Griselda Blanco, the "Cocaine Queen," rose from Cartagena's civil war violence to build a billion-dollar empire in Miami using lingerie mules and motorcycle assassinations. After fleeing her third husband's murder in 1985, she was arrested in Irvine, imprisoned for a decade despite alleged responsibility for 250 deaths, and later released only to be shot dead in Medellín in 2012 while clutching a Bible. Her legacy endures through her sons, including Michael Corleone, who now markets "Pure Blanco" products, illustrating how her criminal dynasty evolved from brutal cartel warfare into a complex family saga of revenge and survival. [Automatically generated summary]
Transcriber: nvidia/parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v2, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo
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Trust Your Girlfriends00:02:27
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When a group of women discover they've all dated the same prolific con artist, they take matters into their own hands.
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Hey, it's Nora Jones, and my podcast, Playing Along, is back with more of my favorite musicians.
Check out my newest episode with Josh Grobin.
You related to the Phantom at that point.
Yeah, I was definitely the Phantom in that.
That's so funny.
Share each day with me each night, each morning.
Listen to Nora Jones is playing along on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
What's up, everyone?
I'm Ego Modern, my next guest.
It's Will Farrell.
My dad gave me the best advice ever.
He goes, just give it a shot.
But if you ever reach a point where you're banging your head against the wall and it doesn't feel fun anymore, it's okay to quit.
If you saw it written down, it would not be an inspiration.
It would not be on a calendar of, you know, the cat just hanging in there.
Yeah, it would not be.
Right, it wouldn't be that.
There's a lot of life.
Listen to Thanks Dad on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
In 2023, bachelor star Clayton Eckard was accused of fathering twins, but the pregnancy appeared to be a hoax.
You doctored this particular test twice, Miss Owens, correct?
I doctored the test once.
It took an army of internet detectives to uncover a disturbing pattern.
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As the season continues, Laura Owens finally faces consequences.
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The Godmother of Cocaine00:15:15
Hey, everybody.
I'm Robert Evans, and this is once again Behind the Bastards.
Each week, I read you a story about a terrible, terrible person, and then I discuss it with my guest.
And this week, that guest is Danny Fernandez of Nerd If on the How Stuff Works network.
She's also a comedian and general funny person.
Hey, Danny.
Yes, thanks for having me on.
Thanks for coming on.
To hear about awful people.
Well, this week our awful person is Griselda Blanco.
Does that name ring any bells to you?
Barely.
With like cocaine, right?
Oh, yeah.
Okay.
Yeah, yeah.
She is the godmother of cocaine as one of her nicknames.
She called herself the baddest bitch to ever take a breath of life.
Hell yeah.
Well, I mean, I think that's reserved for Beyoncé, but sure.
Well, we'll see.
By the end of this podcast, we're going to know if she's the baddest bitch or the saddest bitch, because one of those two is probably the truth.
I will say that having spent the last week learning about her life, it doesn't sound like bragging to me because she's a tough cookie.
Oh, okay.
Okay.
We're just going to get into it then.
Griselda was born on February 15th, 1943 in Cartagena, Colombia.
Oh, wait, the day after Valentine's.
That's right.
So, you know, the 40s, Columbia was not a densely populated place.
When she was three, her mother moved her to Medellin, which was kind of like a quiet, smaller town back then.
They lived in a tin house and sort of a rural slum type part of the area with no electricity or running water.
There were basically no laws at all at that point.
Oh my God, what?
Like not even biblical laws?
I mean, it would.
It's not like those would be like, don't kill your neighbor.
It's about to get pretty biblical in here.
Oh, shit.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So her dad didn't stick around.
There's not much information about him.
Wait, I'm sorry.
There's no laws.
Yeah.
It's a lawless town.
It's like the Wild West.
Yeah.
God.
I mean, it's Columbia in the 40s.
I know, but they still had police then.
I'm sure.
Okay.
So, I mean, they did have some police, but as we're about to hear, the police did not exactly make things better, which is not a familiar situation for anyone in the modern world.
Yeah.
Okay.
So Griselda's mother was a hardcore alcoholic and very abusive.
Griselda was beaten regularly.
The violence at home was broken up with a nice helping of violence absolutely everywhere else.
Because when Griselda was five, there was this guy, George Gaetan.
He was a beloved liberal presidential candidate from Bogata.
He was murdered.
This sparked a 10-year civil war known as La Violencia or the violence.
At least 200,000 people died.
Since a lot of the conflict revolved around local police and politicians urging conservative peasant farmers to butcher liberal peasants and take their land, La Violencia was especially pronounced in areas like Medellín.
So from age five on, Griselda saw dead bodies on a near daily basis.
She and the other local children would find the corpses of murdered people and bury them for fun.
It was like a local pastime for kids in Medellín.
It was just like burying corpses found in the morning.
I wonder if it was like for fun.
That sounds like manual labor, though.
Like, well.
I imagine it's like a Huckleberry Finn situation where like one kid's got to bury the bodies and he cons the others into thinking like this is going to be a great time.
No, I would love it if it's just one kid digging the ditch and like five kids watching them do it.
And just poking the stick at the dead body.
Like what is it?
Stand by me with the...
Yeah, It's like that every day.
Okay.
It's an eternal stand by me.
So yeah, when Griselda was 11, she and some other young people kidnapped a 10-year-old child from a wealthy part of town.
I mean, she's 11.
She's a hard 11.
For whatever reason, the kid's family wouldn't pay up.
So anyway, they gave Griselda a gun and dared her to shoot the child between the eyes, which she did.
So she's 11.
She's committed her first murder, and she did not exactly pump the brakes on life after that.
So one night when Griselda was 14 and La Violencia was winding down, her mother, Anna, started beating her, which again wasn't a super weird situation.
Her mom grabbed her by the hair and punched her, then knocked her daughter down and started stomping.
Griselda somehow managed to run for the door.
Anna ripped the shirt off her back as she ran, and so Griselda ran topless through the pouring rain and mud all the way to the city of Medellín.
From that point until her early 20s, she worked as a prostitute.
Wait, okay, so she was 11, ran down topless.
She's 14 at this point.
Oh, 14.
She's 11 when she shoots the kid.
She's 14.
Like, who is taking note of this?
Like, who added this in her autobiography?
Oh, she told this story?
Yeah, she told this story to a guy.
So I've used a number of different sources.
There's no definitive source on her life, and there's a lot of disagreement about certain things.
There's like a mix of tabloids, like The Sun, that have written stories about her, some actual journalists who have written stories about her where the details are minimal.
And then there's a documentary called Cocaine Cowboys that interviews one of her former lovers, a Coke dealer named George Cosby from Oakland.
And she told this story to him.
Oh, okay, of her running topless.
Yeah.
Because I'm like, who's taking note during this time?
Like, who was out at night when it was raining and just like had their notebook open?
No, it's one of those things, like, we're essentially taking her word for when she was born because I'm pretty sure in Cartagena in 43, there weren't a lot of birth certificates being used.
Although this is the 50s now because she's 14.
The 50s, she's 14.
And then she became a prostitute.
Yeah, she's a prostitute, and she does that for six or seven years.
So she's drawn a hard card out of the deck of life so far.
At some point during that period, when she's in her early 20s, she marries a guy named Carlos Trujillo, and she has three sons with him.
They're all boys, Dixon, Hubert, and Oswaldo.
And then Carlos died.
We don't know exactly how he died.
Some sources say it was cirrhosis of the liver.
Some sources say they moved to New York before he died of cirrhosis.
And some sources say she divorced him and then had him shot in the face for something.
It's hard to say what it was.
Wait, what is the New York one?
Like, that has nothing to do with it.
Well, they definitely moved to New York at some point.
Okay.
No, I love that was his cause of death.
Moving to New York?
Yeah, because you were like, okay, one is that he got cirrhosis.
One is that he moved to New York.
Well, he got cirrhosis in New York is one version of the story.
So he dies in New York is one version.
She has him shot in Columbia is another.
I have no idea what happened because, again, there's just a bunch of versions of her story floating around.
Okay.
But he definitely.
My favorite cause of death is moving to New York.
Okay.
It's a kind of death.
It is.
It is.
It's a death of the soul.
Yeah.
Okay.
Sorry, continue.
Okay.
So, yeah, like I said, we know that she marries this guy.
She has three kids with him.
And then he dies probably because she killed him, given what happens later.
But I'm getting ahead of myself.
So whatever happened, Griselda quickly found a new main squeeze, a guy named Alberto Bravo.
He owned a string of garment factories, which he turned into drug labs.
Alberto hired Griselda to buy rock cocaine for him, and the two quickly fell in love and started operating a little bitty drug empire together.
