Women Drug Traffickers

by Elaine Carey

  Mermelstein and the men interviewed in Cocaine Cowboys—Jorge Ayala, Mickey Munday, and Jon Roberts—saw Blanco’s close female friendships, her shopping trips, and her lavish gifts to female friends as further displays of her insatiable vanity. However, she was using these women to manipulate the men in her business. By getting close to the women associated with her comrades and competitors, she gained an edge over the men. Her vanity in a sense masked her uncanny ability to read the strengths and weaknesses of the men she associated with, whether competitors or colleagues. Mermelstein noted his increasing discomfort with Blanco’s friendship with his wife, Cristina.116 Blanco also understood masculinity at its most elemental, the compulsion to protect women and children. By courting the wives and girlfriends of her lieutenants and competitors, she further inspired fear and even hatred among the men, who realized that she could eliminate their families as she had already done with those who had betrayed her.

  Before moving to Miami, Blanco and Bravo set up the “biggest Colombian narcotics organization” in the United States, but the NYPD worked to expand upon the initial arrests and close in on the bosses.117 The 1975 arrests of members of Blanco’s organization eventually implicated those at the top. Gustavo Restrepo and Lilia Parada were arrested by the NYPD; they were compared with other major drug groups, including members of the Italian mob and Harlem heroin boss Leroy “Nicky” Barnes’s organization.118 Parada was the only woman arrested.

  The NYPD described Parada as “a major importer and supplier.”119 In 1973–1974, the NYPD placed her under surveillance and wiretapped her phones; it was the wiretaps that led police to Blanco and Bravo. In those conversations, Parada and her coconspirators talked about what appeared to be mundane subjects such as laundry, chores, and home life. They discussed dropping off shirts and skirts at the dry cleaner’s or picking up their children. The “children,” it turned out, were one-eighth-kilo packets of cocaine. The wiretaps captured Parada talking to her children while arranging deliveries of “children.” “Beautiful children with good bones” referred to high-quality pure cocaine with crystal rocks.120 The NYPD also learned that the cocaine entering New York City came from a number of locations. Most often it was flown into Kennedy Airport, but one of the coconspirators, “Ruben” drove to the U.S.-Mexico border and smuggled the cocaine into the United States in small statuettes each stuffed with half a kilo. He would then drive to New York City. From the wiretaps, it appears that the Colombians operating in New York in the early 1970s were already working with Mexican drug organizations to move cocaine.121

  Police officer Frank Iturralde recorded and transcribed the conversations of Parada and five other Colombians. Of Spanish decent and educated in Puerto Rico, he was a new recruit who was brought into the huge narcotics case because he was bilingual.122 Dalays Rossi translated the recordings into English. She and Iturralde noted that the Colombians never used their true names, and they used coded language. Rossi, an interpreter for the state supreme court in Manhattan and the Bronx, testified: “I have also come across other types of Pig Latin, syllables, which were used during conversations by participants.”123 The Colombians inserted “cun” rather than English Pig Latin’s “chi” to create nonsense words. In cross-examination of Rossi, one of Blanco’s defense attorneys asked how she could correctly translate nonsense. Rossi assured the court that, just as a native English speaker can immediately pick out alterations in the language, so too, could a native Spanish speaker when the same practice occurs in Spanish. Blanco’s defense attorneys forced both witnesses to confirm that Blanco’s voice was never heard on the wiretaps.

  Like other female drug bosses, Blanco created distance between herself and the actual distribution and sale of her drugs. She had contact with countless women who worked for her, and ultimately they assisted in her prosecution. Parada’s and the Cabán sisters’ experiences show the diversity of roles women play in contemporary drug organizations. Parada was a New York distributor for Bravo and Blanco. The Cabán sisters and many other women ran stash houses and worked as mules, couriers, processors, and local transporters. The NYPD detectives soon realized that the people they had under surveillance in New York City were connected to a far more sophisticated global network, and the newly formed DEA pursued Blanco and Bravo.124 The Cabán sisters cooperated with the police after they were arrested in 1973. Amparo and Gilman Atehortua, the real identities of the Cabán sisters, both received seven-year prison sentences. Gilman (Carmen) initially told her sister that she planned to cooperate with the police because she had children whom she wished to see.125 As Blanco’s attorney Nathan Diamond demonstrated, Amparo and Gilman appeared to be paid informants who had offered assistance because of their involvement in drugs through the early 1970s.126

