TOM LEONARD: She murdered her three husbands, eight strippers who dared look at one of them – and first killed at age 11. As Sofia Vegara plays bloody sex-crazed billionaire cocaine queen Griselda, marvel at the true story you really couldn’t make up

Although one of Griselda Blanco’s treasured possessions was a tea set reportedly once owned by the Queen, history doesn’t record whether anyone was ever invited over for afternoon tea.

That wasn’t exactly her style.

Guests of the ‘Black Widow’ tended to receive rather less civilized hospitality than a cup of Darjeeling sipped from fine bone china.

Perhaps one involving another of the self-proclaimed Godmother of Cocaine’s cherished belongings – a gold-plated, emerald-studded submachine gun.

The notoriously violent, volatile and debauched Colombian gangster chief killed without compunction – starting aged 11 when she murdered another child after his parents refused to pay his ransom.

All three of her husbands died either on her orders or at her hands.

During her 1970s and 1980s heyday smuggling tons of cocaine from Colombia to the US, the cold-blooded cocaine queen was linked to some 250 murders. Often, she insisted on carrying them out herself.

Not only pitiless but chillingly ingenious, she was the first crime boss to put her hitmen on the back of motorcycles so they could get at targets and then escape with ease.

It was a tactic copied by criminals across the world and so it was entirely fitting that she died the same way, gunned down as, aged 69, she stood buying meat at a butcher’s shop in 2012.

She was also one of the first drug traffickers to appreciate that women made better couriers than men as they attracted less suspicion.

Blanco even designed her own range of multi-pocketed lingerie so her female ‘mules’ could hide huge amounts of cocaine on smuggling runs.

The notoriously violent, volatile and debauched Colombian gangster chief killed without compunction – starting aged 11 when she murdered another child after his parents refused to pay his ransom. (Above) Grisela Blanco

Modern Family star Sofia Vergara plays Blanco (pictured above) in a forthcoming six-part Netflix drama titled Griselda.

A matronly mother of four, the ‘baddest b**ch to ever take a breath of life’ – those were her words although few would have disagreed – was utterly depraved: openly bisexual, she forced men and women to have sex at gunpoint and threw cocaine-fueled, anything-goes orgies in a mirrored room at her Miami mansion where her formidable German Shepherd, named ‘Hitler’, kept guard.

It’s no surprise that the war zone she created in the Florida city provided much of the inspiration for the glossy 1980s crime drama Miami Vice.

Soon, the blood-drenched reign of this sociopathic monster is returning to our screens, and this time the Godmother is herself in the central role.

Modern Family star Sofia Vergara plays Blanco in a forthcoming six-part Netflix drama titled Griselda. (Barely five feet tall, Blanco had a wide, oval face and cleft chin so casting Vergara in the role is certainly flattering to her).

Netflix says the series is ‘inspired’ by Blanco and ‘tells the story of a devoted mother who created one of the most profitable cartels in history’.

It will show ‘how her lethal blend of unsuspected savagery and charm helped her expertly navigate between business and family’.

Griselda’s creators, led by Eric Newman (also its director) and Andres Baiz, were part of the team that made Netflix’s acclaimed drug wars drama series Narcos.

Students of Blanco’s brutally violent career may be surprised to hear that Hollywood appears to have sniffed out a ‘MeToo’ theme even here.

‘When we meet Griselda, she is a woman overrun by the male-dominated world around her,’ said Baiz in a press statement. ‘We also see her evolution as she makes use of her oppression as a means of terror…the duplicity is what I find so fascinating about Griselda, and Sofía Vergara captures her essence fiercely.’

Blanco, who was reportedly the first ever woman criminal to become a billionaire, has fascinated actresses as a role.

Jennifer Lopez is due to play her in a yet unreleased film, The Godmother, while Catherine Zeta-Jones already did so in a 2018 Lifetime biopic, Cocaine Godmother. (She was also the subject of two documentaries).

The attraction isn’t difficult to see: Blanco was so outrageous and extreme it’s difficult to imagine a screenwriter ever being able to invent her.

She was born in 1943 to a violent and alcoholic prostitute mother in the shanty towns outside Cartagena, Columbia.

