Griselda: The true story behind the ‘cocaine godmother’ portrayed by Sofia Vergara
“No, my name is Betty,” she said in Spanish, looking up from her Bible in practised nonchalance.
The passport on her nightstand, under a headscarf and next to a .38 calibre revolver, said otherwise; her name was Lucrecia Adarmez. But that was as phoney as another favourite alias, Arichel Vince-Lopez.
By the time Bob Palombo caught up with the “chameleon, who could change her appearance at will” after 11 years, she had been known by many names: La Dona Gris, La Gorda, La Gordita, The Black Widow, La Madrina.
In that moment of reckoning, she regressed to Betty, given for a long since passed resemblance to Betty Boop, if the 1930s character had spent decades in a psychotic spiral of drug-fuelled orgies and homicidal paranoia.
The cleft chin and cartoonish dimples remained, and like so many before him, Palombo was mesmerised. He kissed her on the cheek and introduced himself as the Drug Enforcement Administration Special Agent who was to finally bring down The Cocaine Godmother: “Hola, Griselda. We finally meet.”
“She didn’t kiss me, I can only think what she would have liked to do,” Palombo, now retired, recalled to The Independent of her 1985 arrest.
Kill him, if he had to guess. And without remorse. Griselda Blanco killed lovers and enemies alike. Preferably with one of her Pistoleros hitmen, riding up on a motorbike, and shooting at point-blank in the preferred method that she popularised and how she, in a serving of street justice, was assassinated outside a Medellin butcher shop in 2012.
But for a short moment after being dragged out of a California townhouse in Irvine, Orange County, on 17 February – her birthday weekend – she showed a glimpse of the vulnerability beneath the bravado.
“She was pretty tough and standoffish, a typical Colombian move I would say, nonchalant, not really showing any real emotion, but when we put her in the car, I was in the backseat with her, and the other agent was driving. We drove up to Los Angeles, and when we got close
