Do these look like snow shoes?

A drug ring smuggled Colombian cocaine disguised as fake Manolo Blahnik heels into Spain.

The project was the brainchild of a Colombian couple who devised a way to mould a paste-like form of the drug into shoe shapes, complete with a Blahnik label. Once the ‘shoes’ arrived in Spain, a team of several smugglers converted the paste into white-powder form.

Each of the heels had a street value of €50,000, or slightly less than one of Guiseppe Zanotti and Chopard’s diamond-encrusted shoes (the 22-carat pair sold for $180,000, or €65,000 each).

Anti-narcotics squads in the northern Spanish city of Bilbao spent a year tracking the smugglers in—wait for it—Operation Manolos. In the end, agents seized four kilos of cocaine and arrested six people.

The case has invited some brilliant headline punnery: snow shoes, drug mules, high heels, Manolo Blownik...

Unfortunately, there’s no word on which styles the smugglers emulated. In the past, Blahnik has dubbed his shoes Peron, Nerina and Crespo. Surely he could sneak a little ‘Escobar’ into the next collection?