Go Inside the True Story of Ruthless Cartel Leader Griselda Blanco (2024)

This article contains major character or plot details.

They say the truth is stranger than fiction, but in the real world of Griselda Blanco, the truth is more brutal.

Inspired by the true story of Colombian drug trafficker Griselda Blanco and starring Sofía Vergara (who also serves as executive producer) as the ambitious and murderous Miami cartel head,Griselda tracks the dramatized life, business acumen, and downfall of “the Godmother,” one of America’s highest earning drug traffickers in the ’70s and ’80s… and one of the most deadly.

She went by many nicknames: “La Madrina,” “The Black Widow,” “La Dama de la Mafia.” But for her foes, the name Griselda became synonymous with death.

With six hour-long episodes, Griselda was created by Eric Newman (Painkiller) and Andrés Baiz — who directs every episode — reuniting the team behindNarcos andNarcos: Mexico. Newman, Doug Miro, Ingrid Escajeda, and Carlo Bernard serve as co-creators and executive produced the series alongside Baiz, Vergara, and Luis Balaguer with Latin World Entertainment. Escajeda and Miro are the series’ co-showrunners.

“Griselda is no different thanHamlet, orMacbeth, or any classic tragedy where a character has hubris,” Miro tells Tudum. “Griselda’s violence was a building of her hubris and her sense of power. [But] it’s really important to me how many scenes are actually true, and how much truth exists in the show.”

While Vergara’s emotional dynamism and Carlos Rafael Rivera’s (the Emmy-winning composer ofThe Queen’s Gambit) baroque score amplify Griselda’s villainy and the tragedy in this fictionalized drama, the creators took painstaking efforts to ground the production in reality.

“Authenticity is everything to us,” says Newman who — with series director and executive producer Andrés Baiz — worked on cartel-dramasNarcosandNarcos: Mexico. “Authenticity not just in the place, but in the period and truths of the characters. Another driving force for us is finding that truth –– even when we can’t know the truth. There’s no interview you’re going to get with Griselda Blanco that tells you what she was thinking and feeling. And so creating that in the most authentic way becomes essential.”

While the creators condensed some timelines and combined moments to keep the narrative tight for the limited series, they say it spotlights her atrocities and depicts the life of Blanco as faithfully as possible.

Discover some of the real stories dramatized inGriselda — and a few truths that are even wilder than what you see on-screen.

Alberto Ammann as Alberto Bravo in Griselda.

Elizabeth Morris/Netflix

What was Griselda Blanco’s relationship to the Medellín drug cartels?

Griselda and her second husband, Alberto Bravo (played byAlberto Ammann), were masterminds behind early cocaine shipments into New York City, where they lived in the early ’70s. On Jan. 26, 1976, federal prosecutors convicted 12 people of conspiracy to distribute large amounts of cocaine and marijuana smuggled from Colombia, but failed to nab the leaders of the operation. Those leaders “were identified in the indictment as Alberto Bravo, his brother Carlos Bravo, and an associate, Griselda Blanco, a woman who allegedly outfits female couriers in special bras and girdles designed to conceal narcotics,” a New York Times article from the time stated. Blanco was sentenced to 15 years in prison, but she couldn’t do time because she had already fled to Colombia. She wouldn’t be caught for another decade.

Did Griselda Blanco kill her second husband, Alberto Bravo?

Some estimate that Blanco’s assassination orders run well over 250. In Miami alone, she’s suspected of involvement with 40 murders.

But there’s one which she allegedly carried out herself: husband No. 2, Alberto Bravo. Back in Colombia in 1975, Blanco apparently became suspicious that Bravo was involved in millions of missing dollars. They argued, then the 32-year-old Blanco pulled out a pistol. Bravo pulled out an Uzi submachine gun and shot her in the stomach. A firefight ensued, and at the end,Bravo and his bodyguards lay dead.June Hawkins-Singleton, a former Miami police detective who helped crack the case in the US, says that Bravo was the only direct killing they could attribute to Blanco. “I don’t doubt that she did a number of them perhaps, but we could never get anyone to either tell us that, or she certainly didn’t say anything about it.”

And what about Griselda’s first husband?

