Podcasts · Society & Culture · History
The Underworld Podcast
The Underworld Podcast
286 episodes
Underworld exposes the secret world of transnational criminal networks that have flourished since there were banks to bust, drugs to smuggle, and scams to run. Journalists Danny Gold and Sean Williams bring their experience reporting on dangerous people and organizations to take listeners on a global tour of mobsters, warlords and crooks - from Brooklyn to Beijing, from the streets to the boardrooms - and everywhere in between. Underworld is a show about heroes, villains, and the barely visible mafias that affect all our lives, whether we know it or not.
Episodes page 2 of 6
-
Cattle Rustlers to Cocaine Kings: Los Cachiros
When feds convicted Honduran cocaine kingpin Juan Matta Ballesteros in 1990, authorities hoped it would spell an end to the Central American nation’s growing reputation as a narco state — a status that had caused havoc…
-
The Tijuana Cartel's Bloody Rise and Fall
When the godfather Miguel Ángel Félix Gallardo got busted in '89, he divvied up his empire from a prison cell and handed the coveted Tijuana plaza to the Arellano Felix Brothers, who transformed it into one of the most…
-
The Cartel Puppetmaster: Juan Matta Ballestero
Juan Ramon Matta Ballesteros began life as a pickpocket in his hometown of Tegucigalpa, before heading out on the perilous border roads of Latin America as an emerald smuggler. Soon he was making friends in high…
-
The State Line Mob: Redneck Mafia
Along the blood-soaked border between Mississippi and Tennessee, a ruthless crime empire ruled the night where whiskey flowed, dice rolled, and anyone who crossed the wrong person disappeared into the darkness. The…
-
The Cartel World's Donnie Brasco w/ Ian Frisch
Starting at the tail end of the wild cowboy days of 1980's Miami, undercover FBI agent Martin Suarez didn’t just infiltrate a cartel...he nearly rose to the top. As a smuggler, he helped move a billion dollars worth of…
-
Warlords, Narco-Pirates, & The Gangster King of Vietnam
Emerging from Saigon’s system of warlords and narco-pirates, Nam Cam built a criminal empire by making sure everyone — cops, politicians, media — was in his pocket. But that meant that when everything came crashing…
-
The OG Mexican Narco: Pablo Acosta
Pablo Acosta ruled Mexico's drug trade from a dusty border town, turning Ojinaga into a narco-empire that funneled billions in cocaine, weed and heroin into America during the 1980s. Known as the Fox of Ojinaga, he was…
-
Cambodia’s Untouchable Gangster-in-Chief
Hun To, the nephew of Cambodia’s former PM, is also the ruler of a criminal empire stretching from illegal logging and Triad-run casinos, to corrupt Chinese investment and — ALLEGEDLY — people and heroin trafficking.…
-
London’s Corrupt Cops & Gangland Killers: the Epping Forest Slayings
When a London couple were found dead in a lover’s lane, in 1987, evidence pointed quickly at some of the city’s most notorious gangland figures — both established and upcoming. But despite informants and wiretaps the…
-
World's Most Dangerous Mobster: The Russian Mafiya Godfather
They say Semion Mogilevich is the most powerful gangster on the planet, the mastermind who rewrote the playbook for organized crime worldwide. Boss of bosses in the Russian Mafiya, with a hand in everything from…
-
Burmese Warlords, Gangsters & A Scam Utopia
Buried on the border of Thailand and Myanmar, Shwe Kokko is a shimmering city of skyscrapers, casinos and fresh-laid highways. But peek a little closer and you’ll see why it has become one of the world’s criminal…
-
Europe's Deadliest Biker War: Hells Angels vs the Bandidos
In the 1980's and 1990's, America's biggest outlaw motorcycle gangs were looking to expand all over Europe. Unfortunately, they set their sites on the same countries, and they weren't keen on sharing territory. The…
-
America's Nightmare Mafia Boss: Gaspipe Casso
Anthony “Gaspipe” Casso was the Lucchese family’s brutal underboss, the brains behind boss Vic Amuso's reign, and architect of one of the Mafia’s bloodiest purges. Together they ruled the Luccheses with paranoia and…
-
Fidel Castro: Cuba’s Cocaine Trafficker-in-Chief?
