The Underworld Podcast - The Biggest Unknown Drug Dealer in US History

Episode Date: September 1, 2026

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. A phantom, and a logistical genius. Stewart Newton quietly built what feds called the biggest ever drug smuggling operation in New England’s history, before suffering the largest ever narco assets seizure in US history. And he did it by leaving his Long Island mansion and going to Pakistan to meet the country’s biggest drug syndicate, the mountain warlords who ran the country. It’s one of the wildest stories in American crime history, never before told, until now. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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starting September 8th on CBC Gem. 1983, Narragansett, Rhode Island. It's late afternoon and a big shipment is about to come in on the port. We are talking $40 million worth of Pakistani hash straight from the mountains, $135 million in today's money. Only months earlier, a deal is struck. Not in Rhode Island, but in Pakistan, between very powerful tribal warlord types and a small town New York guy. I mean, picture this. You're barely 30 years old, living in Long Island in the days of jean jackets, feathered hair, and Billy Joel. Uptown girl is screaming up the charts. Somehow, you find yourself in Karachi,

meeting with the most powerful drug trafficking syndicate in South Asia, in a safe house, hoping to set up the American arm of a massive international drug trafficking operation. And you do. And finally, on this day, the loudest day of the year, which is the point, your ship is about to come in. literally and metaphorically. American flags on the porches, tourists on the boardwalk holding sparklers and hot dogs,

fireworks over the whole coastline, and every cop and coast guard in New England spending the evening working crowd control and firework injuries. If you wanted to design the perfect day to get up to some massive seaside smuggling shenanigans, this is it. The man we're about to meet did not stumble into this date. He chose it.

That detail is in sworn testimony. The operation was time. deliberately to the pandemonium of the fourth. This guy, he does things organized. He's meticulous. He's got 16 different alices, numerous passports, property all across America, and money moving through 10 different countries. All of it done quietly.

Oh, and he'll have moved around 200,000 pounds of hash in total before having to give up the largest narcotics forfeiture in American history to that point. Authorities will call him one of the world's leading. hash importers and the biggest drug trafficker ever convicted in New England. But back to the 4th of July. A fishing trawler slips at a point Judith, Rhode Island. 65 feet, give or take, a working boat and a working port, and the paperwork says she's fishing swordfish. But there ain't no swordfish on the boat. There's an inflatable raft with a motor, a gun, and a crew being paid $30,000 each, close to six figures in today's money, for one night's work. There's also $50,000 in

cash in a package, just in case the coast guard starts sniffing around and needs a taste. The boat goes out about 60 miles off the coast, into the dark, and the crew waits. And at 10.30 p.m., a shape comes up on them out of the Atlantic, a freighter, 300 feet or so, panamane flag riding low, and she has come by way of two oceans all the way from Karachi, Pakistan. One of the men on the trawler radios in and on the freighter's deck of figure answers, And then the two vessels sidle up next to each other and the big ship's crew starts throwing cargo down onto the smaller ship. And that cargo? It's 545-pound bricks of hash, straight from Pakistan and Afghanistan's tribal region.

The good stuff, the Khyber Pass's finest. All arranged by the criminal syndicate led by notorious Pakistani drug lord Ayuba Fridi, dubbed the Pablo Escobar Pakistan, who has 5,000 armed tribesmen at his back and call. The shipment is close to 11 tons in total, though some official sources put it at 16.5 tons. The American ship captain and crew head home and tie up the boat back in Port Judith in the early morning hours of July 5th. A truck is waiting at the top of the dock, and in the morning the cargo comes ashore in 55-gallon bait drums under a layer of fish in the literal shadow of a Coast Guard station. And standing near that dock, on the morning of July 5,

with 1983, holding a handheld radio is the man who now owns every brick. He flew to Pakistan himself to buy the load. He will fly to Pakistan again and again. He carries his own money to the banks in Geneva and Singapore under so many different aliases that even the courts, police, and newspapers aren't sure what his real name is for a while. His name for this story is Stuart Newton, though he was born Howard Dats. And over the next seven years, that name is going to grow into a genuine, of American crime lore, a name whose story has never really been told in full.

The mystery man of Long Island's Gold Coast, with a mansion next to the stockbrokers and the lawyers, the defendant whose own prosecutors will stand at a podium and admit they do not actually know who he is. The man the DEA will call in open court, the biggest drug dealer ever convicted in New England. And the most ironic part of the story, with all of this in the grand international scale, is that it all gets blown wide open, thanks to an unhappy wife and a seven-person police force in small town, Rhode Island. It's like blow mixed with Wolf of Wall Street, except it's Pakistan, not Colombia, and it's Long Island in the 80s, not the 90s, Ayuba Fridi, and not Pablo Escobar.