Blanco met her first husband, street hustler Carlos Trujillo, when she was 13 years old and a sex worker. The couple had three sons, but divorced in the ’60s. She reportedly had him killed in the ’70s. And finally, she allegedly also had her assassin husband, Dario Sepulveda (played by Alberto Guerra in the series), killed in 1983 when he returned to Colombia. Blanco earned the nickname “Black Widow” in reference to the short life spans of her spouses.

Did Griselda Blanco really smuggle drugs in bras?

Nearly every mention of Blanco in ’70s and ’80s news articles mentions she trafficked cocaine in bras, but she also went one step further and started a factory to manufacture the specialized smuggling garments. “In the ’70s and ’80s, [it wasn’t] like it is now, where everyone’s going through a scanner or they’ll get a female attendant to search you,” Newman says. “In those days, these guys were all customs guys, and there was no one who was stopping a beautiful woman walking through with a bra full of cocaine. It was sort of genius.”

Did Griselda Blanco smuggle drugs on ships?

Allegedly, yes. Newman and Miro planned to open the series with an even more audacious alleged smuggling attempt by Bravo and Blanco. “In 1976, [the United States] celebrated its 200th anniversary, and countries around the world — as a sign of respect — sent something to honor this momentous achievement. Colombia sent a boat, a 19th-century, three-masted square rigger called The Gloria,” says Newman. “Legend has it, Griselda arranged for a large shipment of cocaine to be hidden in the hold of The Gloria as it sailed into New York Harbor. Everyone was watching and no one saw a thing. And she off-loaded that cocaine when she could, and she sold it in New York.”

How was Griselda involved with the “Dadeland Massacre” at the Crown Liquors store?

On July 11, 1979, Blanco’s extraordinarily armed hit men entered the Crown Liquors shop in the Dadeland Mall, rained gunfire on the store, and “emptied their submachine guns” into co*ke “jefe” German Panesso (played by Diego Trujillo in the series) and his bodyguard Juan Carlos Hernandez. “They looked like Swiss cheese,” said a medical examiner,according to a 1979 Washington Post article.

“It’s a very famous event in the history of Miami crime scenes and was very much as it is on the show, where Griselda publicly announced herself and it seemed intentional,” says Miro.

The assassins riddled cars with bullets in the parking lot and fled in a van labeled “Happy Time Complete Party Supply.” When police officers found the abandoned gun- and bulletproof vest–filled van later, they called it a “war wagon.” Says Miro:“She did leave that wagon full of guns. There [were these] histrionics to it that became a little bit of a Griselda calling card. She always had, as part of her game, an intimidation factor, because as a woman, she needed to walk a bigger walk. And she understood that with the way she arranged her violence, but it was also because she was pressed in[to] a corner and she was an underdog.”

Though Blanco was understood to be the mastermind behind the hit, she was never prosecuted for it.

June Hawkins-Singleton, the real Miami-Dade Police Department detective. “I don’t think I could ever understand a woman or anybody that did that kind of indiscriminate death,” Hawkins-Singleton says about Griselda Blanco.

Courtesy of June Hawkins

Hawkins-Singleton was born in Miami Beach in 1950 to a Cuban mother and a “semi-redneck father” from North Carolina, she says. She grew up in Miami, and she and her sister would go to Cuba every summer to see their family.

Courtesy of June Hawkins

Who is June Hawkins?

Today, June Hawkins-Singleton is 73 and lives in Nashville with her husband, Al — yes, the very Al Singleton who helped her crack the Griselda case. “In retrospect, it has been rather interesting,” says Hawkins-Singleton of her time with the Miami-Dade Police Department. “I don’t really think about it that way, but looking at it through other people’s eyes, I guess it is!”

Detective June Hawkins.

Courtesy of June Hawkins

Hawkins stands over victims of violence during Miami’s drug war years. Hawkins-Singleton says the most accurate costume detail was actor Juliana Aidén Martinez wearing sunglasses on her head. “I used to do that all the time.”

