WOMAN: I went into a stash house.
I seen that money stacked up to the ceiling.
That's when I really knew how big they were.
♪ ♪
WOMAN: Did I know that there was ecstasy being sold? Yes.
Was I involved in maybe some of the talks? Yes.
♪ ♪
MAN: Griselda entrepreneured the cocaine industry
as we know it.
From the jungle, to the street corner,
to the nightclub, to your household.
My mother did that.
♪ ♪
MAN: Shake this square world and blast off for Kicksville.
RICHARD NIXON: Public enemy number one is drug abuse.
NANCY REAGAN: Just say no.
RONALD REAGAN: Halting the drug problem in America
is like carrying water in a sieve.
GEORGE H. W. BUSH: Take my word for it, this scourge will stop!
KAMALA HARRIS: There's now an understanding
that the war on drugs was an abject failure.
MAN: You have to stop and ask yourself, how did we get here?
DONALD TRUMP: We will build a wall.
♪ ♪
(thunder)
♪ ♪
MICHAEL CORLEONE BLANCO: My mother grew up
in this part of town,
which was the only place that you could actually smoke reefer,
you know, have a couple drinks,
bet a little on numbers, watch rooster fights,
and maybe go and have a good time with a prostitute.
I'm talking about 1950s.
There were still muddy streets, horse-drawn carriages.
My name is Michael Corleone Blanco.
I'm the youngest surviving son of one Griselda Blanco.
Also known as the Queen of Cocaine.
(dog barks)
She told me that she remembered being so poor,
she didn't have no shoes or sandals.
And my mother said to herself, the day I have children
I'm gonna make sure they live in the lap of luxury.
The neighborhood was divided
between these two local street gangs,
and she started to date a kid
from the other part of the neighborhood, Pestañitas.
Pestañitas ran bootlegging, he ran a couple prostitutes,
sold some weed, and he met this little girl.
She was 14 when she fell in love with him.
They got married, and he introduced her to marijuana.
They'd been drug dealing together, right.
♪ ♪
They were getting money, but Pestañitas told my mother,
"We're making peanuts here.
If we can get this weed to New York,
we could make a big load of money."
(horns honking)
(siren)
So they relocate to New York,
and they start doing deals in New York.
When they start making serious money,
my mother goes back to Colombia
and she meets a gentleman who was a club owner,
and the gentleman tells her,
"You might want to think about this drug called cocaine."
REPORTER: This is Jackson Heights
in the borough of Queens.
It's one of the places where cocaine
comes home to the United States.
♪ ♪
BLANCO: In the early '70s,
Griselda becomes the queen of Queens,
Queens, New York.
She's selling cocaine.
My mother realizes that this is the future.
♪ ♪
(sniffing)
BOB PALOMBO: Cocaine was on the rise,
the demand was starting to increase.
♪ ♪
At JFK Airport, the seizures were from a pound or so,
or two pounds on the body,
to two or three kilos in the suitcases.
(tires screech)
But we were starting to see other methods,
anything that could conceal cocaine
was starting to make its way in more frequently.
And Griselda Blanco's fingerprint was on that.
♪ ♪
BLANCO: Griselda entrepreneured the cocaine industry
as we know it.
From the jungle, to the street corner,
to the nightclub, to your household.
My mother did that.
♪ ♪
Where's the first place people are gonna buy drugs at?
On the corner.
What's the second place people are gonna do and sell drugs at?
The disco.
It's the epitome and the era of disco music.
(disco music playing)
REPORTER: It's 3:00 in the morning in Manhattan,
and still at Studio 54,
people crowd the doors hoping to get in.
BLANCO: My mother liked to rub elbows
with the elite of the time.
REPORTER: Society columnists adore Studio 54
for the personalities it attracts.
BLANCO: Studio 54, she practically owned the joint.
GEORGE JUNG: Studio 54 was lined up for blocks.
Everybody's snorting cocaine in there.
♪ ♪
It was Saturday Night Fever with señorita cocaine.
♪ Here comes paradise ♪
It took over America.
♪ Mmm ♪
♪ That's nice ♪
PALOMBO: Cocaine, at that point,
really wasn't in law enforcement's radar.
