The Underworld Podcast

In 1992, the New York Mafia is falling apart. The Gambinos are in chaos, the Colombos are at war, the Genoveses are hiding behind Chin Gigante’s bathrobe act, and the Bonannos—the forgotten, disgraced family left for dead after the Donnie Brasco disaster—are waiting on one man: Joey Massino. Known as “The Last Don,” Massino quietly rebuilds the Bonanno family into the most powerful mob outfit in A...

Born into a peasant family on the outskirts of Shanghai, Du Yuesheng grew up an inveterate gambler and opium addict. But as he forged alliances in the growing metropolis’ underworld, members of a secret society-turned-cartel saw promise. Before long, ‘Big Ears Du’ was running gambling dens, opium divans and brothels. And as Shanghai, cleaved into foreign concessions and wildly unequal, became a gl...

Raymond “Shrimp Boy” Chow possesses one of the best mob nicknames out there. The San Francisco Chinatown gangster went from teenage immigrant hooligan from the streets of Hong Kong to one of the most infamous Asian organized crime figures in America. His story has everything: Chinatown tongs, Hong Kong triad influence, immigrant protection rackets, gambling dens, and the violent gang wars that tur...

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 2000, his sons stepped into the void, hungrier and even more violent...but also, more sloppy. They struck deals with Pakistani mobsters and Colombian cartels, turning Kenya’s ports into...

When Mako Nishimura, the yakuza’s only female member, fell in love with a rival gangster, it would send her on a long and painful path from drug and sex trafficking, to painkiller addiction and finally a role helping ex-yakuza go straight. Her journey would mirror the downfall of the yakuza at-large, from the world’s largest criminal gangs to social outcasts, outwitted by cops and outpaced by new,...

On this week's Stash House: A fugitive Dutch cocaine kingpin dodges capture off the coast of West Africa. An Irish gang boss trades gangland warfare for electoral politics. Mexican officials accused of working for the Sinaloa Cartel surrender to U.S. authorities. A violent mafia feud erupts in southern Italy. Nigerian authorities uncover an industrial-scale meth lab allegedly linked to Mexican car...

Mako Nishimura graduated from high school delinquent to kamikaze biker gang, street tough and, eventually, a fully made member of a yakuza syndicate - the first (or perhaps second?) woman to do so. Nishimura made her gang huge amounts of cash selling women plus selling, and taking, huge quantities of methamphetamines. But by the end of the 1980s, Nishimura’s life was unraveling into a mess of addi...

Nuevo Laredo is one of the most feared cartel cities in Mexico, a place where disappearances, gun battles, and corruption became part of daily life as the Cartel del Noreste, or CDN, tightened its grip on the border. Born from the remnants of the brutal Zetas organization, CDN turned the city into a battlefield, fighting for control of smuggling routes into Texas while allegedly terrorizing civili...

Meet the Stopwatch Gang: three polite Canadian crooks turned bank robbery into a precision sport, hitting over 140 banks across North America and walking away with $15 million without firing a single shot. They wore presidential Halloween masks, escaped from prison multiple times, and became so notorious that the boss landed on the FBI's Most Wanted list. At their peak, they stole millions while h...

Vassilis Paleokostas, and his big brother Nikos, grew up shoeless in a Greek mountain village. When the boys moved to a city, they discovered a talent for robbery — and honed it with a mysterious criminal known locally as The Artist. Before long, the trio were pulling off some of the most daring heists in European history. At a volatile time of financial crashes, leftwing guerrillas and political...

When Mexican special forces killed El Mencho in February 2026, the throne of Mexico's most powerful cartel was up for grabs. But there's one man who many assumed would be taking over: Juan Carlos Valencia González, a 41-year-old California-born dual citizen known as "El 03," the stepson of the slain narco boss. His cartel royalty bloodline is almost absurdly stacked, as his mother, Rosalinda Gonzá...

When Paraguay extradited French-Corsican heroin kingpin Auguste Ricord to the US in 1972, some thought Paraguay’s narco trafficking days might be numbered. If anything they were just beginning. Within years the tiny nation had welcomed Hong Kong Triads and Lebanese militants — who, combined with considerable homegrown narco and cigarette trafficking, made Paraguay one of the world’s most lawless p...

