The Fact and Fiction of Griselda’s Violent Reign

The catalogue of infamous drug lords is as male-dominated as the entertainment genre devoted to them, but there was one woman who had to be savvier, more ambitious, and more ruthless than all of them to reach the very top of their ranks: Griselda Blanco. Netflix’s Griselda — not a spinoff but still part of the Narcos family — tells the story of how Blanco came to dominate the cocaine trade in Miami in the late 1970s and ’80s, amassing a personal fortune in the eight-figure range and a reputation for indiscriminate brutality.

Griselda attempts to humanize a figure best remembered for her propensity for violence, and so Sofia Vergara’s Griselda Blanco begins as just one woman who dared to reach for it all: the big house, the handsome husband, four healthy sons, a monopoly on Miami’s cocaine trade, the terrified awe of business rivals. But at the height of her power, Griselda is undone by a trio of personal demons: addiction, hubris, and paranoia.

And how does the real-life Griselda Blanco measure up to this portrayal? Blanco has become such a mythic figure that the line separating fact from fiction soon becomes extremely murky. Unfortunately, Blanco really was gunned down in Colombia in 2012, as the title card at the end of the series says, so we can’t ask her directly. (There is her surviving son, Michael, but he says he was not consulted for the Netflix series and is now suing Vergara and Netflix.) So, we can’t tell you what was in Blanco’s mind as she rose up the drug-lord ranks, but we can tell you that the picture you get from her nonfiction life story is somewhat less flattering than the one in Griselda. Here’s how the historical record lines up with the series’ take on the Black Widow.

Did she really kill her husband?

In fact, she is suspected to have killed at least two of her husbands. Blanco is also alleged to have ordered the murder of her first husband and the father of her three eldest boys, Carlos Trujillo, in the early ’70s over a business dispute.

The Netflix series suggests that Griselda killed her second husband, Alberto Bravo, because he forced her to have sex with his brother, their boss, in exchange for canceling their debt. This incident compels Griselda to flee to the United States, where she starts her cocaine empire from scratch. In real life, however, it seems that Blanco and Bravo were already major players in Colombia’s cocaine smuggling underworld by that time, and I haven’t seen any evidence that Bravo forced Blanco to have sex with his brother.

Rather, Blanco suspected Bravo of being responsible for millions of missing profits from their smuggling cartel and so confronted him in a nightclub parking lot. She pulled out a pistol and opened fire, while he responded by firing a Uzi. Bravo and six bodyguards were left dead; Blanco was left with a minor wound to the stomach and full control of their cocaine-smuggling empire.

Did the party on the boat really happen?

After being repeatedly stymied by Miami’s reigning (all-male) drug lords, in the second episode, Griselda decides to create her own turf, selling to wealthy white people. She deploys her cadre of attractive female smugglers to give out samples at country clubs, expensive gyms, golf courses, and so on. Her plan culminates in an orgiastic bacchanal on a rented yacht, which helps her woo big-time coke supplier German Panesso into partnering up with her.

Such a party may have happened (Blanco loved an orgy), but her major innovation was not tapping into the “rich white asshole” market as depicted on the show. Her biggest and most enduring contribution to the underworld was to use motorcycles for drive-by shoot-outs — a technique that is still widely used today.

The show does seem to have gotten some of Blanco’s clever ideas right. She did manufacture her own lingerie with pockets sewn into the linings for drug-smuggling purposes, correctly assuming that attractive women would attract less suspicion than men.

The orgies, though … were they real, and if so, were they seriously that dark?

It seems so. There are lots of citations supporting the fact that Blanco loved to host absolutely bonkers, drug-fueled orgies. And yes, the forcing-folks-to-have-sex-at-gunpoint incident appears to have happened at least once. For whatever reason, the Netflix series did not include the detail of Blanco keeping a guard dog named Hitler.

How brutal was she, really?

There’s no getting around the fact that Griselda Blanco killed a lot of people. Most sources claim she’s responsible for somewhere between 40 and 250 murders. In the show, murder doesn’t come easily to Griselda at first. She is plagued by guilt for ordering a hit on a pair of state witnesses, and she can’t bring herself to cut the throat of a man who beheaded her best friend. She only turns to mass murder when she can’t get the Narco Boys’ Club to take her seriously any other way.

In real life, Blanco is alleged to have committed her first murder when she was still a child. According to the story, Blanco and her friends kidnapped a wealthy neighborhood family’s young son and attempted to ransom him. But when the adults didn’t take the kidnapping seriously, Blanco, then only 11 years old, shot the boy in the head.

What about the killings we do see in the show; did they really happen?

