WOMEN ARE RUNNING DRUG RINGS AFTER FALL OF
COLOMBIAN CARTELS

Gail Matthews seemed every inch the doting grandmother.

The 56-year-old retiree lived quietly in her modest condo in Fort
Lauderdale, tending to her hibiscus garden and spoiling her infant
granddaughter.

But this grandma had a dark side that would have made Little Red
Riding Hood wince.

Drug Enforcement Administration officials have charged Matthews with
running a sophisticated cocaine-smuggling ring - outfitting her drug
runners in ninja gear and commanding a 60-foot yacht to pick up
supplies from Colombia.

"Her lifestyle was that of a retired grandmother," said DEA Special
Agent Brent Eaton. "Now she's facing 20 years to life for drug smuggling."

The woman the DEA calls the "Grandma Ninja" is part of a new breed in
the traditionally male-dominated drug trade: the "cocaine queenpin."

As if to underscore the point, just last Friday Colombian police
arrested "Doctor Claudia," a k a Gladys Alvarez, the widow of one of
Colombia's fiercest drug lords, on charges of cocaine smuggling and
money laundering.

Alvarez had been on the run for 11 years, ever since anti-drug agents
gunned down her husband, Gonzalo Rodriguez Gacha, and their son,
Fredy, near a banana plantation in 1989.

Locally, coke queenpin Daisy Zea, the mistress of Cali cartel
heavyweight Jamie Orjuela, ran a massive drug lab in Brooklyn and Long
Island in the late 1980s and early 1990s until she was busted in 1992.

DEA officials said her long-distance romance with Orjuela made her
much-feared among the lower-echelon smugglers, and gave her
unquestioned authority.

And then there's the case of ambitious cocaine queenpin Maria Jimenez,
who used her beauty and sexuality to get ahead in the Cali cartel.

Until she was busted in New Jersey and prosecuted in Manhattan in
1995, Jimenez ran an elaborate stash house, drug distribution and
money-laundering network for the Cali cartel in Queens, New Jersey,
New Orleans and Detroit.

Jimenez was legendary for gaining advantage in business deals by
flirting and using what one DEA agent called her "little-girl routine"
with macho drug lords.

IN THE last few years, authorities say they've made many high-profile
busts of big Colombian cocaine smuggling and distribution networks
where women were the central players.

"The Colombians are the only ethnic group involved in organized
criminal activities that we've come across where women are
increasingly becoming central players," said Al Singleton of the Miami
Dade police force, an expert on Colombian drug smugglers.

The "Grandma Ninja" case was busted wide open in March when the DEA
and FBI raided a rented waterfront home in a quiet retirement
community in Punta Gorda, Fla., near Fort Myers.

Six alleged ring members - all wearing dark ninja suits, night-vision
goggles and protected by a vicious German shepherd - were nabbed
red-handed as they unloaded 19 duffel bags of coke, worth $8.5
million, from the 60-foot yacht Tazmania.

The ship had just arrived from the Yucatan peninsula where it linked
up with Colombian drug traffickers.

"If we didn't have an inside informant who tipped us off to this
operation, we would have never known it existed. It was that good,"
said Eaton.

Eaton said they were surprised the operation was run by the little ol'
lady from Lauderdale. But they were not shocked.

Law-enforcement officials say women, going back to the 1970s, had low-
and mid-level positions in the cocaine-smuggling business, mostly
working as "mules" - those who carry the drugs across borders - or as
fronts, secretaries, money launderers or stash-house managers.

Twenty-five percent of all drug-traffic suspects have been women, the
DEA said.

"Let's face it, there's a paradigm in our society," said former DEA
agent Tom Cash. "Cops and customs agents have a lot of sympathy for
women and the drug traffickers have taken advantage of that in a big
way."

In the wake of the violent dissolution of the fearsome Medellin drug
cartel - and the arrest of most members of the Cali cartel - there's
been a splintering in the drug trade.

In many cases, women are quietly rising from mid-level managers to
powerful and wealthy cocaine Cleopatras to fill the vacuum,
law-enforcement officials say.

ALTHOUGH DEA intelligence officials say the drug trade is still a
male-dominated business, there are signs - especially in what's left
of the Cali cartel - that women could soon take over.

"Colombian women are certainly very aggressive in this business from
what we've been able to see," says Eaton.

Being married to - or in love with - a drug peddler is how some women
move into the trade.

Others have gone into the drug business to support their habits or pay
the bills - a rationale that shot one woman into the national headlines.

