The Cocaine Queen of Miami

Griselda Blanco once called herself, “the baddest bitch to ever take a breath of life," and this episode confirms that to be very accurate. In Episode 6, Robert is joined by Dani Fernandez (Nerdificent) and they discuss the life of the cocaine godmother, her mass murders, and invented Motorcycle Assassins And Cocaine Lingerie. 

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
M 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, uh, and then I
discuss it with my guest. And this week that guest
is Danny Fernandez of Nerdificent on the House Stuff Works Network.
She's also a comedian and general funny person. Hey Danny, Yes,

(00:23):
thanks for having me on. Thanks for coming on. So
hear about awful people. Well, this week our awful person
is Griselda Blanco. Does that name ring an els to
you barely with like cocaine? Right? Oh? Yeah, okay? She
is the Godmother of Cocaine is one of her nicknames.
She called herself the baddest bitch to ever take a

(00:44):
breath of life. Oh yeah, well, I mean I think
that's reserved for Beyonce, but sure. Well that's what we'll see.
By the end of this podcast. We're gonna know if
if she's the baddest bitch or the saddest bitch, because
one of those two is the is probably the truth. Um.
I will say that, having spent the last week learning
about her life, it doesn't sound like bragging to me
because she is uh she's a tough cookie. Okay, okay,

(01:07):
we're just going to get into it then. Um. Griselda
was born in February nine in Cartagena, Columbia. Oh wait,
the day after Valentine's that's right. Uh. So, you know,
the forties Columbia was was not a densely populated place.
When she was three, her mother moved her to Metain,
which was kind of like a quiet, smaller town back then.

(01:29):
They lived in a tin house and sort of a
rural slum type part of the area with no electricity
or running water. There are basically no laws at all
at that point, and oh my god, what like not
even biblical laws. I mean it would like those would
be like, don't kill your neighbor. It's about to get
pretty biblical. Yeah. Yeah, so her dad didn't didn't stick around.

(01:52):
Not much information about him, but I'm sorry. There's no laws.
It's a lawless town. It's like the wild, wild wet. Yeah,
I mean, it's Columbia in the forties, I know. But
they still had police then everywhere. 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

(02:13):
not a familiar situation from anyone in the modern world. Um. Yeah,
So Griselda's mother was a hardcore alcoholic uh 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 Gitan.
He was a beloved liberal presidential candidate from Bogata, Ah.

(02:35):
He was murdered. Uh. This sparked a ten year civil
war known as law Viollencia, or the violence. At least
two hundred thousand 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. Lo
Va Allencia was especially pronounced in areas like Medine, So
from age five on, Griselda saw dead bodies on a

(02:55):
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 Medine,
which 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

(03:18):
the bodies and he cons the others into thinking like
this is gonna 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 the dead body. What does it stand
by me with the Yeah, yeah, it's like that every day,
Like it's it's an eternal stand by me. Um. So yeah,

(03:38):
when Griselda was eleven, she and some other young people
kidnapped a ten year old child from a wealthy part
of town. Um, she's eleven, she's a heart eleven. Um.
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 eleven. Uh,
she's committed her first murder. And she did not exactly

(03:59):
pump the breaks on life after that. So one night, um,
when Griselda was fourteen and Lafae Allencia 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, and I
ripped the shirt off her back as she ran. And
so Griselda ran topless through the pouring rain and mud

(04:20):
all the way to the city of Metaine. From that
point until her early twenties, she worked as a prostitute. Wait, okay,
so she was eleven, ran down topless, fourteen. At this point,
she's eleven when she shoots the kid fourteen. She went like,
who is taking note of this? Like? Who who added
this in her autobiography? Oh? She told this? Uh story? Yeah,

(04:41):
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

(05:05):
from Oakland, and she told this story to him. Okay,
of her running topless, 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 Cartagenian forty three there weren't a lot of birth

(05:25):
certificates being Yeah, although this is the fifties now, because
she's in her she's fourteen, Yeah, the fifties, she's fourteen. Um.
And and then she became a prostitute. Yeah, she's she's
a prostitute, and she does that for six or seven years. Um.
So she she's drawn a hard card out of the
deck alive so far. Um. At some point during that period,
when she's in her early twenties, she marries a guy

(05:45):
named Carlos Trujillo, and she has three sons with him.
They're all boys, Dixon, Hubert, and Oswaldo. Uh. And then
Carlos died. Um. 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 curosis, and some sources say she divorced him and
then had him shot in the face for something. It's

(06:07):
hard to say. What 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, I
love that was his his cause of death new yorking
to New York. Yeah, because you're like, Okay, one is
that he got cirosis. One is that he moved to
New York he got He got cirosis in New York
is one version. So he dies in New York is
one version. She has him shot in Colombia as another.

(06:29):
I have no idea what happened, because again there's just
a bunch of versions of her story floating around. Um,
but he definitely 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,
continue um Okay, So yeah, like I said, we we
know that she marries this guy, she has three kids
with him, and then he dies, probably because she killed him,

(06:53):
given what happens later. But I'm getting ahead of myself. So, um,
whatever happened, grissell To 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 bit
of drug empire together. They moved to Queens because New

(07:14):
York at the time was the world capital of buying
cocaine for way too much money. Um, this is in
like the late sixties. Uh. 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 nineteen seventy one, Blanco and Alberto became the first
Columbians to sell medicine cartel cocaine in the United States.

