Blood on the Sand

We’re here, we’ve made it, after all this crazy s#*t we’re finally finished, Griselda Blanco has come to an end, and what an end it is! Don’t want to spoil anything, but this ends with quite the bang! But before all that let’s set this thang up, so Griselda, you know the murderer, kingpin, drug lord, well she’s going to be released, everyone’s happy right? Wrong, the police, for there credit are rightfully pissed about this, so they try to pin all the other years of crimes that she did, oh were you not paying attention? Yea, she’s only in prison for the little, absolutely minor amount of crime she was doing back in NYC, you know back all those episodes ago, when she was just moving an ounce here and there, back before the 200+ murders she most likely did!

So she’s about to get out of her military prison set up and fly back to Columbia and continue running her already, never stopped running, drug empire, but there’s something she wasn’t expecting: The Law, that’s right The Law is going to catch up with her and she’s lookin at a huge amount of potential time back in prison: 30 Years, nearly the rest of her life! Which she will be serving in 3 concurrent terms of 10 years each, so 10 years, minus good behavior and all the other bs… How does she do it, will she make it to the end of the story, how are her sons doing?!?! All this and so much more here on the weeks exciting Blood on the Sand!

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#cocaine #columbia #narcos #griselda #soccermom #truecrime #comedy #podcast

Griselda might be in prison for the next 15 years, but that isn’t about to get in the way of love! In 1991 Charles Crosby, a small time crack dealer in Oakland, sent her some fan mail. He’s reached the limits of what he could make based on his suppliers in Oakland, but he had his sights on bigger things: Driving corvettes, wearing the finest teals and purples, and Jheri curls!

These are the years that Griselda finds true love... While being locked up in a super-supermax prison located on an active military base, but somehow she still finds time to run her business, keep up with the fam, and pay $1,500 EACH TIME to make sweet love to Mr. Charles Crosby, oh I’m sorry have “Sexual Relations” as he likes to put it, in the most romantic location in the whole prison: a multipurpose room. Later, after Charles gets caught messing around, the man has needs after all, we find out what those other purposes for the room really are. After that we catch up with how the boys are doing, as you might imagine: not good, but they find a clever way to screw over the people who may have harmed them. Lastly we also find out: Who’s been in fact having sexual relations with a white woman, the answer may surprise you! All this and so much more here on the weeks exciting Blood on the Sand!

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Episode 17: Griselda Blanco Part 4: The Black Widow Gets Caught

There’s a four million dollar bounty on Griselda’s head in Miami and Columbia, so she takes her mom, you know the one she never spoke to again, and takes her to Irvine in Northern california to hide out. Rivi, her and our favorite hitman, is offered $500 grand for information on Griselda, but he turns them down and goes into hiding in Chicago.

This is the beginning of Griselda’s downfall. Here we are, the calm before the storm, all the crazy stuff that Griselda has done, from ordering the deaths of at least 200 people, having children murdered, cutting the throats of anyone who’s come close to her, the time has come and she will now have to reap what she has sown, she has to pay the piper! Like all evil criminals should, she must spend the rest of her life incarcerated for the evils…. Nah I’m just messin with you, she gets 15 years! 15 F#*kin years! Yes, you did read that correctly, for being one of the, if not THE, largest drug traffickers in the WORLD at the time, murdering countless people, ordering the murder of children, accidentally getting a child murdered, she faces: 15 years! How did that all this S#*t-F#*kery happen? Well you’ll need to listen to find out!

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"Who Put This Thing Together? Me, That's Who! Who Do I Trust? Me!" -Scarface

These are the Miami years, the golden years, the years when everything fell into place, this is when our story takes a sudden and very violent shoot up! Like a bullet in only 6 years Griselda goes from moving 1000 Kilos in a battleship to being able to buy a battleship, and probably would have too because these are some of the most grizzly years we’ve seen in America since the civil war. Bodies keep piling up, and now she’s in Miami, but she isn’t alone, her three sons Dixon, Uber, and Osvaldo,are helping her along with their future ex-stepfather Darío Sepúlveda, and the rest of the gang of hired killers, one of which, Rivi, we actually kind of like. Needless to say, but things go perfectly according to Griselda’s plans, which wouldn’t really be an issue but she is smoking 5 Basucos a day! Which if you’re just tuning in now, are Cigarettes packed with Cocaine! We also take a trip to Cocaine Narnia, find out who owns the “Happy Time Complete Party Supply company”, what a war wagon is, and a few children are brutally murdered, or ruined for the rest of their lives, fun stuff!

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“New York City: If You Can Make it Here, You Can Make it Anywhere”

Like a gunshot Griselda is off and panting a hard foot in America, and like many immigrants before her she lands in the city that never sleeps, New York City! Hot off her international incident smuggling 994 Kilos, Griselda takes New York. First thing on the agenda; how to get more product in? Well, she has all these women lying around, might as well start strapping cocaine girdles on them! In an exciting story we like to call “The Sisterhood of the traveling Cocaine pants” We also find who invented the first crack pipe, and the invention of the female orgasm, all this and so much more!