  DEA agent Heather Campbell confirmed that Amparo and Gilman’s family members received visas, and that Amparo (Gloria, the key informant) received approximately $3,300 (2012: $7,000) a month in 1985 from the DEA for lodging, food, and other expenses.127 Despite Diamond’s efforts to portray the Atehortua sisters as paid informants who created a false case against a prominent Colombian businesswoman, Blanco was found guilty of crimes in New York. She was sentenced to fifteen years and fined twenty-five thousand dollars.128 After her conviction, Miami district attorneys also hoped to prosecute Blanco for murder, but the case was plagued with problems.

  MASCULINE BRAVADO VIA THE GODMOTHER

  Blanco’s career and her reemergence in popular culture offers a vehicle to consider representations of crime with a historian’s more skeptical approach. Blanco’s New York City court documents show a complex illicit business enterprise that employed many people. Her reappearance in popular culture came in the documentary film Cocaine Cowboys, which juxtaposed interviews with news reports and images. In the film and the true crime biographies, Mermelstein, Smitten, and Rivi claimed that her heavy drug use and bisexuality were indicators of her decline into insanity.129 Although her success in drug trafficking rivaled that of many men, her former colleagues ascribed Blanco’s drug addiction and sexuality as signs of her weakness, vulgarity, and hysteria. To the DEA and NYPD, however, she was a force to be reckoned with for many years. The DEA agents and NYPD detectives had a difficult time understanding her organization, and their testimonies bordered on showing respect. Charles Cecil, Bob Palombo, and others spent years unraveling an illicit transnational enterprise that operated in three countries. Their careful work, however, seemed futile once the case reached Miami. There, film director Billy Corben found a story that he could relish.

  Blanco’s story is retold in Corben’s Cocaine Cowboys documentaries. In the second film, Hustlin’ with the Godmother, the documentary style gives way to greater sensationalism. Murderous confrontations are in black-and-white graphic comic in a single-shot format, except when characters fire semiautomatic weapons and bodies fall mutilated, splashing red blood. Female characters have chiseled facial features, cinched waists, and enormous breasts. In these depictions, Blanco appears more masculine and svelte rather than as the stylish, chubby, middle-aged woman she was.

  The added animated sequences, in the style of graphic novels, and the sounds of South Florida rappers Trick Daddy and Pitbull in Hustlin’ with the Godmother serve to heighten Blanco’s “gangsta” hagiography. In 1985, Charles Cosby, a street dealer in Oakland, California, watched the news about Blanco’s arrest. As he describes it, Blanco mesmerized him due to the amount of cocaine she trafficked and her power. He wrote a fan letter to her and ultimately became a prison groupie. In his autobiography, available online, he writes: “Throughout my life, I’ve always been an opportunist, what better opportunity than to fuck with Griselda Blanco. . . . [One] could call it groupie or whatever, no muthafucka in his right mind is gonna wanna pass up that chance.”130 He wrote to her, she replied, and they began a courtship. He recalls: “We developed a bond from the very first phone call. Griselda was like John Gotti, receiving mail from all over the world. I was the only person she ever wrote bac
k.”131

  They allegedly became lovers, and Cosby reported paying the prison guards $1,500 for each sexual encounter. However, he also worked for her and her sons as a distributor. As he tells it, Blanco’s network enriched him, and she elevated him to a high position, which no other African American man held in her organization. He continued to work for Griselda until her legal situation spiraled further out of control. After her trial in New York, she was to be tried for her crimes in Miami. In building a murder case against her that could lead to the death penalty, the DEA and the district attorney’s office in Florida offered Rivi Ayala, her enforcer, a deal of life in prison rather than the death penalty for his crimes if he testified against her. Once Blanco knew that Rivi had cut a deal, she was desperate to return to Colombia, where her sons had been deported, as Cosby describes. She turned to Cosby to help her kidnap John F. Kennedy Jr. in 1994 in order to hold him for ransom in exchange for her release and passage to Colombia. Despite his devotion to Blanco, Cosby was now working with law enforcement and agreed to wear a wire in his prison conversations with her.

