The Underworld Podcast

At one point in the 1960s Air America was the largest carrier on the planet. It was also a CIA front, and its ragtag pilots ferried tons of raw opium up and down Laos during Washington’s “Secret War” against Communism. This week’s show gets into the history of the illicit airline, and the corrupt officials, French mob and heroin-producing tribes who won big from AA’s operations—immortalized in the...

The Trafficante crime family ruled Florida for decades, earning the respect and admiration of powerful mobsters like Lucky Luciano, Meyer Lansky and Sam Giancana. Santo Trafficante Sr arrived in Tampa as a boy from Sicily and took to the underworld with a talent for business, setting up the illegal lottery known as the Bolita before using his Spanish skills to make him indispensable to the powerfu...

Zeke Faux is an NYC-based reporter with Bloomberg Businessweek. His new book, “Number Go Up”, is a wild ride into the criminal heart of cryptocurrency - from missing billions and cartel money-laundering, to Tether, FTX, bros in the Bahamas and crypto slaves in Southeast Asia. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

El Salvador's warring street gangs-turned-armies may have finally been broken thanks to the heavy-handed policies of Nayib Bukele dumping anyone and everyone into prison. But before MS-13 and 18th Street had been taken down a notch, they ruled neighborhoods in El Salvador with a brutality rarely seen. It's not just face tattoos and machetes. We break down the origins of the gangs here and our time...

It is a truth universally acknowledged that a single man in possession of a fake country and a global scam operation, must be in want of a wife with a penny-stock mining operation who can stalk government officials in their dreams. In the second instalment of our Dominion of Melchizedek two-parter, the conman mothership ventures out in search of a home; establishes diplomatic relations with fellow...

Back in the early 1980s David and Mark Pedley were little more than a father-son real estate scam duo. Then came prison, escape, and a self-penned Bible, named for an obscure Jerusalem priest and the foundation for a micronation called the Dominion of Melchizedek. It was no ordinary secession movement. The Dominion would become one of its era's greatest swindles, taking in bogus firms, Vegas slots...

Carlos Marcello went from a small time produce hustler to heading up the New Orleans Mafia with a massive gambling empire and a hand in every pie in the city's notorious underworld. He even found himself in business with the heavyweights from New York's five families. And though he tried to keep himself out of the spotlight, the Kennedy brother's war on America's mafia, with John as president and...

The final show in our Chechen trilogy focuses on the republic's current gangster-in-chief, Ramzan Kadyrov, and his rise to become one of the world's most fearsome—but also bumbling—despots. Kadyrov has cozied up to Vladimir Putin, dispatched hired killers to quell dissent, empowered Chechen mafiosi and even launched his own film studio to create a North Korea-style cult of personality in the Cauca...

The Camorra clans of Naples had always played second fiddle to the Sicilian Mafia and the Calabrian 'Ndranghetta. Until Raffaelle Cutolo started building up his Nuovo Camorra Organization while locked up in a notorious prison. When he wasn't writing poetry or challenging other bosses to knife fights, his old school charisma and genius leadership skills, as well as his insanity, saw him take a smal...

This May, on assignment for _Sports Illustrated_, Sean visited Molipur, a tiny village in Gujarat, India, to dive into what seemed like a funny caper: villagers establishing a fake cricket league to fool Russian punters. But almost as soon as he stepped off the plane, the story took a sharp right turn. The Russians were pulling the villagers' strings all along. And the sportsbook behind it all is...

Deborah Bonello is a Mexico City-based reporter who's distilled years of reporting on some of the most dangerous women on earth into her new book "Narcas: The Secret Rise of Women in Latin America's Cartels". Deborah spoke to Sean about Lola "La Chata", the first female narco boss in Mexican history, the bathtub violence of Argentine smuggler Yolanda Sarmiento, women in El Salvador's brutal street...

The Russian mercenary/state aligned outfit Wagner emerged from the early days of the war in Ukraine, led by an ex-con turned hot dog salesman turned Putin lapdog. In no time, they were operating in the Middle East and Africa, and Yevgeny Prigozhin's stock as a warlord began to rise. When Russia's full scale invasion started to falter, Wagner started trawling Russian prisons like the villain in a F...

The Soviet Union is toast, Chechnya is at war and Grozny, its embattled capital, is being bombed to dust. Gangs of Chechen criminals are getting rich off the bloodshed, capitalizing on gun- and drug-running networks that flourished under Communism. When the war ends a new breed of Chechen mobster-terrorist emerges, empowered by Arab Jihad and financed by goons who've grown fat on the patronage of...

