by Elaine Carey
For over a decade, Blanco served the Medellín cartel as a key distributor, first in New York City and then in Miami. She was the only female distributor affiliated with the cartel not related to the Ochoa family. She developed and maintained her own crime network, which distributed countless kilos of cocaine and allegedly contributed directly to the deaths of more than two hundred people. More recently, Colombian journalists have associated her activities with the rise of sicarios, young male motorcycle assassins in Colombia.87 Her alleged callousness has captivated journalists, writers, television executives, and filmmakers, inspiring the hit television series Miami Vice and the film Scarface in the United States as well as recent telenovelas in Latin America.88 Similarly, Blanco constructed her own narcodrama based on an Al Pacino character; she named her youngest son Michael Corleone.
Like Lola la Chata, who emerged in popular culture in the 1940s and 1950s, Blanco has been the muse for countless narcodramas, whether in true crime literature, documentary film, or popular magazines. She typically appears as an out-of-control, coked-out, bazooka-smoking (heroin and cocaine combined) murderess. Yet, she had a large cadre of accomplices. Miami police arrested Florida engineer Max Mermelstein on charges of smuggling cocaine on June 5, 1985. His arrest facilitated Blanco’s entry into the popular imagination, exposing one of the most successful female drug traffickers. Mermelstein told PBS’s Frontline in 2005:
I was the only American that ever sat on the council of the Medellin cartel. Living undercover and wearing disguises is necessary. There’s still an, in effect, $3 million contract on my head. I’m personally responsible for bringing 56 tons of cocaine into the United States, shipped out $300 million of their profits. I also paid out over $100 million in their expenses here in the United States. And when I decided to cooperate with the government, Escobar wanted me dead.89
Mermelstein’s testimony led to the dismantling of one of the most lucrative drug-smuggling enterprises in the hemisphere and the arrests of key members of the Ochoa family, including Pablo Escobar in Colombia and men such as Roberts and Munday in the United States. In 1990, Mermelstein’s biography, The Man Who Made It Snow, hit the bookstores, in which he told his story to Robin Moore, author of The French Connection, and the novelist Richard Smitten, who, after his work with Mermelstein, turned to the genre of true crime.90 In turn, Mermelstein served as a key witness in federal cases against his fellow traffickers, but he also provided much of the background for Smitten’s book The Godmother.
In The Man Who Made It Snow, Mermelstein explained that he became involved in drug trafficking through his wife, a Colombian native.91 Originally from Brooklyn, Mermelstein worked as a building and facilities engineer in resort hotels. While working in Puerto Rico, he met his future wife. After they married, he was introduced to many of her friends. He started smuggling her relatives, and then later other Colombians, into the United States by plane. His growing circle of Colombian friends, his fluency in Spanish, and his human smuggling business drew the attention of cocaine traffickers. A street hood from Bogotá, Rafael (Rafa) Cardona Salazar, understood that the Spanish-speaking Mermelstein could serve an important role for the Medellín cartel because of his contacts with American pilots through his human smuggling.92
In his testimony to Moore and Smitten, Mermelstein argued that his entry into the cartel did not stem from his personal greed but rather resulted from his fear of Rafa. On Christmas Day, Rafa shot another drug trafficker at a party, fled to Mermelstein’s house, and forced him to assist in disposing of the body. Although Mermelstein had grown up in a working-class neighborhood in Brooklyn, his New York toughness did not prepare him for the brutality of the men and women he encountered in Colombia. While the Ochoa family’s upper-middle-class background protected them from suspicion in the early years of the trade, they relied on men like Rafa to perform their dirty work. Rafa’s elevation of Mermelstein to an essential position in the Ochoa organization brought him into contact with Colombia’s survivors of violence, including Griselda Blanco, who became his friend and associate. Like Rafa, Blanco wore murder as a badge of honor. She did it to preserve her status in the organization.
Smitten found that Mermelstein’s true-life tales were as compelling as the best of detective crime fiction. After the publication of The Man Who Made It Snow, Smitten turned his attention to the center of the Miami drug wars, to Blanco. His work on Blanco construes the contest between the criminal (Blanco) and the police (Palombo) as a struggle between good and evil. What is missing in the sensationalist accounts of Blanco’s life is an appreciation of her ability to survive in a highly masculine and dangerous criminal environment that was rapidly changing in the 1970s due to Nixon’s newly ignited war on drugs.
