Michael Corleone Blanco was not impressed by the way Netflix’s “Griselda” portrayed how his mother Griselda Blanco made her first steps into the drug trade. In the first episode of the limited series, which is set in 1978, the mother of three is shown escaping from her husband in Medellín, Colombia, and relocating with her three sons to Miami, where he attempts to locate a buyer for a kilo of cocaine that she has smuggled into the United States with her. However, Michael takes issue with this version of his mother’s story, claiming that it makes her look like she was just starting out when in fact she was already a queenpin of the drug trade. As he noted on the podcast “The Real Griselda,” the story was not accurate.
“It was quite embarrassing … The lady was the number one cocaine distributor in the world by 1975,” he told the podcast “The Real Griselda.” “She created the industry … You could say my mother was the first official whale because nobody had hundreds of kilos, fifty kilos. Nobody had the laboratories. She pioneered the routes. She pioneered everything in the modern-day cocaine industry as we know it.” Despite Michael’s reservations about “Griselda” and his accusations that the show’s truncated timeline fails to reflect the enormous power she already wielded in the period in which the show is set, it is arguable that “Grisleda” actually makes a point of portraying her as a pioneer, with the trailer going so far as to euphemistically describe her as an “innovator.”