It is one of the wildest stories in American drug trafficking history, and it's never been told in full before, not on a podcast, a book, a magazine article, a movie, a YouTube video, that is, until now. This is the Underworld podcast. Welcome back, everyone to the Underworld podcast, the show where two journalists who have reported on crime and conflict all over the world bring you a new story of international organized crime every single week. And when I say new, I mean, this one is new to everyone. Everyone.

I'm Danny Gold, and I'm joined as always by Sean. I'm in Bolivia for research professionals. says, I swear Williams, intrepid magazine writer, last of a dying breed. Yeah, just feel like I'm dying mostly these days. Yes, it was Bolivia 2.0, Docco-style episode that you guys would have heard last week. I'm thrilled to hear this story, though. If not so, you'd stop banging on about it in the group chat. And for those of you who are wondering, Sean was very clear that he was not on the packet at all.

He is a responsible adult. No, I'm packing. Anyway, we are going to keep the banter short because this episode is one I've been trying to do for like years now. And by that, I mean, I stumbled on it four years ago, did three days of work, realized it was too large in scope and then did nothing until a few weeks ago. Anyway, though, it might be like my podcast, Magnum Opis, and I'm excited for you guys to hear it. Quick business real quick,

Patreon.com slash an underworldpodcast for bonus episodes and interviews, underworldpod.com for merch, the underworldpodcast at gmail.com for tips, corrections, especially if you're involved in the story or if you want to option it from me. So quick recap of our last episode, which you do not have to listen to to to get this one, but it is helpful for a little bit of background. In illiterate Pakistani truck driver from the lawless tribal regions named Ayuba Fridi builds the biggest heroin and hashish operation in Pakistan

on the back of the Soviet war in Afghanistan, starts a global trafficking organization with a few of his pals that's protected by thousands of arbitragemen that he controls, he buys a seat in Pakistan's parliament, and becomes untouchable in his mountain fortress. The one thing his empire needs that the Khyber Pass where he operates cannot supply his customers with dollars. And that brings us to one Stort Newton, the quietest major drug trafficker in American

history. And I feel pretty confident from saying that because nobody knows who this guy is. And he brought in over a billion dollars of drugs into America. Now, Ayuba Fridi is a known entity. We are not the first ones to tell his story, though we've certainly done it better than pretty much everyone else. but Stuart Newton, he is not known at all. Sometimes the papers they spell it, S-E-W-A-R-T, sometimes S-T-U-A-R-T, and we don't have a ton on his early life.

He's born around 1952, which puts him at just about 30 when he starts major international moves. Yeah, I can get behind that. None of his success at 21 nonsense. I've actually saying that, I'm 40 years old, so I'm beyond that by decades.

God, that's depressing. Anyway, he's from Dryden, New York. It's a village of a couple thousand, and people in the farm country outside Ithaca. That's way upstate New York for those of you who aren't from the area. Closer to Canada than New York City, like hardy folk, rural,

bills fans most likely, not Giants fans. And we know he spent some of his early life there. But during trial, during one of his trials, a witness who's known him since the mid-1960s knows him as a Long Island guy, which is a completely different type of guy than an upstate guy. And honestly, I don't know how to explain Long Island to people.

Maybe think of like 1980s, Brooklyn stereotypes, like Irish, Jews, Italians, chicken palm, terrible fashion, stockbrokers, Wolf of Wall Street, like you guys, you guys get it. By the late 1960s, just out of his teens, he said to have been organizing large-scale marijuana importation into Florida, though there's not much detail out there on this. It's not massive like in the cold open, but solid enough where he's making money. Not too much is known about this part of his life, but at some point in that decade, the trail runs through New Jersey because a prosecutor will one day drop, almost in passing, like a single line is all I found about this, that this man was once indicted in New Jersey under his actual birth name, which is

Howard Datz. We don't know why he changed his name, but the record suggests somewhere back then, Howard Dats becomes a name with a problem. And the man's response to a problem name is not to lie low. It's to go out and through lawyers, legally on paper, purchase a new one. Stuart Newton isn't just some alias, just a fake name, right? It's a legal identity. bought and paid for. And it doesn't stop at one name. In 1977, there's a psychologist working at Pilgrim State, the enormous psychiatric hospital on Long Island, a man named Roger Kramer, who's known our guy since they were teenagers. And Nuding comes to his old friend of a proposal, and Kramer sells him the names, birth dates, and social security numbers of six institutionalized