The French Connection and Paraguay In 1968, a gang of smartly-dressed gangsters robbed a bank in Buenos Aires. The fallout from the raid would lead authorities in all kinds of crazy directions — from French paramilitary hitmen to mobsters belonging to the feared Union Corse, Corsican dope traffickers who’d perfected “French Connection” routes from Southeast Asia and Turkey into Marseille, then ont...

In 1960s Boston, Buddy McLean ignited a savage gang war after tensions with the McLaughlin brothers boiled over into open bloodshed. What started as neighborhood beef turned into a cycle of ambushes, barroom executions, and street hits that terrorized Boston. McLean’s Winter Hill crew proved more organized and ruthless, picking off rivals and seizing control as bodies piled up. By the end, the McL...

When fleets of young Chinese men arrived in the tiny, Pacific nation of Palau in 2018, authorities wondered why they’d eschewed the archipelago’s pristine shores and coral reefs for a handful of tumbledown buildings on the edge of Koror, its biggest town. It wouldn’t take long for the story to unfold. These men were the foot soldiers in a new crime wave hitting Palau: digital scammers at the sharp...

We're back with another Stash House and there's a hell of a lot of crazy stuff going on. Daniel Kinahan is spotted in Dubai palling around with a shady oil trader, Sebastian "The King of the South" Marset is bagged up in Bolivia and extradited to the US, Trump goes in hard on Ecuador's narcos and potentially the rest of Latin America, the Scam Lord King of Asia might be saying goodbye for good, an...

Melbourne has been gripped by a new wave of underworld gang wars, this time fueled by the booming billion dollar black-market tobacco trade. Firebombings, drive-by shootings, and extortion targeting shops across the city have roiled the city as middle eastern syndicates and biker gangs fight over profit. At the center of the chaos is underworld figure Kaz Hamad, whose name keeps surfacing as rival...

When a 2023 club brawl ended in a Freetown, Sierra Leone parking lot shooting, cops and reporters pointed the finger at “Omar Shariff,” a portly Turkish millionaire who’d spent much of the past six months throwing cash about at the city’s casinos and top-end restaurants. But Shariff wasn’t Turkish, and he wasn’t just any businessman. And as information about the strange man leaked over the coming...

We told you his life story in our 2022 episode, and now we're back with the sequel. El Mencho rose from poverty to build the CJNG into Mexico’s most violent and influential cartel, trafficking fent, meth and coke across the hemisphere. After years on the run with a huge U.S. bounty on his head, Mexican forces killed him in a daring military operation last week in Jalisco. The cartel responded with...

Not even the IRA scared Martin "The General" Cahill. He terrorized Dublin with audacious heists that left police scrambling. Rising from the gritty streets of Dublin, he became a criminal mastermind whose crew got so proficient at armed robberies and heists they sometimes did two jobs in a single day. From art heists to daring bank robberies, his exploits read like a thriller. Cahill remains Irela...

Monk Eastman ruled the depraved streets of turn-of-the-century Manhattan with fists and absolutely zero regard for human life, commanding an army of 1,200 thugs who terrorized the Lower East Side. At the height of his power, he was pulling cash from every racket you could think of while rigging elections for Tammany Hall and overseeing street violence so extreme that cops needed reinforcements jus...

Orphaned and kicked out of work, Kazuo Taoka was an unlikely candidate to become one of postwar Japan’s most important characters. But by combining violence with a talent for legitimate business and corruption, the immaculately-suited gangster would lead the Yamaguchi-gumi yakuza syndicate from a ragtag Kobe dockworkers’ gang to one of the world’s richest underworld forces, spreading from Japan in...

What's going on with the big Ryan Wedding arrest and extradition? The Canadian city that had to declare a state of emergency because of Indo-Canadian gangs extorting everyone. China executes 11 scammers. All that and more in this Stash House: Sean is moving continents edition. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In the late 1970s, as Sicily descended into all-out mafia war, the island’s allegiances split between the ruthless Corleonesi clan, led by Toto Riina, and southern gangsters fed up with Riina’s campaign of murder that was spilling innocent lives, and disgusting the Italian public. This schism would be the birth of the Stidda — Sicilian for ‘star’ — a group that fought and thrived for turf in south...

Vincent “Chin” Gigante was the most powerful mob boss in America...and he was also the mob's best performance artist. By day, he wandered Greenwich Village in a bathrobe, muttering to himself, selling the world on the idea that he was crazy. By night, he ran the Genovese crime family with near-absolute discipline, avoiding wires, indictments, and the spotlight that destroyed flashier dons. For dec...