(07:37):
Um so trailblazers. Uh. Within a few months of moving
to Queens, Griselda and Alberto were multimillionaires. At the height
of their success, they made around ten million a week. Uh.
And this is you know, ten million and sixties dollars,
so they're fucking banking it. Um. Griselda grew Americanized and
develop a love for mafia and gangster movies, particularly The Godfathers. Yeah, yeah, right,

(07:58):
like you would. So as her coke business takes off,
she starts calling herself Lama Drina or the godmother um.
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

(08:18):
lingerie just for smuggling cocaine. Of lingerie. Yeah, God, I
kind of want to be friends with her. Yeah, So
she's operating a lingerie factory so people can smuggle coke
in their undies. That's so cool. Yeah. In nineteen seventy one,
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 fifty eight compartments. Well

(08:38):
that's heavy, yeah, that is That is a lot to
wear on your bed, you know what. That's 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, And in seventy two
and other of her mules gets caught four and a

(09:00):
half pounds of cocaine and a round your pants, um,
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 but like
implant thingies, so maybe it gave it some padding. Yeah,
it just looks like you have like a really nice
but but it's actually like a half a million dollars
in cocaine. Oh god, yeah, you know what. I bet

(09:21):
that's how much Kim's but is insured for, like probably
more than a million dollars one buttload of cocaine. Yeah,
well probably yeah, yeah, because Heidi Klum's legs are insured
for like five million or something. So hope you knew that. Yeah, huh.
I wonder what the depreciation on legs is. I don't know,
but yours to ship at some point. Yeah, yeah, but

(09:43):
I guess she and other people like have their hair
insured and stuff like when it's a part of your image. Yeah,
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 ensure 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.

(10:04):
Like when you're on Instagram, you 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 how. I mean, there's a lot
of people that are super into beards right now, as
they should. 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 it. No, but I mean you
could use it in your favor. Yeah, I mean, that's

(10:26):
that's something to keep in the back pocket. Four and
a half pounds of cocaine. Yeah, um so yeah. By
the early seventies, Blanco and Bravo were moving one and
a half tons of cocaine into America. Every month. Things
are going great on the business into things, but as
is so often the case, Griselda and Alberto's relationships suffered
as they saw more financial success. You know, the oldest
story in the book. Ye um. The problem started when

(10:47):
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 Alberta, Griselda had
also started smoking enormous amounts of bazooka, which is raw,
unrefined cocaine. I thought she was just smoking ship like
smoking cocaine by the pound, and very paranoid. So he

(11:09):
may not have been cheating on her, and she may
just have been smoking more cocaine than a person was
really paranoid. Yeah, it's hard to say. Probably both her true. Yeah,
because I'm gonna guess being a millionaire coke dealer in
the sixties, you you probably aren't super in the marriage vows.
Yeah yeah, um yeah. So she was so coked out
in paranoid that she started keeping a fueled private jet

(11:31):
on a twenty four hour stand by. This actually worked
out really well for her because it turned out that
a joint NYPD d E A investigation called Operation Banshee
had caught onto her operation. She managed to make it
down to Miami and escaped 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,

(11:52):
and she'd also began to suspect that he was plotting
against her with a little guy named Pablo Escobar. So
she arrived in Metaine with the FBI like right on
her tail, uh and a team of armed gutens in
her private aircraft. She arranges to meet with her estranged
husband out in front of a nightclub to like talk
things out with her. Um. So there's a couple of
versions of this story as well. One of them is
that she just straight up ambushes him and shoots him

(12:13):
in the face. One of them is that they try
to talk and there's like a cold standoff and she
tells him that, you know, she needs to tell him
some things and he has to listen, and then he
says that all this godmother craps gone to her head. Uh.
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

(12:34):
manages to get a shot off with his uzi that
hits her in the belli um. There's a few variations
of what happened at this point. To One of the
stories says she grabs the uzy from his dying hands
and guns down all six of his bodyguards. Well, 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

(12:54):
a hospital where she recovers. Either way, she is now
in soul 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,
other than the getting shot herself part. Oh my gosh, Wow,

(13:15):
I'm more confused that he died instantly but also shot her. Well,
you know, you've got him. He's got the oozy in
his hand, and she shoots him in the face, and
maybe he just twitches 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. Um.
Hard to say, but either way, grisso, No, Pablo was

(13:38):
not there. Um, there's a lot of smart Yeah, there's
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, there's a rumor
that he and Alberto were working to push her out

(14:01):
of her chunk of the coke business and then manage
it together. 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. 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 very

(14:23):
it was gunned down in an alley way, Yeah, a
lot of that. Um. 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 Colombia. Oh
yeah this is this is in like Metain. So like
they police aren't gonna get in the middle of two
coke dealers shooting it out. Um. Yeah, so she earns

(14:48):
a new nickname, the black Widow. Um. 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 widows. That's too live sick. I think she deserves
you feel like two is enough of a pattern. I
feel depending on Yeah, yeah, yeah, I think too. You're
off to a good start. Yeah. I mean she definitely

(15:11):
earns it later on spoiler alert, But I feel like, yeah,
I want to wait until someone's killed three husbands before
I get I don't know, like if she killed her
first husband, what would her name 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