Laurie Anne Hiett, the mom of two boys and wife of Col. James Hiett,
the head of the U.S. Army's $250 million anti-drug effort in Colombia,
faces up to nine years in jail for shipping huge packets of heroin
into the country to support her coke craving.

Many successful "queenpins" have used their romantic connections to
get ahead - like Victoria Henao, 39, wife of Pablo Escobar.

Victoria was believed to have been attempting to take over what was
left of her deceased husband's drug empire when she was arrested in
Argentina last November on money-laundering charges.

THE most successful of the cocaine queenpins to date has been Mery
Valencia.

Until her 1999 arrest in Brazil, and extradition to the United States,
the severe, no-nonsense Valencia - known as La Senora - ran a vast
distribution and money-laundering empire throughout New York, New
Jersey and Florida.

Federal officials estimate her organization distributed more than
12,000 kilos of cocaine worth more than $180 million a year in 1997
and 1998. The senior management of La Senora's organization were all
women - mainly close family members from her hometown in Santa Rosa,
Colombia.

Valencia was a hyper-efficient "bean counting" manager who valued hard
work and precision, officials say. She also was extremely elusive, and
underwent plastic surgery to change her appearance.

Her gang also was one of the very few that never used violence, police
say.

Ironically, it was a man who finally brought Valencia down. On the day
feds raided her stash houses - finding 320 kilos of cocaine and $20
million in cash - a careless male employee was overheard on a wiretap
talking about how "La Senora was going to leave soon for Carnival,"
officials say.

Valencia, who was nabbed in Rio de Janeiro with 13 passports and a
ledger book containing the secrets of her organization, was sentenced
to life in prison by Manhattan federal Judge Kimba Wood. After her
arrest, two of her male drug smugglers were overheard blubbering:

"Our mother is down the drain!"

BUT of all the new cocaine queenpins, none has had a more shocking and
sensational career than "The Black Widow" - the notorious Griselda
Blanco.

A former street hustler, pickpocket and prostitute from the mean
streets of Medellin in Colombia, Blanco controlled a vast
Colombia-to-Miami-to-New York empire that earned an estimated $8
million in profits a month during her fearsome heyday in the 1980s.

She may have been the most violent drug lord cops have ever come
across.

"Griselda Blanco. Oh, my God! The Black Widow," said Cash. "She was
unusual, all right. She had a degree of ruthlessness that we hadn't
seen before."

"All the cocaine-related violence we had down here in the 1980s, well
Griselda Blanco was very much a key player in that scene," added
Singleton, who was part of a joint federal/New York/Florida task force
code-named Red Rum - murder spelled backward - that took her down.

Court records show Blanco was a drug addict who consumed vast
quantities of "bazooka," a potent form of smokeable, unrefined
cocaine, and maintained a lifestyle that would make a porn moviemaker
blush.

Officials say Blanco would force men and women to have sex at
gunpoint, and had frequent bisexual orgies. She named the youngest of
her four sons Michael Corleone, and designed lingerie that had secret
hiding places for packets of cocaine for her mules.

Blanco's favorite possessions included an emerald and gold MAC 10
machine pistol, Eva Peron's pearls and a tea set once used by the
Queen of England.

In court, it was revealed that Blanco killed three former husbands as
well as strippers, business rivals - and innocent bystanders,
including a 4-year-old boy.

Miami police also say she once stole $1.8 million from a business
associate and then ordered her tortured and killed, her body wrapped
in a plastic bag and dumped in a canal.

In all, there are at least 50 murders - including 12 in Queens -
credited to the ruthless Blanco and her band of vicious hit men known
as the "Pistoleros."

In the late 1980s, Blanco - bloated, out of her wits and in poor
health from decades of debauchery - turned over day-to-day management
of her business to three of her illiterate sons, and tried to retire
to suburban Irvine, Calif.

But it was too late - Operation Red Rum caught up with
her.

In 1993, the cops got a star informer - one of Blanco's prized former
hit men, Jorge Ayala, who had spurned her sexual advances and stole
$80,000.

Ayala was on the run in Chicago and facing a multitude of murder
charges when he began singing like a bird.

Blanco's lawyer at trial was William Kennedy Smith's lawyer - Roy
Black - and her case encountered numerous delays, including a scandal
that erupted when the star witness was caught paying secretaries in
the Dade County prosecutor's office for phone sex.

Finally, in 1999, Blanco cut a deal with prosecutors in which she
pleaded guilty to two of her 50 murders. She's now serving a 20-year
sentence.

By all accounts, it will be hard time.

The fearsome "Black Widow" of the cocaine trade is now 56, in frail
health and has already had one heart attack in prison.