A matronly mother of four, the ‘baddest b**ch to ever take a breath of life’ – those were her words although few would have disagreed – was utterly depraved. (Above) Vegara as Griselda Blanco

Barely five feet tall, Blanco had a wide, oval face and cleft chin so casting Vergara in the role is certainly flattering to her

During her 1970s and 1980s heyday smuggling tons of cocaine from Colombia to the US, the cold-blooded cocaine queen was linked to some 250 murders. Often, she insisted on carrying them out herself. (Above) Vegara on the set of Griselda

They soon moved to the slums of the city of Medellin, a neighborhood so crime-ridden that children entertained themselves digging holes to bury the corpses left lying in the streets.

Aged just 11, Blanco and a group of fellow street urchins decided to kidnap a 10-year-old boy from a wealthy neighborhood. When his family didn’t take their ransom demands seriously, her friends handed Blanco a gun and dared her to shoot him between the eyes.

She didn’t hesitate.

According to one version of her early life, she was sexually abused as a teenager by her mother’s boyfriend.

Griselda became a pickpocket and a prostitute at 12.

She left home at 13 to live with Carlos Trujillo, a pimp and forger who specialized in creating false travel papers so he could bring illegal migrants into the US.

They soon married and had three children (all born before she turned 21) but later divorced and she had him killed over a business dispute – the first murder that earned her the nickname of Black Widow.

She quickly re-married, this time Alberto Bravo, a cocaine trafficker, and in the late 1960s they moved to Queens, New York.

They established a cocaine smuggling operation under the cover of Bravo’s clothing import business, the latter manufacturing a range of drug mule lingerie such as bras, knickers and corsets that were fitted with enough pockets for a woman to carry seven pounds of cocaine in a single corset.

The business was soon reaping rich dividends.

The popularity of cocaine was at that time soaring in the US among the rich and famous and, unlike the Italian Mafia that dominated organized crime in the Big Apple, the Colombian couple could exploit strong connections to the main country supplying the drug.

By the mid 1970s, their operation had expanded to the point that they were employing 1,500 dealers and were earning millions of dollars a month by having her own pilots fly large consignments in direct from Colombia where they were in cahoots with the Medellin Cartel of her old friend, Pablo Escobar.

The popularity of cocaine was at that time soaring in the US among the rich and famous and, unlike the Italian Mafia that dominated organized crime in the Big Apple, the Colombian couple could exploit strong connections to the main country supplying the drug.

Blanco even designed her own range of multi-pocketed lingerie so her female ‘mules’ could hide huge amounts of cocaine on smuggling runs. (Above) Catherine Zeta-Jones plays Griselda Blanco in Lifetime movie ‘Cocaine Godmother’

But breaking the cardinal rule that drug dealers should never become addicted themselves, Blanco became hooked on basuco, a highly-addictive raw form of smokeable cocaine.

It made her so paranoid that she kept a private Learjet, fueled and crewed, on continual standby.

In 1975, that precaution paid off when she learned that investigators were preparing to arrest her in what proved to be the biggest cocaine case to date in the US.

She fled to Colombia where the Black Widow, now 32, claimed another mate. Summoning husband Alberto to a meeting in a car park where she accused him of stealing millions from their operation, she pulled a pistol out of one of her ostrich skin boots and shot him repeatedly.

He managed to draw an Uzi submachine gun and shot her back, hitting her in the stomach.

He died but she survived – in one account of the incident that sounds hardly credible, grabbing his gun and mowing down his six bodyguards.

In 1978 she married third husband Dario Sepulveda, a killer with whom she had her youngest child, Michael Corleone Blanco – named, naturally, after Hollywood’s most famous mobster.

They moved to Miami – Blanco’s features by now so ravaged by cocaine abuse that US officials couldn’t recognize her from old photos.

The city was already awash in drug money but Blanco wasn’t willing to share Miami with any competitors. At the head of a squad of killers led by her enforcer and chief hitman, Jorge Ayala, she systematically eliminated her rivals.

One of her Colombian rivals was fatally stabbed with a bayonet as he got off a plane at Miami airport.

The Godmother set new standards for ruthlessness, killing people – as a US prosecutor would later say – ‘at the drop of a hat’.

In 1978 she married third husband Dario Sepulveda, a killer with whom she had her youngest child, Michael Corleone Blanco – named, naturally, after Hollywood’s most famous mobster. (Above) Griselda Blanco holding newborn Michael Corleone Blanco

Michael Corleone Blanco, the only surviving son of Griselda Blanco, in Miami in 2020

Openly bisexual, Blanco forced men and women to have sex at gunpoint and threw cocaine-fueled, anything-goes orgies in a mirrored room at her Miami mansion where her formidable German Shepherd, named ‘Hitler’, kept guard. (Above) Catherine Zeta-Jones as Blanco in Lifetime movie ‘Cocaine Godmother’

Anyone was vulnerable – including customers who didn’t pay up promptly and suppliers she didn’t feel like paying. According to Assistant US Attorney Stephen Schlessinger, people sometimes died just because ‘she didn’t like the way they looked at her’.

