The Underworld Podcast

Peru’s Shining Path, a Marxist-Maoist guerrilla force, plunged the Andean nation into a two-decade civil war that put villagers of the VRAEM, a remote, coca-producing region, on its bloody frontline. The Peruvian government captured the movement’s despotic leader, and the war died. But the rebels switched gears, protecting coca shipments from Peru’s interior to its coast, and out across Latin Amer...

With their leader sentenced to life in a Dutch prison, the most powerful heroin trafficking organzation in Europe, the Turkish-Kurdish Baybasin clan, wasn't about to call it quits. Younger brother Abdullah Baybasin set out to control the streets of North London with his feared crew of Hackney Bombers. But another powerful gang, the Tottenham Turks, and the met police investigators, had other ideas...

From a village in rural Turkey, Huseyin Baybasin emerged as one of the most powerful drug lords in Europe, setting up a global heroin trafficking ring. Stepping into the vacuum left by the downfall of the French Connection, Baybasin and his clan, dubbed "The Family," brought in billions of dollars of opium from Afghanistan through Iran and smuggled into Turkey before it headed to western Europe on...

When Bougainville fought an incredible civil war over a colossal mine, and won, its military leader emerged a hero. But he would soon fall under the spell of a conman and cult leader who wanted the Pacific island—and believed himself to be its king. The unlikely pair soon carved an empire out of a coconut palm jungle—and a wild, picaresque myth about Eden, ancient monarchs, and gold. The wildest t...

When a bizarre group of international gangsters shook on a massive meth deal with a DEA agent in Bangkok, Thailand eight years ago, it kicked off a manhunt ensnaring Hong Kong Triads, Outlaws bikers and an ex-US Army sniper’s band of contract killers. But the bust also shone a light on the shady drug network of North Korea, part of a crime machine fuelling the world’s maddest dictatorship. This is...

Danny and Richard Wolfe were barely even teenagers when they formed the Indian Posse in their mother's basement with a handful of friends, but they had already been living the street life since they were in grade school, robbing, stealing and fighting. Never did they expect that within a few short years, the gang would balloon to hundreds and then thousands of members, taking shape in Winnipeg's p...

Jon Lee Anderson is an author and staff writer at The New Yorker. Anderson recently profiled Ecuador’s young president Daniel Noboa for a piece entitled “Ecuador’s Risky War on Narcos”. Jon Lee spoke about his weeks long visit to the embattled nation, its place in the wider drug world, and how political movements across Latin America have metastasized into the biggest and most violent underworld o...

As Colombia's cocaine industry exploded in the 1980's, Pablo Escobar's Medellin cartel became the dominant player, capturing headlines across the world. But there was a second cartel rising up, one that operated more in the shadows and would soon grow more powerful - and more profitable - than even Medellin. The Gentlemen of Cali were slick, sophisticated and always looking for a solution that wou...

When gunmen ambushed a Mexican-Chinese businessman outside his Guatemala City casino in 2016, few outside the DEA paid much attention. But the shootout presaged the downfall of a man who, feds would later say, hadn’t just made a tidy living out of money laundering, but pioneered it. But Xizhi Li, who grew up in the border town of Mexicali, was just one of a new army of Chinese money launderers who...

Something about Bum Farto, Key West’s fire chief, stunk. And it wasn’t just his red suits, bling and lime green company car. By the early 70s Florida’s farthest-flung outpost was a lawless drug enclave. And Bum was smack bang in its center. ((NOTE: This isn't just our best episode, it might be the podcast episode ever, in the history of podcasts.)) When the state’s governor dispatched a multi-agen...

The Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia fought a guerrilla war against Colombia’s government - as well as against right wing militias and drug cartels - for over four decades before signing a peace treaty in 2016 and then dissolving in 2017, though splinter faction known as The Dissidents still prowls the jungles.  As the FARC were coming up, another violent group in Colombia hellbent on taking...

The Tren de Aragua grew out of disastrous regime policies to give gang leaders more power in prisons. Its mysterious leader, Niño Guerrero, soon controlled an entire facility, and installed a prison bar, a nightclub—and even a zoo. More state bungling allowed the Tren to take over entire city neighbourhoods unchallenged. So when Venezuela’s economy plummeted and hundreds of thousands fled the nati...