They moved to Queens because New York at the time was the world capital of buying cocaine for way too much money.
What year is this?
This is in like the late 60s.
Okay.
Their official cover was that they ran a clothing import company.
They were able to undersell the Italian mob thanks to their direct connection to Colombia.
In 1971, Blanco and Alberto became the first Colombians to sell Medellin cartel cocaine in the United States.
So Trailblazers.
Yeah.
Within a few months of moving to Queens, Griselda and Alberto were multi-millionaires.
At the height of their success, they made around $10 million a week.
And this is, you know, $10 million in $60.
So they're fucking banking it.
Griselda grew Americanized and developed a love for mafia and gangster movies, particularly The Godfather.
That makes sense.
Yeah, yeah, right?
Like you would.
Yeah.
So as her Coke business takes off, she starts calling herself La Madrina or The Godmother.
Griselda was the first female drug lord in the cocaine game.
She was also an innovator.
She realized that female mules were way less likely to attract police attention and searches than males.
This led obviously to Griselda using her husband's garment factories to produce and sell a line of specialty lingerie just for smuggling cocaine.
Wait, of lingerie?
Yeah.
Oh, God, I kind of want to be friends with her.
Yeah, yeah.
So she's operating a lingerie factory so people can smuggle coke in their undies.
That's so cool.
Yeah.
In 1971, one of her corsets was found in a woman's bathroom at the Miami International Airport.
It held seven pounds of cocaine that had been sewn into 58 compartments.
Whoa, that's heavy.
Yeah.
That is a lot to wear on your bed.
You know what?
That would come in handy, though.
Instead of like stuffing my bra, it's just like filled with Coke.
Wow.
She is truly a pioneer.
Yeah.
No, she's an innovator.
She's not content to just do the game as it's been done.
Nobody's doing the game like that.
No.
No.
And in 72, another of her mules gets caught with four and a half pounds of cocaine in her underpants, which sounds more uncomfortable than seven pounds spread out.
Yeah, maybe it was all in the butt, though.
Like one of my friends had like one of those butt like implant thingies.
So maybe it gave it some padding.
Yeah, it just looks like you have like a really nice butt, but it's actually like a half a million dollars in cocaine.
Oh God, yeah.
You know what?
I bet that's how much Kim's butt is insured for.
Like probably more than a million dollars.
One buttload of cocaine.
Yeah.
Well, probably, yeah.
Yeah, because Heidi Klume's legs are insured for like $5 million or something.
I don't know if you knew that.
No.
Yeah.
Huh.
I wonder what the depreciation on legs is.
I don't know.
Your knees go to shit at some point.
Yeah, yeah.
But I guess she, and other people, like have their hair insured and stuff.
Like when it's a part of your image, you can.
This is why I came on actually to educate people about this specifically.
Yeah.
No, no, no.
Thank you for this.
You're welcome.
Now I'm thinking about what part of me to insure.
Your beard.
Really?
Yeah.
Thank you.
You're welcome.
You should.
I don't know if you've checked out.
I always tell my guy friends to go check out like when you're on Instagram, if you post a picture with like of your, you know, your face and your beard and your facial hair, you can do like hashtag beard love or, I mean, there's a lot of people that are super into beards right now.
As they should be.
I mean, I'm just in it for the love of the beard.
It's not like I'm not trying to curry favor with anyone.
No, but I mean, you could use it in your favor.
Yeah.
I mean, that's something to keep in the back pocket.
Okay.
Four and a half pounds of cocaine.
Yeah.
So yeah, by the early 70s, Blanco and Bravo were moving one and a half tons of cocaine into America every month.
Things were going great on the business end of things, but as is so often the case, Griselda and Alberto's relationship suffered as they saw more financial success.
You know, oldest story in the book.
Yeah.
The problem started when he moved back to Columbia to, quote, restructure the business, which mostly means fucking lots of ladies.
At least that's what Griselda thought.
And in fairness to Alberto, Griselda had also started smoking enormous amounts of bazooka, which is just raw, unrefined cocaine.
Oh, I thought it was a gum.
No.
No.
She was just smoking shit, like smoking cocaine by the pound and very paranoid.
So he may not have been cheating on her, and she may just have been smoking more cocaine than a person should be on.
She was really paranoid.
Yeah, it's hard to say.
Probably both are true.
Yep.
Yeah.
Because I'm going to guess being a millionaire Coke dealer in the 60s, you probably aren't super into marriage vows.
Yeah, no.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So she was so coked out and paranoid that she started keeping a fueled private jet on a 24-hour standby.
This actually worked out really well for her because it turned out that a joint NYPD DEA investigation called Operation Banshee had caught onto her operation.
She managed to make it down to Miami and escape to Columbia just ahead of the authorities.
Most people would lay low at that point, but Griselda was still smoking unbelievable amounts of cocaine.
And so she was convinced that her husband was cheating on her.
And she'd also began to suspect that he was plotting against her with a little guy named Pablo Escobar.
So she arrived in Medellín with the FBI like right on her tail and a team of armed goons in her private aircraft.
She arranges to meet with her estranged husband out in front of a nightclub to like talk things out with him.
Jeez.
So there's a couple versions of this story as well.
One of them is that she just straight up ambushes him and shoots him in the face.
One of them is that they try to talk and there's like a cold standoff and she tells him that she needs to tell him some things and he has to listen and then he says that all this godmother crap's gone to her head.
She didn't appreciate this so she pulls a pistol from her ostrich skin boot and shoots Alberto in the face and blows his brains out.
He dies instantly, but he manages to get a shot off with his Uzi that hits her in the belly.
There's a few variations of what happened at this point too.
One of the stories says she grabs the Uzi from his dying hands and guns down all six of his bodyguards while her guards are just like standing there staring.
Another version is that there's just a giant firefight between them and she gets dragged wounded back into the limousine and taken to a hospital where she, you know, recovers.
Either way, she is now in sole control.
Wait, and they've already both seen the godfather and they didn't like, they didn't already anticipate this happening.
I mean, she, it's possible she wanted exactly this to happen.
Yeah.
Other than the getting shot herself part.
Oh my gosh.
Wow.
I'm more confused that he died instantly, but also shot her.
Well, you know, you got him.
He's got the Uzi in his hand, and she shoots him in the face, and maybe he just twitches.
It may have just been like that.
Maybe he shot first.
Or maybe he shot first.
So she was doing it in defense, technically.
She may have been the Han Solo in this situation.
That's entirely possible.
Hard to say, but either way, Grisel.
Is Pablo there?
No, Pablo was not there.
Okay.
There's a lot of dispute.
Yeah.
There's some people that say he was her protege and learned from her.
There's some people that say they probably didn't have that much.
But he was working on.
He was a little guy at this point.
Yeah, but he was, I thought he was Alberto's protege.
No, no, there's a rumor that he and Alberto were working to push her out of her chunk of the Coke business and then manage it together.
Yeah.
That's what she may have thought was happening.
But we don't know that that's what's happening because other people say that Escobar was like her protege at a later date.
Okay.
So it's hard to say.
Again, we're talking about like Coke dealers and everyone who was alive to relate this story was doing impossible amounts of cocaine while it was happening.
So you're going to get different variables.
She was gunned down in an alleyway.
Yeah, a lot of that.
But one way or the other, she kills her husband, winds up in charge of their whole cocaine empire and earns a second nickname.
Wait, the police just look the other way.
Well, it's Columbia.
Oh, okay, right, right, right.
This is in like Medellin.
So like, please aren't going to get in the middle of two Coke dealers shooting it out.
Okay.
Yeah.
So she earns a new nickname, the Black Widow.
Which, so I'm of two minds of this.
I feel like you have to kill more than two husbands to get the name Black Widow.
That's two lives.
Like, I think she deserves.
You feel like two is enough of a pattern.
I feel depending on.
Yeah.
I think two, you're off to a good start.
Yeah.
I mean, she definitely earns it later on, spoiler alert.
But I feel like, yeah, I want to wait until someone's killed three husbands before I give them.
Earning the Black Widow Nickname00:05:40
No, no.
Like, if she killed her first husband, what would her, like, husband kill, like, you know?
One husband might be a fluke.
Hey, if you, here's, here's how I'll do it.
Like, if she ate her first husband, she'd be known as a man-eater.
Like, they would.
They would put that name, they would title her that and think it's like super quirky in like a news headline.
Yeah, that's right.
Or whatever.
So that's that, yeah.
And I feel like if you eat a person, you get that nickname right away.
Okay.
I feel like you got to establish a pattern with Black Widow.
We don't know if she ate him or not.
We don't.
And it's possible she did.
That wouldn't be the craziest thing that she does.
