MIAMI – In northern Bogotá, Colombia, in a posh neighborhood, a woman clad in soft beige walked in high heels out of a two-story house with armed guards to investigate who was spying on her in the 1980s. Detectives identified her as Veronica Rivera de Vargas, better known as Bogotá's “Queen of Cocaine.”
Vargas had already been arrested in the 1970s in Peru and Mexico when U.S. authorities accused her of cocaine smuggling in 1981. She was behind the murder of Horacio Martinez, who was climbing from his wheelchair to his parked Mercedes-Benz when he was shot in Miami, police said.
Dave Wilson, then a U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration agent, described the way Vargas and other Colombian narcotraffickers used violence in the 70s and 80s as just “flat crazy.” Flor Palacio, a Colombian chief judge in Medellin, said there was also an established “direct” Miami-Medellin crime “connection.”
Colombian women from Medellin rivaled Vargas for the crown. The DEA accused Marta Libia Cardona de Gaviria, Marleny Orejuela Sánchez, and Griselda Blanco Restrepo of cocaine trafficking. Blanco was indicted in 1975, and accused of hiding cocaine in women’s lingerie to get mules to deliver it.
Before Blanco — who Colombian authorities knew as a lieutenant of Pablo Escobar’s Medellin Cartel — was the focus of the new Netflix series this year and the “Cocaine Cowboys” documentary, former Local 10 News Reporter Mark Potter reported on her crimes for his 1982 five-part series “Colombian Drug Wars.”
“We’ve got plenty of room here in South Florida for people to be dumping bodies, and they are taking advantage of it — in canals, in the lake, in the bay, on the road — wherever,” Detective June Hawkins told Potter when she worked in Metro-Dade homicide.
Lt. Raul Diaz, who was also a homicide detective with Metro-Dade Police then, told Potter that they had considered Blanco to be “a very dangerous woman,” who aside from being behind murder-for-hire plots was also able to “pull the trigger herself — if given the chance.”
Detectives suspected Blanco was behind the 1980 murder-for-hire of Graciela Gomez, who had allegedly stolen some cocaine and was a romantic rival. A gunman targeted Gomez’s Corvette during morning rush hour in Miami and killed her while she attempted to hide in the backseat of a nearby car.
The married couple — who was in the car waiting in traffic — witnessed in horror from the front driver and passenger seats how the gunman leaned in the front passenger window, fired, and left behind the woman’s bullet-ridden body in the backseat of their car.
“The wife came very close. She felt the gun to the back of her head. She came very close to death. That’s not the kind of thing that you expect at 7:30 a.m. to have to deal with,” Hawkins told Potter.
Miami-Dade residents had already been frightened by a fatal wild-west-style shootout with submachine guns at 2 p.m., on July 11, 1979, at Crown Liquors in Dadeland Mall. German Jimenez Panesso, 37, a narcotrafficker from Medellin, and his bodyguard, Juan Carlos Hernandez, 22, died.
Detectives suspected Blanco’s then brother-in-law Miguel “Paco” Sepulveda, who had been indicted on federal narcotics charges in 1978, was behind the murder. He remained a fugitive until his arrest in 1983 in Queens, New York with the help of a tip from agents in Miami, records show.
“[He was] a master of disguise. We have approximately 10 photographs of Paco Sepulveda. And in each one of them, he appears completely different,” Diaz told Potter.
Detectives believed the shooting at Dadeland Mall was payback as part of a pattern of tit-for-tat killings, and Blanco likely allowed Sepulveda to have Jimenez killed because she owed him money.
Before the Dadeland Mall shooting, there was a high-speed machinegun shootout on May 20, 1979, on the Turnpike. Drivers had to pull out of the road to get out of the way of an Audi and another car. Even a police car was shot at.
While they investigated the Turnpike shooting, detectives found Jaime Suescun dead in the trunk of an Audi and four dead nearby: Ruben Echeverria, Julio Gaona, Jorge Luis de Campo, and Osear Penagos Rios. Suescun was in handcuffs and was strangled to death.
Jimenez was a suspect since he had been seeking revenge for months. Suescun had allegedly strangled Ester Rios, who had worked as a maid for Jimenez’s family. The murder happened during a burglary to steal cocaine from Jimenez’s home in 1978.
Hawkins said the related investigations in Miami-Dade were complicated because many of the Colombians were coming into the U.S. undetected with fake identifications to smuggle cocaine and commit other crimes before they returned to Colombia.
“You can have anywhere from 10 to 15 aliases that you would be operating under,” Hawkins told Potter.
Arthur F. Nehrbass told Potter when he was working for the then Metro-Dade Police organized crime bureau, that he feared another “Dadeland situation” was possible.
“They seem to have been able to put together almost a psychopathic organization,” said Nehrbass, who was an FBI agent and later died of cancer in 1998.
Facts about Blanco
She was born on Feb. 15, 1943, in Colombia’s Cartagena-Santa Marta area and she grew up in Medellin. Her mother was a prostitute and she was a child victim of sex trafficking.
Blanco was a teenager when she wed her first husband, Carlos Trujillo, a human trafficker and ID fraudster who was the father of her first three sons, Dixon, Uber, and Osvaldo Trujillo.
Blanco’s second husband was Alberto Bravo, a cocaine trafficker for the Medellin Cartel. Blanco’s third husband was Dario Sepulveda, who was the father of her youngest son, Michael Corleone Blanco.
Trujillo, Bravo, Sepulveda, and Griselda Blanco were murdered.