Every so often a criminal persona will have a street reputation so grand; it will become permanently fixated into popular culture. From Al Capone and his cigar, the Son of Sam’s grim mystique all the way up to John Gotti’s Teflon disposure. In 2006 a new outlaw would be etched in our hearts via the cult classic documentary Cocaine Cowboys.

The film chronicled the insane drug trafficking flowing throughout Miami in the 1970’s and 1980’s. At the center of all the money, murder, and kidnapping was Griselda Blanco. Also known as “The Godmother”, Blanco was a pioneer in the cocaine trade due to her amassed fortune and ruthless ambition to stay at top.

While Cocaine Cowboys detailed her rise to infamy, her entire story was not told. Now with the recent release of the much awaited sequel Cocaine Cowboys 2, her story continues in California. Albeit being incarcerated, Blanco still ran a multi million dollar drug operation behind bars with the assistance of Charles Cosby. A dealer himself, Cosby would link with Griselda and make street history. In an exclusive, AllHipHop.com speaks to The Godmother’s multi million dollar man.

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via Complex Magazine

While in her late 40s, Colombian cocaine queen Griselda Blanco liked to tell her friends, “I’m the baddest bitch to ever take a breath of life.” If you need proof, watch Cocaine Cowboys 2: Hustlin’ With The Godmother, a spin-off of the 2006 documentary that drops today. While the original examined Miami drug trafficking in the late ’70s and early ’80s, the sequel focuses in on the post-Miami operation of Blanco (aka The Godmother), detailing how she fell in love with Oakland man Charles Cosby and recruited him to run her national cocaine distribution network while behind bars in the early ’90s.

Told primarily through interviews with Cosby, along with archival footage and animated reenactments, CC2 is easily as riveting as the original. But while the first documentary offered broad social commentary about the effects of drug money on Miami, the sequel is much more of a focused character study about how these strange bedfellows developed a symbiotic relationship. If that doesn’t make you want to watch…did we mention that there’s a segment where they give instructions on how to cook crack? Either way, there’s something for the whole family. Watch the trailer here or learn how to win a copy of the DVD below.

To win a copy of the Cocaine Cowboys 2: Hustlin’ With The Godmother, answer the following three questions correctly:

1. Griselda Blanco is originally from Medellín, Columbia. What other infamous drug trafficker called this city home?

2. Cocaine Cowboys 2 takes place primarily in Oakland, CA. Name three rappers from Oakland who have gone platinum.

3. Griselda Blanco named her son Michael Corleone, after Al Pacino’s character in The Godfather. In the first movie, what island does Michael flee to after killing the men who shot his father?

Email your responses to contest@complex.com. If you’re one of the first two people to answer correctly, we will send you a copy of Cocaine Cowboys 2

via CBS4

MIAMI (CBS4) ― The 2006 drug documentary “Cocaine Cowboys” took viewers into the violent, deadly and not-so-underground world of drug trafficking in Miami in the late seventies and eighties. Director Billy Corben’s sequel, “Cocaine Cowboys 2: Hustlin’ with the Godmother” focuses on the lives of “The Godmother” Griselda Blanco, and her former lover Charles Cosby. Both Cosby and Corben talked about the film with Jim and Jade Thursday morning.

Griselda Blanco, aka The Godmother, was responsible for bringing in more drugs and more crime to South Florida’s streets than anyone else at the time. She led a $40 million cocaine business, and Charles Cosby was her lover.

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via AllHipHop.com

Cocaine Cowboys II Set to Hit Stores
Published Tuesday, July 22, 2008 8:46 AM

By Ismael AbduSalaam

In a follow up to the highly successful cult original, Cocaine Cowboys II: Hustlin’ With the Godmother has been confirmed for DVD release on July 29.

The sequel will be narrated by Charles Cosby, a lover of the notorious Griselda Blanco, also known by the aliases “The Godmother,” “Black Widow,” and “Cocaine Queen of Miami.”

Cosby opened his first crackhouse in the late 80’s, and became well known throughout East Oakland’s burgeoning drug trade.

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via New Times

Griselda Blanco has acquired many monikers in her 65 years. The Colombian drug dealer earned the title of “Cocaine Queen” in 1970s New York, and she became La Madrina — AKA “The Godmother” — when she moved her operations to Miami. Because of her tendency to bump off her own husbands, three in all, she has also been dubbed “Black Widow.” Blanco got busted in California in 1985, and she was subsequently convicted in federal court of conspiring to import cocaine. The conviction made the nightly news, which is how Charles Cosby, a small-time street hustler from Oakland, California, learned about her. He was gob-smacked, he says. “My drug dealing was confined to the hood,” he recounts in a telephone interview from California. “I couldn’t see beyond the ghetto. I never knew anything about the higher echelons.”

