As every good fashionista knows style rarely comes cheap and a pair of Manolo Blahniks never do, but paying $70,000 dollars per pair seems a bit much especially when they’re knock offs! Yet that is exactly what a group of smugglers in Spain had been doing for the last two years, but these shoes weren’t made for walking at all. Last Tuesday Spanish Police broke up a smuggling ring that had been taking the term “high-heels” to a bizarre and admittedly brilliant new level molding cocaine into replica Manolo Blahniks and smuggling the shoes into Europe through Spain.
The operation was run by a 34-year-old Colombian man and his 24-year-old wife who were living in Barcelona. The couple paid drug traffickers in Columbia who mixed the powdered cocaine with a liquid, hardened it into a paste and the molded and painted the paste to resemble a pair of Manolo Blahnik high heels. The cocaine heels were then smuggled into Spain by drug (shoe?) mules who handed the heels over to another group of smugglers whose job was to turn the shoes back into powder and distribute it to dealers throughout Europe.
The group was finally busted by Police at the Barcelona airport with an estimated $630,000 dollars worth of cocaine shoes. The police currently have five Colombians and one Spaniard in custody and have told press organizations that the bust represented the culmination of a four month investigation into the group’s nefarious and admittedly very clever plot. The Spanish Police pulled the trigger on the bust when they learned that the boss and his wife were about to receive one final shipment of “Manolos” before heading back to Columbia and out of their reach. No word yet on how the folks over at Manolo Blahnik feel about having their signature footwear copied by the smugglers, but you know what they say: imitation is the highest form of flattery!
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