mental patients. I mean, this is some like classic drug trafficker hygienists right here. The price for it is $600. And three years later, Kramer's working at another psychiatric hospital up in Vermont, and Newton comes back, and this time it's 10 more identities for $3,000. 16 people sold for combined $3,600, and Newton's cover story to his friend, per that friend's later sworn testimony, is that the names, quote, would be used by people who would have difficulty traveling, which, you know, is technically the truest sentence anyone says in this entire episode. In 1983, he calls again, and this time he wants women's names to. Some of those 16 identities become passports, federal passports, like real ones,

with Newton's actual face over the men's names. And years from now, prosecutors will hold the applications up in a courtroom. You know, here he is as Harry Rivers, here he is, Donald Chesbrough. Others, other names become Swiss bank accounts. This guy's like a master of disguise already off the bat. Like, this is intriguing stuff, mate. But yeah, there's not much known of him of his early life, of those drug deals he was doing in the 70s. but we start to paint a picture in 1980 when he starts to build.

He must have been doing all right because he's in St. Thomas, which is the U.S. Virgin Islands, it's rich people, white linen country, full of guys on vacation with chartered sailboats who are vague about what they do. There's a yacht captain working these docks named Nicholas Kukyelsky. He's in his early 20s out of Johannesburg, South Africa, with the accent to prove it, and one cop will later claim he'd gone AWOL from the South African military. He's competent on the water, he's comfortable around wealth, and he's available for hire. and into his orbit comes a charming American with money, and the American introduces himself as Joseph Jaffe.

That's another one of Stort Newton and Howard Dats's aliases. Joseph Jaffy is Stort Newton, Stort Newton is Howard Dats. You guys get it. There's a second sworn version of this meeting offered years later, in which the introduction runs through a mutual friend from the Massachusetts boat world named Peter Underwood. Kukielski, the South African and Underwood, are going to become a part of Newton's inner circle.

Newton notes the guy knows how to drive a boat, and he files it away. When he needs a boat captain a couple of years later, he knows exactly who to call. Fast forward to March of 1983 in Long Island. They call this New York's Gold Coast, right? It's big mansions on Oyster Bay. It's where the money-making Manhattan-type set-up shop,

you know, your stockbrokers, your big-money lawyers, things like that. Kuky-Elski comes to the house, the man he met in St. Thomas, and the vagueness is over. His sworn account of that March meeting is one sentence, quote, We discussed the importation of 20,000 pounds of hashish. The buyer has a source on the far side of the world, the source we spent all a part one on, and what he needs is a man who can make boats meet other boats on open water.

Weeks later, the two of them head off to Karachi, Pakistan. Karachi, 1983, is not a place you want to visit as a tourist. It's a place things passed through on their way to a war. Five, six million people there, martial law, a military dictator who has criminals flogged in public, and a port that has quietly become the loading dock of the CIA's entire Afghan operation. crates of weapons coming off ships by the ton onto trucks which had north on the road, while refugees fleeing the Soviet war machine and heroin flood the other way. Oh man, I love stories of cities like this back in the day.

Sounds pretty amazing. Yeah, I mean, I think Karachi's still pretty gnarly right now, to be honest with, you've been there, no? No, never been in Saar. I'd love to go. It was that gangs of Karachi story from years ago. I think it was Matthew Aiken. Yeah, yeah, great story. And the guns and the drugs, as they often do, they leak out. This city that's about to spend a decade drowning in Kalishnikovs and cheap heroin is feeling up with both right now at this moment.

Four years earlier, mobs burned the American embassy up in Islamabad and anti-American riots tore through Karachi the same week. The hippie trail is long gone, a distant memory if any of the guys who took it hadn't already bribed their memories. On the city's edge, an Afghan refugee settlement is on its way to becoming the biggest heroin wholesale market on earth. and into this in the spring of 1983 walked two guys who were probably whistling uptown girl there to buy 10 tons of hash from a tribal warlord it's one of the ballsy business trips in an industry with quite a few ballsy business trips

the one thing we don't know yet and which we kind of don't find out which I would love to know is how a freeze operation and Newton get connected so they're staying at the house of a travel agent which like what and while they wait for their load of hash to come down from the mountains from the tribal regions, they work on their disguises. According to Kukyelsky, they slicked their hair back with Vaseline,

and they lay in the sun to darken up. It's just kind of genius. I mean, Pashtun's aren't that dark, right? They're the original, are they the original, like, Aryans or something? They're not actually that dark skin. Don't make it weird, John. Don't make it weird.

