On this day back in 1943 we saw the birth of the Black Widow, Griselda Blanco who was the cocaine godmother of the Medellin Cartel during the 70’s and 80’s. She ruled by violence and murder which in the end would be her downfall.

She was killed in a drive-by-shooting aged 69.

On this day in 1943, one of the most feared and ruthless figures in the history of organised crime came into the world. Griselda Blanco, known variously as the Black Widow, the Godmother of Cocaine, and La Madrina, was born in Cartagena, Colombia, and would go on to build a criminal empire that at its peak rivalled anything the traditional American Mafia had ever constructed. Where figures like Lucky Luciano and Al Capone had dominated their eras through a combination of violence and business acumen, Blanco brought that same lethal formula to the cocaine trade decades later, and arguably surpassed them both in sheer brutality.

Blanco's early life was defined by poverty and hardship. She reportedly turned to pickpocketing and street crime as a child in Medellín, and by the time she was a young woman she had already developed a sharp criminal mind and a willingness to use extreme violence to achieve her ends. She married multiple times, and each of her husbands met with misfortune, which did much to cement her terrifying reputation and earn her the nickname the Black Widow. It was through the cocaine boom of the 1970s that she truly rose to prominence, becoming a key architect of the Miami drug trade before the Medellín Cartel had even formalised itself as an organisation.

Her influence over the Miami cocaine scene during the late 1970s and early 1980s was staggering. She is credited with pioneering the use of motorcycle assassins, a method that became a hallmark of cartel violence, and investigators linked her to over 200 murders. The so-called Cocaine Cowboys era of bloodshed that gripped Miami during this period was in no small part her doing. At the height of her power, she was moving enormous quantities of cocaine into the United States and accumulating vast personal wealth, estimated to have reached into the hundreds of millions of dollars.

She was eventually arrested in 1985 and served nearly two decades in American prisons on drug and murder-related charges before being deported to Colombia in 2004. On 3rd September 2012, she was shot and killed outside a butcher's shop in Medellín by a motorcycle gunman, dying at the age of 69 in the same manner of violence she had inflicted upon so many others.

Griselda Blanco's legacy is one of the most complex and chilling in the entire history of organised crime, a woman who shattered every convention of a male-dominated underworld and left a trail of destruction that shaped the modern drug trade. She remains a defining figure of the cocaine era, her story a stark reminder of the devastation that the narcotics business wrought upon an entire generation.