At One Point Griselda Blanco Was Worth $2 Billion

Griselda Blanco's Net Worth Skyrocketed as She Cornered the Miami Drug Market in the Nineteen Seventies

Jan. 24 2024, Updated 1:16 p.m. ET

Journalist Roben Farzad moved to Miami, Fla. in 1978 as the cocaine growth was just beginning. Nearly forty years later, he would go on to write down "Hotel Scarface: Where Cocaine Cowboys Partied and Plotted to Control Miami,” which focused on a hotel that became the heart of the Miami drug trade. In December 2017, Farzad told PBS NewsHour that "when cocaine got here to town it was so ridiculously winning, it was so seductive, it made folks do such loopy issues within the identify of money and power and blood lust."

Griselda Blanco was one of those people. Her rise to power was so unprecedented and terrifyingly impressive, it would earn her the nickname Cocaine Godmother. There was little she wouldn't do to maintain her status and wealth, including kill. For nearly a decade Blanco was moving ungodly amounts of product from Colombia through Miami, New York, and California. She was definitely making bank. Let's take a look at her net worth.

Griselda Blanco had a staggering net worth.

Elaine Carey, author of "Women Drug Traffickers: Mules, Bosses, and Organized Crime," told the Real Narcos podcast that Blanco chose the right people to help smuggle drugs into the United States. She used Colombian sex workers as her mules. Their sexuality worked in Blanco's favor. Blanco created specialized garments the mules used to carry cocaine. "These clothes would permit for the medication to be more smoothed across the body and it would just appear to be a girl’s natural determine."

Griselda Blanco Restrepo

Colombian drug lord

Net worth: $2 billion

Griselda Blanco, aka the Cocaine Godmother, was a Colombian drug lord who cornered the Miami drug trafficking market from the late 1970s through the mid-1980s.

Birth date: Feb. 14, 1943

Birth place: Cartegena, Colombia

Mother: Ana Blanco

Marriage: Dario Sepulveda (1978 - 1983, when he died); Alberto Bravo (late 1960s - 1975, when Blanco killed him); (Carlos Trujillo (late 1950s - late 1960s)

Children: with Carlos Trujillo: Osvaldo, Uber, and Dixon Trujillo; with Dario Sepulveda: Michael Corleone Blanco

Death date: Sept. 3, 2012

It was Blanco's ability to use misogyny in her favor that helped her "set up a distribution community throughout the United States that netted her tens of hundreds of thousands of greenbacks a month ... and maintained her dominance through construction an empire staffed with violent enforcers, who have been well rewarded for following her orders to execute competitors at the drop of a hat to and ensure they left, no witnesses," per The Guardian. It was believed that she smuggled $80 million worth of cocaine per month into the United States.

Celebrity Net Worth reports that Blanco was worth $2 billion at the peak of her drug trafficking ring. Blanco also invested in real estate that was estimated to be worth $500 million at the time of her death. "The feds seized four of Griselda's homes that had been worth 2 billion pesos (round $118.7 million), and it is believed that she owned masses extra, including an condominium that cost 550 million pesos ($32.6 million)."

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