People, yeah.
No, I was going to say people get hungry on Coke, but they don't.
That's kind of the benefit of Coke.
Great weight loss drugs.
Okay, so she's the Black Widow.
Got it.
So she's the Black Widow and the Godmother now.
Oh, she can't have both names.
I see what you mean.
She had something like 20 different nicknames.
Okay.
Yeah.
Grizzy, like the Grizzly Bear.
Yeah.
That one didn't really take off.
No, okay.
Yeah, so she takes control of the Empire.
Mama G. Mama G, that's a good one.
Yeah.
So she runs her Coke business from Columbia for a while.
She grows into one of the most influential figures in the cocaine world.
At one point, she brokered a major meeting of all the big Coke traffickers, including Pablo Escobar, to get everybody to unify their import network so they can more efficiently sell cocaine to Americans, which is cool.
In 1978, Griselda marries a new guy, a bank robber named Dario.
The couple has a son who Griselda named Michael Corleone.
And then they move back into the United States.
Wow, that's very on the nose.
Yeah, really on the nose because you're kind of setting up your kid's life with that name.
Yeah.
And he has quite a life, which we'll be diving into a little bit here, too.
I want to name my kid Hannibal Lecter.
Hannibal Lecter.
Yeah, I'm just really into eating people apparently with this.
I feel like once they start cloning meat, once they really get that down, everyone's going to be eating human meat.
Yeah.
Like I would.
I would eat clean human meat in a heartbeat.
Yeah, and then those people will come out that have been like, I've always been eating human meat.
I've been doing it since before it was cool.
You guys aren't real cannibals.
That shit was never on a person.
Yeah, there's going to be cannibal hipsters.
It'll be just terrible.
Oh, wow.
What a world.
Yeah.
We'll probably wind up getting human-flavored vape canisters.
Yeah, I could see that.
Anyway, so yeah, they moved back to the United States.
She isn't recognized at the border crossing because a decade of smoking uncut cocaine had aged her face by several decades.
She's like 30 years old in this picture.
She doesn't look that bad.
She doesn't look that bad.
But she's clearly taking some...
It's not great to smoke cocaine, for example.
It's not.
By the way, if you want to check out this picture of young Griselda, you can find it on our website, behindthebastards.com.
So yeah, Griselda bought a six-room penthouse in Biscayne Bay, which is a fancy neighborhood in Miami.
What's going on with her kids right now?
They're just living with her and doing some low-level Coke stuff.
Like, you know, your kids you can trust if you're in the cocaine business.
They don't seem to have ever fucked her over.
So, like, she uses her kids in the business a lot, has them as like executives.
They don't care that she killed their dad.
I think they get used to it because she kills a lot of dads.
Okay.
Yeah.
So she settles into Miami, sets to work expanding her cocaine empire beyond anything the world had ever seen.
And I think it's time to break right now for just a little bit and talk about Miami in the late 60s and early 70s.
What words come to mind when you hear the name Miami right now?
Oh, pit bull.
Okay.
Let's see, beaches, good food, good architecture.
You have a really positive attitude towards Miami.
You know, I love my fellow Latinx people that live there.
So, yeah.
See, Vice is the first name in my because I watched a lot of Miami Vice.
Sunwrecked Swamp of Madness might be another.
I haven't had good Florida experiences.
Yeah.
But rural Florida is more where I've been.
And it's rough.
It's just Oklahoma, too.
It is, yeah.
So yeah, once upon a time, Miami was a nice quiet town on the coast.
There weren't any big buildings, no skyscrapers.
In the late 60s and early 70s, there was very little going on.
There was just a single police car patrolling the city at night, even though the city was the size of Rhode Island.
So there was also very few young people in Miami.
It was basically a collection of Art Deco buildings and shirtless elderly men with zinc cream on their lips.
There's a wonderful photo article in the Washington Post about this time called 1970 Miami Beach Culture, All Quirk and No Vice.
We'll include a link up on the site, but I've curated a couple of photos from it just to give you an idea to sort of set the mood.
So you get a couple of old people.
That's still what it's like there.
Yeah, and then there's the picture of the guy with the zinc cream on his lips, which is like a thing old men used to do because they didn't have sunscreen, but it just makes them all look creepy as hell.
So it was into this like nice, quiet Miami that Griselda Blanco drops like a hand grenade in 1978.
We're going to get into what happened when Griselda established her cocaine empire in Miami after the break.
But before that, we have to do some more ads and sell you some things that are less addictive than cocaine, probably.
Griselda Drops a Hand Grenade00:03:46
There's two golden rules that any man should live by.
Rule one, never mess with a country girl.
You play stupid games, you get stupid prizes.
And rule two, never mess with her friends either.
We always say, trust your girlfriends.
I'm Anna Sinfield.
And in this new season of The Girlfriends.
Oh my God, this is the same man.
A group of women discover they've all dated the same prolific con artist.
I felt like I got hit by a truck.
I thought, how could this happen to me?
The cops didn't seem to care.
So they take matters into their own hands.
I said, oh, hell no.
I vowed I will be his last target.
He's going to get what he deserves.
Listen to the girlfriends.
Trust me, babe.
On the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
What's up, everyone?
I'm Ego Modem.
My next guest, you know, from Step Brothers, Anchorman, Saturday Night Live, and the Big Money Players Network, it's Will Farrell.
My dad gave me the best advice ever.
I went and had lunch with him one day, and I was like, and dad, I think I want to really give this a shot.
I don't know what that means, but I just know the groundlings.
I'm working my way up through it.
I know it's a place they come look for up and coming talent.
He said, if it was based solely on talent, I wouldn't worry about you, which is really sweet.
Yeah.
He goes, but there's so much luck involved.
And he's like, just give it a shot.
He goes, but if you ever reach a point where you're banging your head against the wall and it doesn't feel fun anymore, it's okay to quit.
If you saw it written down, it would not be an inspiration.
It would not be on a calendar of, you know, the cat just hang in there.
Yeah, it would not be.
Right, it wouldn't be that.
There's a lot of luck.
Listen to Thanksgiving on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
10-10 shots fired, City Hall building.
A silver .40 caliber handgun was recovered at the scene.
From iHeart Podcasts and Best Case Studios, this is Rorschach, murder at City Hall.
How could this have happened in City Hall?
Somebody tell me that.
Jeffrey Hood did it.
July 2003.
Councilman James E. Davis arrives at New York City Hall with a guest.
Both men are carrying concealed weapons.
And in less than 30 minutes, both of them will be dead.
Everybody in the chamber's ducks.
A shocking public murder.
I scream, get down, get down.
Those are shots.
Those are shots.
Get down.
A charismatic politician.
You know, he just bent the rules all the time, man.
I still have a weapon.
And I could shoot you.
And an outsider with a secret.
He alleged he was a victim of flat down.
That may or may not have been political.
That may have been about sex.
Listen to Rorschach, murder at City Hall on the iHeartRadio app.
Apple Podcasts are wherever you get your podcasts.
I'm Laurie Siegel, and on Mostly Human, I go beyond the headlines with the people building our future.
This week, an interview with one of the most influential figures in Silicon Valley, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman.
I think society is going to decide that creators of AI products bear a tremendous amount of responsibility to products we put out in the world.
From power to parenthood.
Kids, teenagers, I think they will need a lot of guardrails around AI.
This is such a powerful and such a new thing.
The Downside of Drug Money00:15:24
From addiction to acceleration.
The world we live in is a competitive world, and I don't think that's going to stop, even if you did a lot of redistribution.
You know, we have a deep desire to excel and be competitive and gain status and be useful to others.
And it's a multiplayer game.
What does the man who has extraordinary influence over our lives have to say about the weight of that responsibility?
Find out on Mostly Human.
My highest order bit is to not destroy the world with AI.
Listen to Mostly Human on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
So we're back.
We're talking about Griselda Blanco, who has just moved to Miami in 78 to establish her cocaine empire.
Well, at this point in the story, Miami is a quiet little town on the coast filled with old people that Grislda Blanco has just moved in and decided to turn into the cocaine mecca of the United States.
Now, at this point, it is sort of the marijuana capital of the U.S. 95% of the pot smoked during the Summer of Love entered the United States through Miami.
But the pot business hasn't had a huge impact on the city itself.
And the cartels are rapidly moving away from marijuana because pot's bulky and it's hard to hide.
It smells.
Cops were actively looking for it, and they weren't looking for cocaine at this point.
And cocaine at this point in time was worth about $35,000 a pound in like 1970s dollars.
So that's the equivalent of like two or three years' income for a middle-class person if you can smuggle one pound of cocaine across the border.
Wow.