(15:33):
title her that and think it's like super quirky and
like a news headline. Yeah, that's whatever. So that's that. Yeah,
And I feel like if you eat a person, get
nickname right, Okay, 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,

(15:55):
I was gonna say people get hungry on coke, but
they don't. Um, that's kind of the benefit a coke,
great weight loss drugs. Okay, So she's the Black Widow,
got it. So she's the Black Widow and the Godmother.
Now she can't have both names. I see what she
had something like twenty different nicknames okay, yeah, Grizzy Like yeah,

(16:17):
that one didn't really take off, okay. Um. Yeah, So
she takes control of the empire. Um, mama ge that's
a good one. Yeah. Um. 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 broke it a major meeting of all
the big coke traffickers, including Pablo Escobar, to get everybody

(16:39):
to unify their important networks so they can more efficiently
sell cocaine to Americans. Um, which is cool. Uh. In
nineteen Griselda marries a new guy, a bank robber named Dario.
The couple has a son, who Griselda named Michael Corleone. Um,
and then they move back into the United States. Wow,
that's very on the no. Yeah, really on the nose, uh,

(17:00):
because you're kind of setting up your kid's life with
that name, and he has quite a life which will
be diving into a little bit here too. UM's gonna
name my kid Hannibal lector Hannibal Lecter. Yeah. I'm just
really into eating people apparently with this. I mean I
feel like once they start cloning meat, once they really
get that down, everyone's gonna be eating human meat like

(17:22):
I would. I would eat 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 was never on a person. Yeah, there's gonna be
cannibal hipsters. It'll be just what a world. Yeah, we'll
probably wind up getting human flavored vape canisters. Yeah, I

(17:43):
could see that anyway. Um. So, yeah, they moved back
to the United States. Uh, 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 thirty years
old in this picture. She doesn't look that bad. She
doesn't look that bad the but she's she's clearly taking

(18:06):
some It's not great to smoke cocaine for it not.
By the way, if you want to check out this
picture of young Grizelda, you can find it on our
website behind the Bastards dot 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 and doing

(18:27):
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. Um. I think they get used to it
because she kills a lot of dad's Um. Yeah. So
she settles into Miami sets to work expanding her cocaine

(18:48):
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 sixties
and early seventies. Um, what words come to mine when
you hear the name Miami right now? Oh? Pit boll Okay, Um,
let's see beaches, Um, good food, good architecture. Um, you

(19:13):
have a really positive attitude towards Miami. You know, I
love I love my fellow Latin X people that live there.
So yeah, Vice is the first name in my because
I watched a lot of Miami. Vice. Sunracked, swamp of
madness might be another. I haven't had good Florida experience, Okay, yeah, um,
but rural Florida is more where I've been and it's yeah,

(19:35):
it's just Oklahoma too, it is yeah. Um 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 sixties and early seventies, 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. Um, so there was also

(19:56):
very few young people in Miami. It was basically a
collection of Art deco buildings and sure less elderly men
with zinc cream on their lips. There's a wonderful photo
article in the Washington Post about this time called nineteen
seventy Miami Beach Culture. All Quirk and Novace will include
a link up on the site, but I've I've created
a couple of photos from it just to give you
an idea to to sort of set the mood. So
you get a couple of couple of old people there. Yeah,

(20:19):
and then there's the picture of the guy with a
zinc cream on his lips, which is like a thing
old men used to do because like they didn't have sunscreen,
but it just makes them all look creepy as hell.
So it was into this like nice quiet Miami. Uh
that Griselda Blanco drops like a hand grenade. We're gonna

(20:40):
get into what happened when Griselda established a 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, So we're back,

(21:01):
we're talking about Grisella Blanco who has just moved to
Miami and seventy eight to establish a cocaine empire. Well,
at this point in the story, Miami is a quiet
little town on the coast filled with old people that
Griselda 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

(21:22):
the US. The pot smoke during the Summer of Love
entered the United States through Miami. UM, but the pot
business hasn't had a huge impact on the city itself.
UH and the cartels are rapidly moving away from marijuana
because pots 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. UH. And cocaine at this

(21:43):
point in time was worth about thirty five thousand dollars
a pound in like nineteen seventies 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. UM. In the late seventies, coke
was still a rare and exotic drug that only the
really rich people could do. A single gram would be
sixty to one hundred bucks. Or report from the National

(22:03):
Institute on Drug Abuse in nineteen seventy seven estimated that
less than one percent of adults in the country had
even tried it. Like twenty years later, it would be
more like fift of adults had tried it. So cocaine
explodes in this period of time, from like the late
seventies up through the eighties, and Grisello Blanco is most
of the reason why, because she starts moving cocaine in

(22:24):
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 pen and soon Miami was
awashing to see a 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 sold 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

(22:45):
the beach banks who were willing to look at scance
a little blow got rich beyond their wildest dreams and
also bought giant skyscrapers to house there. 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 north West.
So there's all these little towns in Oregon that we're
like just to stop on the road five years ago
that are now filled with money and rich people and buildings.