Oh, okay, okay. Yeah, just sit on a deck chair, become a Pakistani. Yeah, easy as that. Yeah, yeah. It is like, they didn't, like, you know, what sunglasses with a judge, giant mustache. Like, what are they? Not the, not the most well-thought-out, you know, disguises

for this sort of thing. Eventually, the load arrives. It's 20,000 pounds. And then the local cops close in on the house. It is a raid timed perfectly. We don't know who talked or what tripped, but the two of them are able to escape. They leave the country safely, and they leave behind the entire load. I wish we had more details on this, but then again, this scene kind of right to itself, right? You've got these Vaseline, slickback hair, long islanders with a tan, be rocking those robes. What are they? Shalwar Kamis, is that what they're called? Yeah, yeah. Making a break through the alleys of Karachi as a sweaty, moustachioed Pakistani cop kind of

bears down on them. So that's one version of the story. And it's the one of Rhode Island jury here is in 1989. But there's a second one that surfaces in a different court case in 1996. In that account, the order is only five tons, placed with a Karachi broker named Iqbal Baig, one of Afridi's right-hand man, for a $250,000 fee. And the police don't scatter anyone from a house, they just confiscate the product while Nootin kind of stands there watching. And then weeks later, Bay calls him and says the five tons are back, and while we have you, would you mind carrying like four more tons belonging to my partner, a man named Anwar, and a man the crew calls Haji Sab. Haji Saab is Ayuba Fridi. So the king of Kaibirot

personally has four tons of his own product riding in the Fourth of July load. And it's his trucks that bring all nine tons down from the frontier to a staging camp in the desert outside Karachi to wait. Newton is then told to come there and pick it up. So, you know, this is confusing. We have two pretty different versions. Is the load lost? Depends whose story you're in, it depends which court trial you're in. In Kukyelskies, it's gone and he flies home thinking the whole thing died in that house. In a government's later version, the one built after people started talking, the confiscation is just a toll their Pakistani partners can talk and bribe their way out of. So Kukyelty, who in both versions, thinks the trip is a failure, goes home to

Massachusetts in May of 1983, dejected, and by his own account, he's done with trying to make it as a drug trafficker. And then Newton comes to see him again, and he presses him and persuades him. He basically sells him. The captain agrees to go back on one condition. He's going to set up the load, but he's not going to ride to America with the drugs. Fine, deal. And somewhere in these weeks, the crew makes the scheduling decision we opened the episode on. The delivery will be time to the 4th of July. To the one night, the coastline is just all noise. Later that month, Still, 1983, Kukyelsky lands in Karachi again to meet Newton. Same travel agent's house, and this time it works.

20,000 pounds comes down from the mountains. Off the coast, a freighter is waiting. 300 feet of Panaman flagged steel. Newton had previously traveled to Athens, Greece, where he met with Greek shippers to arrange transport of the hash on a massive freighter to a point just off the coast of Rhode Island. For the next eight years, Noon's op uses Greek crude freighters to do runs of 20,000.

into 40,000 pounds of hash from Pakistan to America. And the funniest thing, they're not even Greek. No, I mean, you know, they probably are Greek, but suspected Albanians mention there, just to like to get an Albanian mention him. I don't know if they were moving it in the 80s like that, but potentially. It's always good to mention our buds over there in the Balkans.

Our friends, best friends. Yes. Newton has lined up a small boat on the coast of Pakistan to take it out to the anchored freighter, and Kukielski takes it out with the product to the rendezvous himself. He watches the load go aboard, 10 tons or more of hash packed into tire inner tubes, and then Kukyelsky personally charts the freighter's course to America.

Aboard the freighter, he draws the maps, he hands the ship its route across the Atlantic. You know, no Google Maps in those days, boys, you had to be resourceful. The freighter sails west with 10 tons aboard, and Kukyelsky-Lsky flies home clean per his deal. Interestingly, one account has the freighter having a stopover in Lebanon, which is also a major hash producer, before heading to the U.S., but that's all the info we get on that. And that's what leads to our cold open. But it's not just about getting it from Pakistan to the U.S., right? You've got to figure out what the hell you're going to do with it once it gets to America,

because that is a lot of drugs. You can't just set up on the corner or at the frat house and move all that way. You need distribution. You need a connector. And the connector is Thomas W. Gilbert. And Gilbert has been around a few blocks. He's 50 at a Freeport, Pennsylvania, farm country. And when a judge finally gets a long look at him,

He'll say he doesn't look like a dope dealer. He looks like a small town preacher. He is not a small town preacher. In September 1978, Thomas Gilbert is convicted for helping smuggle 27 tons of marijuana into Florida, which might explain how he knows Newton. 27 tons. So Gilbert is a man of the 70s boat trade. One full career of it already behind him.

And since 1980, he has not filed a single tax return, which is interesting, because he soon makes a down payment on a Pennsylvania farm, $165 grand in $20 bills, duffel bags full of bills. Yeah, that's like almost 700K in today's money, which is, I think, around half of what you're going to be asking for the rights to this story, right? If all goes well, my friend, if all goes well.