The NYPD issued its first arrest warrant for Blanco in 1972. In 1975, a grand jury indictment charged her and thirty-seven others with conspiring to manufacture, import, and distribute cocaine and conspiring to import and distribute marijuana. This indictment also included charges of gun smuggling, possession of drugs, and money laundering.93 Although the indictment was issued in 1975, the court case files are extensive because many of those indicted became fugitives, and some eluded police until the 1990s. Of the thirty-eight, only fifteen were initially prosecuted.
Although the collection of materials spans two decades, members of the NYPD and the DEA identified Blanco as instrumental to and innovative within the cocaine trade by 1973. It was because of the indictment that Blanco fled to Colombia as a fugitive, using her old skills in document forgery to invent a new identity. DEA agents tracked her in Colombia for three years, confident that she could not travel to the United States.94 In this time period, Colombian law did not permit the extradition of its citizens to another country, and international law dating to the 1800s did not require Colombia to extradite.95 As a result, U.S. authorities never filed an extradition request for Blanco.
A HISTORY OF VIOLENCE, DISPLACEMENT, AND BUSINESS
On April 9, 1948, the assassination of populist Jorge Eliécer Gaitán marked the end of Colombia’s democratic stability and beginning of La violencia. Colombians experienced social disarray due to epidemic criminality, political violence, and general impunity triggered by the fighting of political factions.96 Young men took to the streets to wage war for political factions, to join guerrilla movements, or to commit crimes. Women also found themselves drawn into the violence, joining the guerrillas and engaging in social and political protests. The hostilities affected both men and women, and women found themselves to be targets of all factions. Although the violence and social upheaval led to opportunities for some women, many more women experienced these battles as victims. Scholar Donny Meertens has argued that rape became a political tool because “combatants viewed women exclusively in their status as mothers, that is as actual or potential procreators of the hated enemy.”97
In The Godmother, Smitten provides a narrative that rape was a significant event in Blanco’s life, but he does not connect it to the historical instability in Colombia. Instead, it is part of a litany of personal difficulties and traumas that molded Blanco’s later life. Her rape serves as a personal experience of violence rather than something more systemic and daunting. Smitten opens his book with two anecdotes that take place when Blanco was thirteen. The first occurred, Smitten argues, when she returned to her shack one day to find it empty except for her mother’s boyfriend, who attacked her. After the attack, Blanco went to find her mother at the place where she worked as a domestic and found her in the kitchen cleaning the floor. Upon telling her what happened, her mother got up from the floor and stared at her daughter. Smitten writes:
The first blow almost knocked her out. Her eyes were so full of tears she didn’t see it coming. It drove her all the way across the kitchen to the edge of the sink. Then her mother was flailing at her unmercifully. “You lying little puta, he would never do such a thing. It is you, you puta. You are trying to take my man away.”98
Blanco fled from her mother’s h
ouse, turned to a life of prostitution, and ultimately befriended Carlos Trujillo, a barrio hoodlum who had organized a successful human trafficking business. He specialized in creating false papers and transporting illegal immigrants from his old barrio in Medellín to the Colombian neighborhood of Jackson Heights in Queens, New York. Smitten writes that Trujillo, Blanco’s future husband, saw potential in the young girl. Blanco was beautiful, smart, quick, and a survivor. He fathered her three eldest sons and introduced her to the man who ultimately replaced him.99
Smitten employs the alleged rape, her mother’s assumed rejection, and her subsequent survival as an explanation for Blanco’s control issues and also her sociopathic tendencies. This view is repeated in Mermelstein’s autobiography and in Cocaine Cowboys and Cocaine Cowboys 2: Hustlin’ with the Godmother. Blanco’s ability to defend herself against her enemies with corresponding violence and metaphoric castration foreshadows her future use of violence against men.