In the late 70s, Coke was still a rare and exotic drug that only the really rich people could do.
A single gram would be 60 to 100 bucks.
A report from the National Institute on Drug Abuse in 1977 estimated that less than 1% of adults in the country had even tried it.
Like 20 years later, it would be more like 15% of adults had tried it.
So cocaine explodes in this period of time from like the late 70s up through the 80s.
And Grisselda Blanco is most of the reason why, because she starts moving cocaine in by the thousands and thousands of pounds.
Within a few months of coming to Miami, her income had tripled.
Other drug kingpins followed the queen pin, and soon Miami was awash in a sea of blow.
Cocaine Money actually built the city of Miami that we know today.
Huge numbers of bars and nightclubs were built to act as front for cartel operations.
Giant buildings filled with condos and penthouses shot up because there's all these people with drug money now that are just like wanting to buy nice places on the beach.
Banks who were willing to look askance at a little blow got rich beyond their wildest dreams and also bought giant skyscrapers to house their own.
Why aren't we doing this now?
I feel we could help our economy.
We're just getting super into Coke.
Well, we're doing this now with pot in the Northwest.
So there's all these little towns in Oregon that were like just a stop on the road five years ago that are now filled with money and rich people and buildings because like the fucking pot industry moved in.
I don't feel like we're doing that here.
Like I don't think people are making a ton off of pot here in California.
Well no, because California, you can get what, 800 bucks for a pound of weed here.
Like whereas, you know, in the parts of the country where it's still illicit, it still goes for a couple of grand.
Oh, so wait, so they still have to hide it kind of out there?
Most of the growers you're going to meet, some of them are fully legit and they just sell within the state or within like the legal states, but a lot of them will sell a little bit legally to sort of cover their operations and then will sell a lot more in parts of the country where like it's, you know, that's that's where pot comes from is the Northwest.
Okay.
Yeah.
The only thing that would terrify me about this is I've seen good fellas, so I'm like, I would be scared to get into this world.
Oh, it is a scary world.
You're going to die.
Yeah, yeah.
And the pot industry right now has some ugliness to it, but the cocaine era in my, it was unbelievably bad.
You know what?
At least pot chills you out.
Yeah.
So your competitors, you're all chill.
And you might end up like meeting up to fight and then you smoke together.
Yeah.
You know, whereas Coke people are so angry been around cokeheads.
And once they start doing more Coke, it's not going to calm them down.
Okay.
Yeah.
So this leads to a period of time called the Cocaine Wars, which were largely focused in South Florida.
Griselda was probably the most successful Coke baron of the early cocaine wars.
She developed a reputation for being willing to kill basically anyone for basically no reason.
At one point, she cornered an arms dealer with a machete and was about to cut him to pieces.
The man begged her not to and begged her to instead get a gun from his car and just shoot him.
So she shot him and she told everybody like she would tell the story to people that she showed mercy to this guy by shooting him rather than cutting him up.
So she got another nickname out of that.
La Compasiva, the compassionate one.
Oh, God.
So now she's up to three nicknames, all pretty good.
So at one point, Griselda stole $2 million from a business associate and had that associate tortured and killed and wrapped in plastic and tossed into a canal.
She was probably responsible for more than 200 murders in Dade County, Florida alone.
In 1979, two of Griselda's men drove a white happy time party supply van up to the Dadeland Mall, got out and started firing machine guns into a liquor store.
They killed two men who were rivals of Griselda's and they wounded a clerk.
The shootout became known as the Dadeland Mall Massacre because the bar for being dubbed a massacre was set a lot lower back in the 70s.
Like two people doesn't even get you on the news anymore.
Yeah, yeah.
But they were using machine guns and they wound up just like driving around the parking lot of the mall in their white van, firing machine guns randomly in the buildings for a while.
And then they left the van and the police who searched it found that it had been bulletproofed.
It was filled with machine guns and ammo.
They described it as a war wagon.
It was basically like a tank in the body of a box truck.
So this was kind of like the moment in the cocaine wars where the police were like, oh my God, this is like cops at this point, they're all just carrying little six shooters.
They don't have machine guns.
They don't have body armor.
There's not much in the way of SWAT teams.
And they realize that like the gangsters in Miami are tooling around in armored cars with machine guns.
And so this is like the moment that catalyzes that the Coke wars have gotten really fucking serious.
And it's also a moment that catalyzed another great cocaine innovation for Griselda Blanco.
She was frustrated by the loss of her $14,000, which was a lot of money back then, war wagon.
Wait, why did they leave it?
It's not known, but I think it's probably because the traffic was bad.
So they realized they'd be able to get away faster on foot.
And a couple of weeks later, she lost two of her assassins because the cops caught them after killing a guy because they were stuck in traffic in their car.
So she decides cars are bullshit and starts having all of her hitmen drive motorcycles and invents the motorcycle drive-by assassination, which would come to be one of the truly great innovations of the cocaine wars because you could just zoom up, shoot someone to death, and then roll out for wherever.
Pablo Escobar used a shitload of motorcycle assassins in his rise to power.
So this was like a major innovation in killing people in the Coke industry.
It gives a bad name to motorcyclists, man.
I've met some of the nicest weather daddies out there.
If you get into the cocaine business, they'll cap you.
Yeah.
I mean, assuming they're in the cocaine business.
I assume every motorcycle is.
No.
Yeah.
Nope.
I assume they're all on their way to like volunteer somewhere because that's all of the stories I see on my feed.
You know, it'll be like tatted motorcycle guy like helps elderly woman across the street.
So that's my, how I view them.
I mean, theoretically, if riding a motorcycle allows you to more efficiently assassinate people and escape traffic, it also allows you to more efficiently volunteer your time at soup kitchens.
Yeah, see?
Yeah.
Yeah.
It checks out.
Yeah.
And they're saving the environment.
Yeah, they are.
That's why they get to use like the carpooling.
Less emissions.
So you could say she developed a green way to assassinate people.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Someone should say that.
Yeah.
She's an environmentalist.
Also, she is, you know, taking more people off the planet.
And these are usually very rich people who are probably consuming a lot, too.
Yeah, they're also bad.
Yeah.
Well, some of them.
Some of them, I think.
Some of them.
Her competitors that are also murdering people.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I mean, that's the nice thing about the cocaine wars is that you don't have to feel super bad about it.
Yeah, that's kind of interesting.
They're killing each other.
Yeah.
So Miami became the most violent city in the United States pretty rapidly after Griselda moved there.
In 1979, it had 349 murders.
In 1980, there were 573 murders.
And in 1981, there were 621 murders.
So many people were dying that the coroner's office ran out of space to put the corpses.
The medical investigator had to lease a refrigerated truck from a Burger King for $800 a month so they'd have enough space for all the bodies.
That's super dark.
Yeah.
That's super dark.
That's like not only dying, but having to stay in a Burger King.
Yeah, not even McDonald's.
Because back then, McDonald's was huge.
Like staying in the second rate refrigerator.
God.
Yeah, that's a bummer.
And it's also just like if you get up in the morning and read the...
You can't put me in an in-and-out.
You want to be frozen in an in-and-out?
Yes.
Definitely not Arby's.
I'm sorry, Arby's people.
Maybe, you know what a dairy queen would be chill?
Yeah.
I mean, think about getting up in the morning.
Like, that's one of the signs to move out of a place is you get up and you read that, like, we don't have room for all the dead people.
Yeah.
Like, all right, I'm leaving.
So the head of Miami's Police Benevolent Association warned that the criminal justice system could no longer protect people and urged citizens to arm themselves, which, again, not a great sign.
So while all this is happening, Griselda is making billions and billions of dollars, but she's also grown more and more paranoid, partly because she's smoking even more bazooka now.
Yeah.
And partly because tons of people want her dead because she's that would be hard.
Yeah, yeah.
So she's both paranoid and actually being hunted by people.
She mostly sticks to her homes, which now included a Miami mansion as well as the Biscayne Bay penthouse.
The mansion had a bronze bust of her face at the entryway.
Up and coming drug lords who visited the godmother took to rubbing the bust for good luck.
One of these enterprising youngsters was apparently a man named Pablo Escobar.
Again, just one of those.
Back in her life.
Back in her life.
Well, he's learning, you know?
Yeah.
Pablo is always good at learning from teachers.
That's what everyone knows him for.
Wow.
Well, you know, do you think that she could have gotten out of the business at this point if she wanted to?
I feel like it's something once you're in it, you're in it for life.
Definitely once you've got a couple hundred murders that you've ordered, there's probably no going back.
Okay, you're right.
Because it's one of those things she could have gone back to Columbia and been safer from the cops, but then like, there's got to be a shitload of people who want her dead in Columbia.
