Griselda Blanco was a Colombian-born trafficker who ran a large narcotics organization out of Miami in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Her criminal record is much narrower than her reputation. In July 1985 a federal jury in New York convicted her of conspiring to manufacture, import and distribute narcotics, and she was sentenced to 15 years. In October 1998, in the Miami-Dade County courts, she pleaded no contest to three counts of second-degree murder, covering the deaths of Johnny Castro, a boy of two, and of Alfredo and Grizel Lorenzo in 1982, and received concurrent sentences that are given as 20 years.
Police and prosecutors attributed many more deaths to her. Detectives put the figure at 40 or more, other estimates ran to 75, 100, 150 and 250, and none of the additional deaths led to a charge or a conviction. The Florida case itself nearly failed when its main witness was found to have had improper personal contact with staff of the prosecutor's office, and the plea that ended it was negotiated by prosecutors brought in from another part of the state. She was deported to Colombia in June 2004. On September 3, 2012, she was killed in Medellín. She was 69.
Blanco was born on February 15, 1943, on Colombia's Caribbean coast, and grew up poor in Medellín. By the early 1970s she was living in Queens, New York, where she and a partner built a business moving narcotics into the United States.
On April 30, 1975, a grand jury in the Southern District of New York returned an indictment against Blanco and 37 other people, charging a conspiracy to manufacture, import into the United States and distribute a controlled drug. A warrant for her followed in May 1975. By then she was in Colombia, and she stayed out of reach of the New York court for a decade. Twelve of the other conspirators had been convicted by January 1976, and two more had pleaded guilty. The case against Blanco herself waited until she was found.
In the late 1970s Blanco established herself in Miami. The scale of her business there is known only through estimates. Police said she brought thousands of kilograms of narcotics into South Florida, put the flow at about 3,400 pounds a month, and described an organization worth hundreds of millions of dollars. One profile puts her fortune at $500 million. These are the figures of investigators and journalists, not of a court.
Her name was tied to the violence of those years. On July 11, 1979, two men were killed in Miami in a case that detectives connected to her organization. She was never charged over it. Nelson Andreu, a Metro-Dade detective who worked the cases against her and later became police chief of West Miami, estimated that she was responsible for between 75 and 150 killings. Colombian officials went further and said they suspected her of ordering at least 250 killings in Colombia.
Miami's homicide rate was under 35 per 100,000 residents in 1976 and 175 per 100,000 in 1981. In 1984 Blanco left Miami and moved to southern California.
Drug Enforcement Administration agents arrested her in Irvine, California, in February 1985. The arrest was made on the New York indictment of ten years earlier, and she was taken to New York to face it. The agent who had followed her case since the 1970s, Robert Palombo, said later that the sentence she eventually received was too lenient and that she should have been given at least 35 years.
The jury trial began on June 25, 1985, before Judge John Cannella, and ended on July 9, 1985, with a guilty verdict on one count of conspiracy. She was sentenced to 15 years in prison and fined $25,000.
Blanco appealed. Her principal argument was that the ten years between indictment and arrest had violated her right to a speedy trial under the Sixth Amendment, under Rule 48(b) of the Federal Rules of Criminal Procedure and under the Second Circuit's own rules, and that the indictment should be dismissed. She also argued that the trial judge's evidence rulings, including a limit on her lawyers' cross-examination of government witnesses, had denied her a fair trial.
The Second Circuit heard argument on June 17, 1988, and decided the appeal on November 10, 1988, in an opinion by Judge Pierce, with Judges Oakes and Meskill on the panel. It affirmed the conviction. The court accepted that a delay of more than ten years was presumptively prejudicial, but it found that Blanco, not the government, had caused most of it. The government had made diligent efforts to locate her, extradition from Colombia had been futile both before and after the 1982 extradition treaty, and the government had no right to seize her in Colombia without Colombia's consent. Her late assertion of the right and her claims of prejudice did not change the outcome, and the ruling on cross-examination was within the trial judge's discretion.
While she was serving the federal sentence, Miami-Dade County prosecutors brought murder charges against her. The charges came in 1994, after Jorge Ayala, a former member of her organization, agreed to testify. Ayala was serving a life sentence for three Dade County murders, and he had agreed in 1993 to cooperate with the State Attorney's Office in return for avoiding a death sentence. Prosecutors then sought the death penalty against Blanco.
The charges concerned killings in 1982. Blanco and a co-defendant were charged with first-degree murder in the death of Johnny Castro. A second case was brought over the deaths of Alfredo and Grizel Lorenzo.
Johnny Castro was two years old. He died in Miami in February 1982. Blanco and a co-defendant were charged with first-degree murder in his death, with other charges.