  Blanco never stood trial for murder because Rivi engaged in phone sex with the secretaries in the district attorney’s office in Miami, thus tainting the case. Cosby alleged that he, too, had sex with one of the secretaries when he went to a deposition in Miami in 1997. Because of the sexual relationships between Rivi and members of the office staff, Blanco served her New York City sentence until 2004, when she was deported to Colombia. Corben closes Hustlin’ with the Godmother with a photograph of Blanco taken in 2007. The men’s magazine Maxim republished that image along with a story about Blanco:

  The woman in the photo hardly resembles the Black Widow of legend. By all accounts Blanco has been out of the cocaine business for more than a decade and is living a quiet existence in Bogotá. Without her makeup, hair dye, or designer clothes, at 65 the Godmother looks more like a Grandmother these days. But the eyes remain cold and in looking at them one can’t forget that this is a woman allegedly responsible for more than 200 murders, who rose from the slums of Bogotá to the pinnacle of the crime world, who killed three husbands, and sacrificed three sons to her limitless ambition. And on her face as she gazes into the camera, is that trademark smirk, which seems to gloat: I played the game, and I’m still here. That means I won.132

  What Maxim neglected to address is that Blanco continues to make money for men whether in true crime publications or documentary films, or simply by association. While they assert their control over her in interviews, she was the vessel for their performative gangster masculinity whether as hotshot pilots, multimillionaire entrepreneurs, true crime writers, or drug gangsters. To Cosby as street dealer turned gangsta with a Colombian network, to Rivi who uses his insider knowledge to save himself from the death penalty, to Mermelstein, Smitten, and Corben who have a great story to exploit, and even to her son Michael Corleone who uses the family name to promote his music label in Colombia and Miami, Blanco is a remarkable muse who “made” all the men who survived her.133

  William Burroughs created a fictional Lola la Chata so he could imagine what it would be like to assume her power. Neither Cosby, Rivi, nor Mermelstein ever usurped Blanco’s power. What strikingly differs between Burroughs and Blanco’s former employees is that Burroughs created a fictionalized fantasy world to portray la Chata’s drug empire, while the men featured in Cocaine Cowboys created parallel narconarratives to shift the focus to themselves and away from their boss, whom they feared.

  Had Corben followed Blanco’s life to the bitter end, it would not have been a fascinating masculine epic set to a hip-hop soundtrack but rather a feminized story. Her life did not end in a blaze of bullets between her gang and the DEA or Colombian police, like her old associate Pablo Escobar. Instead, she lived a quiet life of retirement in a lavish neighborhood in Medellín. She routinely passed the afternoons sipping coffee and visiting her friends in her old barrio. Two of her children were dead, one she did not raise, and her eldest son became an addict. In her final years, she turned to performing good works for her neighbors and family members in Barrio Antioquia, like many good Catholic women as well as her neighborhood friend Pablo Escobar. Neighbors and friends remembered a ladylike elderly woman who did not swear and who maintained a circle of friends who were well aware of her past.134 She lived a quiet life in a comfortable house, surrounded by portraits of her younger self and commissioned paintings. After her murder, her well-attended mass was followed by her burial.135 In her lavish neighborhood of El Poblado, her neighbors observed her old friends from Barrio Antioquia who drank aguardiente and sent her off with wails of grief.136

  The 1975 New York Times article “No Antiwoman Job Bias in the Narcotics Trade” misrepresented women in drug trafficking and organized crime by arguing that Latin American women were somehow unique in organized crime and drug trafficking. Perpetuating the gendered images of women found in Mario Puzo’s novel and Francis Ford Coppola’s film of the same name, The Godfather, a journalist wrote: “Unlike Mafia wives who avoid involvement in their husband’s racket, Latin women often work closely with their men in narcotics traffic.”137

  It is true that women worked closely with their lovers, partners, and fathers in the drug trade, but they also created and worked within sophisticated organized crime networks in which they were not intimately involved with men. Where women had few options for employment or encountered obstacles to legitimate business ownership, they used the distribution of drugs as a vehicle for socioeconomic advancement. Journalists often ignored the complexity and continuity of women’s roles, whether as equal partners with their husbands or as high-ranking distributors and suppliers in global trafficking organizations.

