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Griselda Blanco Restrepo was an infamous Colombian-born woman who rose to power as a top drug lord in the United States during the 1970s and 1980s, with hundreds of murders attributed to Griselda and her drug empire. She used innovative systems and ruled by instilling fear of her ruthless business dealings and her reputation for murder. This is the story of how one woman rose to power in a male-dominated crime ring. This is the story of Griselda Blanco Restrepo and the bloody trail which followed her each step of the way to her ultimate demise. This is True Crime and Headlines with Jules Welcome. I've missed you. Let's just jump into the case, shall we? Let's go. This is part one of three. Before there was a Griselda known as the Queen of Cocaine, the godmother of cocaine or the black widow. She was just Griselda as a child. This is not going to be a very cheery childhood picture painted for y'all here, you guys, griselda's entire life timeline. It just appears to be marred with violence upon violence. Interestingly, an article on Griselda from National Geographic reflects on how Griselda learned from a very young age that power often comes from violence, and we'll see that in her life actions starting as young as 11 years old.

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Griselda was born to Mother Anna Restrepo and Father Fernando Blanco in 1943 in Colombia. Many news sources allege that Griselda's mother, anna, was a sex worker who struggled with alcoholism greatly, and they lived in extreme poverty, while her mother did continue her work in that same field and did continue to struggle with drinking. And when Griselda was just three years old, her mother Anna moved with Griselda to Colombia's second largest city, medellin, and it's in this new city that Griselda's mother would have new boyfriends, and Griselda would subsequently be sexually abused by the men in and out of her mother's life. It is important to note, though, that Griselda, she was a young girl during the backdrop of intense violence and political unrest. There were riots and physical violence in the streets of her homeland during this formative time, in this young Griselda's life. Now, this time was called La Violencia, and after it ended, it was a long 10 years, though, guys. National Geographic reports that nearly 200,000 citizens were killed, and Griselda became very street smart at a very young age. I mean, she almost had to to survive and get around right, and we are left to wonder if this was a survival choice. Recall, she's from a very broken family and neighborhood, and her mother struggled greatly just to make ends meet and she lives in a home where she is actively being sexually abused by men that her mother is bringing into the home. Is it that Griselda learns also at a young age? Not just violence is power, but is money the root of power as well? Is that the key to a new life for Griselda? She does begin to pickpocket and do small petty crimes in the streets of Medellin at a very young age and at 11 years old. 11 years old, she commits her first murder.

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Now, you guys, I wanted to have a primary source about this incident to quote for everybody listening and to have the credibility on the information I am about to share. But after many, many, many sources search, they appear to not exist as primary sources, but rather alleged according to reports. But then the reports don't have any primary sources. So we are left to wonder if this is even true. However, because it is such a well-known story albeit it may not be true about Griselda, I am going to share it with you because it does paint a picture of the wake of folklore that she left behind. So, as we can infer, you know, many incidents from Griselda's life and illegal activity were not documented, obviously, but I did want to try to clarify this next story. You know, could parts of her life even be spun into hyperbolicized versions of itself? Yeah, big tales absolutely. And we also have to wonder and leave room to believe. You know, yes, people are as evil as you will hear about Griselda being. They do exist. They continue to exist. Is it possible that all of these stories, all of these horrible, heinous stories, are true? Yeah, it's absolutely possible. Now there were some books referenced which I will link in my show notes, and there's one titled Searching for the Godmother of Crime, by Ethan Brown, that I think you should check out.

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But on May 13, 1954, when Griselda was just 11 years old, she allegedly kidnaps a young boy from a wealthy neighboring street. Now, she did this so that she could have the boy's family pay her money ransom to get their son back. Well, as the story goes, the family didn't take Griselda's kidnapping seriously, and the next part of this story is very disturbing. So if you want to skip for 20 seconds, go ahead and do so. But there are a few different versions. One version is that Griselda was running around with some other kids from the streets and they dared her by handing her a gun to shoot the boy. Once they learned that his parents would not pay the ransom, she took the gun and shot him between the eyes. Another version ends the same way, but it's just her doing it on her own. Either way, in each version, she is pulling the trigger and killing a boy who is just 10 years old.