(23:08):
Because like the fucking pot industry. Then, yeah, 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 know, because California, you can get what eight hundred
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 so they
still have to hide it kind of out there. Most
of the growers you're going to meet some some of

(23:30):
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 we'll 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. Yeah.
The only thing that would terrify me about this is

(23:51):
I've seen good fellas, so I'm like scary. I would
be scared to get into this world. Oh it is
a scary world, like you're gonna die. Yeah. And and
the pot industry right now has some some ugliness to it,
But the cocaine era, in my it was unbelievably you
know what, at least pot chills you out. Yeah, so

(24:11):
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. 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

(24:32):
uh 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 machette 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 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

(24:53):
rather than cutting him up. So she got another nickname
out of that, La Kampaseva, the compassionate one. So now
she's up to three nicknames, all pretty good. Um. So,
at one point Griselda stole two million dollars from a
business associate and had that associate tortured and killed and
wrapped in plastic and toss into a canal. She was
probably responsible for more than two murders in Dade County,

(25:15):
Florida alone. UM. In nineteen seventy nine, two of Griselda's
men drove a white Happy Time party supply van up
to the dad Land Mall, got out and started firing
machine guns into a liquor store. They killed two men
who arrivals of Griselda's, and they wounded a clerk. The
shootout became known as the dad Land Mall massacre because
the bar for being dubbed a massacre was set a
lot lower back in the seventies, like two people, doesn't

(25:37):
even get on the news. And 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 uh 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

(25:58):
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
so like cops at this point, they're all just carrying
a 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 realized that like the gangsters
in Miami are tooling around and armored cars with with
machine guns. And so this is like the moment that

(26:20):
catalyzes that the coke wars have gotten really fucking serious. Um.
And it's also a moment that catalyzed another great cocaine
innovation for Grissel de Blanco. She was frustrated by the
loss of her fourteen thousand dollar, which was a lot
of money back then. War wagon. Wait, why did they
leave it? It's not known, but they do. I think
it's probably because the traffic was bad, so they realized
they be able to get away faster on foot. And

(26:42):
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 hitman drive motorcycles and in vince the motorcycle drive
by assassination, which would come to be one of the
truly great innovations that cocaine wars, because you could just
zoom up, shoot someone to death, and then roll out

(27:03):
or wherever. Pablo Escobar used a shipload of motorcycle assassins
like in his Rise to Power. So this was like
a major uh innovation in killing people in the coke industry.
And it gives a bad name to motorcyclists. Man, I've
met some of the nicest leather daddy's out there. If

(27:23):
you get into the cocaine business, I mean, assuming they're
in the cocaine business. I assume every motorcyclist, No, 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 tadded motorcycle guy like helps
elderly woman across the street. So that's my how I

(27:44):
view them. I mean, theoretically, if writing a motorcycle allows
you to more efficiently assassinate people and escape traffic, it
also allows you to more efficiently volunteer your time at
soup kitchen. Yeah see, yeah, it would checks out. And
they're saving the environment by they Yeah, they are. That's
why they get to use like the carpool lane less emissions.

(28:05):
So you could say she developed a green way to
assassinate people. Yeah yeah, and that yeah yeah, yeah, she's
an environmental also, she is, you know, taking more people
off the planet. And these are usually very rich people,
probably consuming a lot too. Yeah. They're also bad, well
some of them, some of them. I think some of
them heard competitors that are also murdering people. Yeah yeah,

(28:28):
I mean that's the nice thing about the cocaine Wars
is that you don't have to feel super bad. It's
kind of interesting. They're killing each other. Yeah. So Miami
became the most violent city in the United States pretty
rapidly after Grizelda moved there. In nineteen seventy nine. It
had three hundred forty nine murders in nineteen eighty there
were five hundred and seventy three murders in nineteen eighty
one that were six hundred murders. So many people were

(28:50):
dying that the coroner's office ran out of space to
put the corpses. The medical investigator had the least refrigerated
truck from a burger King for eight hundred dollars a month,
so they have enough space for all the bodies. That's
super dark. Yeah, that's super dark's dying, but having a
stay in a burger king. Yeah, not even McDonald's because
back then McDonald's was huge. Like staying in the second

(29:12):
rate refrigerator. God, yeah, that's that's a bummer. And it's
also just like if you get up in the morning
and reason and out, 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, Like I mean I think
about like getting up in the morning, like that's one

(29:34):
of the signs to move out of a place. As
you get up and you read that, like we don't
have room for all the dead people, Like, all right,
I'm leaving. Uh 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. Uh So, while all this is happening,

(29:55):
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 and partly because tons of people
want her dead because she's that would be hard. Yeah yeah,
um So she's both paranoid and actually being hunted by people.
She mostly sticks to her homes, which now included in

(30:16):
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 that 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

(30:39):
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. You're right, because it's one
of those things. She could have gone back to Columbia
and been safer from the ops. But then, like there's

(31:01):
got to be a shipload of people who win are
dead in Columbia. She so, she it's not worth it.
I mean, being 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,

(31:23):
that's the downside of like drug money that you have
to kill people for, is that you never like, you're
never safe um So, grisse Old was on top at
this point, but she's basically hiding in her massive houses
doing shiploads of cocaine. She turned to increasingly uh wild
parties in order to kind of take her mind off
the threat of impending death or legal Actually, she's in

(31:46):
her forties. She's like, she's like. 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. Um again, it's hard
to tell. This is what the cops say that she
was doing. Um 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

(32:07):
this stuff, okay, but she talked about running topless when
she was fourteen. 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 million, I already do that now, But if I had,
But I'm not kidding. If he and I talk about
sexual stuff on our podcast all the time, but we're
also were exactly so I hear both millennials so, um,

(32:32):
I hear frequent bisexual orgies now and there's nothing bad
about it. But in THEE they clearly meant it as
a slur when the cops Yeah yeah, um, now everyone's
gonna think I have orgies. I haven't. It's on my
to do list, and I want to make it clear
that behind the bastards of the show has nothing wrong
with frequent bisexual orgies. I get what you're saying. Like,
at the time, the cops were trying to slander her.