So she had, oh, it's not worth it.
I mean, I'm still good cage.
Having millions of dollars in multiple homes, but never knowing at what point you're going to die.
Yeah.
You know, I mean, I guess we're all going to die.
But like, even if she moved to a different country that she's never been to before, I still feel like I'd be looking over my shoulder the rest of my life.
Well, that's the downside of like drug money that you have to kill people for is that you never like you're never safe.
So Griselda's on top at this point, but she's basically hiding in her massive houses doing shitloads of cocaine.
She turned to increasingly wild parties in order to kind of take her mind off the threat of impending death or legal action.
Where is she?
She's in her 40s.
She's like 39, 40.
During this time, she was known to force both men and women to have sex with her at gunpoint.
She's also accused of having frequent bisexual orgies at her mansions.
Again, it's hard to tell.
This is what the cops say that she was doing.
So it's hard to tell if they're just trying to slander her or if she is just.
Has she spoken about her sexual life before?
Not about this stuff.
Okay, but she talked about running topless when she was 14.
Yeah, she talked about that.
She told that to one of her lovers, but you probably wouldn't talk about your frequent bisexual orgies.
I mean, if I had millions, I already do that now.
But if I had, I'm not kidding.
If he and I talk about sexual stuff on our podcast all the time, but we're also in 2018 where we're allowed to be.
Exactly.
So I hear both millennials.
So I hear frequent bisexual orgies now, and there's nothing bad about it.
But in the set, they clearly meant it as a slur when the cops released all the ways.
Now, everyone's going to think I have orgies.
I haven't.
Yeah, it's on my to-do list.
And I want to make it clear that Behind the Bastards the show has nothing wrong with frequent bisexual orgies.
No, but I get what you're saying at the time.
The cops were trying to slander her.
Maybe she did this.
Maybe she didn't.
And so they use that as opposed to murdering 100 people.
So instead, they use like, oh, but also she's bisexual.
This is sex parties.
Oh, man.
This is America.
We're always more scared of sex than violence.
Than murder.
Yeah, we're great at violence.
We're not good at, you know, being healthy sexually.
Yeah, it's like she's murdered people, but also she's not a lady.
She's weird.
Yeah, yeah.
But also she's not Christian.
Okay.
So she's a billionaire now.
She's indulging in rich people's passions, buying, like buying lots of dumb, expensive stuff.
Griselda Blanco purchased a gold-plated MAC-10 machine pistol with inlaid emeralds.
She owned a set of Eva Perrone's pearls and a tea set that had once been property of the Queen of England.
So she's like buying crazy rich person stuff and having parties, which is what you do if you're a billionaire and wanted by a bunch of criminals.
Yeah.
Her third husband, Darios Apulveda, started spending more and more time in Colombia in the early 80s.
Griselda eventually learned that he was cheating on her and she did the thing she always wanted to do.
Why would?
Yeah, exactly.
Exactly.
Your wife's name is the Black Widow.
Don't fuck with her.
Oh, man.
What if they're like terrified?
So they're like confiding in the arms of another because they're so scared that they like have an emotional partner, you know, like emotional cheating.
And then she kills them.
And then she, yeah.
Well, yeah, you've kind of anticipated what's about to happen.
She hires a bunch of assassins to dress as police officers, pull over Dario's car, and machine gun him to death in Medellin.
Her son, five-year-old Michael Corleone, was in the backseat of the car at the time.
Having people killed next to their kids was kind of a pattern for Griselda.
In 1982, she tried to kill a rival Coke dealer, Jesus Castro, for making fun of her son's butt, I think.
Her assassins had missed Castro, but hit and killed his two-year-old son, who was also in the car.
In 83, she had a married couple murdered while their children were in the adjacent room.
And she actually wanted the kids killed, I think, but her assassins were like, we're not going to go that far.
Yeah, so she's fully off the fucking chain at this point.
By 1984, she'd made a lot of enemies and had a bounty of more than $4 million on her head.
From who?
From everyone.
Like, multiple different people had to do.
Like, so all of the godfathers got together and put a bounty on her?
Several of them did.
I'm sure she had allies too.
No, no, no, no.
Okay.
Okay.
No, she has pissed off everybody.
They did one of those roundtable things where it was like all the heads of the families got together.
This lady is crazy and we need to kill her.
She claimed that she loved being at war, but repeated attempts on her life finally convinced her to flee Miami for Irvine, California.
Oh, God.
The real place to die.
Yeah, it's fucking.
That's the motto of everyone, right?
It's a good place to die.
It is.
A good place to be forgotten.
Oh, wow.
A Million Dollar Bounty on Her Head00:04:54
Okay.
So it was in Irvine in 1985 that the police finally caught up with her.
They knocked on the door of the home she shared with her mother and young son, Michael Corleone, and arrested the godmother while she was.
It's that fucking name.
That's why.
You gave it away.
Yeah, it's very clear she's a criminal.
Yeah.
Wow.
So they find her lying in bed with her Bible.
The officer who arrested her, a guy named Palumbo, kissed her on the cheek as he handcuffed her because he'd promised to do that for some reason.
I don't know.
Cops are weird.
So yeah, so now the godmother, after almost 20 years in the Coke business and billions of dollars, has been caught by the police.
Her past has caught up with her and she's about to go to prison.
And we're going to get into what happens in prison after the break.
There's two golden rules that any man should live by.
Rule one: never mess with a country girl.
You play stupid games, you get stupid prizes.
And rule two, never mess with her friends either.
We always say, trust your girlfriends.
I'm Anna Sinfield, and in this new season of The Girlfriends...
Oh my God, this is the same man.
A group of women discover they've all dated the same prolific con artist.
I felt like I got hit by a truck.
I thought, how could this happen to me?
The cops didn't seem to care.
So they take matters into their own hands.
I said, oh, hell no.
I vowed I will be his last target.
He's going to get what he deserves.
Listen to the girlfriends.
Trust me, babe.
On the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
What's up, everyone?
I'm Ago Modern.
My next guest, you know, from Step Brothers, Anchorman, Saturday Night Live, and the Big Money Players Network, it's Will Farrell.
My dad gave me the best advice ever.
I went and had lunch with him one day, and I was like, and dad, I think I want to really give this a shot.
I don't know what that means, but I just know the groundlings.
I'm working my way up through and I know it's a place they come look for up and coming talent.
He said, if it was based solely on talent, I wouldn't worry about you, which is really sweet.
Yeah.
He goes, but there's so much luck involved.
And he's like, just give it a shot.
He goes, but if you ever reach a point where you're banging your head against the wall and it doesn't feel fun anymore, it's okay to quit.
If you saw it written down, it would not be an inspiration.
It would not be on a calendar of, you know, the cat just hang in there.
Yeah, it would not be.
Right, it wouldn't be that.
There's a lot of luck.
Listen to Thanks Dad on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
10-10 shots fired.
City Hall building.
A silver .40 caliber handgun was recovered at the scene.
From iHeart Podcasts and Best Case Studios, this is Rorschach, murder at City Hall.
How could this have happened in City Hall?
Somebody tell me that!
Jeffrey Hood did.
July 2003, Councilman James E. Davis arrives at New York City Hall with a guest.
Both men are carrying concealed weapons.
And in less than 30 minutes, both of them will be dead.
Everybody in the chamber's ducks.
A shocking public murder.
I screamed, get down, get down.
Those are shots.
Those are shots.
Get down.
A charismatic politician.
You know, he just bent the rules all the time, man.
I still have a weapon.
And I could shoot you.
And an outsider with a secret.
He alleged he was a victim of flat down.
That may or may not have been political.
That may have been about sex.
Listen to Rorschach, murder at City Hall on the iHeartRadio app.
Apple Podcasts are wherever you get your podcasts.
I'm Lori Siegel, and on Mostly Human, I go beyond the headlines with the people building our future.
This week, an interview with one of the most influential figures in Silicon Valley, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman.
I think society is going to decide that creators of AI products bear a tremendous amount of responsibility to products we put out in the world.
From power to parenthood.
Kids, teenagers, I think they will need a lot of guardrails around AI.
This is such a powerful and such a new thing.
From addiction to acceleration.
The world we live in is a competitive world, and I don't think that's going to stop.
Even if you did a lot of redistribution, you know, we have a deep desire to excel and be competitive and gain status and be useful to others.
And it's a multiplayer game.
What does the man who has extraordinary influence over our lives have to say about the weight of that responsibility?
The Warning Shot from Prison00:15:00
Find out on Mostly Human.
My highest order bit is to not destroy the world with AI.
Listen to Mostly Human on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
And we're back.
We're talking about Griselda Blanco.
She has been arrested in 1985.