And so there was a gap in the intelligence
that was being developed,
and this gave the Colombians an opportunity to establish
a greater foothold for smuggling the drugs into the country
and distributing the drugs without being caught.
♪ ♪
BLANCO: My mother makes a fortune in New York City
and moves back to Colombia.
And her and El Capitán see that their empire's grown so much
that they need henchmen, they need soldiers.
And everybody knew
that if you wanted to get into the cocaine business,
you had to get the green light from Griselda.
♪ ♪
Pablo Escobar's boss was one of those smugglers.
My mother didn't like him too much, so Pablo killed him.
And my mother said, "Pablo, you've got a future, kid."
♪ ♪
PALOMBO: It wasn't until later
that I realized what a role she played,
not only in the cocaine business,
but also in the business of violence.
She was psychopath.
She loved killing people.
(camera shutter clicking)
♪ ♪
BLANCO: Griselda comes to Miami.
You have an industry that was trying to be established
by other Latinos.
My mother always told me, "You know what's the best way
to take care of your competition?
Erase your competition.
Then you have nobody to compete with."
(siren)
INVESTIGATOR: Right now two people are dead,
and there are others injured.
I don't know the exact amount.
REPORTER: Police say they don't know what the motive was
for the shootings, but they are sure it wasn't robbery.
AL SINGLETON: The shooting occurred
in the middle of the day,
in a very popular shopping mall called Dadeland.
REPORTER: Inside the liquor store,
one Colombian national and another non-Cuban Latin
suspected of drug trafficking lay face up in a pool of blood.
REPORTER: The assailants sprayed gunfire
all around the parking lot.
Shell fragments were found some 40 yards from the store.
SINGLETON: They'd fired automatic weapons
into the sidewalk area,
wounding two other totally innocent bystanders.
Witnesses were just beside themselves.
PALOMBO: This was the handiwork of Griselda Blanco.
BLANCO: That day, 1979, I think
Miami and the United States understood that cocaine
would generate so much violence and so much financial gain,
that people were willing to kill people in broad daylight,
innocent or not innocent.
REPORTER: Colombian drug dealers have opened fire
in crowded shopping centers, along busy highways,
in quiet residential neighborhoods.
SINGLETON: We became known as Dodge City.
Our homicide rate doubled from 300 a year to 600 a year.
We were all overwhelmed.
PALOMBO: The primary target of Metro-Dade Homicide
was Griselda Blanco.
She not only wanted the person shot,
but she wanted the person's wife and even the children shot.
She was a monster.
♪ ♪
As she began to create more and more enemies,
she wasn't able to really enjoy the fruits of her endeavors
because she was on the run.
♪ ♪
PALOMBO: Her husband, Darío Sepúlveda,
is growing weary of her, he's disgusted with her.
Talk about the pot calling the kettle black, right?
He's an assassin himself, and even she was too much for him.
♪ ♪
He's worried about the well-being of his son,
Michael Corleone, and he takes Michael and goes to Colombia.
Well, Griselda wasn't having any of that.
♪ ♪
And a short time later, she pays off police in Colombia.
Darío's driving down the road with little Michael in the car.
(bell tolls)
BLANCO: And after a couple minutes,
four cops, two motorcycles pull us over.
He handcuffs my father, and my father goes,
"What are you doing?"
And I look at my daddy,
and I said, "Papi, papi!"
My dad was hit by 27 bullets.
I saw the holes on his back.
And there was all blood coming out of 'em.
I was about to be six years old.
PALOMBO: Griselda Blanco ordered the hit on her husband,
and there's no doubt in my mind that she didn't care
whether her son saw the assassination or not.
♪ ♪
All he knew was that he was whisked up, put on a plane,
and delivered to his mother in Irvine, California.
And shortly thereafter is when we arrest her.
♪ ♪
She was just propped up in bed reading the Bible.
She didn't have the .38 in her hand;
that was on her nightstand.
I said, "Hola, Griselda."
She looked at me with a very bewildered look.
"No. Me llamo Betty."
I said, "Nah, I don't think so."
And I put the cuffs on her, away we went.
♪ ♪
BLANCO: When you've done so much bad in your life,
that type of beef never goes away.
That type of generational hatred, revenge,
it don't go away.
So after eight years of my mother's release,
she was killed.
