. Then, something happens to confirm law enforcement's suspicions that Blanco is behind it all.
A young detective with the Miami police is called to the scene of a shooting at the home of a Colombian family, the Lorenzos. His name, Nelson Andrew. That scene was, it's a residential single-story home in a nice part of town. And you could tell that there had been a struggle in the house because of the blood that's in the carpeting. You can tell that people had been shot and were running.
Andrew has only been working homicide for around a year, but it's clear that this is no routine homicide.
The Lorenzos are cocaine dealers, and whoever killed them clearly were looking for revenge. You can tell that people had been shot and were running. Then they're tied up. They have belts. They have telephone cords that are used to tie them up. I believe the woman was even blindfolded. They were both shot multiple, multiple times, I think three or four times each in the torso and in the head. So there was no doubt that they were dead. The evidence of torture...
The violent overkill, the links to cocaine, it leaves the DEA in absolutely no doubt. The Black Widow is back and more bloodthirsty than ever. Steven Schlesinger. She was extremely violent and she had a whole stable of gunslingers that at her order would go out and murder people in a sense that probably undermined the profit-making motive that underlay the whole thing.
But that's all she knew. That's, you know, that's the way she operated. She resolved all problems with a hit. During her reign of terror in Florida, the Black Widow orders as many as 200 revenge attacks. Every month, her empire ships more than 3,400 pounds of cocaine into the country. Her distribution network spans the entire U.S. The Miami cops and the DEA know the Black Widow is behind the slaughter on the streets.
but they have no idea where she's running the show from. We knew that she was alive and we knew that she was in operation, but how she was running the operation, where the principal players were, that we did not know.
There was no guarantee that we were ever going to find her. I mean, she had eluded arrest for, by that time, seven or eight years. And I'm not talking a local arrest warrant. I'm talking a federal warrant in a major federal prosecution. So, I mean, it was a very daunting task just to find her, just to get a sense of where she was. To bring her to justice, they have to lure her from her hiding place and set a trap to gather airtight evidence against her.
What they learn from informants on the street sparks an entirely new strategy. There was a sort of an understanding that she had installed each of her three older sons, Uber, Osvaldo, and Dixon, in each of the three major areas of her distribution: San Francisco, Los Angeles, and Miami. There was sort of an understanding that the cocaine source of supply was hers,
that she dealt with the Colombian supplier, but that they sort of, the sons, oversaw the distribution in each of these different markets. Beyond that, I don't think DEA really know at any given time where she was, where the sons were, where they were living. The information was extremely scant, as best I recall. The Black Widow now has so many enemies. The only people she can really trust are her own flesh and blood.
Jenny Smith. Griselda's relationship with her sons is a really curious and sort of perverse thing. I mean, on one level, drug businesses are family businesses, right? Because who else can you really trust with that kind of activity? But at the same time, the really perverse thing about her relationship with her sons was that they had all the opportunity in the world to
Griselda was born into a relatively poor family with significant disadvantages in life. And so one can almost excuse some of the ways that she became wealthy.
But why drag those kids into it? Why condition them to be part of it? It wasn't really necessary. You know, they grew up with, you know, a good foundation, with good education. But I think she absolutely encouraged that. And it could be on some level because it was all she knew. The DEA thinks they can turn the Black Widow's strength into her weakness. They can somehow gain the trust of one of her sons.
they may just be able to get the insider information they desperately need to bring her whole operation crashing down dea agent bob palombo has spent 10 years on blanco's trail from new york to miami now with the help of assistant u.s attorney stephen schlesinger he needs to position an informant at the heart of blanco's family network we needed somebody that was in her confidence
somebody that could get close to her, and somebody that could actually deal with her in a criminal manner such that we could make a prosecution out of it. And to do that, we really had to have somebody inside the organization, which was very, very difficult because this was an extremely close-knit group. These people don't deal with strangers. They don't deal with people whose bona fides are not established.
I mean, neither you and I can go up to them and say, you know, I'd like to distribute your narcotics. I mean, that's just not going to happen. You're talking a respectable wholesale level of narcotics trafficking. She's only going to deal with people that she knows. She's only going to deal with people that are bona fide. She's only going to deal with people that are vouched to her. And they're very hard to come by.
