The Underworld Podcast
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
July 15, 2025 • 63 mins
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 gateways for global dope. But the...
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July 8, 2025 • 67 mins
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 spotted a chance to turn underworld kudos into an independent nation.
When the war ended, and Indonesia dove into chaos, a handful of kingpins would emerge as the architects of a new, modern state. But the madness was on...
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July 1, 2025 • 51 mins
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. At the height of his power, he controlled the Juárez Cartel and operated a fleet of private jets, outpacing rivals and law enforcement alike.
His influence stretched from Mexico to South America and the U.S., making...
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June 24, 2025 • 69 mins
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 and underworld friends would soon take their toll - and before long, the world’s greatest sportsman was in a tangled web of vice, drugs and match-fixing that would haunt him until his dying days.
Learn more about your...
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June 17, 2025 • 55 mins
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 where, is more deadly than Moscow. In 1992, there was 2,500 murders in Moscow alone.
There’s a lot of action, and everyone wants a piece of that action. Problem is, sometimes two people wanted a piece of that same ac...
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June 10, 2025 • 56 mins
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 reignited a bitter feud between the Lyons and Daniel crime families that had simmered for almost two decades.
Today, with a third, international gang entering the fray, the feud has spilled into all-out war, with residents o...
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June 3, 2025 • 71 mins
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 over the next few years the group would rally around its charismatic leader, Ziz LaSota, tearing across North America on a rampage of robbery and murder.
But even today, with LaSota in prison and several members dead, n...
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May 27, 2025 • 58 mins
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 of illegal grow ops across the U.S. From California suburbs to rural Maine, these operations are powered by slave labor, stolen utilities, and chemicals banned in America.
But it gets even crazier. Cause behind it a...
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May 20, 2025 • 49 mins
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 would send the world’s greatest player into a tailspin of drugs, sex and crime, even while his onfield performances won Napoli its first league in over six decades.
But as Maradona Mania gripped the Italian city, the sta...
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May 13, 2025 • 47 mins
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 kid who managed to build himself into a powerful narco kingpin.
But how the hell did a middle class kid from small town Canada go from being one of the world's best snowboarders to ordering numerous hits across Canada...
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May 6, 2025 • 51 mins
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, limited-edition Nikes, mostly Air Jordan...
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April 29, 2025 • 60 mins
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 years. This is the story of the outlaw...
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April 22, 2025 • 57 mins
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 working with both the Medellin and C...
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April 15, 2025 • 52 mins
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 they were far from gentleman thieve...
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April 8, 2025 • 46 mins
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 up for extortion, his other son, ...
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April 1, 2025 • 78 mins
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 — and how populism and the mob have of...
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March 25, 2025 • 57 mins
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 quest to build a citadel in his home...
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March 18, 2025 • 58 mins
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 something more than a gang, it was almo...
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March 11, 2025 • 55 mins
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 genesis of the war — and its l...
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March 4, 2025 • 62 mins
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 teens.
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