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Before there was Pablo Escobar, there was Griselda Blanco. Coming from a...let’s say “circumstantial” (or circumspect) upbringing in Columbia to become one of the deadliest women in modern day history, listen as we bring you the first episode in our latest series of psychos from the tropics. today’s episode focuses on the early years, the come-up years, of Griselda; we dive way deeper than we should, and uncover one hell of a bloody episode, a period of time called La Violencia which is still not extreme enough, to Griselda’s first forays into kidnapping, murder, and a whole lotta sex and drugs....come with us as we sift through the BS and pull out some Columbian Drug Lord gold! We’re gonna get murdered!

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"There is no doubt some of Read's stories are embellished, polished or in some cases, stolen, but there is also no doubt that through the 1970s and 1980s he was one of the most dangerous men in Australia.”

So here we are, this is it! We have made it to the finale of Mark Brandon “Chopper” Read, we sift through all the truth and lies and finish this story in a way we feel would’ve made Chopper proud. But outside of that we get into what Chopper was capable of doing once he honestly, truly was capable of retiring from a life of crime, Chopper for all intents and purposes has left the life behind him and focuses of his children, painting, producing several albums, a live show featuring standup, stories, writing many books, some of which twice, being featured on television and films, and just doing anything and everything he could. It’s really inspirational, in a psychotic way. This final episode really shows all the potential Chopper could’ve had given a different upbringing, and we finish with his final “death bed confession” interview where he clears the air and gets into the “truth” of a lot of his stories, given 7 days before passing away.

"Dangerous gangsters feared Read because he was a local version of an underworld terrorist. For many years, he saw himself as a street soldier who didn't care if he lived or died."

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eRiFTBrDhHA&ab_channel=andrehashem

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“I have a lucrative speaking career now. Why would I ruin it with being hasty and violent?”

Bang, we come in on chopper leaving prison, we know you’ve heard that before, and this time he promises that he’ll be good, we also know you’ve heard that before, but unlike all those other times, this time, it’s actually (mostly) true! We say mostly because, there might have been a little, well you really should listen to the full episode to learn about that one! But yea, that’s right Chopper is now on the up and up, by the time he leaves prison he has sold an insane amount of books, 300,000 and in Australia he’s kind of a regular celebrity, he gets asked onto television shows, mostly drunk, gets interviewed by journalists, mostly drunk and hangs out with celebrities, mostly to drink. We gotta tell you, once Chopper got that taste of fam he did not want it to go anywhere, but will that lead to his downfall? Will Mark Brandon “Chopper” Read’s story be met with some insane poetic irony and eventually lead to his final judgement for all the wrongs he’s done? Well tune in and listen till the end to hear the thrilling conclusion to one of the most interesting psychos we’ve ever heard about!

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February 11th 1998, Chopper gets out of jail, 1998, he’s sold at least 300k books. Hell, he sold 260k by the end of his appeal because they reference his literary career as his reason for being safe to release into society.

These are the books he releases in prison:

Chopper 2: Hits And Memories: More Confessions Of Mark Brandon Read 1992

Chopper 3: Hell Hath No Fury Like a Mate Shot in the Arse 1993

Chopper 4: For The Term Of His Unnatural Life: More Confessions Of Mark Brandon Read 1994

Chopper 5 Pulp Faction 1995

Chopper 6 No Tears for a Tough Guy 1996

Crime journalist John Silvester wrote the forward for a re-release of Chopper: From the Inside and said:

"It was a series of books on the life of Chopper Read that many consider to be the greatest crime against literature in the history of the written word,"

"I do not believe that he has any psychiatric disorder or personality disorder. I am of the opinion that there are no intrinsic propensities for him to return (to) violent behavior if he is released from prison."

Ooooh boy, we’re finally here, this is the big one ladies and gents, this is where chopper goes from being just another grimy street tough with a few stories, to front page world news! When he gets out of prison he's treated like a friggin celebrity, and Like all other subsequent episodes, this one spans a fairly short amount of time, that’s right, all this craziness that is about a handful of years, if that! Chopper, again, “tries” to settle down, he actually gets married to that woman we’ve been bringing up from time to time.

“I went out of my way to meet all of them to try and settle matters down. I told them that I had retired and had come to Tasmania to live the quiet life and not to take on any hits. We had a million drinks and things seemed to settle down. At first I was treated with suspicion and distrust. But in the end, they seemed to accept me”

Alas Chopper’s heart is about to be tested when the beautiful Renee Brack enters the picture, she’s a feisty little firecracker that steals choppers shark-like gaze. You see Renee does a little story on Chopper, an Australian Hardcopy exposé on the Tasmanian terror from down under, because our little psycho’s past has come to bite him in the arse. Chopper, as we all know, doesn’t like to murder, he just likes to maim and terrorize, chop off a few toes, ears, peckers, and well shoot a few people too, one of which will send him away for quiet some time, and give him some of that Governor’s pleasure he’s been hoping for! How about you lock the doors and hide under the sheets, this one’s a treat!