♪ ♪
KAREN GRAVANO: Sometimes I feel like I talk too much,
but that's a good thing, right?
My name's Karen Gravano.
I'm the daughter of Salvatore "Sammy the Bull" Gravano.
♪ ♪
I was about nine years old when I started to realize
that my father had a different type of lifestyle.
We was the underboss of the Gambino organized crime family,
which was the most powerful organized crime family
in New York City.
♪ ♪
He was a gangster.
If you crossed him, you had a problem.
When he came home, he wasn't a gangster at home.
He was a father, he was a friend, he was a protector.
There's this one time, when we were kids,
like my father took us to a duck pond,
and I think we had a couple of my cousins.
So everybody was feeding the duck, and the duck went crazy,
and I think it bit me or my cousin,
and I remember my father just, like,
grabbing the duck by its neck and choking him.
Feathers were flying, ducks were all screaming.
Everybody was running.
But, you know, he was protective.
I mean, I would choke a duck if they attacked my daughters.
(quacking)
♪ ♪
RONALD REAGAN: The time has come
to cripple the power of the Mob in America.
Can we honestly say that America is a land with justice for all
if we do not now exert every effort to eliminate
this confederation of professional criminals,
this dark, evil enemy within.
♪ ♪
GEORGE GABRIEL: So the strategy was we got to bug this guy
any place he's potentially doing business.
♪ ♪
GRAVANO: Everything started going fast, you know?
It just all started to come together in my head.
So I realized that my father's in trouble.
Like this is something big.
GEORGE ANASTASIA: Sammy Gravano's a very shrewd guy
and a very intelligent guy,
and Sammy Gravano looks at the lay of the land,
and on some of the tapes,
Gotti is not saying very nice things about Gravano.
GABRIEL: He implicates Sammy in a bunch of murders
that are gonna put Sammy in jail for life.
GRAVANO: He felt betrayed,
and the Feds were actually smart enough,
because they used this tape
as the wedge between my father and Gotti.
He came over, he sat down,
and he was like, "I'm gonna tell you something
that goes against everything I believe in
and everything I've ever taught you to believe in."
"I'm gonna cooperate with the government."
And it was like, I couldn't even believe that those words
came out of his mouth.
♪ ♪
My father was released from prison in 1995.
The FBI wanted him to go into witness protection,
so he agreed.
He went into the program.
There's so many restrictions.
He wasn't able to talk to us
because we didn't go in the program,
so he signed himself out,
and he joined my mother and my brother in Arizona.
♪ ♪
He started a company called Marathon Development,
which, in New York, he actually had Marathon Concrete.
He was in the office every day
trying to build this company from the ground up,
legitimately creating a business.
He wasn't Sammy the Bull anymore.
He wasn't Salvatore Gravano, he was Jimmy Moran.
That was the identity the government gave him.
♪ ♪
HUGH DOWNS: Do you know where your teenagers are?
This could be the night your child ventures
into a secretive and potentially dangerous world.
The world of the rave.
REPORTER: Use of the designer drug ecstasy
is rising at an alarming rate.
RICH LEBEL: Ecstasy never carried that dirty social stigma
that methamphetamine did or heroin did or cocaine did.
So, the younger generation thought it was OK
to be taking it.
♪ ♪
JIM COPE: When my lieutenant asked for volunteers,
there wasn't one supervisor
that wanted to volunteer for that mission
because it wasn't one of them sexy things to do.
I'm Sergeant Jim Cope from the Phoenix Police Department.
I drafted Rich Lebel.
We developed the strategy to go in the raves
and actually make undercover purchases at the raves.
♪ ♪
LEBEL: You walk inside and, right away,
the music makes your insides vibrate because it's so loud.
It's all sort of hypnotic.
♪ ♪
Once you were inside, they were super trusting.
Somebody would walk by you, and they'd ask you,
"Hey, you need any E?"
And we would just be making buys.
(thunder)
COPE: When Rich Lebel was up to 250- to 500-pill buys,
the suspects we were dealing with said,
"Hey, if you guys are gonna be players in this market,
you'd better be careful
because the New York guys are running everything,
and you're gonna have to pay tax on your pills to them."
We didn't take it serious at all.
