Griselda Blanco, a former drug lord for the Medellín Cartel and a pioneer in the Miami-based cocaine drug trade, was gunned down in Colombia by an assassin on Monday. The drug queen-pin was reportedly taken out by two gunmen on a motorcycle as she walked out of a butcher shop in her hometown of Medellin.
Blanco, 69, was dominant during the drug-related violence known as the Cocaine Cowboy Wars that plagued Miami during the 1970s and 1980s. Known as the Godmother of Cocaine, she is said to have been the matriarch of a drug network that brought an estimated $8 million worth of cocaine into the United States per month.
Blanco was arrested in 1985 in a cocaine trafficking case in New York, and she was released in 1998 to Florida authorities. She pleaded no contest in October 1998 to three counts of second-degree murder.
Blanco reportedly continued to spearhead her cocaine operation while she was in jail. Despite the fact that the Miami-Dade State Attorney's Office obtained sufficient evidence to indict her for three additional murders, the cases against her collapsed and she was released from prison and deported to Colombia in 2004.