“Where a judge declares that a person is a “dangerous criminal” pursuant to subsection (1), he shall order that that person be detained during the Governor's pleasure.”

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It’s 1989, Chopper is famous, FAMOUS! Like famous famous. But he’s going to jail for 4 ½ years for attempted murder, arson, and reckless endangerment and sending morbid Christmas cards. But unlike Episode 2 where we covered his long jail stint, go back and listen it’s a doozy a guy cuts off his d*ck and people burn themselves alive on purpose in a prison escape, but unlike episode 2, there really aren’t too many anecdotes from Chopper’s second big jail stint.

Also in 1991 he published his first book! Sort of. It’s called Chopper: From the Inside, a book compiled by a journalist from a collection of letters that Chopper wrote to him about the insanity of prison. And he’s ready for the good life now! He’s out of jail, he’s published, time to put the guns away and let the cash roll in.

He moves to Tasmania, for two reasons, and they may be related. One, it’s because that’s where a lot of criminals go to retire. Reason number two and it may have been the cause of reason number 1, because the gun laws are less restrictive and he can have a giant arsenal without getting hassled. But he wasn’t getting hassled before unless he was shooting people in the chest or face and even then half the time he got off.

Quick little lesson: today, gun laws are VERY restricted in Tasmania. No automatic weapons, nothing semi automatic or “self loading” or resembling anything military you essentially have to have a musket. But that’s since 1996. Before 1996, it was totally apesh*t, because Australians used the threat of aboriginals, either real or imagined, to keep really loose restrictions on quantity and what types of guns you could have.

So, Chopper is famous and has a reputation and he just moved to this new place with a bunch of “retired” bikie gang guys, so naturally, THEY think he’s there to carry out a hit or hits. This is not good,

Before getting into the description for this episode let’s give you a little taste of the insanity of Mr. Chopper

“For a while after I set fire to his house, I would send Nick a Christmas card that read,

apologies to jerry lee Lewis

I shook your walls and I rattled your brain

My kind of love just drove you insane

I broke your will

Oh what a thrill

Goodness gracious great balls of fire”

Chopper would send this as a Christmas card to Nick “the Greek” Apostolidis every year after he set his house on fire in 1987

Let's just get right into it, this episode is the beginning of Chopper’s fame years, now he isn’t the celebrity that he’ll eventually become, but here’s getting there. He's 32, only been OUT of jail for 13 months of his adult life, you read that right, since the age of 18 he’s only been a free man for 13 months! But after he gets out of prison he starts to fly straight, he settles down, as much as the down under version of a Tarantino-esque character could, with the “love” of his life Margaret. So he tries this for all of two seconds, then goes right into more chaos, “Just when I thought I was out...they pull me back in” to quote a famous movie that Chopper himself will end up quoting many times, but the “they” Chopper would refer to is… Ugh let’s just say the world, or his own mind really! From his first court documented murder, to the burning down of a few Mob Boss’ homes to ending with some turns you have to hear to believe this episode will blow your head off, as insane as it all might sound, this was only in a period of 3 Months! Pour yourself a drink and join in on the insanity!

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Ok so guys, a lot has happened these last two episodes. We’ve covered 30 years, we went through his entire horrific childhood, dad with PTSD from WWII, 7th day adventist mom, 15 years of abuse by his parents, as an adult so far he’s killed a couple people, chopped off a few of his own ears, kidnapped a judge, started a tomahawk wielding trench-coat gang in prison, and now it’s 1986, he’s out of Jail. He’s 32, he’s only been out of jail for 13 months of his adult life.

We know he gets out, Margaret is there to meet him. Imagine you waited 8 years for the love of your life to come out of prison and he comes out without ears? Do you stay?

Imagine the girl waiting for the dude who cut his dick off? There was no girl waiting for him.

So I think as we’ll see, Margaret is somehow one of the few calming influences in his life. Because yeah he goes back to his shenanigans immediately, robbing drug dealers and whore houses (which took me entirely too much time to figure out that’s what massage parlours were), but nothing really extreme happens til 1987. April 1987 to be exact.

So, to preface what happens here, we have to give some background on some more of Chopper’s friends. Not the old Surrey Road Gang guys like Dave the Jew who is making a return appearance next episode, or ---. These guys are a little more legitimate; Chopper’s moving up in the world.

Norm Dardovski is the head of the Albanian mafia in Melbourne which sounds both impressive and something like a AA baseball team, like a minor league team but not single A or triple A, no one’s a prospect, they just send injured players for rehab stints and guys trying to make a comeback after failing too many drug tests. But Norm owns the Builders Arms Hotel as a front and is a drug kingpin by night.

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