Gilbert's job is receiving the load, the boat. A lot of boats. I mean, you guys get it, though. Small boat in Pakistan leaves Pakistan shores to find giant big oceans crossing boat anchored a bit further away. It crosses the ocean, and then smaller American boat picks up the product and brings it to shore.

And the first boat Thomas Gilbert lines up is a vessel called the Northern Lights. And to vet the choice, the crew brings in another boatman from Massachusetts, Peter Underwood, 31 years old. He helps arrange the offloading situation and the initial storage. But then Gilbert gets a tip and the tip is that the Northern Lights is on a Coast Guard watch list, under surveillance as a suspected smugglers boat, so the Northern Lights is out. The replacement is another boat called Sondra and Cindy, the working trawler from our cold open,

captain by a Narragansett fisherman, who will one day testify he's known Gilbert since at least 1950. So to be clear, that's just one single boat, which its name is Sandra and Cindy, right? That's correct, Sean. That is correct.

They should think about podcasts when they make these names. It does make a lot of names in this episode, but you guys, you know, we try to steer clear of too many, but these guys all play a role and they're all super interesting. You know what the biggest criminal enterprise

is on earth right now. It's not drugs. It's not arms. It's cyber fraud. Scams. Identity theft. These guys have running billion dollar operations out of spare bedrooms and the scary part you never see them coming. There's no crowbar, no ski mask. Just a text message that looks a little too convincing. Which is precisely why you need cover-on. Cover-on is identity theft protection service, basically a guy watching your back in the places you can't see. It scours the dark web around the clock, your emails, passwords, credit cards, social security number, and the second your info shows up where it shouldn't, you know about it. It also watches your bank account and credit for anything suspicious, so a bad day doesn't turn into a financial nightmare.

And if things do go sideways, cover on covers you for up to a million dollars in identity theft recovery costs plus a dedicated specialist who walks you through the cleanup. You're not making those phone calls alone at 2 a.m. I got cover on myself and let me tell you the amount of info floating around there. Just waiting for a bad guy to pick it up, it is pretty scary. Not to be trifled with and I trifle with far too many things in life as you well know. One scam can cost you everything. Protect yourself now. The first 100 users get 20% off with code under World at coveron.com slash underworld. Two and five Canadians will hear the words you have cancer.

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Save on lunchbox savers like Ziggy's sliced delimmy products for always 375. And get life brand pure Vita shampoo or conditioner for $8 each. At Real Canadian Superstore, when you're ready, we're ready, with a whole world and more. A couple of days before the fourth, Gilbert sits down with a guy and two crewmen and lays it out. There's a drug run to be made, do you want it? The crew pay is 30,000 a man. one of the crewmen is a local named Michael Salberto, and Salberto is going to end up the single most important set of eyes in this story,

and also its most complicated witness. He's a heroin addict with a record going back years, a man doing state time before this is over, and the guy who will eventually put the whole night on the record, 500 bricks and all. So there's your American end assembled. That's the crew working that cold open. The port they arrive at is fittingly called the port of Galilee

on the bottom corner of Rhode Island. You know, trawlers, seagulls, fuel docks, a Coast Guard station right there. Nothing fancy. With the cold open held back is the morning after. Because at first light, as the bait drums full of hash come up the dock in the shadow of the Coast Guard station, Nicholas Kukielski arrives with his younger brother, Peter, and there is Newton himself, nearby, radio in hand, watching his own cargo land. They get the product on American soil, landed, clean, all the way from the mountains of tribal

Pakistan. Oh, also, after the big ocean crossing freighter drops off the hash, It's believed to have sunk. Like nobody in the story ever explains it. We have no idea what happened to it or the crew, but it's somewhere on the bottom of the ocean. So yeah, anyway, moving on. Now that they have the hash in America in the houses,

it's time for distribution. And that runs out of two houses. The first one, 75 Ocean Ave James Town, Rhode Island, the staging villa, 12 bedrooms, 20 acres, sitting above the water with the kind of you people by paintings of. Newton rents it for June and July under the name John Mitchell, Peter Kukyelsky, which is Nicholas's younger brother,

gets paid a $2,000 bonus just to live in it and keep the lights on as a believable cover in the weeks before the load to deflect any suspicion. House 2 is a split-level home somewhere on Long Island, unremarkable on a street of unremarkable houses, and this is where the 10-tons actually goes to be turned into money. And the scene inside the house is not pretty. The hash had gotten wet on the way in,

seawater in one of the boats, and so in the basement of a suburban split-level in Long Island, Peter Kukyelsky and three other men spent three weeks scraping cellophane off water damage 45 pound bricks drying and salvaging that 10 tons of product and working alongside them part-time weighing and repackaging his own inventory with his own hands

