Colin 'Smigger' Smith, Britain's so-called Cocaine King with an estimated personal fortune of £200m, murdered in a gangland hit.

Colin 'Smigger' Smith, Britain's so-called Cocaine King with an estimated personal fortune of £200m, murdered in a gangland hit. Six months on, his assassin remains at large despite a massive police investigation. Only now, though, can the circumstances behind the murder of Britain's biggest cocaine baron be revealed. It is a vicious tale of duplicity, violence and retribution in the shadowy world of international drug dealing.But Smith's killing carries more profound implications, threatening a ferocious war between Britain's original drug syndicate, the so-called Liverpool mafia, and the largest Colombian cocaine suppliers to Europe, the Cali cartels. At stake, say underworld sources, is control of Britain's £2bn cocaine market. They revealed that Merseyside's crime gangs believe Colombian cartels ordered the hit on Smith over a missing consignment of the Class A narcotic worth £72m.Merseyside police are aware of at least one meeting in which the heads of Liverpool's cocaine trade met and agreed to avenge the death of Smith, a high-stakes player whose 1,000kg deals were legendary and sometimes affected the price of cocaine throughout Britain. Police throughout Europe are concerned that any attempt by Liverpool's gangs to target the Cali cartel's sophisticated cocaine distribution network will produce a spate of killings.Sources in Amsterdam, where Liverpudlians and Colombians operate together to disseminate cocaine across the continent, claim that Liverpudlian expat dealers in Amsterdam, Spain, Portugal, Bulgaria, Turkey and South America - allied to the Merseyside mafia - have been warned to prepare for a 'mafia-style bloodbath'. Already Liverpool dealers are understood to have shot at least one senior Colombian cocaine emissary in Amsterdam.Smith's murder raises the question of how a suspected foreign mercenary could fly into Liverpool and assassinate one of the country's best known cocaine barons - the first time a Colombian cartel has successfully eliminated one of Britain's biggest dealers on UK soil. Officially Merseyside police will confirm only that the investigation into Smith's murder 'is ongoing', but detectives believe that his death has triggered a standoff in a volatile business. Liverpool's gangs have traditionally worked directly with their Colombian counterparts, with Smith's syndicate buying cocaine from South American networks whose origins can be traced back to the infamous cartels that controlled international cocaine traffic in the 1990s.