From La violencia’s legacy, power frequently came through violent acts. From violence-induced societal disarray, however, economic opportunity also emerged. Blanco and Trujillo succeeded in human smuggling in part because of the violence that drove people to flee the country. Once exiled, they sought opportunity, whether legitimate or illicit. Thus, Trujillo, Blanco, and others involved in falsifying papers and trafficking people established an early network for human cargo that later evolved into the use of mules to smuggle cocaine.
Blanco, like la Chata, la Nacha, the Barragáns, and the Hernandezes, accessed power though a number of different channels. Trujillo introduced her to document forgery, which would prove to be an invaluable skill. Like la Chata’s relationship with Castro Ruiz Urquizo, who introduced her to the border, Blanco encountered men and women who had a profound impact on her life. Her informal social network served to construct a new business when Trujillo introduced her to another man involved in human smuggling, Luis Alberto Bravo. As the civil unrest in Colombia calmed, falsifying papers was not as lucrative as it had been in the past. By the early 1970s, U.S.-style discos and clubs were growing in popularity, and in those spaces cocaine was consumed. DEA crackdowns on the heroin and marijuana trade contributed to the growing demand for cocaine. Bravo grew interested in cocaine as an alternative source of revenue, although Trujillo was skeptical. Blanco and Bravo collaborated to distribute cocaine, and their business relationship turned romantic. When Trujillo found out, Smitten asserts, he badly beat her, but he died soon after of cirrhosis of the liver, leaving Blanco and Bravo to consolidate and build their emerging business in cocaine.100
Whether Smitten’s biography and analysis are completely accurate or not, Blanco and Bravo created a business that became phenomenally successful. Their experience in human trafficking ensured that they had a network of reliable Colombian workers in New York City. Essentially, they benefited from perfect timing. They were in the right place, with the right contacts, at the right time. Like the Barragáns and Hernandezes, Bravo and Blanco also had a nearly perfect partnership that endured separations, affairs, economic losses, and law enforcement. Their impact on the modern drug trade is indisputable. Colombian journalists have argued that Blanco may have mentored Pablo Escobar. In her home, she had a painting that featured her children and Escobar, as well as herself, gathered around a table.101
Because of Blanco’s ties to the Medillín cartel, her case generated substantial interest in New York City. Numerous attorneys represented the government, including Attorney General Rudolph Giuliani. For Giuliani and his later tough stance on crime and drugs as New York’s mayor from 1994 to 2001, Blanco’s case surely fit the image of the depraved and corrupt New York of the 1970s. Blanco’s wealth allowed her to assemble a formidable defense team. Frank Mandel and Nathan Diamond, Blanco’s attorneys, questioned every aspect of the case and the indictment, and even demanded that their client be granted permission to hire her own translator rather than use the one provided by the government.102 In their cross-examinations, they expertly sought to discredit the witnesses for the prosecution as paid informants who were only trying to discredit a successful businesswoman. However, the evidence against Blanco that had been compiled over ten years proved to be insurmountable for the defense.
Attorney Arthur Mercado opened the case by referring to the past:
It was in a country called Colombia. They were in a city called Medellin. Pepe was there, Alberto was there, Dona Gris was there, and they were talking about how to get merchandize from Dona Gris in Colombia to Pepe in New York where Pepe could sell it. Pepe said, “Let’s bring it in a cage,” and Dona Gris said, “Let’s bring it in bras and girdles. Pepe’s name is Jose Cabrera, They call him El Tio. Alberto’s name is Alberto Bravo, Albertico, Trapito they call him. Dona Gris’s name Griselda Blanco. They called her La madrina, the Godmother, or Dona Gris.103
Mercado explained to the jurors that this was a conspiracy case between Pepe (José Antonio Cabrera-Sarmiento), Alberto, Griselda Blanco, “and a host of others.” He argued that the jurors would hear many names, dates, and places, but that they must consider the conspiracy as a whole and Blanco’s role in it because the leaders did not carry the cocaine across borders themselves, but rather they employed others to bring cocaine into the United States, as the money from cocaine sales went back to Colombia.104
One of the first witnesses called was Charles W. Cecil Jr., a DEA agent. In Colombia, Cecil had tracked Blanco using informants.105 He contacted her attorneys in Colombia and asked for their assistance in convincing her to surrender to authorities. His attempt to reach Blanco through her attorneys proved unsuccessful, but his informants told him that Blanco had a legitimate passport under the name Ahichel Vence López, and that she continued to travel. According to court documents, Cecil attempted to get his informants to persuade her to travel to Costa Rica, where the DEA hoped they had a greater chance of extraditing her.