(32:54):
Maybe she did this, maybe, and so they use that
as opposed to like murdering a hundred people, So instead
they use like, oh, but also, she's bisexual, has sex parties.
This is America. Were always more scared of sex than violent. Yeah,
well we're great at violence, we're not good at you know,
being healthy sexually. Yeah, it's like she's murdered people. But

(33:16):
also she's not a lady. Yeah yeah, but also she's
not Christian. Okay, so she's a billionaire. Now she's indulging
in rich people passions, buying, like buying lots of dumb
expensive stuff. Griselda Blanco purchased a gold plated Mactin machine
pistol with in late Emeralds. She owned a set of
Eva Paron's pearls and a t set that had once

(33:37):
been property of the Queen of England. Um. 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. Um. Her third husband,
Dario Sepulvida, started spending one and more time in Colombia
in the early eighties. Griselda eventually learned that he was
cheating on her, and she did the thing. Yeah, exactly exactly.

(33:58):
Your wife's name is the Bacu widow. Don't funk 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 you've kind of anticipated what's about to happen. Uh.
She hires a bunch of assassins to dress his police officers,

(34:21):
pull over Dario's car and machine gun him to death.
In Metaine. Her son, five year old Michael Corleone, was
in the backseat of the car at the time. Um.
Having people killed next to their kids was kind of
a pattern for Griselda. In two, she tried to kill
a rival coke dealer, Jesus Castro, for making fun of
her son's but I think her assassins had missed Castro
but hit and killed his two year old son, who

(34:42):
was also in the car. In eighty three, she had
a married couple murdered while their children were in the
adjacent room. Um, and she actually wanted the kids killed,
I think, but her assassins were like, we're not going
to go that far. Um. Yeah, So she's she's fully
off the fucking chain at this point. By night eighty four,
she'd made a lot of enemies and had a bounty
more than four million dollars on her head from everyone,

(35:06):
like multiple different people. So all of the Godfather's got
together and put a bounty on several of them. Did
she had allies to No, no, no, no, okay, no
that she she like she has piste 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. Um. She

(35:28):
claimed that she loved being at war, but repeated at
hymns in her life finally convinced her to flee Miami
for Irvine, California, the real place to die. Yeah, that's
that's the motto of her right. It's a good place
to die, a good place to be forgotten. Oh wow,
So it was an Irvine in The police finally caught

(35:49):
up with her. They knocked on the door of the
home she shared with her mother and young son, Michael Corleone,
and arrested the god Mother. It's that name. That's why
gave it away. It's very clear she's Yeah. 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 a handcuffed her because he promised to
do that for some reason. I don't know. Cops are weird. Um.

(36:11):
So yeah. So now the Godmother, after almost twenty years
in the coke business and billions of dollars, has been
caught by the police. Her past is cut 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 and we're back. Uh, we're talking about Roseldo Blanco.

(36:34):
She has been arrested in nineteen five. The police had
a very strong case against her. Um, they were able
to get her long bisexual. Yeah, yeah, exactly. They locked
her up for being bisexual. Um. 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. Um. Their hope was that

(36:56):
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 twenty years, which was a pretty
good deal considering the two fifty murders the state blamed
on her. Um. But she's behind bars for a while now. Um.
Her arrest and the subsequent revelations about her life of
crime were big news. She became known as the Queen

(37:17):
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.

(37:39):
I appreciate you, and I salute you for being a
real woman. Unquote. I'm not gonna lie. That sounds like
some of the d M 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 yeah, and so I like screenshot it.
I cut out his name whatever. He didn't deserve that

(38:00):
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 young shirt. I sweat. You're right, you're right. Yeah,
I can't be the queen again then that that's reserved

(38:22):
for Beyonce. But I can be a sweat queen for sure.
Sweat Queen Uh. 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. Uh. Griselda
asked if she could talk to him, and you know
when he answered, she asked why he was interested in her.
Cosby responded that he wanted to quote rub elbows with
a legend. The wart up talking for an hour. The

(38:44):
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
jail house 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 as it was because he kidnapped her kid um.
And the other is that she just thought he was

(39:05):
cheating and murdered a third husband. Um. But anyway, Cosby,
if you watch the documentary Cocaine Cowboys Too, which is
on Netflix, yeah, there's there's two coke and they're not.
It's weird because like the information and 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

(39:26):
the the editing and the art is just just the worst.
Maybe I'll watch it, Maybe I'll audio, Yeah you could.
It's 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.
I mean, I answer my emails and just casually have

(39:46):
this season on in the background. Yeah, Like the second
one deals more with Griselda's life, and it 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 poor, Like what were you thinking
and putting this together? Um? Was it made by this guy?
He's their main source, and so the documentary is not

(40:09):
very credible towards him like it does 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. Um, and clearly he has his
own angles and everything that he's saying. So again, like
we never know anything about this woman. Um, we just
have a bunch of different stories. Did she even exist?