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And with Bluehost Cloud, your sites can handle surges in traffic no matter how big. Plus, you automatically get daily backups and world-class security. Get started now at Bluehost.com. Finally, in April 1983, the DEA finds a Colombian who might just give them access to Blanco's inner family circle. He's been serving time for narcotics trafficking. His name is Jerry Gomez. He's a businessman who knows Blanco's three sons with first husband Carlos Trujillo.
They found a candidate named Jerry Gomez, who was then just recently sentenced for narcotics trafficking in the Southern District of Texas. And I think he was serving, I believe, was a 10-year jail term. Gomez had
had run a motorcycle shop in Medellin, Colombia and had sold or rented or made available to Blanco's sons some fairly high-end motorcycles down there. And so he had what we believed to be, you know, an entree into the organization.
I mean, he was a legitimate Columbian. He had known them in Columbia. He had dealt with them in Columbia. And we felt that he could make a credible approach to them
The plan is to release him from his 10-year stretch and send him undercover. Gomez is to approach one of Blanco's sons, offering to launder money for them across their national network. It was our understanding that if we could get Jerry, if Jerry could weave his way into the confidence of even just one of the sons, we would eventually find the mother and we would find the other two brothers. It's a huge gamble.
And they won't know if they can trust him until it's too late. I mean, Jerry was a federal prisoner. He was not merely someone who was charged. He was not merely an informant. Jerry was a federal prisoner. And to lose a federal prisoner is a major law enforcement error. I mean, that would have been a law enforcement disaster. If Jerry had fled, Jerry had booked, as we say,
it would have been a huge embarrassment to us and it would have been no end of trouble. We would have had to answer to that judge in Texas, which I wouldn't have looked forward to at all. - But the DEA feels it's their only choice. Gomez sets up a meeting in California with Griselda Blanco's youngest son, 24-year-old Dixon Trujillo. - My recollection is that they had a meeting. Initially, Jerry was able to interest him in the proposition. Dixon was ready to take the bait
Jerry paraded out his, you know, I've become a money launderer, let me handle your proceeds. And there was, you know, there was some interest in that. Wearing a wire, Gomez keeps his cool. Dixon Blanco doesn't appear to know he's being set up. He even gives away that his mother is always on the move between Miami and L.A. But he's no more specific than that.
At the end of the meeting, the team can't tell if they've done enough to trick Dixon into drawing his mother from her lair. Three tense weeks pass. Then, Gomez gets a call. And it's not from Dixon Blanco. It's from the Black Widow herself. She's taken the bait. A meeting was set up between Jerry and Griselda, which was, of course, a huge breakthrough in the investigation because it not only provided evidence,
hopeful conversation in which she would incriminate herself and admit to drug trafficking, money laundering, and so on and so forth. But it also gave us the first lead I think we had as to her actual whereabouts. She did travel fairly extensively between the United States and Colombia, but she had a healthy catalog of false passports and fraudulent travel documents.
So it was a huge step when Jerry was able to interest Dixon in this proposition, in this undercover ploy, and it was a huge step forward. -Rissel de Blanca wants to meet Gomez in person, but she says she no longer operates out of Miami.
While Griselda's business was in Miami for the large part in the 1980s, her sons were doing better on the West Coast, in California. So eventually Griselda moved out to be with them as well. And she created so many messes for herself and for them in Miami. And she made things so dangerous for herself and her family that she too took up in California. Blanco invites Gomez to meet her in a Los Angeles hotel.
The Black Widow has eluded the law for over a decade, but she could finally be in their grasp. To get Blanco to incriminate herself on tape, the DEA has to resist the temptation to arrest her on sight. Wired for the meeting, Gomez feels the pressure. He takes a seat in the bar area. Hotel guests and staff are all around him, but that counts for nothing. Griselda is so trigger-happy, if she doesn't buy his story, she could pull a gun on him at any moment.
Doesn't matter that this is a public place. A waiter brings Gomez a glass of water. His hand trembles as he brings it to his lips. There was a concern that, you know, Jerry could slip up at any moment or Jerry could offend Griselda at any moment or Jerry could be unmasked at any moment, which would, you know, lead almost immediately to his death. The glass chatters against his teeth as he takes a sip.
