User Reviews

Griselda Blanco Restrepo was known as the Black Widow. She was a member of the Medellín Cartel and moved into power within the dangerous New York City cocaine game in the 1970s and her sons soon moved into the business. She fled to Columbia when nearly caught and then moved to Miami, where she was part of some of the most violent crime in the history of our country. In fact, she may be responsible for more murders than several serial killers put together.

Directed by Victoria Duley (Tubi originals Sins of the Father: The Green River Killer and Suburban Nightmare: The Mendenze Brothers; he also produced Gone Before Her Time: Brittany Murphy, Scariest Monsters In America, Killing Diana and several more Tubi originals) and writer Chip Selby (Branded & Brainwashed: Inside Nxivm), this has a lot of info in it, including an appearance by one of Blanco's sons who was nearly killed by one of her commands. I've seen a lot of people complain that the narrator sounds like a voice from TikTok and not what you would expect from a bloody tale of the drug dealer who got Pablo Escobar started, but that's what they decided on.

If you haven't seen Cocaine Cowboys or any of the many documentaries about Miami's drug scene, this would be a good start.

A shallow, girl-boss piece. As we go through, it becomes increasingly clearer that this is a very "yas queen" doc.

It largely depicts Griselda Blanco being a victim of men's violent world, but the severe abuse Griselda Blanco endured at the hands of her own mother, who begot her violent ways, was completely ignored.

The filmmakers only care that a woman rose the top of a male-dominated industry, not about how she rose. It seemed to slyly laud the fact that Blanco used actual children to smuggle drugs during her NY days, as if that was just merely shrewd business and not horrid & inherently evil. There was very little condemnation or critique of her horrific actions.

Too many podcasters and not enough experts. I was particularly amused by the one who said "Colombia is a great place to grow COCOA". Not coca. Wow. I suppose this is what passes for actual experts here.

There also is a Harvard business school professor who brought very little to nothing meaningful to this, going so far as to apply business school theory to organize crime. To boot, she even went so far as to wreck a common saying by uttering that the "means justify the ends" instead of the actually correct "ends justify the means." Wow again.

Narrator sounds like a TikToker with an outrageous, cartoonish Latino accent when pronouncing Hispanic proper nouns. Pretentious. Peppered throughout are tacky titles like "lordess" and "queenpin" for Blanco. More pretension. The "Griselda's Secrets" quip when referring to her "clothing line" was goofy. Many documentaries can be very sensationalist on their subjects, but this was one of complete worship of a very dangerous criminal who, if anyone of these acolytes crossed her, would have slit their throats and those of their loved ones with no hesitation.

Didn't mention all the innocent people, including children, who died as a result of her shot calling. Including the accidental killing of 3-year-old Johnnie Castro; when Blanco was told about about it, she didn't care that the kid died (per Rivi). The doc chose to ignore this also.

Joltingly segued to a queen of crack segment, which had too little to do with Blanco to justify its existence. Clearly this is a cross promotion to get people to watch another one of their docs. No thanks.

Line: "But she's facing a bigger threat; her own conniving husband (Bravo)." The only things they established were Bravo was stealing from Blanco and that he also took a girlfriend back to Colombia. Bravo wasn't trying to kill her, didn't put a contract out on her, nothing like that. Meanwhile, it was the female (!) travel agent who ratted her out to the DEA. But no, somehow Bravo is the bigger threat. Gotcha. I don't doubt the philandering and stealing are what compelled Blanco to kill Bravo; it was established during the groundbreaking 2006 documentary "Cocaine Cowboys" that she was very erratic, making very rash decisions when it came to killing people. Moreover, this doc seems to justify Bravo's murder on the grounds of infidelity and theft. Examples of this include the lines "shooting her philandering husband right in the face", and "with Alberto now dead, the crown is fully hers." Even the Bravo shootout scene didn't look convincing even in slow mo.

Doc later states that Blanco's biggest rival was Pablo Escobar. But during "Cocaine Cowboys", 2 things were firmly established: 1) Popo Mejia, and perhaps Rafa, were the more direct rivals, and 2) they are now incorrectly presenting Pablo Escobar as being at the top of the food chain in the cocaine trade during the mid 1970s. That is wrong, as it was contradicted by the late Jon Roberts, a coke runner at the time, who said it was Fabio Ochoa Restrepo, the old man as Roberts called him, who was the real Boss of the entire trade. Roberts even said Ochoa controlled Escobar. I will take Roberts' word over that of these documentarians.

It seemed this doc also justified what all Blanco did when they said that Miami's economy really took off with all the spending and partying (that garbage, now-disproven term "trickle down"). So they're justifying her insane level of violence, which stands in stark contrast to what Edna Buchanan, Dr. Joseph Davis, and others have said during Cocaine Cowboys when they explicitly stated that it wasn't worth the price. Sure, Miami likely would not have been what it is now had it not been for cocaine, but was it worth the cost of so many lives? This doc never approached answering that question.

Now onto the few positives...

So glad they brought back retired DEA agent Palumbo and former CENTAC head Diaz, because unlike these podcasters and Ivy league professors, they were there as it all went down (BTW, why wasn't June Hawkins interviewed??). But the real highlight was her son, Michael Corleone Blanco himself, Griselda's youngest son and last of her line. Real people who were actually there, unlike the throng of podcasters and other talking heads. MCB made this watchable, so glad he finally got his voice heard.

I was heartened that Michael said that he realizes his father, Dario Sepulveda, loved him very much. In this apparent reveling of misandry, that was a bit of a shining light. Nevertheless, Blanco pursues Sepulveda anyway regardless of the facts 1) Michael was obviously safe in his father's care and thus she needn't worry about harm coming to him, & 2) she had Sepulveda killed right in front of Michael. Thankfully her sloppily-ordered hit didn't get him killed too, but it sure left him scarred. Michael's emotional story of seeing his father's murder (again, on orders of his own mother) was very stirring. And yes she ordered Dario's death despite her denial to Michael. I have to credit the producers for landing him, but he should've been more prominently featured, but clearly the pinkwashing of Blanco was paramount.

I saw Cocaine Cowboys, Cocaine Cowboys 2, and Cocaine Cowboys Reloaded years ago. But after recently watching Netflix' "Griselda", I binged all 3 plus this new one, and frankly "Queen Of Cocaine" is not up there at all. My suggestion is to watch the Cocaine Cowboys series to get a far better and more accurate assessment of not only Blanco, but of the Cocaine Wars in general for proper context. That series is the bar, whether this documentary likes it or not.

Regarding whether the ends justified the means for Blanco, it was clear that was this doc's message. As long as a woman rules, who cares how she got there.