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Now, this would be her first quote unquote documented through retelling's murder, and this was a catalyst likely for her comfortability with using violence as a means to control her desired outcomes. Not much is available as far as information goes on who this 10 year old victim was, his family, the effects of this act in the city, her reputation, but we do know that it's reported that Griselda very quickly turned to the streets to make money, both as a pickpocket, small time thief, as she had done previously, but also soon as an alleged sex worker, just like her mother. Now, because she was being sexually abused by her mother's boyfriend during her early teen years, griselda fled her home. There are conflicting reports about her age when she did this. It was reported she left as young as 13. And some say it was a few years older. However, I am led to believe because she got married in her teens. She did flee when she was about 13 years old.

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Now she goes on to meet a man named Carlos Trujillo and he would become her first husband. So they would marry while she is still a teenager. Now, woo, let's talk about Carlos. Oh, carlos Trujillo. He was a small time criminal in Medellin and he was known for falsifying documents and for trafficking humans. And this is another place of disagreement among the stories of Griselda's life. There are some who believe Griselda also turned to sex work because of Carlos, and then there are some that believe she was already in sex work and met Carlos because he was a pimp, and that's how their worlds collided. Either way, they did end up living together while she was a minor and they did end up marrying and they went on to have three children very quickly, right after each other, three boys. It's alleged that in this relationship, carlos and Griselda started selling marijuana as a small-scale operation. So she's dabbling her toe in the drug world with Carlos, and I'll return in a little bit about Carlos' fate.

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I do want to stick to our case fairly chronologically. You know Griselda had three sons before she was 21. Their sons were Dixon, uber and Osvaldo. Carlos and Griselda would divorce in 1969. This makes the marriage to Carlos her first of three marriages lasting just under five years. And soon after divorcing Griselda, here we go circling back to Carlos' fate. Carlos was found dead, which would make him the first of three dead former husbands of Griselda Blanco.

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Now we find Griselda, in 1972, about to marry her second husband, a man named Alberto Bravo. And this is where Griselda gets her foot in the door in that cocaine business. Alberto Bravo was a novice in the cocaine business, having just begun his operations when they got married and moved together to Queens, new York, along with her three sons Remember, her three sons also no longer have a father because he has since died. Griselda entered the country under false documents and quickly settled into a life in New York. Now it's in New York that Griselda and Alberto work together on building up the cocaine business. Oh, my goodness, you guys build it up, they do. It becomes an empire, nothing short of an empire, when working together. They created likely one of the top drug trafficking empires in the country at the time, and it's been stated in numerous theories that her husband, alberto Bravo, was actually a member of the Medellin cartel.

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Recall, medellin is the city in Colombia where Griselda's mother moved them to when Griselda was a young girl, and you may have heard about a man named Pablo Escobar at some time in your life. Now it's absolutely imperative to take a moment to dive a little deeper into the brief 411 about this drug cartel. I do need to paint as great a picture for you about Griselda's connections and influence in the drug smuggling world as I can, and please forgive me for mispronunciations. I've been practicing these words. However, I am known to mispronounce things time to time again, and please forgive me if I do so. I'm out here just doing my best for y'all.

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So what is the Medellin Cartel, you guys? This drug trafficking group was based out of Medellin, colombia, and was headed up by you may have guessed it Pablo Escobar. The Medellin Cartel was allegedly spread throughout Colombia and then up to New York, over down to Miami and then, as cocaine became a symbol of elite and wealth in the 70s and the early 80s, it became highly sought after in California, most notably the Hollywood elite circles, and the main producer of cocaine was in South America. So, even though there were multiple suppliers, the Escobar's cartel was at one time known to allegedly supply 80% of the global, global cocaine market. Pablo Escobar is quoted saying this of Griselda. Quote the only man I was ever afraid of was a woman named Griselda Blanco. End quote. And now we have an alleged tie between Griselda and the Colombian drug lords, the Medellin Cartel. Living in Medellin, marrying the alleged associate in the Medellin Cartel, here we go Now, involved with Pablo Escobar's booming cocaine business, griselda was about to get creative with how to smuggle cocaine in through international borders.

