Griselda Blanco, Original Cocaine Kingpin With SoCal Ties, Assassinated in Colombia
Griselda Blanco, the cocaine queen who plied her trade in Southern California in the early 1980s, was fatally gunned down in her native Colombia yesterday.
Cocaine Cowboys 2 / YouTube Blanco.
You're probably asking, What took so long?
Blanco was one of the most murderous drug kingpin's in recorded history, having turned Miami into a city of blood in the late '70s and early '80s before coming to Orange County:
According to our sister paper, OC Weekly, she didn't stay long:
Blanco's entrée into Orange County's coke scene was short-lived ... The U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) caught up with her in 1985, arrested her at her house in Irvine and sent her back to Florida to face drug-smuggling charges. She spent the next 20 years in prison before being released in 2004 and deported to Colombia, where she promptly disappeared.
After that there was much speculation and expectation she would turn up dead. She seemed to cross everyone in the drug trade in her bloody rise to the top, killing even her own husband, according to lore. As many as 250 deaths have been attributed to her reign.
At one point in her Miami days Blanco was turning $8 million a month worth of cocaine. Her operations cost dozens if not hundreds their lives.
The era she ruled inspired television's Miami Vice. Her power and control dwarfed that of Pablo Escobar. Maxim magazine, in 2008:
... When Escobar met Blanco in Miami in the late 1970s he was just a lowly car thief ...
Blanco, immortalized in the documentaries about Miami's drug trade, Cocaine Cowboys and Cocaine Cowboys 2, was gunned down yesterday in her hometown of Medellin, according to El Colombiano newspaper (translation).
The publication says she took two rounds to the head.
The Miami Herald says she was fatally shot "by a motorcycle-riding assassin."
[@dennisjromero / djromero@laweekly.com / @LAWeeklyNews]
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