How did Griselda Blanco get her start in the drug trade?
Blanco was born Feb. 15, 1943, in Cartagena, Colombia, but grew up primarily in Medellín, where notorious drug lord Pablo Escobar was born in 1949, ran his bloody business and died in a shootout with police in 1993.
Turning to crime as a kid to earn money, Blanco started as a pickpocket and then sold marijuana.
In 1964, she moved to Queens, New York, where there was a sizable Colombian community—finding marijuana not a very practical commodity to move in large quantities—found a booming market in cocaine.
At first she had a factory in Medellín produce corsets and other undergarments with hidden compartments for female smugglers to stash drugs on commercial flights to Miami, and eventually pilots themselves were on her payroll.
Her reputation for shrewdness and violence grew as, authorities said, she was raking in millions of dollars a year in the cocaine trade.
“She would kill you if she owed you money and didn’t want to pay you,” former West Miami Police chief and homicide detective Nelson Andreu told Today.com in January. “And if you owed money and couldn’t pay her, she would kill you as well. It was a win-win for her and a lose-lose for everyone else.”
As Vergara put it in a behind-the-scenes clip, “She was not as famous as someone like Pablo Escobar, but even he was scared of her at the time. She stood on her own.”
