“Godmother” of Medellin Cartel, Dead @ 69

Griselda Blanco, known as the “Godmother” of the cocaine racket, was gunned down at the age of 69, at the Cardiso butcher shop on 29th Street in a Medellin neighborhood, after a life of drugs and solicited murder. Blanco, the former cocaine madrina, who made a name for herself by making Miami streets run red with blood from the drug trade, died, the same way she was arrested in 1985: with a Bible on her chest. It was predictable that she died in the same way she lived, via violence. On Monday afternoon, a middle-aged man climbed off the back of a motorbike outside a butcher in a Medellin suburb, entered, pulled out a gun and shot Blanco twice in the head before calmly walking back to his bike and disappearing into the city. As Blanco lay dying on the ground, her pregnant daughter-in-law, who had been waiting in the car, lay a Bible on her chest. According to a witness interviewed by The Miami Herald, the killer was a man in his 40’s or 50’s who was calm and composed throughout the attack. “He was a professional,” the witness said. “It was vengeance from the past.”