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.
281 episodes transcribedCape Town is one of the most beautiful cities in the world. It's also home to one of the most violent and tangled criminal underworlds on the planet,...
How Cuba is Slipping into Drug Chaos Since the beginning of the year, the US has placed Cuba under an oil embargo, crippling its public services an...
Sean got beaten up in Cuba! To celebrate this, we’ve thrown together a biopoly of crime in the tropics, beginning with the story of how American organ...
Danny and Sean take another lap around the criminal world, where somehow everything is getting bigger, stranger, and more international. Sinaloa’s car...
In the picturesque Montenegrin port of Kotor, a cocaine trafficking partnership fractured into one of Europe’s bloodiest gang wars. A dispute over a d...
In our final episode on the rise and fall and rise of the Pablo Escobar of Pakistan, he negotiates his own surrender to the DEA, maneuvers his way int...
In Albania's turbulent Nineties, the small, seaside town of Vlore became a gangster’s paradise, playing host to hundreds of crooks ferrying drugs, wea...
He might just be the biggest US drug smuggler you’ve never heard of. 1.3 billion in product moved. 16 different aliases. Bank accounts in 10 countries...
Bolivia's Cerro Rico has been spewing out tons of silver for centuries. It was the economic bellows of the Spanish Revolution, whose lust for the prec...
5000 armed tribesman at his beck and a call. A mountain compound in a lawless territory. A seat in Pakistan’s parliament bought and paid for. And a he...
On this episode of Stashhouse: Wagner's leftover mercenaries are running a tramadol empire in the heart of Africa, while in Monaco a bomb takes out a...
Earlier this month, Sinaloa Cartel mastermind Ismael Zambada García, aka El Mayo, was sentenced to life in prison for his role in growing one of the w...
When his Green Gang goons killed thousands of leftists in 1927’s Shanghai Massacre, Du Yuesheng was welcomed into the political scene of China’s natio...
By the mid-1920s, Green Gang Boss Du Yuesheng had conquered almost all before him — including his own underworld mentor Huang Jinrong. Shanghai’s opiu...
They call him Brazil's Pablo Escobar. Sérgio de Carvalho was an elite Brazilian police major who became one of the most wanted drug traffickers on Ear...
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 bathr...
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...
Raymond “Shrimp Boy” Chow possesses one of the best mob nicknames out there. The San Francisco Chinatown gangster went from teenage immigrant hooligan...
Ibrahim Akasha was the kingpin of East Africa’s heroin highway, setting up a massive tracking empire that stretched from Afghanistan, Pakistan and Ira...
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 s...
