The wild true story of murderous drug baroness Griselda Blanco

How did Griselda Blanco get into drug trafficking?

Blanco was born on February 15, 1943, in Cartagena, Colombia, but grew up primarily in Medellín, where notorious drug lord Pablo Escobar was born in 1949, ran his bloody business, and died in a shootout with police in 1993.

To earn money, Blanco became a criminal as a child. He started as a pickpocket and then sold marijuana.

In 1964, she moved to Queens, New York, where there was a large Colombian community. Since marijuana was not practical to transport in large quantities, she discovered a thriving market for cocaine there.

First, she had a factory in Medellín produce corsets and other underwear with secret compartments so that smugglers could hide drugs on scheduled flights to Miami. Eventually, she even had pilots on her payroll.

Her reputation for cunning and violence grew as authorities said she made millions of dollars annually from the cocaine trade.

“She would kill you if she owed you money and didn't want to pay it back,” said the former West Miami police chief and homicide investigator Nelson Andreu told Today.com in January. “And if you owed her money and couldn't pay it, she would kill you, too. For her, it was a win-win situation; for everyone else, it was a lose-lose situation.”

As Vergara put it in a behind-the-scenes look: “She wasn’t as famous as someone like Pablo Escobar, but even He was afraid of her back then. She stood on her own two feet.”