In the chaos of 1970’s New York, it took a lot to shock the city. But the Westies managed to leave quite the impression. Dubbed the last of the Irish mob despite being more like an anarchic gang, they terrorized the Hell’s Kitchen neighborhood of Manhattan, garnering headlines due to their penchant for daytime hits and chopping up their victims bodies.  They even managed to attract the attention o...

This year, the Phoenix suburb of Gilbert has been rocked by the death of 16-year-old Preston Lord, at the hands of a group calling themselves the ‘Gilbert Goons,’ jocks and hicks combining forces to unleash violence on the city’s streets. The craziest thing? This happened before. And back then, the group’s godfather was none other than Sammy the Bull, Gambino consigliere turned super-snitch. The 9...

In recent years, Sebastian Marset has emerged as the first narco kingpin out of Uruguay. He rose from a mid-level weed dealer to an international cartel boss in less than 10 years, even with half that time being spent in prison, pioneering Latin America's southern route; trafficking blow from Bolivia to Paraguay and Uruguay, and then Europe, where he's allegedly behind record-breaking multi-ton bu...

When Mohammed Alaa Allawi, a former US military interpreter, moved to Texas in 2012, selling weed was a side hustle. But when a company asked him to design a website, the young Iraqi soon realised his American dream was better forged online. Soon Allawi was making millions on the dark web, selling counterfeit pills with precursors from China—including the deadly opioid fentanyl. When a Marine OD’d...

Bombshell out of Mexico, El Mayo (!!!!!) is in US federal custody after arriving on a small private plan alongside El Chapo's son, Joaquin Guzman Lopez. What. The Hell. Is going on. How does the most elusive, powerful narco kingpin in Mexico's history, whose avoided arrest for decades and operated like a ghost in the shadows, end up being gift-wrapped for feds? Alongside 1/4 of Los Chapitos? In th...

When Nelson Mandela and the ANC delivered South Africa from Apartheid in the 90s, hopes were high that the country could become a beacon of freedom and fairness. A generation later, those dreams lie in tatters. Elites have plundered state coffers to the tune of billions, mines have been taken over by illegal “chancers,” and the ghettoes of South Africa’s largest city, Cape Town, are suffering leve...

Sam Walker already had a huge rap sheet in his native Liverpool before 2018, when he took off across Europe and through the Sahara Desert into Sierra Leone - posting on social media the whole time. There he crafted a new life as a saviour of Freetown’s slums. But is there another, darker motive for Walker’s second act? Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

With El Chapo locked up in a supermax prison and never going home, there's been a battle to maintain the power of his feared Sinaloa cartel. Many thought his sons, groomed to take his place, would falter. Seen mostly as spoiled rich kid "narco juniors" who possessed neither the intelligence nor the strength to outmaneuver older, more experienced druglords, the men known as Los Chapitos have surpri...

In the mid 90's, the Quebec Hells Angels made an offer to every drug trafficking organization in Montreal: buy from us or die. The Rock Machine motorcycle club refused to bend the knee, allying with a secretive group of business owner drug dealer money launderers known as the Dark Circle. What followed was 8 years of unparalleled violence, resulting in over 160 killed and turning the streets of Mo...

For years the Pacific region, and its tiny, tropical nations, steered clear of the global meth and cocaine trade. But politics, war and wild profit margins have pushed ships and planes out from Latin America to Australia across a new ‘drug highway.’ The phenomenon is prompting mass murder, crippling governments, and creating a wave of addiction where none existed. Locals are getting corrupted into...

The Hells Angels Motorcycle Club first chapter emerged in the US in the 1940's but didn't reach Canada until 1977. Less than 20 years later, they would be neck deep in the bloodiest motorcycle gang war ever fought as the Quebec chapter sought to monopolize the cocaine trade, utilizing car bombs and death squads to turn the city of Montreal into a war zone. Led by the psychotic and brilliant Mauric...

Since 2019, Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele has smashed the country’s two main gangs, MS-13 and Barrio 18, throwing almost 80,000 people into megaprisons and implementing a harsh but effective “state of exception,” aka martial law. Murder rates have plummeted and, for the first time in years, Salvadorans can live without the fear of violence, extortion, or death. But the sneaker-wearing “world’s...

When hitmen shot dead Sikh activist Hardeep Singh Nijjar near Vancouver last June, Canadian cops blamed the government of India’s strongman leader Narendra Modi. Subsequent assassination plots in NYC, the UK and Germany have pointed at two men. One is India’s most notorious mobster. The other is its most decorated spy, a man whose undercover ops—and willingness to dip into the underworld—has earne...