![]() ![]() “She was seeing the ghosts of people past, and she had a hell of a time sleeping at night. He later fled the cartel’s $3m bounty on his head and went into hiding in witness protection. More would follow, like Max Mermelstein, a Jewish American smuggler who pioneered the cocaine pipeline from Medellín to Miami. Gomez was eventually placed in witness protection and hasn’t been heard from since. Never again, that s*** was crazy,” he added. “My mum had been balling since the 60s,” says her youngest and last surviving son, Michael Corleone Blanco. She used multiple sources for her supply and like her contemporary, Carlos Lehder, pushed for pooling resources and sharing risks with other drug traffickers, creating what became the Medellin Cartel and setting the stage for its most infamous leader, Pablo Escobar. She created secret compartments in bras and girdles and recruited couriers to import cocaine by the body load. But as the drug was crystalised and demand increased late in the decade and into the 1970s, the “innovative businesswoman” backed off marijuana and purchased an undergarment business. In 1960s New York, cocaine wasn’t particularly popular in the low-grade paste form called basuco, or “bazooka”. You almost, almost I say, and I don’t say this a lot, you almost have to feel sorry for somebody that never had a real chance.” “Her mother being an alleged prostitute … the thieving, her getting involved in phoney passports, pick-pocketing, her whole life was brought up around crime. “Right off the bat, there she is,” Palombo said. Now in her 20s, Blanco went from pickpocketing, forging fake ID documents to “small amounts of marijuana” (as far as the DEA knew). The pair made their way to New York in the mid to late 1960s. Abandoned by her father, Blanco was taken to Medellin at a young age and grew up in a shanty slum where her mother, said to be an alcoholic prostitute, beat her savagely.įorced onto the streets, she met her first husband and mentor Carlos Trujillo, a heavy drinker and small-time document forger. ![]() On February 15, 1943, while the world was at war with Nazi Germany, Griselda Blanco Restrepo was born in Cartagena on Colombia’s Caribbean coast. ![]() Meanwhile, much of what became known (at least outside of Colombia) of Blanco and her early life came second-hand from DEA informant Maria Gutierrez, Blanco’s travel agent who eventually became a friend, trusted confidant and unrequited love interest. There were rumours she was shot in Miami in 19, but Palombo wouldn’t get close again until almost 10 years after she was first indicted during Operation Banshee. She was tracked in Colombia until at least 1977, but ultimately disappeared into barrios and remained an enigma. ![]()
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