"Black Widow" : The Female Face of Miami-based Cocaine Trade

Black Widow AKA Griselda Blanco had made her way into the states at the age 17 with the use of a fake passport. In 1970 she pursued a relationship with Alberto Bravo, a drug trafficker whom she married, he had introduced her to the cocaine trade. The money that drugs had to offer became extremely enticing to her while she lived in Queens with her three sons, this was the start to her title as the Cocaine Godmother. As money began to flow into the family income her sons abandoned school and joined the family drug trafficking business. They had established a sizable cocaine buiseness there, and in 1975 she had become indicted on federal drug conspiracy charges along with 30 of her subordinates. She fled back to her hometown Colombia before she could be arrested and later moved to Florida. Her empire was expanded to a larger extent once they had made the move to Miami, Florida. Florida is where her business had flourished. While her empire grew, her second husband had died in the process, giving rise to one of her many well known titles "Black Widow". Her willingness to use violence against her Miami competitors, led her rivals to make repeated unsuccessful attempts to kill her. In efforts to protect her youngest son, she had made a move to California where she was later arrested by the DEA and sentenced to a decade in jail. She had masterminded the use of beautiful women, the elderly and children as the mules and had creatively created false-bottom suitcases to smuggle cocaine from her country, Colombia. Her creativity had lead her to also creating lingerie made with highly secretive compartments to smuggle drugs, which became an extensive and highly profitable operation within her empire. She was often partnered by a spouse, who never lived long due to their involvement in the drug cartels, always targeted and involved in shootouts. She had proudly lived up to her title "Black Widow" by winning a shootout between her and her husband Bravo, and ordering a hit-man to kill her third husband.  Blanco was one of the world's wealthiest drug traffickers, smuggling more than three tons of cocaine into the United States annually, about eighty million a month. Blanco embraced her criminal persona, notably naming one of her sons Michael Corleone, a crime boss in the Godfather series. In her lifetime, Griselda's drug-distribution network spanned across the US and was suspected of ordering over 200 murders. She was one of the many drug lords who had given the Colombians who were migrating to Florida at the time a bad reputation on behalf of the race as a whole, giving other races room for judgement. Her return to the US from Colombia more or less had coincided with the beginning of very public violent conflicts that involved hundreds of murders and killings yearly which were associated with the high crime epidemic that swept the city of Miami in the 1980's.