Alfredo Lorenzo and Grizel Lorenzo died in Miami-Dade County in 1982. A separate prosecution was brought over their deaths, and it rested on the same witness as the case concerning the child.
The case in Miami-Dade County depended on Ayala. No physical evidence supported his account. The prosecutors on the case, led by Assistant State Attorney Catherine Vogel with Metro-Dade detective Al Singleton, kept him cooperative with privileges that included extensive telephone access.
It was through the telephone that the case came apart. Ayala developed close personal relationships with several secretaries in the major-crimes unit of the State Attorney's Office. They exchanged gifts, and he sent money to one of them. Governor Lawton Chiles ordered an outside inquiry by the Fort Myers State Attorney's Office, and the secretaries were dismissed. The governor also issued an executive order removing the lead prosecutor from the case, and the State Attorney's Office in Orlando took it over.
The Orlando prosecutors concluded that Ayala's relationships had compromised the case. Andreu, the detective, said afterward that it went from being a good case to nothing. Jeff Ashton, a prosecutor in the Orlando office, then negotiated a deal with Blanco and with her co-defendant in the Castro case, a man who was already serving a sentence for another murder.
In October 1998 Blanco pleaded no contest to three counts of second-degree murder, the three killings in which Ayala had implicated her. She received three concurrent sentences, given as 20 years. She had been serving the federal term when she entered the plea, and she was released from federal custody to Florida authorities. With the time she had already served, the arrangement meant she would be out in about seven years.
A no-contest plea carries a conviction and a sentence in the same way a guilty plea does. No trial took place, and the evidence against her was never tested before a jury.
She served the Florida sentence in state custody. She was released in June 2004 and deported to Colombia, where she settled in Medellín. The deportation ended close to twenty years in United States custody.
In Medellín Blanco lived quietly. She had no criminal record in Colombia after her return and no charges pending against her there, and the city's police said they had no indication that she was still involved in crime. She was by then in her sixties.
Griselda Blanco was killed in Medellín on Monday, September 3, 2012. She was 69. Police in the city announced her death the next day. Colonel Mauricio Cartagena of the Medellín metropolitan police said that investigators had not identified a firm motive and that the first line of inquiry was revenge or a settling of accounts connected with her past.
No arrest or charge in connection with her killing has been announced. Andreu, who had investigated her in Miami, said after her death that it was surprising she had not been killed sooner, because she had made a lot of enemies.
Two features of the case explain why it took so long. The first was extradition. The Second Circuit found that, throughout the decade after her indictment, there was no workable way to bring her to New York from Colombia. The extradition treaty that took effect in 1982 did not change that, and the government could not take her from Colombian soil without that country's consent. She was arrested only after she moved to California.
The second was the nature of the Miami evidence. The killings of 1982 were charged twelve years later and rested on a single witness, who had himself been convicted of murder and who had made a bargain to avoid the death penalty. When his dealings with the prosecutor's office came to light, the state could not carry the case, and a plea to three murders took the place of a trial.
The number of deaths. Police and prosecutors put the deaths connected to her at 40 or more in the United States, and Colombian officials suspected her of ordering at least 250 in Colombia. None of the deaths beyond the three covered by the plea led to a charge, and the Miami-Dade case ended with those three counts alone.
The plea. Most contemporary reports describe the plea of October 1998 as a plea of no contest; some later accounts call it a plea of guilty. Either way it carried a conviction. The evidence of the state's only witness was never tested before a jury, and the plea was negotiated after his dealings with the prosecutor's office had damaged the case.
February 15, 1943: Born on Colombia's Caribbean coast.
April 30, 1975: Indicted in the Southern District of New York with 37 others on a drug conspiracy count.
May 1975: Warrant issued; she is in Colombia.
Late 1970s: Establishes herself in Miami.
July 11, 1979: Two men are killed in Miami in a case that police connected to her organization; no charge.
February 1982: Johnny Castro, 2, dies in Miami.
1982: Alfredo and Grizel Lorenzo die in Miami-Dade County.
1984: Leaves Miami for California.
February 1985: Arrested in Irvine, California.
June 25 to July 9, 1985: Jury trial in New York; guilty verdict on one conspiracy count on July 9.
1985: Sentenced to 15 years and a $25,000 fine.
November 10, 1988: Second Circuit affirms the conviction.
1993: Jorge Ayala agrees to testify.
1994: Miami-Dade murder charges filed.
October 1998: Pleads no contest to three counts of second-degree murder; concurrent sentences, given as 20 years.
June 2004: Released and deported to Colombia.
September 3, 2012: Killed in Medellín, aged 69.