Griselda "La Madrina" Blanco Restrepo (15 February 1943-3 September 2012), nicknamed "The Cocaine Godmother", was a Colombian drug lord of the Medellin Cartel who transported cocaine from South America to New York, Miami, and California. She was murdered in Medellin in 2012.
Biography[]
Griselda Blanco Restrepo was born in Cartagena, Colombia on 15 February 1943, and her family moved to Medellin when she was three years old. She was a pickpocket and a hostage-taker before she had even turned thirteen, and she ran away from her home to escape the sexual assaults from her mother's boyfriend, looting homes until she was 20. During the mid-1970s, Blanco and her husband moved to Queens, New York City in the United States, establishing a sizeable cocaine business there. She fled to Colombia in 1975 before she could be arrested, only to return to the USA at Miami, Florida. During the late 1970s and early 1980s, her distribution network waged war against rival cartels on the streets of Miami, and she brought in $80,000,000 per month through the cocaine trade. She escaped various assassination attempts and fled to California, where she was arrested by the DEA in 1985. Blanco continued to run her business from behind bars, and she was released in 2004 and deported to Medellin, Colombia. The bloated Blanco gave control of her business to her sons, and she was shot twice in the head by a motorcyclist at the Cardiso butcher shop in Medellin on 3 September 2012.