is Stort Newton. The thing about Newton is like sure he's a man of mystery but he's also a guy who does it all himself. He goes to Pakistan to shake hands. He oversees the unloading. He cleans up the product when it gets dirty. I mean he is a goddamn go-getter. One more detail from the basement in Long Island, Peter Kukyelsky never learns the address. Nudin drives him there personally every day by a different route each time

so that the man working in the house cannot find the house. Years later, under oath, with every reason to give it up, Peter cannot locate the split level because he was never once allowed to know where he was. It's just a testament to how careful Nudin is. I mean, who is this guy? I'm assuming Kukkiowski is blindfolded the whole time. otherwise how does he get thrown off by going to a house a different way each day? But yeah, he's blindfolded, right?

It doesn't mention that, but it's the only thing that makes sense. Although he probably recognized it, you know? Yeah. See like the number, the number on it. That's kind of a dead giveaway. Again, you know, I know I'm dropping too many names, but there's a six figure moving through the Long Island end of the summer, staying at Newton's place, helping him with the repack and mostly handling something more important than the product.

We got to know his name. His name is Kenneth Bloomfield. He's in his early 40s out of Dobbs Ferry, New York, and he is the money man. And that's an important job because that hash turns into roughly $28 million. Call it, I don't know, $85 million today, maybe $100 million. And $28 million in street cash is a problem, a physical, logistical, warehousing problem. And solving it is Blumfield's whole job. Here's how the money moves.

And this is where the Wolf of Wall Street half earned its billing. well, that and the fact that these guys are central casting, Long Island guys, most likely blasting Billy Joel out of their 80s porches cruising through the five towns as they holler at women with big hair and short, jean skirts. But anyway, where were we? Yeah. So the cash goes overseas the same way the hash came in, personally. Newton and Bloomfield fly to Switzerland to Geneva,

and the accounts waiting there are not in the name Stuart Newton, because why would they be the man owns 16 spare identities? The Swiss accounts sit under the borrow names of the mental patients, Harry Rivers, Gregory Reed, Kenneth Broom, Donald Chesboro, holding eight figures of Khyber Pass hash money in the most discreet vaults in Europe. And when the Swiss police eventually searched Bloomfield, who they catch there, years from now, they'll find a three-page document that is essentially the machine's wiring diagram. Alias names across four Swiss bank accounts, plus operating instructions for accounts in London,

Hong Kong, Tokyo, Kuala Lumpur, Frankfurt, Signapur, Sydney, Zurich, Amsterdam, in Paris. and Paris. They also find on him two passports, both with his face, one in his own name, one in the name from the same batch of psychiatric patients that Newton bought. He has to have like a mentor, right? How has this guy just figured out this entire, like, genius criminal network from scratch? Like, I mean, I guess people actually read books in the 80s and not short form videos, which, you know, people should watch ours, of course, because they're completely different to the others. But this is insane. I mean, how is he figuring out? the Swiss banking system. I don't know, dude. I needed help opening up an LLC for this podcast. So I don't,

people like this, misdify me and amaze me. And like, that's what I mean by he, like, who is this guy? He is a logistical financial traffic. Like, he's a genius. There's no, there's no other way around. And nobody knows his name. But I'm getting ahead of myself here. That list is the whole scale of the thing, 10 cities, four continent banking apparatus. And the letter of banking instructions in the file is per the government, written by Newton himself. Singapore matters most of those countries, and not only because $5 million ends up parked there in an account under Bloomfield's own name. Singapore is where the pipes two ends meet, because per confession, Bloomfield later gives the DEA. Most of the product came from a Pakistani supplier who keeps a house in Singapore, a house Bloomfield offers to show them.

He doesn't get named, but signs point to that supplier being either a friddy or his partner big. And the pipeline is bigger than just Rhode Island, right? Which is the part almost nobody knew even up until 1988. On two more occasions, loads go into Virginia, 35 tons worth between 1983 and 1985, more than three Rhode Islands very quietly. The distribution still runs out of Long Island to five wholesale buyers in New York, Michigan and Massachusetts, plus a whole Northern Division moving product into Canada that we barely met, plus shipments parked on farms across the country. One of those wholesalers, a guy by the name of David Kaplan, also operated out of a, he's operated out of a $7 million mansion in Long Island,

ends up being more of a mystery man than Newton, but we'll get to that later. Newton also ships some of his hash to Europe from his base of Long Island. So yeah, 200,000 pounds in total, 100 tons of Khyber hash into North America, somewhere in the neighborhood of $1.3 billion on the street.