In this episode we track the concept of the Chechen Mafia—not an easy thing to define—from ancient invasions and the creation of the "Abrek", or "outlaw-exile," through Soviet repression, Stalin's deportations and the "Scab War" of the feared Gulag Archipelago. The rise of a Communist blackmarket later allowed Chechens in Siberia and Kazakhstan to carve out their own illicit empires, outside of Ru...

The origins of Naples' feared criminal clans known as the Camorra go back hundreds of years to the days of rural banditry and villa owners with private armies that lived by a code. Now, having access and control to one of Italy's most active ports and corrupt governments has paved the way for their growth but unlike the Sicilian Mafia or the Calabrian 'Ndranghetta, there's a whole lot more paralle...

The Messina family came from Sicily, then Malta and North Africa, before settling in 1930s London—whose underworld was about to be supercharged by wartime blackouts and love-lorn American G.I.s. They would soon control an empire of brothels and gambling dens in the British capital, conning, bribing and killing their way to gangland dominance. And while the Messinas' flame died in the early 60s, th...

Mexican Cartels have always had a penchant for violence, but the brutal tactics of Los Zetas plunged Mexico into never before seen levels of bloodshed. Originally formed by only a few dozen special forces soldiers who went rogue and became the enforcement wing of the Gulf Cartel, Los Zetas eventually broke away and ran roughshod all over Mexico, warring with everyone from the Sinaloa Cartel to the...

The term ‘rumrunning’ might be associated with Prohibition-era goons in the American Midwest. But bootlegging is alive and well today, and this week’s episode goes from Sean’s surprising discovery in western India, to a booze-inspired political execution in Pakistan, a Scot in Saudi shackles, homemade soju in Kuwait—and much more. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hundreds of millions of dollars have been made by a vicious network of organized crime figures throughout Southeast Asia by preying on what the United Nations has called "the most persecuted people in the world," the stateless and desperate Rohingya people. From the high rises of Bangkok and Kuala Lumpur, we follow the transnational network that operates like a modern day slave trade, roping in po...

Trevor Aaronson is a contributing writer at The Intercept. The second season of his show Alphabet Boys digs into the strange story of Flaviu Georgescu, a Romanian-American “fixer” who got tangled up in Eastern European crime in Vegas, before falling prey to a DEA arms trafficking sting in Montenegro. The catch? He claims he was working for the CIA all along. And he may just have a point. Learn mor...

We have a special episode swap from the good folks at the Click Here podcast. For years, North Korea was known for making such a perfect counterfeit hundred-dollar note, the Treasury Department had to change how it printed them. Now, North Korea is all about crypto – and it has been cooking up all kinds of crazy schemes in order to get the Big Score. Plus, we hear from a two-time North Korean defe...

Mitchell Prothero has been on the tail of Ridouan Taghi, the Mocro Mafia and the Marengo Trial for years—and he joins Sean to discuss "Gateway: Cocaine, Murder & Dirty Money in Europe", a podcast about every aspect of the so-called "super cartel" that has taken control of the world's most lucrative cocaine market. From Spanish boat crashes to doorstep hits, notorious bloggers and torture cells, th...

In 2019 Sean spent weeks on the road between Oklahoma and Miami, investigating roadside zoo owner—and soon-to-be American icon—Joe Exotic. The truth was way, way darker than anything Netflix's Tiger King revealed. This week's episode also dives into ancient lion hunters, tiger-wielding mafiosos, and of course Pablo Escobar's "Cocaine Hippos". Plenty to sink your claws into. Learn more about your a...

In recent years, another one of Italy's feared criminal groups has risen above the Sicilian Mafia to become among the most powerful organized crime groups in the world: The Calabrian 'Ndrangheta. Started as a self-defense militia centuries ago to protect against pirates and raiders, the secretive society later morphed into a powerful group of bandits who made their bones through high profile, high...

Last year’s murders of journalist Dom Phillips, and indigenous rights campaigner Bruno Pereira, shocked Brazil and the world. But they were just one violent conclusion to a story of mafias of all stripes—from fish mobs and narcos to KKK-like ranchers and rubber barons—who’ve stalked the remotest corners of the Amazon Rainforest since the turn of the 20th century. Going from gold rushes to the deat...