How I caught the cocaine godmother — as she read her bible
The Netflix series starring Sofia Vergara needs no embellishment — this gangster’s bloodlust and Bible habit speak for themselves.
Robert Palombo had spent 11 years hunting a drugs kingpin who had brought carnage to south Florida during the blood-soaked cocaine wars of the 1980s.
Finally, after more than a decade of tireless work, the retired Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) agent had closed the net on his target and climbed the stairs of a well-to-do townhouse in southern California.
When he opened the door to the master bedroom, however, Palombo was not confronted with a Tony Montana-like gangster wielding an automatic weapon but a startled housewife reading the Bible.
“My name is Betty,” the woman muttered in Spanish. But she was surrounded by clues to her true identity, including a forged passport on the nightstand and a .38-caliber revolver.
Griselda Blanco, better known as the Cocaine Godmother or the Black Widow, had finally been caught, ending the career of a kingpin accused of ordering scores of murders, including the killings of three of her husbands.
Exhilarated, Palombo gave Blanco a kiss before taking her into custody.
Now Blanco’s story is being told in a Netflix six-part series, with the Colombian-American actress Sofia Vergara in the lead role.
Griselda, from the producers of the hit show Narcos, focuses on the late Seventies and Eighties when Blanco had moved to Miami from her native Colombia.
While Hollywood has a tendency to exaggerate, in this case the source material requires no embellishment.
“There was no doubt that she had a blood lust, she loved killing and she personally killed on a number of occasions,” Palombo, now 77 and living in Florida, said.
“She dispatched her shooters at will to kill people that she owed money to or that owed her money and were slow to pay.”
Blanco served nearly 20 years behind bars in the US for drug-trafficking and three drug-related killings before being deported to Colombia in 2004. Her retirement lasted longer than many expected. She spent years in Colombia before her enemies caught up with her.
In September 2012 she was leaving a butcher’s in Medellin when two assassins pulled alongside her on a motorcycle. The killer shot Blanco twice, ending one of the most murderous careers the drugs trade has known.
Palombo noted the “poetic justice” that Blanco, who had ordered an untold number of murders by motorcycle-riding pistoleros, was herself gunned down in a drive-by.
Filmmakers feared that public appetite for the Cocaine Godmother’s story would be diminished by her death, but Palombo disagreed. “If people went to a movie they’d wonder, ‘How could she do all she did for all those years, and get away with it?’ Well, now she didn’t.”
The Sunday Times