Griselda Blanco Was in Jail for a Shorter Time Than You Think
By the end of the Netflix series Griselda, June Hawkins was able to take Griselda Blanco down for her drug importation charges. The empire Griselda built was left with no clear successor, and she was sent to jail for what appeared to be ages.
It was a creative way for the producers of the series to show that Griselda was aging in jail because of how long she’d been there, but we didn’t really get a definitive figure of how long she stayed. The ending of the series highly deviated from the real events of Griselda Blanco’s life, and that includes her time in jail.
After multiple conspirators turned their backs on her, Griselda Blanco was implicated for cocaine distribution, importation, and manufacturing. But what made her jail sentence longer were the three murders she was convicted of. With all her charges, Griselda was sent to a federal prison for 13 years. She escaped Florida’s death row because of Rivi Ayala’s phone scandal and received three concurrent 20-year sentences instead.
This meant Griselda had to serve twenty years, three times, separately. What the drama didn’t tell us was that Griselda only stayed in prison for a total of nineteen years. That’s not a short time, but it’s nothing compared to sixty years.
We also won’t see the Netflix series show that she was still running her cocaine empire behind bars with her sons. Due to her failing health, Griselda Blanco was released back home to Colombia in 2004.
She didn’t exactly die a withered woman who had lost her sons by the time of her release. Griselda lived a relatively long and peaceful life in one of the wealthiest villages in Medellin. She would last be seen gunned down after walking out of a butcher shop.
(featured image: Netflix)
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