She lived as the "godmother of cocaine", ruthlessly ordering scores of bloody murders and violent revenge attacks as she plotted the course of Miami's infamous drug wars.

So it seemed only fitting that the manner of Griselda Blanco's death on Monday reflected the brutality for which she became notorious – gunned down in the street by a killer on a motorcycle as she left a butcher's shop in her hometown of Medellín, Colombia.

Blanco, 69, was credited with inventing the motorcycle ride-by killing during her years controlling southern Florida's fledgling cocaine trade in the late 70s and early 80s, an era in which she pocketed billions of dollars before being convicted of three murders, including that of a two-year-old boy. Detectives suspected her of dozens more.

"It's some kind of poetic justice that she met an end that she delivered to so many others," said Professor Bruce Bagley, head of the University of Miami's department of international studies and author of the book Drug Trafficking in the Americas.

"Here is a woman who made a lot of enemies on her rise and was responsible for the deaths of untold numbers of people.

"She might have retired to Colombia and wasn't anything like the kind of player she was in her early days, but she had lingering enemies almost everywhere you look. What goes around comes around."

Blanco, who was deported from the US in 2004 after serving almost two decades in jail in New York and Florida for racketeering and murder, became one of Miami's original drugs gangsters as tidal waves of smuggled cocaine swept aside marijuana as the dealers' most profitable commodity.

She set up a distribution network across the US that netted her tens of millions of dollars a month, making shipments of more than 1,500kg, and maintained her dominance by building an empire staffed with violent enforcers, who were well rewarded for following her orders to execute rivals at the drop of a hat to and make sure they left, no witnesses.

She was also personally involved in developing creative methods to get cocaine into the US, even setting up a lingerie shop in Colombia that produced underwear for export with secret compartments.

Her story, which was featured in the 2008 documentary Cocaine Cowboys: Hustlin' with the Godmother, showed that her love of the underworld did not only extend to her drugs activities. A son with her third husband, Dario Sepulveda, was christened Michael Corleone Blanco after the central figure in the Godfather trilogy of mafia movies.

Two of her three other sons by her first husband were murdered after entering the family business.

Blanco became a widow three times, and remained under suspicion for the deaths of all three husbands. In one notorious episode in 1975, remarkable even among Colombia's hardened drugs criminals for its violence, she confronted her husband and business partner Alberto Bravo in a Bogotá nightclub car park over millions of dollars missing from the profits of the cartel they built together.

Blanco, then 32, pulled out a pistol, Bravo responded by producing an Uzi submachine gun and after a blazing gun battle he and six bodyguards lay dead. Blanco, who suffered only a minor gunshot wound to the stomach, recovered and soon afterwards moved to Miami, where her body count – and reputation for ruthlessness – continued to climb.

During her Florida reign of terror she was suspected of responsibility in at least 40 murders, possibly as many as 200, yet was convicted of only three – two drug dealers who crossed her and a two-year-old boy, Johnny Castro, the son of a former Blanco enforcer, who was shot twice in the head by hitmen as he travelled in his father's car.

Blanco's former lieutenant, Jorge Ayala, told police: "At first she was real mad because we missed the father, but when she heard we had gotten the son by accident, she said she was glad, that they were even."

She escaped the death penalty on a technicality when Ayala was discredited as a witness after being caught having phone sex with secretaries in the prosecutors' office.

Bagley said Blanco, who was shot twice in the head, was likely to become the subject of books or a Hollywood movie.

"She was a pioneer in the sense that she helped to forge and carve out the drugs trade in south Florida and used bloody tactics to do so," he said.

"The danger is she will be remembered not for her cold-heartedness and brutality but for being a woman entrepreneur in an emerging field dominated by men."