The police had a very strong case against her.
They were able to get her locked up.
She's bisexual.
Yeah, yeah, exactly.
They locked her up for being bisexual.
But yeah, they were able to get her in prison for like a decade or so, but they didn't have quite enough to put her away for life because, you know, she was smart.
She keeps her.
Yeah, yeah.
Their hope was that while she was locked up, they'd be able to dig up enough dirt to convict her of murder.
Griselda wound up taking like a special plea deal to get her sentence locked in at 20 years, which was a pretty good deal considering the 200 to 250 murders the state blamed on her.
But she's behind bars for a while now.
Her arrest and the subsequent revelations about her life of crime were big news.
She became known as the queen of cocaine and the subject of many lurid daytime TV news profiles.
And one man, a street-level Coke dealer from Oakland named Charles Cosby, saw one of these daytime TV things and became obsessed with the Queen of Cocaine.
He happened to have a connection to her in prison, and so he wrote her a note.
Quote, Godmother, I think you're the greatest queen to ever sit on the throne.
I've admired you ever since I first heard of you.
I appreciate you and I salute you for being a real woman.
Unquote.
I'm not going to lie.
That sounds like some of the DMs that I get.
I'm not kidding.
I will show you after this.
It'll be like, some guy called me my beautiful sweat queen.
I think he meant to say sweet.
Sweet queen.
Yeah.
And so I like screenshot it.
I cut out his name, whatever.
He didn't deserve that because he was a rando and I get a lot of random creepy dudes, but it was like my beautiful sweat queen.
And then I just asked everybody to start calling me that.
My beautiful queen, your gorgeous eye.
Like, oh, man.
I feel like sweat queen is a solid like yoga shirt.
I sweat queen.
You're right.
You're right.
Yeah.
I can't be the queen.
Again, that's reserved for Beyonce, but I can be a sweat queen for sure.
Sweat queen.
So yeah, that's the letter he writes her.
He also tells her he wants to meet her in person.
Three days later, Cosby gets a phone call.
Griselda asked if she could talk to him.
And when he answered, she asked why he was interested in her.
Cosby responded that he wanted to, quote, rub elbows with a legend.
They wound up talking for an hour.
The pair struck up a friendship and then a romance.
Soon they were talking every day.
Griselda told Cosby her whole life story, or at least the parts of it she wanted to tell and wasn't afraid to reveal over a jailhouse phone line.
The version of her story we hear from him is a lot more sympathetic.
For example, the guy that she had shot in front of her son, she claims it was because he'd kidnapped her kid.
And the other is that she just thought he was cheating and murdered a third husband.
But anyway, Cosby, if you watch the documentary Cocaine Cowboys 2, which is on Netflix, you can see.
There's multiples.
Yeah, there's two cocaine.
And they're not...
It's weird because the information in the docs is good.
They have a lot of really good interviews with people who were like smugglers at the time.
But it's like they're hideous is the only way to describe it.
Like the editing and the art is just the worst.
Maybe I'll watch it.
Maybe I'll audio.
Yeah, you can.
I'll be like cooking in the other room and can hear it.
It's the perfect documentary to cook while it's on somewhere else and you're not looking at the screen.
That's what I do most of the time when I'm watching something.
Yeah.
It's like I'm going to answer my emails and just casually have this season on in the background.
Yeah, like the second one deals more with Griselda's life and it animates stuff like that time that her mom attacked her and she ran topless through the night, but it does it in like the grossest way possible where it's almost like, this is like fucking porn.
Like what were you thinking in putting this together?
Was it made by this guy?
He's their main source.
So the documentary is not very credible towards him.
Like it doesn't question him on anything.
And I think we'll talk about Cosby once you hear a little bit more about him.
But he's an interesting character.
And clearly he has his own angles and everything that he's saying.
So again, like we never know 100% anything about this woman.
We just have a bunch of different stories.
Did she even exist?
She definitely exists.
I mean, do we have her birth certificate?
We have her audio that we're going to play later.
Oh, okay.
Okay.
So yeah, after a few days of phone calls, Cosby visits Griselda in prison.
He immediately noticed that while every other prisoner wore a standard issue prison jumpsuit, Griselda had on a silk jacket.
Yes.
White silk pants.
Red pumps and a ton of makeup.
Before you even said it, I'm like, he's going to say silk.
And that was the first thing that came out of your mouth.
Yes.
Oh, I respect it.
Man.
Oh, yeah.
Okay.
They start making out immediately in the visitor's room.
Oh, just going down on each other.
And then they like fuck in this little private-ish area.
She apparently bribed the guards $1,500 every time he visited her.
Where is she getting this money still?
She's a billionaire.
I mean, I know, but you think that they would like take her assets or something.
Why?
Because she's...
They're illegal.
I mean, I assume she's got her money in foreign banks and stuff.
Like, if you're that level of drug impresario, you don't lose your money just because you go behind bars.
So she promised that she would make Cosby rich, and she cut him in on some of her business dealings.
She was continuing to manage her cocaine empire from behind bars.
Her network had shrunk since she got arrested, but she was still netting like 50 million a year in profits.
Dang.
45 days after he met her, Cosby claims he was a millionaire too.
He went from slinging ounces to selling hundreds of pounds of blow.
Cosby visited Griselda in prison every week.
So prison was not the same thing for Griselda that it was for anybody else in prison.
Her status as a billionaire and her just raw charisma meant that life didn't change all that much once she was inside.
She bribed guards to bring her money, cocaine, Colombian sausages, and perfume.
For a time, all was well.
Griselda fell madly in love with Charles Cosby, and the two carried out a surprisingly intimate relationship considering she was incarcerated the whole time.
Here's a couple of pictures of them at the jail.
That doesn't look like a jail.
Oh, is that them like outside?
Yeah, it's like out in the yard or something.
Yeah.
Dang.
Look at.
Oh my gosh.
She's dressed, right?
Yeah, look at her posing.
She's like a little princess.
Yeah.
So we'll have those pictures up on our website behindthebastards.com so you can see Charles Cosby and the cocaine godmother just sort of having a nice, nice little picnic at prison.
In 1992, her three older sons were released from prison.
Her enemies almost immediately set to murdering them.
Oh no.
Yeah, well, that's kind of what happens.
Yeah.
Oswaldo was killed in Medellin at a celebration for his release at the Hilton.
He was machine gunned to death.
Cosby, who informed Griselda, says she screamed for like minutes when she heard that her son was dead.
She wrote a note that was read at her son's Colombian funeral.
To the cowards who killed my son, the ground will shake beneath your feet.
This deed will be punished.
And a few days later, the killers were caught and tortured for like a week before being executed.
Griselda was still formidable, even though she was behind bars.
She was strong, but she was not stronger than Charles Cosby's desire to have sex more than once a week.
He started cheating on her with some lady.
Oh, no.
Did he not read her?
Did he not know?
He was obsessed with her.
You should know this.
Yeah, I feel like, I mean, he probably thought he could get away with it because she was in prison, but clearly she had people spying on him from prison because one day as he's heading home, he gets a warning from Griselda, which is two guys driving up and a firing machine guns into his car.
His car is shot 12 times and he takes a bullet in the arm.
I don't think that was a warning.
I think they were trying to murder him.
I think that's a warning for her.
I think they were trying to murder.
I feel like if there's only 12 holes in his car, that was like her putting, like, she had kid gloves on still.
Because she calls him as soon as he gets home.
So he's like staggers home in a shot-up car, bleeding from the arm, and gets a phone call.
And she tells him to meet her at the prison the next day, which he does because, yeah, what else do you do?
When he arrives, she just starts strangling him in the visiting room.
And all the guards are watching and just don't do anything.
Like, she just throttles him for like a couple of minutes until he manages to get away.
And he shouts at her and tells her that if she ever tries it again, he'll beat the shit out of her.
She just stares at him and says, Charles, you're no more a threat to me than a fly is on my shirt.
And again, this is Cosby's recollection of what happened.
It's kind of incredible he's alive at all, given Griselda's history and three murdered husbands.
She must really care about him.
I think she did because she told him she loved him a bunch.
And in his recollection of events, he claims that he was able to get her to see reason by basically saying, like, look, I love you.
I'm in love with you, but you're stuck in prison.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
And I'm a man like once a week isn't enough for me.
And she, like, agreed that that made sense and forgave him.
Okay.
Which is, you know, pretty progressive.
It's kind of like prison polyamory almost.
So Griselda seemed to be pretty happy with her love life, but things were not going nearly so well on the legal end of things.
The authorities had continued to pursue her since she'd made her plea deal.
She wasn't as blamed on creating the crime wave that turned Miami into a battleground.