And what does Newton do with his end? He does the thing his lawyer will later call a compulsion for financial security, which is to say he buys the world quietly. He's got the mansion in Long Island, $950 grand cash, no mortgage, $326 acres in like small county, Georgia, landed in Virginia,

two Manhattan condos, a shopping center in St. Croix in the U.S. Virgin Islands, a few islands down from where he first shook Kukie Elsie's hand, a $340,000 pilot cash just sitting in a safe in Fairfax, Virginia that nobody finds for years. And these are just his assets. It doesn't include the entire network stuff. And the machine is only warming up

because the biggest deal of Stort Newton's life hasn't happened yet. And it's the one sealed literally with a handshake between him and none other than Ayub Afridi. It's late 1984 in Karachi. Noon is back in Pakistan because he goes himself always. And this trip, his broker has an upgrade for him. Iqbel Beg, the guy he had been working with, his source, introduces his American customer face-to-face to his partners. Anwar Kotik and Ayub Afridi, Pakistani heavy hitters. If you didn't listen to the first episode, Afridi is known as the Pablo Escobar of Pakistan.

a man who controls the lawless tribal area known as the Khyra Pass. Yeah, I mean, like, can I just get my two seconds of credit on this show? His name is Pablo Hashgabar, okay? That's what we're going to call him. It's pretty good. He's a chief tin, a tribal warlord slash drug lord with 5,000 armed tribesmen under him, who lives in a mountain compound, untouchable to the Pakistani state or anyone else. The man atop the most prolific drug trafficking organization in Pakistan

at a time when Pakistan is the number two heroin exporting country in the world. So what you're saying is no cell phones, just guys hanging out, having a good time, you know, just living in the real world. Sounds good. Face to face, man,

doing business the right way. Touch, so here we have, touch stones. Here we have, we've got the buyer from Long Island and the king of Khyber heroin in the same room,

shaking hands. Everything in part one and everything in this episode has been converging on that handshake. A free D has one of his partners went to house in Karachi is the deal office, and in that house,

and at Bags home, the four of them plan the next shipment. 20 tons double the 4th of July. And the tradecraft goes industrial. Newton ships commercial vacuum packaging machines from New York to Pakistan so the product can be compressed and sealed against the sea. Learning from the seawater issue from the last time, and a free-de orders a whole lot of tires because this load is going inside them. Then it's March of 1985.

Newton's been in country for a minute, and they're at the staging camp in the desert outside Karachi, where hired villagers are packing hash into rubber tires, tons worth of bricks stacked under the open sky. And then it rains. Three to four hours of hard rain on an uncovered desert stage and ground and much of the 20 tons is soaked. And what happens next is Stuart Newton,

Ayuba Fridi, Iqbal Baik, Enwar Khadak, and Nudan's American workers, side by side in the desert, try to salvage the soaked hash out of the mud. The Gold Coast Long Island Mystery Man and the King of Heiber Heroin sleeves up in the rain, saving the product together. If the movie ever gets made, like, this is the poster right here. Yeah, and like, you know, we keep saying it, but organized crime,

it really does bring together people of all races, crees, and religions, eh? It's just the big denominator. It's the great uniter, you know? Yeah. Now, get this. The salvage act fails. They can't save the hash. It's ruined.

And Newton refuses the water damage product. And if Fridi, the old school drug lord with an army, he replaces it 10 tons fresh, no drama, no fee. And this kind of, I mean, this like straight up blows my mind, right? One that Newton has the balls to tell Afridi in Pakistan that the shipment they're working on together that for all intents and purposes is at least somewhat in his control is no good. And Afrii, the most powerful underworld figure in Pakistan at the time, a man who does what he wants just accepts it and says, okay, my bad, let me replace this tens of millions of dollars of drugs for you.

And he does. and they all work together to help vacuum pack what now ends up being 20 tons and the hash makes its way to sea and heads towards the U.S. About eight tons are actually lost at sea on the way over. We don't know how. And the rest lands in the U.S. on October 31st,

1985, Halloween. And again, probably a good night to choose if you're looking for distracted coast guards and distracted police. The shipment lands. It makes its way like the rest of them do to get distributed from the Long Island House. The proceeds run the pipeline in reverse

through Singapore where the Americans and the Pakistanis Ronding. where Newton and Bloomfield hand cash to bake, to Codic, and on occasion, to Afridi himself, 35 tons into Virginia across 1983 to 1985, according to DEA. In 1986, Newton again goes to Pakistan and arranges a shipment of 20 tons ahead to Newport News, Virginia. It gets there, and then they truck it up to Long Island and distributed in the fall of 1986. Nicholas Kukielski takes his cut with his wife and does what sounds to me like a smart thing to do if you're in the game. He buys a normal house in a small town and lives in it in a town called Little Compton, Rhode Island.

