Jennifer Lopez will play a notorious drug lord known as “The Cocaine Godmother” for HBO in a film currently in development.
Deadline reports the project tells the story of Griselda Blanco, a woman “who revolutionized the U.S. drug trade during the 1970s and 1980s and became the most powerful female cartel member of all time.” Blanco was shot and killed in Colombia by two men on motorcycles in 2012. Some backstory via Miami Herald:
Blanco came to epitomize the “cocaine cowboy” bloodshed of the 1980s, when rival drug dealers brazenly ambushed rivals in public.
Raised in the slums of Medellin, she began her criminal career as a pickpocket, eventually commanding an empire that reportedly shipped 3,400 pounds of cocaine per month, by boat and plane. She was considered a Colombian pioneer in drug smuggling to the United States, a precursor to the larger cartels that dominated in the 1980s. She even had a Medellin lingerie shop custom design bras and girdles with special pockets to hold cocaine, a tool used by her drug mules flying to Miami.
The HBO project is in conjunction with J. Lo’s company Nuyorican Productions. Lopez—who currently stars in NBC’s cop drama Shades of Blue—says of Blanco, “I’ve been fascinated by the life of this corrupt and complicated woman for many years.”