On February 17, 1985, Blanco was arrested in her home by the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) and charged with conspiring to manufacture, import, and distribute cocaine. The distribution network, which spanned the United States, earned $80 million per month. This was a period when cocaine was trafficked more than cannabis. īlanco was involved in the drug-related violence known as the Miami Drug War or the Cocaine Cowboy Wars that plagued Miami in the late 1970s and early 1980s.

The struggle by law enforcement to put an end to the influx of cocaine into Miami led to the creation of CENTAC 26 (Central Tactical Unit), a joint operation between the Miami-Dade Police Department and the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) anti-drug operation. Her return more or less coincided with the beginning of public violent conflicts, including hundreds of murders and killings yearly associated with the high crime epidemic that swept the City of Miami in the 1980s. She fled to Colombia before she could be arrested, but returned to the United States and settled in Miami in the late 1970s. She established a sizable cocaine business there and in April 1975, she was indicted on federal drug conspiracy charges along with 30 of her subordinates.

In 1964, she illegally immigrated to the United States with false passports and settled in Queens, New York, with her three children and husband. Drug business īlanco was a figure in the drug trade from Colombia to Miami, New York and California. It is also speculated that she engaged in prostitution to support herself financially during this time, although Blanco denied this allegation. To escape the sexual assaults of her mother's boyfriend, she ran away from home at the age of 19 and resorted to looting in Medellín until the age of 20. Blanco had become a pickpocket before she even turned 13. Blanco's former lover, Charles Cosby, recounted that at the age of 11 she allegedly kidnapped, attempted to ransom and eventually shot a child from an upscale flatland neighborhood near her own neighborhood. She and her mother, Ana Blanco, moved to Medellín when she was three years old, and this move exposed her to a criminal lifestyle at an early age. Griselda Blanco Restrepo was born in Cartagena on the country's north coast.

She was shot dead on September 3, 2012, aged 69. Griselda Blanco Restrepo (Febru– September 3, 2012), known as the Black Widow or Cocaine Godmother, was a Colombian drug lord who was prominent in the cocaine-based drug trade and underworld of Miami, Florida, during the 1970s through the early 2000s, and who has also been claimed by some to have been part of the Medellín Cartel.

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