(40:31):
She definitely exists, do I mean? Do we have rebirth certificate?
We have her audio that we're going to play, Okay, Um,
so yeah. After a few days of phone calls, Uh,
Cosby visits Griselda in prison. He immediately noticed that while
every other prisoner wore a standard issue prison jumpsuit, Griselda
had on a silk jack. Yes, white silk pan, red
pumps and a ton of makeup. Before you even said,

(40:52):
I'm like, he's going to say silk and it was
the first thing that came out of your mouth. Yes,
oh I respect it. Maybe, Oh yeah. They start making
out immediately in the visitors room, just going, don't even
count on each other, and then they like fuck in
this like little private ish area. She apparently bribed the
guards fifteen hundred dollars every time he visited she she's

(41:14):
a billionaire. I mean, I know, but you think that
they would like take her assets or something? Why? Because
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. Um. So she promised that she
would make Cosby rich, and she cut him in on

(41:35):
some of her business dealings. Um. 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 fifty million a year in profits. Um. Forty five
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, uh,

(41:57):
prison was not the same thing for Griselda that it
was or anybody else in prison. Her status is a
billionaire and her just rock her rhythma 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.
Um for a time. Allways, 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.

(42:19):
There's a couple of pictures of them at the jail definitely. Look,
Oh is that them like outside? Yeah, it's like out
in the yard or something. Yeah, dang, look at home.
My gosh, she's she's dressed right, yeah, look at her
pose in like little princess. Yeah. So we'll have those
pictures up on our website behind the Bastards dot com,
so you can see Charles Cosby and the cocaine godmother

(42:44):
um just sort of having a nice, nice little picnic
at prison. Um. In r three older sons were released
from prison, her enemies almost immediately set to murdering them. Yeah,
well that's kind of what happens. Oswaldo was killed in
Metaine at a cell laboration for his release at Hilton.
He was a machine gun to death. Cosby, who informed Griselda,

(43:06):
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. Um, Griselda was still formidable even though
she was behind bars. She was strong, but she was

(43:28):
not stronger than Charles Cosby's desire to have sex more
than once a week. Started cheating on her with some lady.
Did he not read or did he not know? He
was obsessed with her? 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,

(43:48):
he gets a warning from Griselda, which is two guys
driving up and firing machine guns into his car. His
car is shot twelve 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. That's a
warning for her. I think they were trying to murder
I feel like, if there's only twelve holes in his car,
that was like her putting like she had kid gloves

(44:10):
on still, because she 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

(44:31):
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 ship 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. Um, it's kind
of incredible He's alive at all. Given Griselda's history and
murdered husband's, she must really care about him. I think

(44:53):
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 re reason by
basically saying like, look, I love you, I'm in love
with you, but you're stuck in prison and I'm a
man like once a week isn't enough for me, and
she like agreed that made sense and forgave him. Um,
which is, you know, pretty progressive. It's kind of like

(45:14):
prison polyamory almost. Um 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
Vices based on the drug war she had united. Uh so, yeah,
the cops kept after her. In a n she was

(45:35):
indicted for three murders. Now, murder indictments weren't a new
thing for Griselda, but these ones were scary because her
former hit man, a guy named Rivy, had turned state's
witness against her. Cosby says Griselda had a mental breakdown
when Rivy flipped. Among other things, Rivy testified that Griselda
had paid him fifty thou dollars to assassinate a man
while her three year old son, Michael Corleone, was in
the room. She said, Rivy has enough dirt on me

(45:57):
to put me on death row ten times. She who
was facing the death penalty in that fact, terrifighter. Cosby
didn't understand her panic. He was like, you're a billionaire,
We've got to spend twenty or thirty million fighting this thing.
Let's just let's just do that. Um. But she told
him she had a way out of the situation. UM. Again.
He kept suggesting we should hire a lawyer. But Griselda
had a better idea than hiring a lawyer. She was

(46:18):
going to kidnap the president's son. Um. So she told
him she needed a favor. The president of the United States,
well a president of the United States. Um. She told
him she needed a favor, reached into her brazier and
handed him a piece of paper that had JFK five
m n why written on it. She told her to
get him to give it to an associate of hers.
Cosby asked what the paper mint, and Griselda said, we're

(46:40):
going to move against Kennedy, who you know, the president's son.
We're going to kidnap JFK in New York and we're
gonna give five million dollars 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 in and then ransom him for her freedom.

(47:02):
He'd be released once her plane touchdown in Columbia. Cosby
flew to New York with four Columbians and a hundred
thousand dollars. Ironically landed in JFK Airport. They bought a
van in nice clothing and started stalking JFK Jr. That's hilarious.
She could have just used millions of dollars to bribe
all the like jury and just Hi, what's his name?