The show Miami Vice is based on the drug war she ignited.
So yeah, the cops kept after her.
And in 1995, she was indicted for three murders.
Now, murder indictments weren't a new thing for Griselda, but these ones were scary because her former hitman, a guy named Rivi, had turned state's witness against her.
Cosby says Griselda had a mental breakdown when Rivi flipped.
Among other things, Rivi testified that Griselda had paid him $50,000 to assassinate a man while her three-year-old son, Michael Corleone, was in the room.
She said, Rivy has enough dirt on me to put me on death row 10 times.
She knew she was facing the death penalty, and that fact terrified her.
Cosby didn't understand her panic.
He was like, you're a billionaire.
If we've got to spend 20 or 30 million fighting this thing, let's just do that.
But she told him she had a way out of the situation.
Again, he kept suggesting we should hire a lawyer, but Griselda had a better idea than hiring a lawyer.
She was going to kidnap the president's son.
So she told him she needed a favor.
The president of the United States?
Well, a president of the United States.
She told him she needed a favor, reached into her brassier, and handed him a piece of paper that had JFK 5MNY written on it.
She told her to get him to give it to an associate of hers.
Cosby asked what the paper meant, and Griselda said, we're going to move against Kennedy.
Who?
You know, the president's son.
We're going to kidnap JFK in New York, and we're going to give $5 million to the kidnappers.
So she's decided to kidnap JFK Jr., the son of the murdered president, who at this point is kind of like a Playboy socialite living in New York City, by throwing him into a van and then ransom him for her freedom.
He'd be released once her plane touched down in Columbia.
Cosby flew to New York with four Colombians and $100,000, ironically landed in JFK airport.
They bought a van and nice clothing and started stalking JFK Jr.
That's hilarious.
She could have just used millions of dollars to bribe all the jury and just hire fucking, what's his name?
The crazy-haired guy who got lawyers.
Yeah.
Yeah.
What's his name off?
OJ off.
Yeah.
Like that guy was still alive back then.
He could have done it.
Wow.
But no, she decides to kidnap the president's son.
So apparently the three kidnappers got close enough to do the deed at one point, but a random police car happened to pass by and they lost their nerve.
What happens next is a little bit unclear.
He's also like one of the most watched people.
Yeah.
As opposed to like kidnapping somebody else.
You're kidnapping somebody that has like constant security.
Well, he apparently didn't have bodyguards at this point.
Okay, yeah.
How old was he?
He was like, I think he was like in his 30s.
Okay.
Early 40s.
He was, I mean, he didn't live that much longer after this because of the plane thing.
But yeah.
So Charles Cosby claims that he realized kidnapping the president's son was a bad idea, but that he was willing to do it for her.
And then the plan got spoiled because of a phone conversation that they had.
This conversation, actually, which is where you'll get to hear Griselda Blanco talking to Charles Cosby about the JFK kidnapping.
How are you?
Oh, man, I'm doing too good, man.
How's Michael doing?
Mike, good to see Colonel Bianch.
I got something to give you a mic or two.
So, so, so, is the JFK plan still together?
Uh-huh.
Oh, that's good.
I'm glad to hear that, you know.
But you be sure to be careful, though, you know.
Be careful for the one.
I mean, just always know what you're doing ahead of time, you know.
I love you, Joe.
How are you doing?
I didn't remember today, tomorrow, whatever.
Oh, that's a good idea.
I love you so much.
I love you, too.
Yeah, but I love you always, okay?
More skises, okay?
Okay, Griselda.
Okay, baby.
Okay.
Bye.
So that sounds to me like he's trying to set her up to admit something about just like the way his voice sounds on that.
So there's a couple different versions of the timeline.
Cosby claims that he flew back to California and had this phone call with her, and then the police were at his door because they realized something was going on with JFK.
He got subpoenaed and he was forced to testify.
The more likely thing is that Cosby flew straight to Miami and got in connection with the police who were investigating Griselda and set this all up so that he could turn her in to try to get free from a shitload of crimes that he committed.
Yeah.
And I think that's what happened.
So prosecutors at this point are pretty sure they've got Griselda dead to rights.
Both Cosby and her former hitman were willing to roll on her for a litany of horrific crimes.
But then during the deposition, Cosby got up to go to the restroom.
Well, he was walking back to the room.
He claims he was approached by one of the secretaries from the major crimes division of the Dade County Prosecutor's Office.
And I'm going to play a selection from the documentary where he explains how this interaction went down.
As I'm leaving the bathroom, I almost bumped head on into a secretary.
She was, you know, a nice looking lady.
She smiled and I smiled.
She reached out her hand and pressed a piece of paper in my hand.
So open my hand, I unfolded the paper.
It basically said, Charles, I think you're cute, and I would like to meet up with you later at your hotel.
So I smiled, you know, I winked my eye.
You know the number.
You know where I'm staying at.
She walked off, her little slim ass switching down the hallway in her skirt.
So I laughed at myself and I went back to the prosecution's office.
So he claims she visited him at his hotel later that night and they had sex.
Okay.
She swore him to secrecy.
But six months later, it turned out that the secretary had also started a phone sex relationship with Rivi, the cartel hitman, who was the other major witness against Griselda.
Here's how a book, and this is, again, this is very weird and complicated.
Basically, both of the state's major witnesses have now engaged in a sexual relationship with the same person.
Buying 150 Pounds of Meat00:08:34
Yeah.
Okay.
Well, and Rivi is engaged in it with two secretaries.
Okay.
Phone sex.
Here's how the book Queen Pens describes what Rivi did with the two major crime secretaries.
Fancying himself an artist, he sent the secretaries pencil sketches of flowers and cute hand-drawn Garfield the cat sketches.
As opposed to actual flowers?
Okay.
Well, I mean, he's in prison.
Oh, yeah, he could still get him ordered.
Yeah, he could continue.
Yeah.
And Garfield the Cat sketches.
That's the most romantic kind of thing.
I mean, is it?
Yeah.
What's more romantic than Garfield?
He's like a depressed, you know, snarky, like, yeah.
Yeah.
Okay.
But yeah.
You're criticizing this guy's game.
But clearly it worked.
He would also give the secretaries money to buy gifts for themselves.
In return, they made arrangements for his wife to visit him in jail where she got pregnant.
The secretaries were apparently in love with Rivy.
One of them described the cold-blooded killer as a sweetheart.
That's another quote from Queenpens.
Another secretary set up a Thanksgiving dinner to be delivered to his jail cell.
Eventually, they started having phone conversations that were straight up pornographic.
And two secretaries were eventually suspended for having phone sex with Rivi.
Then the prosecutors found out that Cosby had also had sex with one of these secretaries.
And so that basically meant that neither of these guys could deliver their testimonies for the state.
They'd been compromised and they were no longer credible.
So suddenly a slam dunk case against Griselda goes away completely because both of the major witnesses had sex with prosecutor secretaries.
Neither could those secretaries.
Yeah, yeah.
It's funny in the documentary about this, the police are still furious all these years later that like this happened and it just like blew this case out of the water.
There is a widespread belief that Rivi and Cosby did this deliberately to discredit the case and also avoid having to snitch on Griselda.
So this was like a plan that they carried out to both have her release.
No, it wasn't.
You think they're just fucking.
Yeah.
No, it wasn't.
They were thinking with not with their head head.
No.
And Cosby doesn't strike me as a guy who's smart enough to plan something that well.
My beautiful queen.
Yeah.
So Griselda Blanco was released from prison in 2004.
She was flown to Colombia and pretty much everyone expected she'd be murdered in a matter of days.
Two of her sons had already been killed after being sent back there, so this was a safe bet.
But Griselda lived another eight years in a fancy neighborhood in Medellín, walking out in the open without bodyguards.
And then on September 4th, 2012, Griselda Blanco, the black widow, the cocaine godmother, walked to a butcher shop near her home and purchased 150 pounds of meat.
As she was walking away, a man on a motorcycle drove up to the now 69-year-old and shot her twice at very close range.
She bled to death on the street next to an impossible quantity of meat and apparently a Bible.
Wow.
Yeah.
It's so symbolic, too.
God.
What?
150 pounds of meat.
Yeah.
What is that?
One pound for each person she's murdered.
That was her weekly every week.
The Bible was there.
This was like if it was written as like a screenplay or something, you know?
The like imagery and stuff they want you to pick up on.
Okay.
One again with the motorcyclist murders.
Yeah, she's killed the way she with her own innovation.
You know, and she's there with meat, which is something that she has, you know, cost the lives of others.
That they were nothing but just, you know, dead, lifeless meat to her.
So that you're, you're interpreting it the deep way.