Courtesy of June Hawkins

In the heyday of the Miami cocaine wars, Hawkins-Singleton was among the first female police officers in Miami. “I think that because women were relatively new to the police environment back in those days, my fellow colleagues didn't really know how to handle having a female there,” she tells Tudum. “When I was going through the Academy, I had a guy tell me once, ‘Why don't you become something normal for a woman like a nurse or a teacher?’ ” Those types of attitudes meant Hawkins-Singleton really did undergo the harassment — or hazing, as she calls it — that’s depicted in the series. “Good lord, in those days, you just didn’t make a big deal out of some of the teasing and the air conditioning with the nipple hardening and any of that stuff — that was something that you just rolled with,” she says. “Homicide detectives had quite a reputation of being ball-busters, and so I was bracing for some of that. I knew they were testing me.”

As in the series, she was also assigned to an office away from her colleagues. “I was separated from the regular bullpen, so to speak. I was sent down to this conference room, and they plopped a bunch of names and photographs and information and said, ‘Make some sense of this, and let’s figure out who’s doing all these murders and shootings and so forth.’ ”

Juliana Aidén Martinez as June in Griselda.

Elizabeth Morris/Netflix

See Also

The real-life rise and fall of Griselda Blanco—cocaine ‘godmother’ of the ‘70sThe True Story of Griselda Blanco, Deadly 'Cocaine Godmother' of MiamiWho Was Griselda Blanco, the Miami Drug Queen Profiled in Lifetime's Cocaine Godmother?Netflix’s Griselda: The true story behind the ‘cocaine godmother’ portrayed by Sofia Vergara

Did June from Griselda meet the real June Hawkins?

Juliana Aidén Martinez, who plays June in the series, spent hours chatting with Hawkins-Singleton while researching the role. Martinez was born in the largely Cuban community of Hialeah in Miami-Dade County — a “Hialeah girl” as Hawkins-Singleton liked to call her —and celebrates roots in Colombia, too. During Miami’s worst years of drug-related violence, Martinez said her parents worked in banks, where they’d witness people mysteriously drop off thousands of dollars of cash. This background helped her connect with the real June.

“During her time, Miami became the murder capital of the country,” Martinez says. “She’s navigating being the first female homicide detective in this world of men. She’s also Cuban American, and she understands the cultural authenticity and the cultural factors that are happening in these conversations with the witnesses. It really shows how representation and being able to understand your own community is really important. We understand our own. I feel like June [is] a testament to that.”

In researching June, Martinez was also able to draw parallels between how Griselda and the detective were perceived by the men around them. “Both of them go from a place of being underestimated, undervalued, or dismissed and struggling to take care of themselves –– to even financially provide for themselves, to then being like, ‘I’m actually here and you’re going to see me and I’m actually going to be telling you what to do,’ ” she says. “It’s fascinating. As women, as you see, even in today’s society, we want to be seen as equals and to also be in a place of autonomy and a place of power as well.”

But being overlooked and underestimated was something both June and Griselda could work with. “Men could not perceive them as anything outside of this domestic sphere that they were so used to,'” says Martinez, adding that using the “element of surprise to their own advantage speaks to their resiliency, and their resourcefulness."

How was June Hawkins involved with the Rafael “Amilcar” Rodriguez car chase in Miami?

The real1981 car chase and shoot-out with Blanco’s smuggler rival Rafael “Amilcar” Rodriguez (played in the series by José Zúñiga) lasted a few days, according to Hawkins-Singleton. “We worked with the phone company, and they set up what we call the ‘trap and trace,’ ” she says. “Amilcar was using pay phones. Remember, we didn’t have cell phones or any of that, all we had was beepers and things. I was in the office with the radio and also with the phone company on the other hand, on the regular [phone]. The phone company would tell [me], ‘It’s this location.’ Then I’d get on the radio and tell everybody, ‘OK, he’s calling from this location,’ and they’d run over there. It was crazy. Everybody’s talking, trying to advise where he is. And at one point, one of our detectives even rammed the car that Amilcar and this other guy were driving.”

Miro fills in a crucial detail: “Amilcar’s guy did this thing they call a ‘Florida turn’ where he turned [the car around] to face the traffic — only in Florida, right? — and just started shooting at them.”

Hawkins-Singleton continues: “The guy that was driving got out, they caught him — but Amilcar ran. In the meantime, there was shooting back and forth. We shot out the windows of the Burger King that was on Le Jeune Road. Well, somebody did, I’m assuming it was some of us, as well as the bad guys.”

How was Amilcar caught?

