West Miami Police Chief Nelson Andreu’s phone was swamped with phone calls.
“I got 10 phone calls in 10 minutes," says the one-time City of Miami Homocide Detective.
The news was Griselda Blanco was dead on Monday. Gunned down while shopping in a Medellin, Colombia meat market.
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Blanco, a central figure in Miami’s 1980’s Cocaine Cowboy war, was shot twice in the head by two men riding a motor bike.
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The so-called Godmother had in the 1980’s run a major drug trafficking operation that was knit together by fear, Andreu said. Blanco had blood on her hands, ordering the assassination of over 40 people, men, women, and children, authorities said.
She was always believed to have been involved behind the scenes in the infamous 1979 Dadeland Mall liquor store shootout, authorities said.
“There were two sides to her. If she owed you money and she did not want to pay you she’d have you killed, said Chief Andreu. “If you owed her money and you could not or would not pay her she’d have you killed to.”
She would order a hit on a whim and is credited with the motorcycle assassination technique where hit men rode motorcycles up to victims and sprayed them with machine gunfire, authorities said.
Blanco was a prominent figure in two documentary films produced by Miami Flim maker Billy Corben. Corbin says that Blanco was a survivor. She outlived most of the notorious figures of the Cocaine Cowboy Era including Pablo Escobar.
Corben says: “You know the old saying, ‘live by the sword, die by he sword.’ I suppose live by the motorcycle assassination die by the motorcycle assassination.”
“She did so much bad, she harmed so many people, killed so many people it was only a matter of time. What was more suprising to us is it took so long, “ said Andreu.
