Griselda Blanco, dubbed 'The Godmother of Cocaine' and 'The Black Widow', was a Colombian drug lord who ruled over the Miami underworld with an iron fist in the 1970s and 1980s.
An associate once said she ordered hits "the way other people order pizza" and she is believed to have been responsible for more than 250 deaths during her time on top.
Her first murder came much earlier though, when she was aged just 11 and growing up in Colombia. She was alleged to have kidnapped another child and shot them when the parents failed to cough up a ransom.
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Declaring herself the "baddest b**** to ever take a breath of life", Blanco was depraved. She supposedly forced people to have sex in front of her at gunpoint, held mass orgies with strippers at her Miami mansion before killing them, and once even had eight strippers executed as she suspected they had slept with her husband. She had three husbands in total – all died at her hands.
Modern Family star Sofia Vergara is set to portray Blanco in Netflix's upcoming series Griselda (created by the people behind Narcos). Vergara spent two hours in make-up every day while filming to transform herself into the gangster.
Blanco is thought to have earned a living through prostitution and pickpocketing before moving into the cocaine business. She illegally immigrated to New York in the 1960s but was forced to flee back to Colombia when she was indicted on federal drug conspiracy charges. She returned to the US in the late 1970s, setting up shop in Miami.
She got ahead by introducing a number of innovations to the drug trafficking game. Among the first drug lords to realise female mules worked better than blokes, she designed her own range of multi-pocketed lingerie to be used on smuggling runs. She is also said to be one of the first to put hitmen on motorbikes, allowing them to speed away after gunning down their targets.
Blanco's return to the states coincided with an explosion of violent crime in Miami in the 1980s dubbed the Cocaine Cowboy Wars. Murder was so prevalent that from 1981 to 1988 the city was forced to rent out a refrigerated truck to keep all the bodies.
It is thought that during this period Blanco's empire was making £63million a month. With the money came the glam lifestyle – one of her most prized possessions was a gold-plated, emerald-studded submachine gun. She drank from a tea set that was once owned by the Queen.
However, her empire came tumbling down when the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) finally arrested her in 1985. She was initially sentenced to 15 years on drug charges and later pleaded guilty to three counts of second degree murder. For those she was sentenced to 20 years, to run concurrently.
Blanco was deported back to Colombia in 2004 after her release from prison. She lived a quiet life there for eight years before her enemies finally caught up with her. It was an assassin on a motorbike who gunned her down outside a butcher's shop.
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