(siren)
GRAVANO: My father just came home from prison.
My mother and brother bought a restaurant.
Everyone always thinks that we picked the name Uncle Sal's,
the best kept secret in Scottsdale.
♪ ♪
We joke at home,
but I think my mother's the real gangster here.
My mother's name is Debbie.
She came to Arizona with all the money.
So she financed things.
My brother, Gerard, he was a chef
working in the restaurant.
I'd just had my daughter, my brother had a son,
and we were doing good.
We were working hard, we were staying out of trouble,
and we were just really, honestly
building our family back up.
♪ ♪
Once that newspaper article came out,
it made everyone start looking at us.
That was actually the start of everything going bad
for my family in Arizona.
♪ ♪
GRAVANO: My brother was working in the restaurant.
This guy came in, and he threw $1,000 on the table,
and he told Gerard, "Here, put this in your pocket.
Come out with us tonight.
We're gonna go to the clubs.
Everything's on me,
and, by the way, I love your father."
So, that's how Mike Papa comes into the whole picture.
That's how this whole ecstasy thing started.
♪ ♪
So, Gerard, building his friendship with Mike Papa,
started going to clubs with him.
Gerard started seeing that this guy's, you know,
he's selling pills, he's selling ecstasy.
♪ ♪
COPE: As our investigation was progressing,
we kept hearing the rumors about the New York guys.
I was at the gym working out, an acquaintance of mine said,
"Hey, do you know anything
about some kind of crazy club drug or..."
He called it a sex drug.
He goes, "All these young kids are at the gym
bragging about how much money they're making off these pills,"
and he named Mike Papa, and he goes,
"You're not gonna believe it,
they say they're being backed by Sammy the Bull Gravano."
RON STERRETT: I didn't believe that Sammy would be associating
with college kids selling drugs, quite honestly.
I thought that was beneath his level.
But when we obtained Mike Papa's phone number,
it was subscribed to Marathon Development.
COPE: It right away hit me,
a business that Sammy ran back in New York was Marathon.
STERRETT: So, the link was created.
♪ ♪
(modem screeching)
But actually, the link was created to Gerard Gravano.
♪ ♪
GRAVANO: When Gerard got involved
in the ecstasy business,
all of a sudden it went from the Mike Papa investigation
to the Gravano investigation,
because they realized that this is Sammy the Bull's son.
♪ ♪
(engine revving)
COPE: During our wiretap, I kept seeing
this light-colored Mercury Marquis out on surveillance.
♪ ♪
GRAVANO: My father started feeling
like people were following him,
and he said, "Listen, I don't know if it's the cops,
if it's people from New York,
but I feel like something's going on."
GABRIEL: The whole time Sammy was out in Arizona
we knew Gotti had given the contract on Sammy:
"He screwed us. You got to go get him."
♪ ♪
(dial tone)
(dialing phone)
COPE: In January of 2000,
Ron Sterrett and the investigative team
start intercepting calls
between a supplier in California and Mike Papa.
(phone ringing)
COPE: As those calls progressed,
we realized a large shipment of 25,000 pills
were gonna be coming in from LA.
♪ ♪
STERRETT: We saw the bag of ecstasy
coming into possession of Mike Papa.
(camera shutter clicking)
We followed Mike Papa directly back to Marathon Development
and saw Mike Papa carry the bag in.
(clicking)
♪ ♪
(phone ringing)
STERRETT: That call came in
somewhere between 11 o'clock in the evening
to 1 o'clock in the morning.
A normal business doesn't pay somebody
at 11 o'clock in the evening for a gas receipt.
$70 for gas receipts,
we knew that that was code for $70,000 for the ecstasy.
♪ ♪
Gerard and Mike Papa needed to ask Sammy
to front the $70,000 for the next shipment.
That brought him right into the middle
of the financing of the ecstasy organization.
♪ ♪
COPE: Hey, we got him. We got enough.
We got enough for everybody.
This whole group is done.
♪ ♪
(siren)
GRAVANO: We come to find out
Gotti had sent a hit team down to Arizona.
♪ ♪
STERRETT: There was a plan to kill Sammy
where Sammy parked his car.
♪ ♪
GRAVANO: My father would have never laid down lightly.
