The Underworld Podcast

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 has been jumping aboard freight cars, sometimes at 70mph, and grabbing…Nike sneakers. Yes, these enterprising thieves have got their eyes on a very particular prize: unreleased, limite...

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 room. From underground boxing rings to arms deals, Cohen fought the Japanese and Soviets, battled communists, warlords and mercenaries, and drank his way through China's bloodiest yea...

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 mountains of cocaine through a city shaped by Cuban exiles, ambition, and an underworld that blurred the line between loyalty and lawlessness. From funding anti-Castro revolutionaries to wo...

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 European politics went mad, the group glommed onto a new fad taking Italy by storm: kidnapping. And it got them the capital to get into property, cigarette smuggling, and cocaine. But t...

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 work. He trained his sons Kurt and Frank Jr in the mob enforcer life since they were kids, through fear, intimidation and horrific abuse. When the entire Calabrese family got locked...

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 spoke to Sean about what he saw in both places, how politics and organized crime is coverging, what new Mexican President Claudia Scheinbaum can do without triggering full-scale war — a...

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? From avocados to abogados, weed to coke to fentanyl, Mencho is a narco so bloodthirsty his men are compared to ISIS. Can the Mexican state cut him down to size? Or will a lifelong q...

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 colonial South Africa, they took shape in the brutal prison system of apartheid, where sometimes the only way to communicate was through stabbing whoever was around. What formed was someth...

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 in the drug trade? Reporting from Duterte’s stronghold of Davao, where he ran a decades-long death squad, and capital Manila, which bore the brunt of that bloody blueprint, we expose...

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 was before they linked up with one of the Triad-connected tongs to run the neighborhood protection and gambling rackets, earning millions every year despite being barely out of their...

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 affair — and an ill-advised friendship with the kleptocratic leaders of the Philippines — would send Khashoggi’s businesses into a tailspin, and land him jail. What came next was one of...

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 grew more organized after starting to use the infamous Biloxi strip of undercover brothels and gambling houses as a base, eventually shifting to everything from drug smuggling to cont...

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 millions of dollars. Khashoggi made his first riches shipping arms from the US to Saudi Arabia. But soon his “fees,” and the ways he got them, began to catch up with him. And dalli...

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 son slammed his car into a truck and died, it sent the kingpin on a spiral of misplaced rage — ending in murder, conspiracy and even a chemical weapon attack. Even when the law caugh...

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 lines. Though they're alleged to only have approximately 150 full-fledged members, the Aryan Brotherhood has found ways to dominate prison economies and expand their rackets into th...

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 professional boxer despite his short stature, and a rep as a wild-haired stick up kid that never backed down from a gunfight or a robbery. But when he got the call to head back to LA to serve a...

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 and just a year from siezing its control. Pablo Escobar, head of what will become the feared Medellin Cartel, is there too. But even these criminal heavyweights aren’t the biggest g...

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 biggest city as a transshipment point to move heroin across the Mediterranean. Instead, the last two decades have seen street gangs of mostly North African teenagers warring over retail...

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, including the CIA, and reaped enormous wealth, power, and protection. Barbie then hooked up with the fascists and druglords of Bolivia, christened a death squad called the “Bridesgroom...

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 more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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, indicting 70 people. And it all started with some country outlaws. These men were farmers, mechanics, and handymen by day, and by night, they transformed into savvy businessmen mana...

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 rich: but how did Guo own a helicopter, $200,000 jewelry and a McLaren sports car? Perhaps she really was an industrial savant. Or perhaps there was something a little more sinister go...

You don't earn a nickname like The Lord High Executioner by not killing a whole lot of people. And Albert Anastasia, one of the most psychotic gangsters to ever come out of New York City, was alleged to have participated in at least 60 murders as part of his role as one of the leaders of Murder, Inc., the hitmen organization that Lucky Luciano and the other members of The Commission tasked with do...

Sinaloa’s capital Culiacan is roiling with violence in the wake of El Mayo’s capture, and his alleged betrayal at the hands of the Chapitos. But the bloodshed is just part of an ever-changing drug landscape, that’s increasingly dominated by the Sinaloa factions and the CJNG. How do these two organizations work? How can they work together? And what on earth can Mexico’s new president do to stop the...

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...