There’s a famous saying that blood is thicker than water. Ironically, cartels and mafia believe that their bonds should be stronger than actual family ones. But what if you have both, as is the case with Dixon Trujillo, son of Colombian drug lord Griselda Blanco. He is both blood and water when it comes to the drug trade. Unfortunately, he also became her foil. Here’s how one simple mistake upended the family business and inadvertently defeated one of the biggest and most notorious drug lords of all time.
Griselda, or the Black Widow, as they called her because she kept killing her husbands, worked out of New York City and Colombia moving mountains of cocaine and cavern-sized amounts of cash. Her son Dixon was working on the West Coast out of San Francisco at the time. His job was to move the cocaine sent by his mother — but let’s back up a bit.
Griselda’s first (of three) husbands was Carlos Trujillo. He met Griselda when she was just a teenager of 13. She had already started her life of crime at this point, and legend has it that when she was 11, Griselda kidnapped a rich kid and tried to get some ransom money out of his parents. When they refused, she killed the boy. At 12, she was working the streets as a prostitute. Then she met Carlos, a man known for smuggling immigrants across the border.
While Griselda and Carlos weren’t meant to have a long relationship together, the union produced three sons: Dixon, Uber, and Osvaldo. Those three boys would be instrumental to her drug empire, and operation that saw hundreds of people murdered over the years. Would it still have happened if Griselda never met Carlos? Impossible to tell, but Carlos wasn’t long for this world, and Griselda had him murdered in 1970.
From there she moved young Dixon and his brothers to Queens and married Alberto Bravo, who owned a garment factory, which manufactured bras that she used to smuggle cocaine in. She was still in her 20s and was incredibly good at breaking the law and making money. Eventually, she had to run back to Colombia in 1975 after things got too hot in New York. By this time, Dixon was entering his late teens and had a first hand look at how to run the drug trade.
In fact, he’d been helping his mother all along. Griselda had no qualms about using her children in her work, as she herself worked and made her own money as a teenager. The first push that would bring down the dominoes of the Griselda empire started in the early 1980s with a man who worked for the DEA named Bob Palombo.
Authorities had hatched a plan called Operation Los Niños, or “the sons,” where they would capture her sons or find a way to use her sons against her. Little did they know this plan would work like like a brand new toaster. Initially, all the DEA knew was the geographical location of son Uber (Miami) and Dixon (San Francisco). Word got back to the brothers that the DEA was looking for them, so they disappeared.
Enter Gerry Gomez. Gomez was facing ten years in prison for a drug bust, but he didn’t want to leave his young son in America, so he decided to do what any loving and caring father would do, and chose blood over water. In order to squeeze out a less harsh sentence for himself, he decided to become a rat. The thing about Gomez was he was no stranger to the Griselda family. He’d been the mechanic for her for years and knew Dixon since he was just a wee lad.
Gomez’s first move was to get a hold of Dixon, which he did. They met in San Francisco with younger brother Osvaldo and Dixon asked Gomez to launder money for the organization. The brothers pretty much fell right into the DEA trap, but Griselda was a bit too smart to just trust Gomez off the tip.
Griselda put Gomez through some hoops, making him drive across the country to pick up some money and prove his mettle. Of course, the DEA was along for the ride the whole time. Palombo described the scene in the South Florida Sun Sentinel.
“We placed ourselves strategically in the Marriott hotel lobby so that we could watch Gomez. We waited and waited — and then, suddenly, Griselda appeared. She was wearing a wig, a cape, a smart dress and high heels, but she was easily recognizable because of her dimples and cleft chin.”
Gomez grabbed the money and then drove to San Francisco to meet Dixon. Griselda never fully trusted Gomez, but by that point it was too late. While she tried to hide, the DEA did some digging and found her through electric bills. Once you kill the head of the snake, the body dies soon after, and unfortunately this was the case for her sons.
Osvaldo was captured quickly on charges of money laundering and weapons possession. They found Uber next, because of a phone number that kept calling Griselda in prison, which conveniently coordinated with her trial. Authorities tracked down that number and got an address, which happened to be the house where Uber lived. Now they were on the hunt for Dixon.
There was a young girl at Uber’s house who would be Dixon’s downfall. After his arrest, Uber said he wanted to call his lawyer, and Palombo agreed. The girl went inside the house to make the call. When she came out she said she couldn’t reach the lawyer but she did reach Dixon, and he was on the way. In an anticlimactic moment that was years in the making, Dixon arrived and was put in cuffs.
“You’d have thought Santa Claus had just given us the biggest present of our lives,” Palombo told the Sentinel. This leaves one question. What happened to Dixon? There are some theories. In the Netflix show Griselda, Dixon was shot while he was walking to his car. Some reports say he died in prison. Others say he moved back to Colombia and died there. One thing we do know for sure is that he outlived his mother.