Cosby saw Blanco as a role model, someone to be emulated. In 1991, he sent a fan letter to her California prison cell, and she wrote back. The two struck up a fast correspondence friendship. Authorities wouldn’t let Cosby, then 23, meet the 51-year-old Blanco in person because, he says, he was on probation for carrying a machine gun.

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via DVD Talk

The story of Oakland, Calif.-based drug lord Charles Cosby and his tumultuous association with Griselda Blanco (the so-called “Godmother” of the Colombian cocaine trade) is the kind of stuff Hollywood screenwriters salivate over and indeed, Cosby seems highly self-aware, conscious of the seductive nature of his tale. And so Cocaine Cowboys 2 follows Cosby from his Oakland childhood up through the ranks of Griselda Blanco’s organization (including their brief, torrid affair that might just re-define your ideas of conjugal visits) and their lethal falling out, culminating in protracted legal proceedings that most definitely do not end in a conventional manner.

Through it all, the implacable Cosby — seen frequently in snapshots fondling cash, posing in front of cars or sticking his tongue down Blanco’s throat — maintains an effortless cool, embodying the very type of outlaw celebrating in rap songs, a bad-ass dude who ran the streets and got out clean…

via East Bay Express

Oakland crack-house operator Charles Cosby became the twentysomething lover of fiftysomething Colombian cocaine queenpin Griselda Blanco after writing the then-incarcerated billionairess a fan letter that said: “I wanna rub elbows with a legend.” Mano a mano with Blanco, Brookfield Village-bred Cosby soared to Medellín-financed überhustlerdom in the early ’90s, stashing his millions in suitcases and car trunks, burying some in backyards. See his saga in Cocaine Cowboys II: Hustlin’ With the Godmother, a straight-to-DVD documentary due out next month from Miami-based Rakontur Productions. Magnet Releasing, part of Mark Cuban’s Magnolia Pictures, has picked up world distribution rights. At one point, Cosby narrates authentic-looking footage of cocaine, water, and baking soda boiling in a coffeepot. “The cocaine turns into a yellow gel-like liquid,” Cosby intones somberly; subtitle-instructions superimpose the stovetop. Tapwater, ice cubes: a crack-cake forms and is tipped out onto a plate: “Take a large knife or a meat cleaver or what have you and break it down into ten-dollar pieces,” Cosby instructs. Now retired from mackerdom and married with children, he describes himself as “incredibly blessed … it’s my turn to save lives.” For starters, at CharlesCosby.com he sells Cafe Press items depicting his cigar-smoking face at the center of a hundred-dollar bill, wielding a semiautomatic weapon, and pointing the weapon at viewers with the caption “Respected by a City of Killas.” Select your favorite on a shirt, notepad, messenger bag, or thong.

-= The Official Charles Cosby Site =-
Buy Cocaine Cowboys 2: Hustlin With The Godmother Now!

The new July issue of Maxim magazine presents a 5-page spread on Griselda Blanco and Charles Cosby in their article The Female Scarface: The Rise and Fall of the Deadliest Woman Alive

Maxim Article (PDF)

-= The Official Charles Cosby Site =-
Buy Cocaine Cowboys 2: Hustlin With The Godmother Now!

via SlashFilm.com

Author, Hunter Stephenson, reviews the script of the Cocaine Cowboys pilot for HBO.

Earlier this month, we reported on the possibility of a new HBO show based on 2006’s engrossing hit documentary, Cocaine Cowboys, from uber players Michael Bay and Jerry Bruckheimer. Today, Slashfilm gives you an exclusive review of the script for Cocaine Cowboys‘ pilot episode written by Billy Corben and David Cypkin of Rakontur, the Miami-based production company behind the doc and its sequel (set for release this July). For legal reasons, we’ve omitted specific plot details in the review.

Being familiar with Rakontur’s M.O. and work from my time on Miami Beach, I had previously tagged their HBO show pitch as “the antithesis of Miami Vice.” So, it was no surprise to see the opening credits in the script described as such. Verbatim. But while the show’s oddly subdued credits might fit this “antithesis” (old farts playing shuffleboard, an idyllic underdeveloped Miami Beach circa ‘79) , the pilot is not as leery of Don Johnson’s white blazers and Michael Mann’s kooky multiculti derelicts and crabs as I surmised. Recall that the first season of Miami Vice didn’t drip with Art Deco camp under Mann’s watch: the action exuded unprecedented cinematic flash and all of Miami was game, not just Miami Beach beauty. New York City figured into Vice’s early storyline, as it does here. Everything in Cocaine Cowboys is similarly bigger-than-life but far seedier.

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An article in Modern Luxury Magazine titled ” True Grit” by Esther Park focuses on rakontur’s ability to thrive in the Miami environment and produce films with unrivaled quality. The author of the article, Esther Park, also takes a glance at Cocaine Cowboys 2 and reminds the readers just how rare it is to produce a sequel to a documentary.

-= The Official Charles Cosby Site =-
Buy Cocaine Cowboys 2: Hustlin With The Godmother Now!