The meeting is fraught with risk, but it's too late to pull out. Jerry puts the glass down and looks up. Griselda is halfway across the room walking towards him. He greets her, offers her a chair. She sits down. As their conversation unfolds, Gomez starts to fall apart. Jerry's wearing a recording device, and he's ushered into the presence of one of the most feared narcotics homicidal maniacs
that we've ever encountered, Jerry became totally incoherent. I mean, the conversation was muddled. He was so fearful, he could not string together two logical sentences. And the first meetings with Griselda, they were recorded. Jerry made it in, Jerry made it out. They were very helpful because there was some incriminating conversation, but it was really, uh, uh,
Just babble. This isn't the type of man the Black Widow trusts. She had good instincts for when somebody might cross her, you know, or for when something wasn't right. I think most of these people do have very good instincts and they're cautious.
And so I think she smelled something pretty quickly when this informant was approaching her in California. She came from a closed world. It was a closed world because it was a gangster world. And it was a smuggler world, even before cocaine entered the picture.
She ran the business essentially with her family, you know, and some thugs that she paid to do her bidding. But the inner circle was her family, you know, and I think it was with that level of secrecy that she was able to evade detection for as long as she was. Everyone around her thought like her, you know, they were somewhat paranoid. It became apparent to us that Griselda was simply not going to trust this man.
She was not going to trust him with his money. She was not going to trust him with drugs. I mean, he simply was not going to be made part of her operation. And it was all basically because of his absolute mortal fear of the woman. Jerry's performance is a disaster for the DEA. Gomez is unhurt as Griselda leaves the hotel. But safe to say she won't be scheduling a follow-up meeting. There's nothing for it. They haven't managed to nail her.
but her incoherent chat with Jerry is all they have. It might be the best opportunity to indict Griselda. Basically, we returned an indictment against Griselda and her three sons, charging them essentially with a narcotics conspiracy and
I think there were some other minor charges involved as well. But it was basically a narcotics conspiracy because there was enough incriminating conversation, particularly with the sons, to bring the charge. We weren't going to get any more. Jerry was never going to be accepted by them.
We had what we had and it was enough. It was not as much as we wanted. It was not a slam dunk. It was not a, you know, open and shut prosecution, but it was viable and we went with it. The DEA sift through all of Gomez's recorded conversations, desperate for hard evidence they can use in a prosecution. Names of key players, the location of drugs, clues to the hiding place of the Black Widow herself.
Then, a moment of realization. It turns out their terrified informant has extracted one vital piece of information: the address of a Los Angeles distributor. It's worth a look at least. In LA, Bob Palambo obtains a warrant to search the property.
In the course of reviewing the information gathered from the execution of one of the search warrants, they found a utility bill for an apartment in Irvine. It was an upscale but not elaborate apartment. Blumbo's instincts tell him this Irvine apartment is exactly the type of residence someone like Blanco would use to lay low. But he has to act quickly before she pulls another disappearing act.
On February 17th, 1985, Palambo takes a Sunday evening drive to the apartment in Irvine, California. He turns onto a dead-end road, tucked between a small row of convenience stores and a tired-looking ballpark. The apartment is unremarkable, indistinguishable from the other handful of houses on the street, and humble in size for a woman who earns millions of dollars a month. After a short while, a small child appears in the doorway of the home, led by an unknown older woman.
The pair walk down the street and out of sight. Palumbo reaches for his binoculars and begins to scan the windows for any sign of life. In an upstairs window on the furthest left of the property, a figure appears in the window. It's the Black Widow. The fear was that if they could not affect the arrest then and there, they might never see her again. They were all in on this. Palumbo sinks into his seat to avoid being seen and radios for backup.
Within minutes, several unmarked police cars arrive. Palumbo checks his magazine and walks to a side door of the residence. The other officers begin to flank the property. The door clicks open. Cops file in quietly. To Palumbo's surprise, the house seems empty. Palumbo walks silently through the home. Room after room, there is no armed henchman, no automatic weapons, no security detail. As he enters the stairwell,
Two police officers appear behind him with their weapons drawn. At the end of the dimly lit corridor, Palambo sees a door, likely to lead to the first floor side room which he had spotted Griselda in. The officer behind ushers that he can kick down the door. Palambo agrees. They burst in. She was very surprised. She was in a state of semi-undress.
There was a famous moment, I guess famous in DEA lore, any event where Bob went directly up to Griselda and gave her a big kiss on the cheek, which she, you know, demanded to know what is that for, what is that for? Which Bob replied, "That's because I'm so glad to see you." Bob had been hunting her for a decade. Palumbo can't believe his luck. No armed guards, no booby traps. The famous Black Widow's only protection
A weapon on the dresser, which thankfully for Palumbo, is just out of reach. Within months, all three of Blanco's sons are captured in sting operations by the DEA. It's the culmination of over 10 years of dedication, bringing the deadliest female cocaine boss in history and her criminal family to justice. I think there was like a real relief.
because they really had succeeded. They had arrested all three sons, they had arrested her, they were all in custody. I mean, it was a masterful operation to have rolled up Griselda and her three sons all at the same time. And it was really an accomplishment, tremendous investigative accomplishment. Charged in New York with drug trafficking offenses, Blanco serves 13 years of a 15-year sentence in a federal jail.