♪ ♪
If some gun battle was going off,
he's coming out shooting.
♪ ♪
COPE: There was probably 200 tactical officers
at that meeting from different agencies.
♪ ♪
STERRETT: When they made entry,
Sammy was crawling on the floor toward getting a gun.
I think he thought it was
the Mob coming after him.
He surrendered, was handcuffed
and brought to the facility where I was waiting for him.
I told him, you're being arrested
for conspiracy to distribute dangerous drugs,
and he just kind of leaned his head back
and closed his eyes and sighed.
Like, "Jeez, I can't believe I got caught for this."
But quite honestly, we feel we saved Sammy's life
by arresting him a few days before he was gonna get killed.
♪ ♪
NEWS ANCHOR: And authorities
say it was a family affair.
♪ ♪
GRAVANO: I made mistakes.
Did I know that there was ecstasy being sold?
Yes.
Was I involved in maybe some of the talks?
Yes.
NEWS ANCHOR: The crime ring allegedly distributed
up to 30,000 pills a week of the drug ecstasy.
LEBEL: I was over at Mike Papa's residence when we arrested Mike.
REPORTER: He might just be the most famous snitch of all time,
but now Salvatore "Sammy the Bull" Gravano
has had the tables turned.
♪ ♪
GRAVANO: Once Mike Papa started cooperating with the government,
they threw everything at us.
They threw charges at my mother.
They threw charges at me.
They threw charges at my brother.
My father's now boxed in.
♪ ♪
You know, I don't think people understand.
My father didn't get involved in the drug business
because he wanted to sell drugs.
Family's everything to my father.
He would never let us jump in quicksand
without jumping in with us.
And that's why Sammy the Bull got involved in drug dealing.
♪ ♪
SAMMY GRAVANO: I believe you and this court
have been very fair with me and my family,
and I appreciate it very much.
♪ ♪
GRAVANO: Me and my brother,
we (bleep) up.
♪ ♪
MAN: Good to see y'all.
Happy St. Patrick's Day.
Chicago's annual St. Patrick's Day Parade.
MIA FLORES: Growing up in Chicago, we had a great life.
MAN: Chicago's finest.
Nice welcome to Chicago's finest.
MIA: Our fathers were police officers.
Our whole family is in law enforcement.
We grew up in a blue collar neighborhood.
(cheering)
You don't really run into drug dealers or gangs.
And Peter and Junior moved down the block from me.
MIKE FERRARA: The Flores twins were born as Pedro Flores
and Margarito Flores, Junior.
Almost nobody called them that,
they were referred to as Pete or Peter, was Pedro,
and Margarito went by Junior or Jay.
MIA: Peter and Junior would go to extreme measures
to just put a smile on our face.
I was always attracted to these bad boys.
So I ended up falling in love.
FERRARA: Without a doubt, the Flores twins
became the biggest drug dealers in the history of Chicago.
The Flores brothers were more or less born into the drug trade.
Their father was a marijuana trafficker,
and they had an older brother in a gang in Chicago.
So through those role models they learned drug trafficking.
JACK RILEY: They were moving 1,000 kilos a month
of pure cocaine.
A kilo was going for about $60,000.
You can do the math.
OLIVIA: We were very young. We were very flashy.
When we would go out, we would go to clubs,
and it was like we were popping bottles of Cristal,
and we were just living that life.
I was known as the Million Dollar Bitch,
just because like, you know, I was the first girl
to get my boobs done and always wore designer clothes,
and I was very flashy.
You know, this was a whole 'nother level.
It was obvious to see what they were doing
and how much money that they were making.
Everyone in Chicago knew where the drugs were coming from.
The drugs they were getting were coming from the Sinaloa Cartel.
From Chapo.
REPORTER: Mexican drug lord Joaquín Guzmán.
REPORTER: The man known as El Chapo, AKA Shorty...
NEWSCASTER: The top drug dealer in the world.
REPORTER: ...who runs the world's largest drug cartel.
(siren)
MICHAEL JORDAN: This is what Chicago is all about.
MIA: Anyone from Chicago knows it's a place
you really don't leave unless you really have to.
I can never go back to Chicago.
(gulls squawking)
FERRARA: In 2004, the twins were very much a known quantity
in drug trafficking.