(47:23):
The crazy haired guy who got lawyers? Yeah, what's his name?
Off o j Off, Like that guy was still alive
back then, he could have done it. But no, she
decides to kidnap the president's son. Um. So apparently the
three kidnappers got close enough to do the deed at
one point that a random police car happened to pass
by and they lost their nerve. What happens next is

(47:44):
a little bit unclear. He's also like one of the
most watched people 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, so he okay, yeah,
how old was he he was? I think he was
linking his thirties rely, Uh he was. I mean he
didn't live that much longer after this is it the
plain thing? But yeah, So Charles Cosby claims that he

(48:09):
realized kidnapping the present son was a bad idea, uh,
and but that he was willing to do it for her,
and then the plan got spoiled because of a phone
conversation that they had. Uh this conversation actually, which is
where you'll get to hear Griselda Blanco talking to Charles
Cosby about the JFK kidnapping How are you man? I'm

(48:30):
doing true good man? Couse, Michael dor I got come
to give you a microL trup so so, so I
h a JFK plan come together after. I'm glad to
bear that, you know. But but you you'd be sure
to be careful though, you know, I mean, just always
know what you're doing at the time. You know. I

(48:53):
love you. I didn't do today tomorrow. I love you
so I love you always. Okay, okay, okay, okay, baby, okay,
But so that sounds to me like he's trying to
set her up to admit something about just like the

(49:15):
way his voice sounds on that. Um So, there's a
couple different versions of the timeline. Cosby claims that he uh,
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
gets a poenut and he was forced to testify. Um.

(49:35):
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 shipload of crimes that he committed. Um and I
think that's what happened. Um So, prosecutors at this point
are pretty sure that got Griselda dead to rights, both
Cosby and her former hit man. We're willing to roll

(49:58):
on her for a litany of her if it crimes.
But then during the deposition, uh, Cosby got up to
go to the restroom. While 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.

(50:18):
As I'm leaving a bathroom, 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 folded 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 spawned,
you know, I went my you know the number, you
know where I'm staying at. She walked off, her little

(50:40):
slim ass, switching down the hallway in her skirt. So
I laughed at myself and I went back to the
Prosecutor's office. So uh. He claims. She visited him at
his hotel later that night and they had sex. She
swarmed a secrecy, But six months later it turned out
that the secretary had also started a sex relationship with Rivy,

(51:01):
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, but basically both of the state's
major witnesses have now engaged in a sexual relationship with
the same person. Yeah, well, and Rivy is engaged in
it with two secretaries phone sex. Here's how the book

(51:23):
Queen Pens describes what Rivy did with the two major
crime secretaries. Fancying himself an artist, he sent the secretary's
pencil sketches of flowers and cute hand drawn Garfield the
cat sketches as opposed to actual flowers. Okay, well, I
mean he's in he's in prison. Oh yeah, he could
still get him ordered, but continue, Yeah, and Garfield the
cat sketches. That's the most romantic, mean is it? Yeah?

(51:47):
What's more romantic than gars? Like a depressed you know,
um snarky like yeah, yeah, okay, but you're criticizing this guy.
But clearly it worked. He would aso give the secretaries
money to buy gifts for themselves. In return, they made
arrangements for his wife to visit him in jail while
here she got pregnant. The secretaries were apparently in love

(52:10):
with Rivy. One of them described the cold blooded killer
as a sweetheart. It's another quote from Queenpen's Another secretary
set up like a Thanksgiving dinner to be delivered to
his jail cell. Um. Eventually they started having phone conversations
that were straight up pornographic. Uh, and two secretaries were
eventually suspended for having phone sex with Rivy. Then the

(52:33):
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 from the state. Um,
they've 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. We can't

(52:55):
help prosec secretaries. Neither could those secretaries. Yeah, it's it's funny.
In the documentary about this, the police are still furious
all these years later that like this happened and it
just blew this case out of the water. There is
a widespread belief that Rivy 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

(53:16):
carried out to both It wasn't you think that you
think they're just suck Yeah, No, it wasn't. They were
thinking with not with their head head, and and Cosby
doesn't strike me as a guy who's smart enough to
plan something right, Well, my beautiful queen. Um, Yeah, so
Griselda Blanco was released from prison in two thousand four. Um.

(53:39):
She was flown to Columbia 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 and medine walking out
in the open without bodyguards. And then on September four,
two thou twelve, Griselda Blanco, the Black Widow, the cocaine godmother,
walked to a butcher's shop her home and purchased a

(54:01):
hundred and fifty pounds of meat. As she was walking away,
a man on a motorcycle drove up to the now
sixty nine 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,
so symbolic to God? What a hundred and fifty pounds
of meat? Yeah? What is that? One pound for each person?

(54:23):
She's murdered. Every 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. Um 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,

(54:47):
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 sixty nine year old lady with
a sack of meat the size of a man, just
struggling down the street in the middle tip of the
day and Metaine. But maybe she knew she was going

(55:09):
to go out that way. She's like, I might as well. Yeah,
my cross is a man worth of um so uh yeah,
it's probably worth including a little 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

(55:29):
with like I think one of her nieces or something
like that, but it's still was her niece watching her
carry the one 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. Um, I just can't imagine her having
all that money and like like even my my family

(55:50):
and like Brazilia like servants, So 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, but that's just that's

(56:12):
just bragging. Yeah, I don't. I don't know if I
agree with that, but well, and I don't know. It
may it may have been like the stories just say
she bought a hundred fifty pounds of meat, so maybe
it was going to be sent to her house or something.
Maybe she didn't even have it with her. Yeah, I'm
just choosing to Why would they include that in the story?
I don't know, but I had to once I read