She was insanely jealous and once had eight strippers murdered because she suspected them of sleeping with her husband. When one of her sons was dumped by his girlfriend, she had the girl’s father killed.

Her hitmen – nicknamed Los Pistoleros and notorious for always taking a body part such as an ear or finger from a victim as a trophy – were instructed to not only kill the target but anyone in their vicinity, women and young children included.

She was livid when her thugs once shot dead a couple in their home but defied her orders and left alive their three children watching television in an adjoining room.

The Miami police were overwhelmed, not least by the gang’s terrifying arsenal and its willingness to use it without restraint.

In a particularly savage outrage in 1979, she had her assassins drive an armored, gun-filled van with the words ‘Happy Time Complete Party Supply’ on the sides to a local shopping mall where they indiscriminately opened fire with machine guns on a store.

Two rival drug dealers died and four bystanders were injured in a wild spray of bullets that earned the killers the nickname of the ‘Cocaine Cowboys’.

In Miami, the body count during these drug wars rose so steeply that the medical examiner was forced to rent a refrigerated van from a local branch of Burger King to accommodate the overflow.

‘She liked to be at war,’ Blanco’s chief enforcer Jorge Ayala would later testify. ‘Every day she’d say, ‘We’ve got to get so-and-so, we’ve got to get so-and-so.’ It was something she enjoyed.’

At the height of her power in the 1980s, her US-wide drug distribution network was earning $80 million every month from smuggling some 3,400 pounds of cocaine.

Luxury-loving Blanco spent her fortune with abandon. She bought not only the Queen’s tea set but a fleet of expensive cars and jewelry that had once belonged to Argentine politician and actress Eva Peron.

Visiting cocaine criminals would rub a bronze bust of her head at the mansion entrance for luck. Her luck.

In 1983, third husband Dario Sepulveda made the dangerous decision to leave her, heading back to Colombia where he kidnapped their son, Michael, in a custody dispute.

She had him killed, the gunmen striking as he sat in his car with Michael next to him.

The following year, facing a $4 million bounty placed on her head by one of her many enemies, the Black Widow fled to Irvine, California, where she hid away in a modest suburban bungalow.

It was there that federal agents arrested her in 1985, supposedly reading a Bible as she sat in bed because – her family unconvincingly claimed – she’d found God.

She was convicted of drugs offenses in 1986 and sentenced to 15 years.

At the height of her power in the 1980s, her US-wide drug distribution network was earning $80 million every month from smuggling some 3,400 pounds of cocaine.

‘She liked to be at war,’ Blanco’s chief enforcer Jorge Ayala would later testify. ‘Every day she’d say, ‘We’ve got to get so-and-so, we’ve got to get so-and-so.’ It was something she enjoyed.’ (Above) Griselda Blanco with her sons Michael, Osvaldo, Uber and Dixon

The ‘Born Again Christian’ continued to run her drugs empire from prison and, when one of her sons – Osvaldo was killed in a 1992 hit in Medellin, she had his killers captured, tortured and murdered.

She even dreamt up a wild scheme to kidnap John-John Kennedy, son of JFK Jr and Carolyn Bessette-Kennedy and exchange his release for her freedom.

Four hoods from Colombia were reportedly just about to abduct the boy in New York when they were spooked by a passing police car and the plot was dropped.

Then in 1994, Florida prosecutors tried to charge Blanco with three murders dating back to the early 1980s.

Unfortunately for the prosecutors, their case fell apart after secretaries working in their office allegedly had phone sex with their chief witness, Jorge Ayala.

Blanco pleaded guilty to the new charges in exchange for a reduced sentence that ran concurrently with her previous one.

In 2004, the Godmother was released and deported to Medellin where, despite predictions she’d be dead within days, she lived quietly for eight years.

But, apparently, not quietly enough to be forgotten by her enemies.

In 2012, she met a bloody end at a Medellin butcher’s, the motorbike assassin shooting her in the head in the classic hitman style she’d used so often.

Local police said there’d been no evidence she was still involved in crime.

It was, said a witness, ‘vengeance from the past’.

The full list of potential suspects hardly bears thinking about.

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