Alberto Bravo’s Uzi: The Black Widow’s Prey

It was the spring of 1975, and the most dangerous woman on the planet had just deplaned from her Lear jet at the Bogota airport. The quick hop from Miami had taken some two and one-half hours. All the way down Griselda Blanco Restrepo steamed. She was having husband troubles, and her marital squabbles were about to go public.

Blanco was unimaginably successful. As the undisputed leader of one of the largest cocaine smuggling enterprises on the planet, Griselda was turning $80 million per month. Several years before Blanco and her second husband Alberto Bravo had smuggled themselves into Queens, New York, with $26,000 in cash they had scammed back home in Medellin, Colombia. Their cocaine smuggling empire subsequently became the stuff of legend.

Origin Story

Griselda Blanco arose from a world where violence was a staple to be hoarded, metered, wielded, and traded. At age 11 she and several friends abducted the ten-year-old son of a wealthy Colombian family and demanded a ransom. When the family failed to pay the girl shot her young captive in the forehead with a pistol. This first commercial hit unleashed an eventual torrent of bloodshed.

As a teenager she married a small-scale hood named Carlos Trujillo and mothered three children. Trujillo specialized in falsified immigration documents and similar modest hustles. Griselda and Carlos eventually suffered a disagreement of some sort, and she had him killed.

Alberto Bravo, Griselda’s second husband, was just another hustler. However, where Carlos smuggled people, Alberto’s forte was drugs. Using the aforementioned $26,000 as seed, the couple rapidly expanded into some serious money.

At first, Griselda sewed custom female undergarments to help her mules sneak Colombian coke through American airports. At the apogee of her career, Blanco employed around 1,500 professional smugglers, a modest air force worth of pilots, and a handful of government officials. By 1975 she had murdered her way to the pinnacle of her profession and become fabulously wealthy in the process. Along the way she caught her husband Alberto skimming cash and decided to balance the business. The stage was set for a simply epic marital tiff.

The Killing

Griselda traveled to a local nightclub in a multi-vehicle convoy. She was dressed in her typical finery including a pair of custom ostrich skin boots. Tucked into one of her boots was her favorite compact automatic pistol. Griselda stood a mere five feet tall and weighed 165 pounds. While not necessarily physically imposing, her wrath once tooled up was indeed the stuff of legend. Her embezzling husband Alberto was soon to feel some of that.

This small dangerous woman traveled with a veritable army of heavily armed bodyguards. Her husband moved with a similar professional security detail. When Griselda arrived at the nightclub she left her vehicle and strolled over to her husband’s limo. Alberto was himself in a sour mood and verbally lashed out at his diminutive spouse. Griselda was commonly known as “the Godmother,” and Alberto felt that such an innately excessive moniker might go to her head.

The resulting argument escalated through the car window until Griselda drew her pistol. In response, Alberto produced an Uzi submachine gun. Griselda pumped several rounds into her husband at contact range. Before he was incapacitated Alberto loosed a long burst from his Uzi, spraying the countryside with 9mm rounds.

Griselda took a 9mm bullet to the abdomen. At least one of her rounds center punched Alberto in the face. By the time the smoke cleared half a dozen bodyguards were dead along with Griselda’s sticky-fingered husband. Griselda recovered to ultimately murder yet another spouse some years later. Whether the security troops fell to Griselda’s pistol, Alberto’s SMG, sundry bodyguard’s weapons, or some lethal combination has been lost to history.

The Gun

The Uzi submachine gun was arguably the most rugged pistol caliber submachine gun ever produced. While the faster firing HK MP5 got most of the press, I myself consistently shoot better with the Israeli gun. The Uzi arose during the dark early days of the reconstituted Jewish state.

Uziel Gal was born Gothard Glas in 1923 in Weimar, Germany. His parents divorced when he was young, and he fled Germany for England as the Nazis slithered to power. In 1933 he accompanied his father to Palestine, settling in Kibbutz Yagur.

The communal life of the kibbutz foments a fierce sense of community. Gal joined the Palmach early on and learned military weapons. In 1943 he was arrested by the occupying British forces for possession of a firearm and sentenced to six years in prison. Two years later he was pardoned and returned home to Yagur.