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So what does she do? Well, there are many different ways that they accomplish this some high scale operations with airplanes and cargo. However, what Griselda is famously known for is using fashion garments to hide cocaine. An expose on Griselda by reporter Jessica Sager with People Magazine says, quote Griselda was notorious for her innovations in drug trafficking, even opening up her own lingerie factory to create undergarments with hidden pockets for women smugglers to move cocaine without detection. End quote. Griselda actually opened this lingerie factory in Colombia, you guys and you know. Going back and forth, it would make sense that she would have this main operation, the home base, in Colombia. It's actually a well known area of operation for her husband, as he was very well versed with this. Alberto was actually running his drug world trafficking pipeline through the roofs of a clothing import factory as well. So we have to somehow move Griselda to Miami, where she will rule the cocaine world, murder hundreds of people, start drug wars and go on to bring in over $2.5 million a month to begin with. That's not even her ending number. So let's get her out of New York. This is what happens.

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The Drug Enforcement Agency, the DEA, along with the New York Police Department, nypd, had Griselda and Alberto on their radar. In fact, their operation out of New York was known as the Alberto Bravo Organization, and it was known to be one of the largest takedowns of organized Colombian narcotics crime in the United States at the time. So this was a really big deal. The year is 1974, and the Alberto Bravo Organization, a part of the Medellin cartel, is thriving. However, the DEA manages to take down 150 Colombians operating in the United States under the Bravo Organization, so this means that 150 of the people caught were working directly for Alberto and Griselda.

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According to a New York Times article, colombians never really had much difficulty finding people to carry drugs across the borders on their person. Now, these individuals, as you likely know, are called meals drugmills, because instead of getting, you know, locked up in the United States, they would most likely just be deported back to Colombia if they were not a repeat offender or if their crimes were not significant. The money they made from the trips as a drug mule outweighed the risk of just getting deported back home. So it was fairly easy to grow the Bravo Organization. Now recall that Alberto and Griselda were also really good at falsifying documents, so these type of illegal skills also help them in their operations of having people come from Colombia to New York. Now, the 150 individuals arrested actually only made up 10% of the Bravo Organization at the time, as of 1975, griselda and Alberto had approximately 1,500 Colombian dealers working under them through the United States.

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When the DEA closed in on the Bravo Organization during a sting that they named Operation Banshee, they arrested Griselda and Alberto and put them in jail. Wait, no, no, they didn't. That's because Griselda, her three sons on Alberto, fled back to their hometown of Medellin, colombia, once they learned that they were officially being indicted with conspiracy to distribute cocaine. They fled and Colombia would not extradite either of them, because Colombia would not extradite its own citizens to the United States at the time. So Griselda and Alberto were seemingly safe from United States federal authorities.

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However, things will not go well for Griselda's husband, alberto, the leader of the Bravo Organization at the time, because immediately following his move back to Medellin, griselda and Alberto will go into an altercation which will prove to be fatal for Alberto. With all intention of operating their successful and booming cocaine trafficking business out of Medellin, griselda and Alberto would first get into their altercation. Their relationship would go south very quickly. So what happened? Well, there are many different versions as of what happened and why, but the end result is all the same that Griselda shot her husband in the head and killed him. Now some of the versions are that she accused him of stealing millions of dollars worth of profit from their cocaine trafficking business and keeping it from her, and Griselda didn't play that game, as we'll learn in part two how ruthless she was and how she actually didn't need any justification for shooting and killing anybody.

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We're going to learn about that part two and part three. It's insane what she does. And it says that she went to go meet Alberto when they were in Medellin outside of a Colombian market and in the parking lot they were shooting at each other and she ended up shooting him in the head and killing him as well as six of his associates that were with him that night. Now Alberto did manage to get one shot at Griselda, shooting her in her stomach, but it was not fatal and she would make a full recovery from that. So if you're keeping track, that's husband number two that is now dead. We have not talked about what killed husband number one just yet, but I will go back into that for you guys in part two and part three. This event where Griselda kills her husband Alberto in cold blood is likely the turning point from when Griselda changes from just a cocaine associate to the cocaine leader.

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Next episode, I'll take you along as we find Griselda in Miami with husband number three and her rise to becoming one of the world's most dangerous and richest women of the 70s and 80s in the United States. Thank you for being here at True Crime and Headlines with Jules. I can't wait for you to join me in part two and part three and, as always, you're loved, you're needed and if you enjoyed this episode and you haven't done so yet if you could go on wherever you get your podcast, wherever you're listening, and give me a five star review. It will help me continue to show up in people's feeds and keep telling these stories about crime and justice and advocate for victims. You guys are amazing and I love you. And late. I want to have a healthy. My mama is a podcaster. Bye, too.