To me, I'm just imagining the 69-year-old lady with a sack of meat the size of a man just struggling down the street in the middle of the day in Medellin.
But yeah.
Maybe she knew she was going to go out that way.
She's like, I might as well die with a despair.
Yeah.
My cross is a man worth of meat.
So, yeah, it's probably worth including a little bit of a.
You know, that doesn't really even make sense because she should have servants with the amount of money she has.
You know, she was with like, I think one of her nieces or something like that.
But it's still...
Was her niece watching her carry the 150 pounds by herself?
There's no details on that, but I hope that.
I hope that was like.
It wasn't even broken up.
It was like she was carrying the full load.
I just can't imagine her having all that money.
And like, even my family in like Brazil, they have like servants.
I imagine that she would have a full class of you know, but it's kind of a thing, and I think this happens sometimes to people who like grow up super poor and then get rich, where like you kind of want to do some things yourself.
And maybe.
She had a bronze thing of her own face.
I don't know.
But that's just, that's just bragging.
Yeah, I don't know if I agree with that.
Well, and I don't know.
It may have been.
Like, the stories just say she bought 150 pounds of meat.
So maybe it was going to be sent to her house or something.
Oh, maybe she didn't even have it with her?
Yeah, I'm just choosing to believe.
Why would they include that in the story?
I don't know, but I had to once I read it was 150 pounds.
No, no, I'm saying why would they include that in there if she wasn't if she didn't die with it?
It was like she made some layaway order to be delivered at a different date.
Well, I don't know that that's what she did.
I just know that her last act in life was buying 150 pounds of meat.
And carrying it with her.
And I choose to believe she was carrying it over her shoulder with a giant sack.
Yeah.
And her Bible in another hand?
Yeah.
The niece or whoever who was with her says that she had a Bible in her hand that she clutched to her chest as she bled to death.
But again, that may have just be something one of her family members threw in for some extra color.
And she had her full rosary with her, and she was on the 10th one when she passed.
Got it.
Yeah.
It's probably worth including a little postscript about her kids.
As I said, two of them died in the cocaine wars.
Michael Corleone, the youngest, stayed in the United States after his mother was released from prison.
He never returned to Columbia because two of his brothers had died doing exactly that thing.
So from age 12 on, he was raised by a series of legal guardians that he picked himself.
He would just find people that his mom had worked with and say, I'm going to live in your house and I'm going to pay you rent and you're going to be my guardian.
Cosby claims that he took care of Michael Corleone while Griselda was in prison.
Michael, for his part, says Cosby is a liar and the whole JFK scheme was also a lie that he made up so that he didn't sell Griselda out to the police and avoid murder charges for shit he'd done.
The police aren't saying either way, so we'll never know.
But Cosby's a free man today, as far as I know.
An FBI report released after Kennedy's death does show that agents couldn't prove that there'd ever been a threat against him, but that doesn't mean one way or the other that it wasn't real.
Michael and his mother kept in touch after her release, although he never saw her again because, yeah, you know, Columbia was a death trap for him.
On May 12th, 2012, a couple of months before his mom was killed, he was charged with trying to buy five kilos of cocaine from an undercover cop with $10,000 cash, a motorcycle, and a diamond-studded necklace with the phrase, kill all rats, written into it.
He seems to have gotten out of any serious trouble, though, because he's a free man today and active on Facebook.
He's out of the cocaine game, but today he sells a different drug.
Can you guess what kind of business he's in now?
Love.
No, I'm just kidding.
No, he sells vape products.
Wow.
Yeah.
Under the Pure Blanco label.
And his vaporizer products are like packaged in like a little box that looks like a kilo bag of cocaine kind of.
I thought you were going to say that he's like, and now you can catch him on Tinder, which people have.
I'm sure you can.
Yeah, so I'd like to close this episode by reading his latest post from April 30th.
To everyone that has been asking, yes, this is our official product, and we have invaded the market.
We have all certifications and thorough testing of our product.
Like Griselda used to test that Pure Blanco.
Nothing but the finest on this side.
You want to buy some?
DM us.
You want to distribute for us?
DM us.
Salute our business partners at Wake and Vape.
We about to blow this up.
Pure Blanco is also a lifestyle clothing brand.
You can visit their website, pureblanco.com, right now and order Griselda Blanco themed hoodies and t-shirts.
I mean, I hope they're paying you for this ad because maybe they'll hit you up and send you some stuff.
I will take anything Pure Blanco wants to send my way.
Business Smarts and Ruthlessness00:03:40
I feel like, like, it's one of those things.
I kind of want to make fun of Michael Corleone, but he's had, like, his dad and a bunch of people murdered in front of him.
Like, and his name is Michael Corleone.
This seems like the best case scenario for him.
Yeah.
That he sells vaping products and hoodies.
So that's like, that's like naming like being a sailor or something, naming your son Jack Sparrow or just going through the rest of his life as Jack Sparrow.
It's so weird to me that someone like her would be like everything, like her whole life, like every year, something happened to her that was crazier than anything that went down in The Godfather.
Yeah.
And like she still was drawn enough to that movie to name her kid after that.
That's weird.
That's funny.
Yeah.
And I guess aspirational.
Grisselda Blanco.
I still need the bra with the cocaine in it.
That's, oh, God.
I'd be wild at parties.
So do you think the two different versions of her that are in my head right now are either she's like a stone-cold sociopathic badass, which is what I thought when I first started reading about the shit she did.
But like the more I got into her story and like hearing her actual voice, I feel like she was just a person who got into a really ugly line of business and like was smart, but always just sort of acting out of fear to not get killed herself.
I don't know if she was like without emotions.
She kind of reminds me of like a Walter White-esque person where it was like she kind of fell into this and then has definitely murdered people.
Yeah.
But also kind of like probably still has feelings for, you know, the family members and loved ones and things like that where she's not just completely cold-blooded.
Yeah.
It's not like a dial tone inside, but she's just able to like switch into murder mode when shit gets real.
Yeah, when she feels threatened.
Maybe it was something that she felt like she had to do.
Yeah, because that call between her and Cosby, like there, she sounds almost like genuine, like desperate in her, in her need.
I don't know how I would be as a woman back in that day because I can't imagine someone telling me no.
And I'm sure that she heard that constantly.
So, you know, maybe she felt like she had to be this badass in order to be successful.
And she was.
She was like one of the most successful women, even though she murdered a bunch of people.
Yeah.
And for someone who was born dirt poor and had to like had to work as a prostitute on the streets in order to make ends meet to go in like the space of five or six years from that to a billionaire.
A billionaire.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Like she like clearly, if she had grown up at another time and had access to like more opportunities, she could have been running Microsoft or whatever right now.
Like she's got that combination of business smarts and ruthlessness that you need to succeed in capitalism.
There was just no legal avenue for it.
Yeah.
I always think it's fascinating too to look at because there's so many murder shows, I feel like, like true crime that look into true crime.
But as far as the psychology of like, would we do that if we had a billion dollars?
Like just get people we didn't like murdered.
You know, I, this sounds really dark, but I do think it's like whenever they do those college studies and they like give these college students like literally 10 hours of power and they all want to kill each other.
So it's like just looking at human nature instead of looking at it as like she's a horrible ruthless person, which she was ruthless, but like also looking at what is that, what would the average human being do if they had a billion dollars.
And we're also smoking pounds of uncut cocaine.
Yes, exactly.
So you're like highly stressed out, rage.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So Grisselda Blanco.
Wow.
Claiming the Baddest Bitch Title00:04:54
I want to go back before we close out to the quote that I opened this with where she called herself the baddest bitch to ever take a breath of life.
How do you feel about that on the other end of this?
Look, I told you who that is.
You're still saying Beyonce.
Beyonce probably could get people murdered if she wanted to, but she hasn't.
I don't think that I'm aware of.
She has that type of money.
So, yeah, I don't know.
I think that if she was the baddest bitch, maybe she wouldn't have been caught.
Yeah.
So.
But I mean, they all get...
I'll say this.
I feel like if she had, if she was a young woman today, she could put on a kick-ass Coachella.
Yeah.
Yeah.
That's true.
Yeah.
But I think she's, yeah, a bad bitch, but her wanting to kill little kids kind of also, yeah, turned it off.
Yeah.
Yeah.
That is a, that is, does decline some.
See, what you do is you kill the parents and then you take the kid under your wing.
Like if she's watched any, you know, 90s movie ever.
Yeah, but then those kids kill you.
Like, that's always how you do it.
I know.
We got like Kylo Wren and stuff out here.
So yeah, I know, I hear you.
You're damned if you do, damned if you don't.
So you might as well have the kids machine gunned.
Okay.
But I may have been doing this podcast too long.
All right.
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