In the series, Griselda retaliates against German Panesso’s betrayal by having him killed as he and one other man shop for liquor at a strip mall. It’s not clear what real-life Blanco’s motivation was, but in 1979, just like in the show, three of Blanco’s soldiers drove a van with the words “happy time complete party supply” written on the side to a mall and opened fire on a liquor store where Panesso and an associate were shopping. Panesso and the associate were killed and two others were injured. The event became known as the Dadeland Mall Massacre.

Likewise, it seems that Griselda got the accidental murder of Chucho’s toddler son mostly correct. Griselda is portrayed to be at the height of her drug addiction and paranoia when she orders Chucho killed for failing to take the blame for a murder her son committed. Rivi pulls up next to Chucho’s car and shoots, missing his target but killing the 2-year-old boy in the backseat.

In real life, 2-year-old Johnny Castro was indeed killed when Jorge “Rivi” Ayala and his henchmen were aiming for his father on Blanco’s orders. It was one of the three murders Blanco actually faced charges for, over a decade later when she was serving prison time for drug charges. The charges were brought, and eventually fell apart, thanks to the same man: Rivi himself.

And speaking of Rivi …

Rivi, Griselda’s rival turned right-hand hitman turned informant, is an important character in Griselda. In the show, he is depicted as instrumental in fueling Griselda’s bloodlust and paranoia, but by the end of the series has agreed to testify against her rather than face the death penalty.

As it turns out, the show got a lot of his story right. Yes, including the part where he has phone sex with DA assistants while in prison, thus damaging his credibility as a witness against Blanco. According to CBS News, Jorge Ayala’s lawyer argued that the phone-sex scandal damaged his ability to get fair treatment even decades later. “Because supposedly he made some phone calls or had some phone-sex conversations with some state attorney’s secretaries, now all of a sudden they can say, ‘Well, you messed it up. You blew the agreement.’ You know everybody needs to get over that,” his attorney Jim Lewis said in 2013 after Ayala was denied an evidentiary hearing for parole. Ayala is currently still serving a life sentence.

What other real-life figures show up in Griselda?

• June Hawkins and Raul Diaz were both real Miami cops who worked to take down Griselda Blanco in the 1980s. When Blanco’s story was made into a play in 2019, Diaz attended the opening and told Miami New Drama, “It was well put together and very accurate. Brought back a lot of memories of those days … A lot of good and bad memories. They portrayed Rivi and Griselda very well. Rivi was like that. Is like that.” Hawkins, meanwhile, was a series consultant for Griselda.

• Papo was based on Blanco’s real-life rival, Papo Mejia. In the show, Griselda sends an assassin to cut off Papo’s head, but if you can believe it, the real-life assassination may have been even grislier. Billy Corben, the director of a documentary about Blanco called Cocaine Cowboys, told NPR that Blanco’s assassin, equipped with a vintage bayonet from World War II, was sent to stab Papo “like a pig” in the middle of Miami International Airport, which he dutifully did.

• Fabio and Jorge Ochoa, leaders of the powerful Medellin cartel, were absolutely real people who’ve been featured as starring characters in biopics of their own, including Narcos. This series depicts them as, alternately, Griselda’s most dangerous enemies and her most valuable allies, and they eventually drive her to flee Miami.

Blanco did flee Miami at some point, but it wasn’t because the Ochoas were after her. It was her second husband Alberto Bravo’s nephew Jaime who wanted to kill her. Former DEA agent Bob Palombo told Maxim that after learning of his uncle’s murder, Jaime became hell-bent on revenge. “Jaime and two gunmen he’d imported from Colombia would go to the malls where Griselda spent time shopping and just wait for her,” he said. But Palombo’s team of DEA agents got her first.

What about Griselda’s friends?

If Carmen — the character who put Griselda up when she first arrived and later laundered her money through her travel agency — or Isabela — Griselda’s best friend and partner in every meaningful sense — really existed, I haven’t been able to find any evidence of them. I also haven’t found any reference to Griselda Blanco accidentally killing Jorge Ochoa’s girlfriend, but, to be honest, keeping track of Blanco’s alleged murders is very difficult. For instance, she is also alleged to have murdered eight strippers she accused of sleeping with her third husband, Dario Sepulveda.

Does that mean Dario was real, too?

He sure was. Dario Sepulveda and Blanco may or may not have first met when he refused to carry out his orders to murder her and killed his boss instead, as happens in Griselda. But we know that they got married in 1978 and that they eventually got into a custody dispute over Michael. Per Miami New Times, Sepulveda took young Michael Corleone to Colombia with him, where he hoped they would be safe. Unfortunately, Sepulveda was found and shot dead, and Michael was returned to Blanco.

Michael Corleone Blanco … is that his real name?

Yes, she really did name him that.