In 1959, when Fidel Castro’s revolutionaries toppled Cuban dictator Fulgencio Batista, they wasted no time booting out American business owners, casinos and drug kingpins — much to the delight of US law enforcers. But…
-
The Dixie Mafia's Texas Millionaire Murders
When Bill Richardson, a troubled oilman and pro pigeon shooter, was gunned down on his Corpus Christi doorstep in 1971, everybody assumed it was an open-and-shut organized crime hit. But when Richardson’s supposed…
-
Mexico's New Ultraviolent Narco-Terrorists: The CDN
From the ashes of Los Zetas rose the Cartel del Noreste or Northeast Cartel, a brutal splinter group led by the infamous Treviño Morales family and headquartered in the blood-soaked border city of Nuevo Laredo. Known…
-
Crack, Chaos, and Cartels: Rayful Edmond’s Empire
In the 1980's, Rayful Edmond rose to infamy as Washington D.C.’s most notorious crack kingpin, building a multimillion-dollar empire by the age of 19. At the height of his reign, D.C. became the murder capital of…
-
Australia's Gangster King of Sin: Abe Saffron
Abe Saffron rose from wartime wheeler-dealing to become the king of Sydney’s underworld, a man whose appetite for sex, money and scandal was unmatched by any other Aussie gangster in the swinging Sixties. Saffron paid…
-
Africa's Pablo Escobar: Kenyan Kingpin Ibrahim Akasha
Ibrahim Akasha was the kingpin of East Africa’s heroin highway, setting up a massive tracking empire that stretched from Afghanistan, Pakistan and Iran to Kenya, South Africa and Europe. When he was gunned down in…
-
The Shaman-Gangsters Who Built Indonesia
For centuries, brigands, gangsters and street toughs ruled the island of Java so thoroughly that they were woven into local myths. But in the 20th century, when the world bounded towards war, mob bosses in Jakarta…
-
The Narco Lord of the Skies: Amado Carrillo Fuentes
Amado Carrillo Fuentes was one of the most powerful drug traffickers of the 1990s, moving hundreds of tons of cocaine and amassing billions while forging deep ties with Colombian cartels and corrupt Mexican officials.…
-
Cocaine, Camorra, Call Girls: Maradona's Downfall
In 1987, Argentine soccer star Diego Maradona was on top of the world. He’d just handed his nation a World Cup, and his club side Napoli its first league title in over 60 years. But Maradona’s hard-partying lifestyle…
-
Russian Mafia Superhitman: Alexander Solonik
The 1990's in Moscow were the glory days of Russian organized crime. Emerging out of the downfall of communism, wannabe oligarchs and gangsters turned the country into a free-for-all as they fought for control. And no…
-
Scotland's Narco Blood Feud Explodes!
When cops on the English coast busted a bid to bring in a huge shipment of cocaine in 2020, it sent shockwaves through the underworld hundreds of miles north in Scotland, where the drugs were destined for, and…
-
The Wild, Murderous Rampage of the Zizians
When cops arrested a group of masked, black-robed protesters at a California campsite in 2019, most folks thoughts they’d caught some eccentric but harmless members of the Bay Area’s niche rationalist movement. But…
-
The Chinese Mafia Takeover of America's Weed Industry
There''s a new king at the top of the US weed game, raking in tens of billions of dollars, so organized and prolific that they've replaced the cartels. A sprawling, shadowy empire of Chinese triads is running thousands…
-
How Diego Maradona Fueled the Rise of Naples’ Camorra
When Argentine soccer wizard Diego Armando Maradona swapped Barcelona for lowly Napoli in 1984, it shocked the sporting world — and sent Naples’ deadly Camorra into overdrive. Corrupt from the very start, the move…
-
The Olympic Snowboarder Narco Kingpin
How did a Canadian former Olympian build a one billion dollar narco empire? A few months ago, the feds added a new name to their 10 most wanted list: Ryan Wedding, a former Olympic athlete and middle class Canadian…
-
The Sinaloan Train Robbers Causing Havoc in the Mojave Desert
You may have missed it, but there’s a new gang of train robbers in the American West — and they’re suprisingly like the bandits of old. For over a decade a team comprised mostly of Mexicans from the state of Sinaloa…
-
The Gunrunner Who Tried to Save China: Two Gun Cohen
On Christmas Day, 1941, as bombs tear Hong Kong apart, gunrunner Morris "Two Gun" Cohen — a street hustler from the slums of London turned Canadian frontiersman turned Chinese general — stares down death from a hotel…
-
Los Muchachos: Miami's Cuban Cartel
In 1980s Miami, amid the glitz, gunfire, and power boats, two Cuban-American friends Sal Magluta and Willy Falcon, built one of the most powerful drug empires in U.S. history. Known as Los Muchachos, they moved…
-
The 'Ndrangheta's Notorious Kidnapping Gang Wars
Today the ‘Ndrangheta, Calabria’s clan-based Mafia, is one of the world’s richest and most powerful drug trafficking organizations, worth an estimated $55 billion. But it wasn’t always like that. From the 1960s, as…
-
Meet The Chicago Outfit's Most Infamous Hitman
Kurt Calabrese grew up in the Chicago mafia known as The Outfit. His father, Frank Calabrese Sr, was the premier hitman, known for strangling his victims with his bare hands. But Frank didn't just leave the violence at…
-
Jalisco’s Death Camp, El Salvador's Mega-prison and Mexico’s Cartel Extraditions
Will Grant, the BBC’s Mexico, Central America and Cuba correspondent, was recently on the ground at Jalisco’s Rancho Izaguirre, dubbed ‘Mexico’s Auschwitz’, and CECOT, Nayib Bukele’s megaprison in El Salvador. Will…
-
Mexico's Most Sociopathic Druglord: El Mencho & CJNG
He’s a recluse, a cockfighting high-roller, a former cop and a maniac. But will Nemesio Oseguera Cervantes, aka El Mencho, do what he’s been threatening for years and become the most powerful cartel boss on the planet?…
-
The Most Insane Prison Gang Ever: South Africa's Numbers Gang
South Africa's secretive Numbers Gangs almost defy description; they're one part cult, one part religion, and all parts violent psychopaths. Emerging originally as bandits preying on gold miners and policemen in…
-
Duterte Arrested: Was the Drug War a Cover Up?