  In the 1970s, women such as Helen Hernandez, Yolanda Sarmiento, and Griselda Blanco operated as suppliers. They were not street vendors, peddlers, or dealers. They ensured their own safety and wealth by maintaining a distance between themselves and their sales, and their work as suppliers led them to embrace new forms of technology. All of them added new methods and innovations to the trafficking of drugs. They relied on men and women to work for them and with them in their pursuit of profit. Whether using picture frames, wine bottles, undergarments, false-bottom suitcases, or human mules; whether working with existing banking laws or manipulating them; all the women demonstrated that constant shifts in government policies must be followed by further innovations in their own businesses.

  Sarmiento and Blanco operated in New York City in the 1970s. They lived fairly comfortable lives, although fraught with danger. They had nice apartments whether in New York, Colombia, or Argentina; substantial bank accounts; and legitimate, although falsified, passports that permitted them to travel about the hemisphere. NYPD narcotics agent Kathy Burke argued that, in her experience, women in their position were rare. Global conspiracy cases fell under the domain of federal agencies such as the DEA. Burke experienced the local trappings of the drug trade, and she suggested that the drug life of women in New York City in the 1970s was far from glamorous. It was a cycle of poverty, prostitution, and violence.138 That poverty and violence had developed into a fifty-billion-dollar industry by 1985, and it continues to grow, affecting the lives of more women and their families far beyond the era of Hernandez, Sarmiento, and Blanco.139 All three served as architects of the modern drug trade and played significant roles in organizations that were supposed to be the exclusive domains of men. Like their predecessors and successors, they found a space in a male industry, an industry that for decades accepted women as lovers, mules, couriers, partners, and bosses.

  CONCLUSION

  GANGSTERS, NARCS, AND WOMEN

  A Secret History

  IN 2003, THIS PROJECT TOOK FORM WITH A SIMPLE QUESTION: IF women dominate the informal (secondary) labor market, why are they missing from most historical studies on drug peddling and trafficking? By researching from this perspective, I uncovered countless women who have operated at transnational levels throughout the Americas si
nce the passage of the 1914 Harrison Narcotics Tax Act in the United States, which marked the beginning of the modern drug war. Those few scholars who work on the history of narcotics have long recognized the roles of women in the illegal business, but usually as burros or mules who are portrayed as tangential rather than central to the trade. Recently, popular culture and news accounts have served as the primary evidence to document the rise of las narcas such as the Mexican María “Chata” León and U.S. customs agent Martha Garnica.

  Dubbed the gangster matriarch, León built an empire that included both human and drug trafficking.1 An undocumented immigrant from the state of Guerrero, León led a family business with ties to the Mexican Mafia. She settled on Drew Street in Los Angeles, a neighborhood of California bungalows and low-rise apartments, There, she raised her family of thirteen children, some of whom also entered the drug trade.2 León, like la Chata and la Nacha, was in and out of prison, and Los Angeles police monitored her house and her neighborhood as a central site of drug distribution, particularly crack cocaine.3 Her case triggered public declarations that she and her family contributed to the moral decline of Los Angeles without considering the demand that ensured she always had a market.4

  In the case of Garnica, also known as la Estrella (the Star), Washington Post journalists fueled public fear north of the Rio Grande by demonstrating that the lure of the drug trade even influenced U.S. agents.5 Garnica had been an El Paso police officer who transferred to U.S. Customs and Border Protection. Once at Customs, it appeared that she knowingly allowed massive amounts of marijuana to pass into the United States. Like Sandra Ávila Beltrán, Garnica was characterized by journalists on both sides of the border as sexually insatiable, with a similar appetite for the good life. Ávila Beltrán, la Reina, sashayed into her arrest wearing tight designer jeans and demanding time to fix her hair and makeup for her mug shots. Before her arrest, customs agent la Estrella, “a brassy looker,” appeared to live above her means, donning designer clothes, vacationing in Europe, and driving a Hummer, all on her modest civil servant’s salary.