“Amilcar grabbed some poor man that was driving a car. [He] kidnapped him and commandeered the car and told the guy to drive,” says Hawkins-Singleton. “He got 10, 15, 20 blocks away, and when he stopped, he threw the man out. But when he did, he said, ‘Here’s my Rolex watch for the use of your car,’ and then he took off. And of course we did interview that poor man, and he was freaked out.”

Amilcar later ditched the car and the chase continued on foot, and then Miro says everything turned into a very unglamorous situation for the drug kingpin: “He ended up in a laundromat hiding behind a [washing] machine, and that was where June and Raul [Diaz] finally caught him.”

When they brought him in, Hawkins-Singleton was surprised by his appearance. “He was a very unusual man, Amilcar, in that when we brought him in, he was very unassuming. He wasn’t a big guy; he wasn’t scary-looking or anything. He was very mild and soft-spoken… He was very calm, and he denied having been involved in a murder.”

Elizabeth Morris/Netflix

How was Griselda finally arrested and how long did she spend in prison?

After a decade of searching for her, DEA agentBob Palumbo caught Griselda in 1985. She was charged with conspiring to manufacture, import, and distribute cocaine. She was convicted andsentenced to 15 years in prison for her original drug trafficking indictment. In 1994, she was additionally charged in Miami for the1982 death of a 2-year-old boy, Johnny Castro, who was accidentally killed during a Griselda-ordered attack on his father, Jesus Castro, after he allegedly insulted Blanco’s sons. She was also charged in the killings of two other drug dealers. She pled guilty to the three murder charges in 1998, andwas sentenced to serve three concurrent 20-year sentences.After serving only six years, however, Blanco was deported to Colombia in 2004.

Did the Jorge “Rivi” Ayala phone sex scandal really happen?

Yep! Griselda’s hit man, Jorge “Rivi” Ayala (played by Martín Rodríguez in the series), became involved with a scandal when anumber of Miami-Dade state attorney’s office secretaries allegedly had phone sex with the killer while he was serving time for three murders. He was a key prosecution witness in Blanco’s trial, and investigators believed the alleged improprieties had compromised the case.

Did Rivi really rob a bank for quarters?

“The quarters [story] is true,” says Miro. “That was how they ended up catching Rivi, and then ended up catching Griselda.”

Elizabeth Morris/Netflix

Did June Hawkins ever meet Griselda?

“After having written memos about [Griselda], and talking to informants, and talking to DEA, and all the history that we knew… I only saw her one time,” Hawkins-Singleton says. “I had left homicide. I was already up on the third floor working in criminal intelligence in a different division. Alan [Singleton, the Miami detective who teamed up with Hawkins on the Blanco case] called me and said, ‘Hey, I got Griselda here in the office.’

“It was right after they had brought her back to Miami, had her in the office there, and he knew that I had known of her and worked on her, written about her, 10 years before. And he said, ‘Would you like to come down and see her?’

“And so I came down the stairs, and there she was sitting at the desk looking like a grandmother. I didn’t interact with her personally then, I just kind of observed her. I thought, ‘Man, she looks so diminished.’ And in my view, she didn’t look like the big badass that we had assumed that she would be.… She was just diminished in every way. Old, tired-looking, resentful.”

Who killed Griselda Blanco?

Eight years after Blanco returned to Medellín, she was gunned down outside a butcher shop by assassins on a motorcycle. The 69-year-old’s death mirrored the exact kind of drive-by killings she was suspected of ordering during her early days of cartel life.

She is buried inJardines Montesacro cemetery south of Medellín, the resting place of another cartel kingpin:Pablo Escobar.

Where can I find out more about Griselda?

Check out this essential reading list:

• The Godmother: The True Story of the Hunt for the Most Bloodthirsty Female Criminal of Our Time by Richard Smitten
• The Cocaine Wars by Paul Eddy, Hugo Sabogal, and Sara Walden
• The Man Who Made It Snow by Max Mermelstein
• Hotel Scarface: Where Cocaine Cowboys Partied and Plotted to Control Miami by Roben Farzad
• Kings of Cocaine: Inside the Medellín Cartel — An Astonishing True Story of Murder, Money, and International Corruption by Guy Gugliotta and Jeff Leen

  Stream all six episodes of Griselda now. And check out some Easter eggs you might’ve missed here.

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