Sean Williams reports from the Philippines, where former President Rodrigo Duterte’s brutal drug war cost up to 30,000 lives and tore Philippine society to shreds. But was it all cover for his family’s own involvement…
-
The Last Street Boss of Chinatown: Ghost Shadows Peter Chin
The Ghost Shadows are said to have been the wildest of Chinatown's gun-toting teenage gangs in the 1970's and 1980's, engaging in countless shootouts with their rivals the Flying Dragons and the White Eagles. And that…
-
The World's Biggest Arms Trafficker Goes Down Hard
When Adnan Khashoggi, Saudi arms dealer and self-styled world’s richest man, met with US officials to discuss the Ayatollah, it may have seemed like a chance to cash in corporate power for political clout. But the…
-
The Dixie Mafia: Gone South w/Jed Lipinski
The Dixie Mafia terrorized the southern US for decades before authorities were finally able to bring them down. Starting off as a loose collective of career criminals who specialized in burglaries and robberies, they…
-
The Richest Arms Dealer Ever: Adnan Khashoggi
Adnan Khashoggi was born in Mecca — but his life was anything but pious. The billionaire had multiple wives, girlfriends and armies of callgirls, not to mention gambling sessions and club nights whose costs ran into…
-
The Mobster Who Ruled Hawaii & His Brutal Revenge Quest
Michael Miske came from a broken home through years of petty crime to lead a gang of lost boys in Honolulu, cornering its drug scene and befriending cops to build an empire of pain in the Aloha State. But when Miske’s…
-
America's Most Dangerous Prison Gang: The Aryan Brotherhood
What started as a small gang of white prisoners in a California state prison in the 1960's is now one of, if not the most powerful prison gang across America, with tens of thousands of soldiers across federal and state…
-
Hollywood's Celebrity Gangster and the Battle for Los Angeles: Mickey Cohen
Mickey once said of himself, quote, “I was a pretty fair replica of the devil.” He also killed a bunch of people, and got away with it. A street hustler since he was 6, Cohen gained a rep as a hard-fighting…
-
The Nazi Drug Kingpin, the Biggest Narco You've Never Heard Of & The Cocaine Coup
It’s January 5, 1982, and the central American state of Panama is playing host to one of the most extraordinary narco summits in history. Hosting the pow-wow is Manuel Noriega, chief of Panamanian military intelligence…
-
The Teenage Hitmen of Marseille's Gang Wars
You might recognize the city of Marseille as the home of one of the biggest drug trafficking operations in history, the French Connection. These days, though, it's no longer Corsican mobsters using France's second…
-
The Nazi Fugitive Who Created The Modern Cocaine Cartel & Befriended Escobar
When Klaus Barbie, the “Butcher of Lyon”, escaped Europe at the end of the war and fled to Latin America, he didn’t follow his fellow Nazis into hiding. In fact, Barbie remained on the books of western spy agencies,…
-
STASH HOUSE: Captagon Craziness, Free Narcos, Russian Crypto Scams, and More!
In this holiday special, we get into some of the big stories of the month from Captagon updates, the Gulf Cartel leader and Zetas creator going free, a wild Russian crypto London drug dealing scam, and more! Learn…
-
The Biggest American Weed Cartel Ever: The Cornbread Mafia
When the Cornbread mafia started to unravel in the late 1980's, the feds had no idea what they had stumbled upon. Within a few years, they had seized 400 million dollars in marijuana grown in 30 locations in 10 states,…
-
The Human Trafficking Illegal Casino Kingpin Who May Have Been a Chinese Spy
Alice Guo was a Philippine success story, a homeschooled farmhand who rose to become a millionaire business leader. But when Guo ran for mayor of the small town of Bamban in 2022, eyebrows were raised. Sure, she was…
More in Society & Culture
This American Life
This American Life
On with Kara Swisher
Vox Media
Listen & Laugh with Ice Cube and Mike Epps
BlueJay Partners
Sold a Story
APM Reports
Notes from the Edge
Gamut Podcast Network
The Ezra Klein Show
New York Times Opinion
The Shawn Ryan Show
Shawn Ryan
Stuff You Should Know
iHeartPodcasts
The Builders
iHeartPodcasts and Kaleidoscope
The Binge Crimes: What Happened to the Harrisons?
Sony Music Entertainment
Miss Understood with Rachel Uchitel
Rachel Uchitel
METRO with Sarah Koenig
Serial Productions & The New York Times
Shows are listed from Apple Podcasts' charts and directory, and Podcast Index where it is used. Every show and episode belongs to its publisher and plays from the publisher's own feed; this site hosts none of them. Explicit shows are for adult profiles only, and children’s profiles hear only children’s shows. More about this list.