(56:32):
it was a hundred and fifty 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 a
hundred and fifty pounds of me and carrying it with her.
And I choose to believe she was carrying it over

(56:53):
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 just be something one
of her family members threw in for some extra color.
And she had her full rosary with her and she

(57:13):
was on the tenth one when she passed. Got it. Yeah, Um,
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 state 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 twelve on he was raised

(57:35):
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 gonna pay you rent, and you're going to
be my guardian. Um Cosby claims that he took care
of Michael Corleone while Griselda was in prisoning. Michael for
his part, says Cosby as a liar, and the whole
JFK scheme was also a lie that he made up
so that he couldn't sell Griselda out to the police

(57:55):
and avoid murder charges for ship he'd done. Um the
police aren't saying either way, so we'll never know. But
Cosby's a freeman today as far as I know. UH.
An FBI report released after Kennedy's death does show that
agents couldn't prove that there had 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

(58:17):
again because yeah, you know, Columbia was a death trap
for him. On May twelve, two thousand twelve, 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 ten thousand dollars cash, a motorcycle, and
a diamond studded necklace with the phrase kill all Rats
written into it. Uh. He seems to have gotten out
of any serious trouble though, because he's a freeman today

(58:38):
and active on Facebook. He's out of the cocaine game.
But today he sells a different drug. Can you guess
what kind of businesses in now? I'm just kidding. Now
he sells vape products under the Pure Blanco label. UM,
and his vaporizer products are like packaged in like a
little box that looks like a kilo bag of cocaine.

(58:59):
Kind of. I thought you're going to say that he's
like and now you can catch him on Tinder, which
people have. I'm sure you can. Um. Yeah, So I'm
I'd like to close this episode by reading his latest
post from April 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,

(59:19):
like Griselda used to test that Pure Blanco. Nothing but
the finest on this side. You want to buy some
d m s you want to distribute for us d
M S. Salute our business partners at wakend Vape. We
about to blow this up. Uh. Pure Blanco is also
a lifestyle clothing brand. You can visit their website pure
blanco dot com right now in order Griselda Blanco themed
hoodies and T shirts. I mean, I hope they're paying

(59:41):
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. Um. 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 Corleon. This
seems like the best case scenario for that he sells

(01:00:03):
vaping products and hoodies. UM. 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,

(01:00:23):
Like every year something happened to her that was crazier
than anything that went down in the Godfather, and like
she still was drawn enough to that movie to name
her kid and after that that's weird, it's funny. Yeah,
I guess aspirational, you're Seldo Blanco. I still need the
brawl with the cocaine in it. That's god, I'd be
wild at parties. So do you think the two different

(01:00:47):
versions of her that are in my head right now?
Or either she's like a stone cold, sociopathic badass, which
is what I thought when I first started reading about
the ship 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

(01:01:09):
not get killed herself. I don't know if she was
like um 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 um has
definitely murdered people, but but also kind of like probably
still has feelings for you know, the family members and

(01:01:30):
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 she 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 she sounds
almost like genuinely like desperate in her in her I

(01:01:52):
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

(01:02:13):
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. 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

(01:02:34):
she's got that that combination of business smarts and ruthlessness
that you need to succeed in capitalism. There was no
legal avenue for yeah. I always think it's fascinating to
to look at because there's so many murder shows. I
feel like like true crime that that look in a
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.

(01:02:55):
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 ten hours of power,
and they all want to kill each other. So it's
like just looking at human nature instead of looking at
us like she's a horrible, ruthless person, which she was ruthless,
but like also looking at what is what would the
average human being do if they had a billion dollars

(01:03:19):
And we're also smoking pounds of uncut cocaine. Yes exactly,
so you're like highly stressed outrage Um. Yeah, yeah, So
Griselda Blanco, 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

(01:03:41):
the other end of this look, I told you who
that is so you're still Beyonce probably could get people
murdered if she wanted to. But she has and I
don't think that I'm aware of. Um, she has that
type of money, So yeah, I I don't know. I
think that if she was the baddest bitch, maybe she

(01:04:02):
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, Um,
but I I think she's yeah, a bad bitch. But
her wanting to kill little kids kind of also yeah

(01:04:24):
turned off? Yeah yeah, that is a that is does decline.
See what you do, um is you kill the parents
and you take the kid under your wing, like if
she's watched any you know, nineties movie ever. Yeah, but
then those kids kill you, like always have. We got
like Kylo Reren and stuff out here. So yeah, no,
I hear you. You're damned if you do, damned if

(01:04:46):
you don't. So you might as well have the kid's
machine gun. Okay, but I may have been doing this
podcast too long, alright, this has been behind the bastards.
I've been Robert Evans, and my guest for today has
been Danny Fernandez. Danny, you want to tell the people
where they can find you on the inner Net. Yeah,
I'm at MS Danny Fernandez. It's M S D A
N I F E R N A N D E Z.
And then I'm also host of Nerdificent with if you

(01:05:08):
watty Way and it drops. Our episodes drop every Tuesday.
We do a deep dive into all things nerd dum,
subcultures and nerd Dum. It gets a little crazy tech. Uh. Yes,
So we go in the past, present, and future of
of a lot of the topics that we cover. Awesome, uh.
And I am Robert Evans. You can find me on
Twitter at at I right okay to letters uh. And

(01:05:31):
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