Griselda Blanco, the drug queenpin known throughout the underworld as the "Godmother of Cocaine," was gunned down in Colombia Monday (September 3) by two assassins on a motorcycles.
The 69-year-old, the subject of the popular documentary sequel to Cocaine Cowboys, fatally shot as she left a butcher's shop in western Medellin, said reports. An investigation into the slaying is currently underway.
Blanco spent nearly two decades behind bars in a U.S. prison for drug trafficking, and at one point, was suspected in as many as 40 murders. She was deported in 2004 to Colombia, where she maintained a low profile.
Former Miami homicide detective, Nelson Andreu, told the Miami Herald that he expected her to be killed much sooner. "It's surprising to all of us that she had not been killed sooner because she made a lot of enemies. When you kill so many and hurt so many people like she did, it’s only a matter of time before they find you and try to even the score."
During her reign as a drug overlord, she was once listed alongside Pablo Escobar as one of the "most notorious drug lords of the 1980s" by the Drug Enforcement Administration.
Blanco was in the slums of Medellin, where she began her criminal career as a pickpocket, eventually commanding an empire that reportedly shipped 3,400 pounds of cocaine per month, by boat and plane. She was considered a Colombian pioneer in drug smuggling to the United States, a precursor to the larger cartels that dominated in the 1980s.