They were indicted,
and that's ultimately what caused them to flee to Mexico.
MIA: We were basically on the run,
hiding from the US government.
We moved to Guadalajara,
and we were just thrown into this narco world.
FERRARA: Once the Flores brothers were in Mexico
they began to interact directly
with more and more senior members of the Sinaloa Cartel.
♪ ♪
(phone ringing)
OLIVIA: When you are taking drugs from the cartel,
you're taking drugs on consignment.
(phone ringing)
You owe millions and millions of dollars.
Making the smallest mistake can cost them their lives.
(phone ringing)
FERRARA: In 2005, Guadalupe Ledesma,
one of the twins' sources of supply,
declared that the twins owed to him
a massive drug debt of several million dollars.
(phone ringing)
Guadalupe ultimately received his drugs from Chapo.
(phone ringing)
OLIVIA: I remember the day when Junior's phone rang.
(phone ringing)
(receiver lifts)
Peter had been kidnapped.
Junior says that he's gonna go to Sinaloa
to try to get to Chapo.
I was so frightened.
I didn't think that Peter was gonna come back alive.
♪ ♪
A lot of people that go to the mountaintop, they don't return.
♪ ♪
Junior is greeted by Chapo's army.
They have AK-47s, they're like ready to go to war.
That's when he met Chapo.
♪ ♪
Chapo told him that he can have him killed with his brother.
♪ ♪
Junior...
(clicking)
...asked him for permission...
(clicking)
...to pull out these ledgers.
(clicking)
♪ ♪
As Junior's flipping through these ledgers,
Chapo realizes the amount of drugs that they're moving.
FERRARA: Chapo was convinced
that this drug debt wasn't their fault.
Effectively that Guadalupe Ledesma
was lying to Chapo.
And so Pete was released.
Under Chapo's order, Ledesma was executed.
From that point on,
Pete and Jay began dealing directly with, with Chapo.
RILEY: I think it's at that point
that Chapo made it pretty clear to them,
if they chose to buy from other people, they were gonna be dead
and their family was gonna be dead.
OLIVIA: So everything began to change.
(heart beating)
♪ ♪
Mia and I found out that we were both pregnant.
(heart beating)
MIA: It was very scary to realize
that we are gonna bring up our children in this drug world.
We realized how this cycle was, was just going on and on
from generation to generation.
OLIVIA: When you're working for Chapo Guzmán
and you're bringing in the money, $2 billion in their case,
he was never gonna let them stop.
I started telling Junior that I couldn't do this anymore.
"What do you mean? Like, we can't stop.
Like, we're good. Nothing's gonna happen to us.
No, there's gonna be no end game for us,
like, it's not gonna happen."
♪ ♪
They basically went against everything
that they ever learned their whole life.
♪ ♪
He knew that this is the only way to save our family.
FERRARA: We were not aware of a single
legally admissible recording of Chapo, period, full stop.
The twins presented that opportunity.
♪ ♪
(phone ringing)
MIA: They got it.
OLIVIA: I knew at that point that life was gonna change.
I knew that our husbands
were going to have to turn themselves in
to the US government, and that they were gonna go to prison.
♪ ♪
REPORTER: A dramatic capture,
the world's most wanted, most dangerous drug lord.
♪ ♪
MAN: He was a man known for no other life
than a life of crime, violence, death and destruction,
and now he'll have to answer to that,
as I'm pleased to announce the extradition of Chapo Guzmán
to the United States from Mexico.
♪ ♪
(siren)
REPORTER: Yesterday the court heard from Chicago's
infamous twins, Pedro Flores and his brother Margarito.
OLIVIA: We knew that our husbands would have to testify,
and we knew the whole world was watching.
CHRIS JANSING: Good day, everyone.
We're coming on the air with breaking news,
a verdict has been reached.
REPORTER: Joaquín "El Chapo" Guzmán was just found guilty
on all counts.
♪ ♪
OLIVIA: Chapo getting sentenced, I feel like this was
resolution to what we started 12 years ago.
♪ ♪
Basically it's a sentence for life.
We're always gonna be hunted,
but we do it for the protection of our family, for our children.
♪ ♪
This is gonna be our life forever.
Captioned by Side Door Media Services