Griselda Blanco: Miami's Deadly Cocaine Queen

so my captain when I was in Narcotics called me and he was already he was a major in charge of homicide by that time and he said I want to bring you up to homicide I said I don't know anything about homicide he what you know about scene investigation because you work bombings I said yeah said but what I need is I need somebody to build the morale up here and to develop lines of communications to other agencies because we we've lost it and that I had because by that time I was already an instructor for DEA I had gone to all these schools the DEA I had gone through I had taught DEA schools who have made connections uh with with with guys uh with you know other officers in many departments Across the Nation plus I had my contact with Customs plus I had my contact with the with the FBI I was part of the first terrorist force in 1975 so I said okay so I went up to homicide and we started working and then in 1980 there was an article that came out in Time magazine called Paradise Lost and that article had to do with the violence that was going on in Miami The Sensational murders that were taking place as a result of the cocaine Wars and in the end it actually was you we show we we we we found out that it was not even a war it was just one person one woman Cela Blanco was a person responsible for 90% of these homicides so the problem that we faced was that a homicide in Colombia caused the homicide in Queens New New York which caused a homicide in Miami day County which caused a homicide in Los Angeles and then it went all the way around it again so homicide investigators are reactive somebody gets killed they get dispatched to a location the dead bodies there and they start the investigation reactive so that was one problem the other problem was that no one was communicating all these other sites were related and no one was communicating so I put together a concept I wrote a paper and I took it to Washington and I met with Peter bensinger who was then the director of the agency and he approved the concept and named it sentac 26 he put it under the C the sentac program and we created a centac it was great for us as police officers for a local police department because when I came back my major asked me what's the budget I said zero budget zero budget we ask we get and it was great you know we needed cars we got renal cars we needed radios we got radios we needed computers we got computers we needed the analyst for the computers and then he went and we brought in people from uh Queens homicide from New York State Police we brought people from Los Angeles homicide we brought people from all over the United States and people from uh buot the cocaine desk in in Washington and and the people in Bogota in the embassy so if a homicide happened anywhere all that information would come to us it would be put into a computer be massage and boom back to back to the people who are working the that homicide of that time so then we started to come we started to to realize that we were dealing with a huge organization but it was Mo mainly one organization okay and that was prela Blancos organization so we were very fortunate in that syac 26 when operational and then we started being proactive we went from reactive to proactive we developed a list of 20 targets and we went out the first week that we went operational on Monday we started looking we started looking for that Target we found him on Mon on Monday we got into a shootout with him on Monday he got away with us that Monday we continue trying to locate him we located him again on Wednesday we got into another shootout with him on Wednesday but we nailed him and at that time we thought you know this a pretty bad guy you know he we got him on on a double homicide in Miami day he suspected of another 20 or 29 homicides and then we came to find out at the end you know to as as we were working these other cases that there were grela had been there that 120 hits 200 hits I mean it was incredible incredible