Uzi Gal fought for his country during the 1948 War for Independence and eventually developed his eponymous submachine gun based upon personal experience in combat. At the time the struggling state of Israel was using WW2-surplus weapons, many of Nazi origins, and was desperate to establish a domestic source of armaments. Sundry arms embargoes made supplying the fledgling Israeli military a labyrinthine chore.

Gal spent two years developing the Uzi, and it first saw service with IDF Special Forces in 1954. By all accounts, a humble personable man, Uzi Gal protested when the IDF named the gun after him. The Uzi ultimately became the most produced submachine gun in history, with more than ten million seeing service. The Uzi has been produced under license in several countries.

The basic Uzi sports an overhung bolt design inspired by the Czech ZK 476. This telescoping system is almost bullpup in its execution. Orienting the breech far to the rear allows the gun to feed through the pistol grip and remain markedly shorter and more portable than more conventional designs. The Uzi fires from the open bolt via advanced primer ignition.

Not only is Uzi efficient, reliable, and effective in action, the gun is also designed to be easy to manufacture in large quantities via semi-skilled workers. The receiver and fire control unit are comprised of steel pressings that can be rapidly and cheaply produced in bulk. However, unlike the MAC-series guns, the Uzi is also accurate and controllable.

The basic Uzi design ultimately spawned the Mini Uzi and Micro Uzi as well as semiauto versions of each for the American civilian market. The full size Uzi features a solid wood or folding steel stock and cycles at a sedate 600 rounds per minute. The smaller versions run much faster and are more difficult to manage.

The grip safety along with a ratchet in the top cover helps keep the gun safe in a rugged military environment.

Trigger Time

The Uzi is undeniably heavy, but the gun’s mass along with its modest rate of fire make the gun exceptionally controllable. Magazines come in a variety of capacities, but 25 and 32-round boxes are the most common. The magazine catch is easily accessible on the left. The fact that the gun feeds through the grip makes it easy to reload even in the dark.

The sights are heavily fenced and rugged. However, once the gun starts running you will be sighting grossly through the sight ears. Three and four-round bursts are easy with a disciplined trigger finger. After untold thousands of rounds through sundry Uzis I have never had a stoppage.

Denouement

Griselda Blanco was ultimately responsible for between 40 and 200 murders. The argument that could be made that she more than any other single person precipitated the bloodbath that was the South Florida drug wars in the 1980’s. Many to most of the drug-related murders that rolled through the morgue back then had Griselda’s bloody fingerprints on them to one degree or another.

Blanco was by all accounts a bloodthirsty reprobate for whom killings on whim and violent bisexual perversion were a regular part of her opulent decadence. She ultimately spent more than a decade in prison and continued to helm her cocaine empire from behind bars. In 2002 she suffered a heart attack while incarcerated.

In 2004 Griselda was released from prison and deported to Medellin where she lived a fairly low profile life. Prior to her death in 2012 she had only been positively identified once at the Bogota airport in 2005. In September of 2012, Griselda went out to a local butcher’s shop with her granddaughter to purchase $150 worth of meat. An unidentified man on a motorcycle emerged from the crowd and shot her twice in the back of the head, sparing the child. This method of assassination had, ironically enough, been one of Blanco’s signature operations. At the time of her death, Griselda Blanco was worth roughly $2 billion.

Her son Michael Corleone Blanco (yep, from The Godfather) reported that prior to her assassination Griselda had become a born again Christian and renounced her violent past. If true Blanco’s tale becomes an epic example of God’s breathtaking capacity for forgiveness and redemption. In the bloody life of Griselda Blanco, we see that no human sin no matter how egregious exceeds a loving God’s capacity for salvation.

Uzi Submachine Gun

Calibers	9mm Parabellum, .22LR, .41AE, .45ACP, 9x21mm IMI
Weight	7.72 lbs
Barrel Length	10.2 in
Overall Length	18.5 in collapsed/25 in extended
Cyclic Rate of Fire	600 rpm
Feed	20, 25, 32, 40, and 50-round box magazines
Sights	Flip-adjustable peep rear, post front