What Happened to Griselda Blanco's Husbands?
The crime boss was known as the "Black Widow" due to the tragic fates of her three husbands.
Netflix's true crime miniseries Griselda is an engrossing depiction of the life of Griselda Blanco (a.k.a. the "Cocaine Godmother," a.k.a. la madrina, a.k.a. la jefa). It covers the drug tycoon's rise to the top of the underworld during the Miami drug war of the '70s and '80s. Even though the fictionalized six-episode series tells a complete story of Blanco's rise and fall in the U.S., it only covers part of her life story, leaving viewers with plenty of questions about her personal history including her family's fate. There's also the question of the brutal boss's romantic history, as the series only introduces two of her three husbands (and even the second spouse only gets a couple of scenes). Read on to learn about all three of Griselda Blanco's husbands, including how they were all involved in her life of crime, and why she received the moniker of "The Black Widow."
Who was the father of Griselda Blanco's sons?
Blanco was born in Cartagena, Colombia, in 1943, into an impoverished family and her mother, a sex worker, struggled with alcohol addiction. They later relocated to Medellin where Blanco committed her first major crime as a child. Per Vice, at the age of 11, Blanco kidnapped a young boy, and when his wealthy parents didn’t take the kidnapping-for-ransom seriously, she shot the boy dead. By 12, Blanco was working as a sex worker and pickpocket, and by 13, she was living with an alleged pimp and document forger named Carlos Trujillo, who specialized in creating false immigration documents and importing illegal immigrants into the United States.
Blanco and Trujillo later got married and had three sons together: Dixon, Uber, and Osvaldo "Ozzy" Trujillo-Blanco. However, the marriage did not last long. The pair were divorced by the late 1960s, and in the early 1970s, Blanco allegedly had Trujillo killed over a business dispute, according to Maxim.
Blanco (seen here portrayed by Sofía Vergara) was suspected of killing each of her three husbands.
What happened to Griselda's second husband, Alberto Bravo?
Soon after her divorce from Trujillo, Blanco met and married a cocaine trafficker named Alberto Bravo. They moved to Queens, New York, where they set up a smuggling empire disguised by Bravo’s clothing import company. That's when Blanco began implementing the practice that Griselda viewers would later see her also use in Miami: adding secret compartments into the undergarments, so female couriers (who would elicit less suspicion) could smuggle the drug into the U.S. undetected. By the mid-1970s, the pair reportedly employed 1,500 dealers and were earning millions of dollars a month by having her own pilots fly large consignments in directly from Colombia, where they were in cahoots with Pablo Escobar.
Things reportedly went south in April 1975, when Blanco fled back to Colombia after she, Bravo, and more than 30 of their partners were indicted on federal drug conspiracy charges as part of what was then the biggest cocaine case in history, termed Operation Banshee. Some time later, the married couple had a confrontation in the parking lot of a nightclub in Bogotá, which resulted in Blanco fatally shooting Bravo.
Episode 1 of Griselda shows the demise of her marriage to Alberto Bravo (played here by Alberto Ammann).
But fight reportedly went down differently in real life than on Griselda, as the team appeared to fictionalize the scenes where Bravo asked Blanco to sleep with his brother and Blanco obliged. Per Maxim, in real life, Blanco suspected that Bravo had stolen millions in drug profits, and many more people were involved in the shootout, which ultimately left six bodyguards killed. As seen on the show, Blanco did walk away with a stomach wound, while Bravo was shot in the head.
What happened to Griselda's third husband, Darío Sepulveda?
In 1978, Blanco met her third husband, Darío Sepulveda, who worked as an assassin and bank robber. Although the show's fictional depiction of their meeting set up Sepúlveda as a hitman ordered to kill Blanco, there's no report confirming how they met in real life, per Insider. They had one child together, named Michael Corleone (after The Godfather character); the couple moved to Miami together after their son's birth, unlike in the show. Though Blanco was at the height of her career at the time, their marriage was marred by infidelity and jealousy; per Vice, at one point Blanco had eight strippers killed because she suspected they had slept with Sepulveda. They also disagreed on Michael's future; "Griselda always wanted Michael by her side, while Sepúlveda wanted to send their son to school," People reports.
The Netflix series depicted the discord within Blanco's relationship with her third husband Darío Sepúlveda (played by Alberto Guerra).
As seen in the show, after their marriage soured, Sepulveda moved to Colombia with Michael Corleone in 1983, without Griselda’s permission. He died in a shooting that same year, and it was reported that Blanco ordered the hit. The assassins dressed up as police officers and shot at Sepulveda with their son in the car. After Sepulveda's death, the then five-year-old was taken back to U.S. to live with Blanco in California, until she was finally captured in 1985.