As in 1942, when U.S. authorities tried to lure Ignacia Jasso across the border, Blanco avoided traveling to places where she might be extradited. If she did travel, which she did often during this time, she used false documents. Stories circulated about Blanco. She was rumored to have entered the United States or to have been killed in Miami or in Medellín.106 The DEA considered such stories rumors, but their circulation had the purpose of shielding Blanco, her travels, and her ongoing business. Cecil’s investigation was part of Operation Banshee, a large-scale initiative to dismantle Bravo and Blanco’s cocaine networks.107
Despite the numerous DEA agents who testified, the prosecution’s key witness was Gloria Cabán. Cabán, whose real name was Amparo Atehortua, used more than twenty aliases while involved in petty crime and the drug trade in Colombia, Puerto Rico, and New York.108 She became Gloria Cabán when she worked at a bar called Intermezzo at Seventy-Fourth Street and Columbus Avenue in Manhattan. A patron sold her a Puerto Rican birth certificate and social security card. This allowed her to apply for a U.S. passport and travel there despite her earlier arrests and deportation. While at Intermezzo, she met Edgar Restrepo and Pepe Cabrera, part of the Bravo-Blanco organization, who sold kilos of cocaine to her boss, “Mr. Morris.” When police raided Morris’s bar and closed it for drugs, he simply opened a series of others. Cabán continued to work for Morris.109
Under oath, she testified how Morris bought kilos from Restrepo and Cabrera, which he then resold, but she also described the transnational operation. Eventually, Restrepo approached Cabán, and she began working for him. At his apartment close to LaGuardia Airport, she observed numerous cocaine purchases and also the arrival of the supply. Suitcases and shoes would be carefully broken apart, and the valuable contents weighed and bagged for sale. On one occasion, while on an outing to Rockefeller Center, Restrepo and Cabrera asked Cabán to carry money to Colombia and to give it to Bravo, Blanco, and another partner. She returned to Colombia with the cash and money orders. Cabrera, who worked as a loan officer in a bank, and Restrepo had purchased money orders at numerous banks in the city
. Cabán stated that they would visit more than ten banks in one day to purchase money orders, and these she took to Colombia.110
While on her first money courier trip to Colombia, Cabán heard and observed a conversation between Bravo, Blanco, and Cabrera about people getting caught smuggling cocaine.111 Gloria’s sister Carmen, who was in Colombia, was also recruited to become a courier.112 During this time, Gloria became the lover of Restrepo and then of Cabrera, whose wife and family lived in Colombia.113 The sisters often flew directly from Bogotá to JFK Airport in New York; other times, they flew to New York from Colombia via Puerto Rico. After a number of arrests, the Cabán sisters worked closely with the DEA to build a case against Blanco.
Other women involved included Olga Perdomo, a college-educated musician who had played for the Bogotá Philharmonic Orchestra.114 She, as well as other highly educated women, worked with Blanco. They smuggled drugs under false names and false passports, which Perdomo thought were obtained from people working in the U.S. embassy.115 She met Blanco in 1974 at the U.S. embassy via an acquaintance who worked in security. They would later meet at the embassy and then go out to have lunch or coffee at luxury hotels in the city.
In his autobiography, Max Mermelstein described how Blanco sought female friends to accompany her on shopping trips, to parties, and to beauty salons. DEA agents observed this quite early in Colombia. Blanco recruited and employed attractive young women to transport cocaine into the United States. Many of these women were fair skinned and more accomplished than her friends from her old neighborhood, Barrio Antioquia, a rough part of Medellín. Women also worked as distributors for her and Bravo in New York City. These included Lilia Parada and Gloria and Carmen Cabán. These women, who testified against Blanco, described her and Bravo’s extensive businesses and their partners. Even early in the 1970s, Blanco owned ranches and real estate in Colombia.