In 1992, Griselda's sons Dixon, Osvaldo, and Uber are released from Lewisburg Federal Prison. They'd have been better off staying in jail. They might still be alive at least. The brothers are deported back to Colombia, where their family has made plenty of enemies over the decades. Osvaldo is the first to go, machine-gunned to death at a welcome home party in his honor. The news filters back to Griselda Blanco and her American jail cell. She's utterly distraught.
She can't attend Osvaldo's funeral, so she sends a handwritten message. It's read out by a priest at the service. Osvaldo's killers had better watch out. She's on to them. Dixon eventually catches up with his brother's killer in Colombia. He tortures him before stabbing the man through the head with a screwdriver. But this revenge is short-lived. The tide has turned against the Blancos. Within years, Dixon and Uber have joined their brother on the other side. Fate is getting its revenge on the Black Widow.
In 1994, she's put on trial in Florida for murder. Griselda is staring straight down the barrel at death row. She's been indicted for multiple murders. Key allies have turned on her. Surely, this is her end. This time it isn't cunning or bribery that gets her out of trouble. It's pure luck in a situation of extraordinary farce.
Out of nowhere, news breaks that a secretary for the lead prosecutor at the state attorney's office has been fired for having phone sex with a key witness for the prosecution. The state attorney's office have had to recuse themselves from the investigation into Griselda Blanco. The murder case is totally compromised. The Miami cops and DEA can't believe it. She avoids death row. And with time already served, the murder rap adds just seven years.
In 2004, she is released from prison in the US and deported back to Medellin, Colombia. She's served time in jail, and she's finally out of America. So it's a victory of sorts for the DEA and Miami Police Department. But it can't be denied that in leaving the clutches of the US criminal justice system once and for all, the Black Widow has engineered yet another unbelievable escape, albeit one she had no part in. And in true style, she vanishes without a trace.
September 3rd, 2012, Medellin. The city's changed a lot since the heyday of cocaine cartels, and Griselda has been in hiding for six years. Drugs are still a blight on the city, but not like the 80s. Medellin is full of tourists, textbook example of urban regeneration. An elderly-looking woman hobbles into a butcher shop. The store clerk has no idea that the lady he is serving is responsible for hundreds of murders. It's a rare trip in public for the Black Widow.
but she hasn't gone totally unnoticed. As Griselda Blanco steps onto the street, she looks up to see two men on a motorbike speeding towards her. On September 3rd, 2012, Griselda Blanco, one of the most vicious drug lords in history, was killed by the very same motorcycle drive-by killing technique she had pioneered just 35 years before. For the police and prosecutors who spent a decade chasing her, it came as no surprise.
We saw how her children were killed almost the minute they stepped off the plane when they were deported. We were waiting for that news that Griselda was killed. And days and weeks and months and years went by. She had changed a lot in physical appearance. I saw the pictures just before she was killed,
I don't know if I would recognize her if I would have seen her on the street. She looked like, you know, somebody's great-grandmother. So maybe it took a while before somebody said, "Hey, by the way, that old lady is Griselda Blanco." There are very few women who are the architects and designers of highly sophisticated organized crime entities. And she is one. That makes her exceptional. The fact that she was functionally, she had a low level of literacy.
and created these highly sophisticated organizations is also exceptional. Her background too, the ability to kind of overcome this and develop this highly sophisticated criminal mind is pretty amazing that she is hunted for years by very intelligent and very capable people. And I think even in the testimony of DEA agents,
and NYPD police officers. They recognize that. The queen of crime achieved notoriety that very few ever thought possible. They don't talk of her as kind of this incompetent, you know, drug dealer or something. They recognize that it's a highly sophisticated organization. And that's evident in their testimony. The fact that she lasted so many years, late 1960s into 1985 at the time of her arrest,
20 years, almost 20 years. That's exceptional. Her legacy is one of violence, terror, and intimidation. And she will forever be remembered as the Black Widow.
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. ♪