Population, just a little over 3,000s, stone walls, farm stands, old money keeping quiet and new money trying to. It's got a seven-man police force. But it just so happens, there's a young cop there who starts to wonder about this new couple in town, who happened to have cash to spend and no discernible way of making that cash. Ronald Coffey is a sergeant in a police department you could fit in a minivan. and he's starting to get a feeling about the new couple in town. Nicholas Kukyelsky, South African, Charming, a yacht captain who doesn't seem to captain, anything, and his wife Sharon in a $400,000 house with a black wood panel Jeep Waggoner in the driveway and no W2 anywhere in his life.

Small town cops are underrated for exactly one skill, and it's this one. They know what everyone's money is supposed to look like. Kukyelsky's money doesn't look like anything. These guys, the small town cops, they also have a lot of time on their hands. Maybe a few daydreams about doing a big investigation, taking on the mob or the cartel single-handle, the usual male daydream sequences. Usually, they stay daydreams, not for coffee. Sometime around late 1984, custom agents down in South Carolina call the Little Compton Police

Department about suspected marijuana smugglers in their jurisdiction in South Carolina phoning a local house in coffee's town from a motel. Here's New York Newsday, quote. In late 1984, custom agents called. called him and said suspected marijuana smugglers had made a call from a South Carolina motel to a house in Little Compton. The suspects were said to be driving a car with Massachusetts license plates. Adds coffee, quote, by a fluke, I was on patrol several days later, late at night, and the car passed. You have to understand, this is a small town surrounded on three sides by water, and it's not a place you pass through.

You have to come here for something. Inside the car, Nicholas and Sharon Kukyeltsky. Not sure how it comes up in conversation, but they tell him they're going to open up an oriental rug in importing business, which I mean, you might as well hang in. We are actually importing drugs sign out front because I'm trying to think of that's more obvious than like importing bananas or just vaguely saying you're an import exporter, but there are very few things that say I'm dealing drugs more than saying you import and export like oriental rugs. Oh man, this is so cool. And I guess you can also add Fargo to that long list of movie references. It's starting to feel a bit like

that. Yeah. And I guess like super troopers too. If you're talking about like small-time police departments that stumble on big stories though, this isn't as comical, I would say. We can make a comical for the movie, but you know, something along those lines. It depends. It does depend. What follows is a surveillance operation that involves tapping the Kukyelsky phone line with what's called a pen register from the deck of coffee's own backyard. So that means they can't hear the actual voices like the calls, but they can see every number dialed from the phone. Coffee plus two D agents who show up in lawn chairs to monitor the situation while coffee's wife cooks the

feds hamburgers and hot dogs, they sit on his deck. They soon see that the phone line is used to basically call the entire world, including cities that just happen to match the travel schedules later on of Stuart Newton's aliases. One call books a New York helicopter firm for $6,000 to pluck Nicholas off a freighter sitting off the Virginia coast and set him down in his own backyard, which, I mean, almost definitely one of the Virginia loads coming in, right? Yeah, it's probably not the Oriental rugs. No, no, definitely not rugs. Meanwhile, Nicholas has developed a bit of a heroin problem, and his marriage is coming apart because of it. It actually starts from a legit prescription for painkillers, and a year later, he's shooting up coke and heroin.

Soon enough, he starts getting arrested for little things like possession, getting into car accidents, kind of see where this is going. Coffee, by the way, has stayed on the case long after the DEA is kind of thrown in the towel. But he alerts them to what's been happening with Kukyelsky, and eventually coffee and the D.A. knock on Kukyelski's door and start trying to bluff their way to confession of sorts. And his wife, Sharon, who is like at the end of her rope, starts to talk to the small town cop. The story differs on who initiates the contact. Some people say she calls coffee.

Some people say the investigators call her. But the outcome is the same. She starts talking. In her own words per newsday that had, quote, so much money they didn't know what to do and ended up bored. Which is the problem that me and Sean are trying to have. And you can help us out by making this into a movie. And her talking is a problem for the meticulously careful Newton

and is massively successful drug trafficking enterprise because she knows a lot. She knows about the loads coming in. She knows about Pakistan, about the freighters, about her house being bought with hash money, and she tells investigators about several hash loads between 1981 and 1985. The prosecutor will eventually say that her talking basically starts the entire real investigation. A five-year federal case, 100 tons, 10 cities, four continents, one board wife. Small business owners, business owners, you guys are going to want to hear this. Every crew recover on the show has one thing in common.

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And I know these guys, like for real, like before the podcast. Tell them Underworld sent you. And, and they're offering a free statement analysis. Send what you're paying now. They'll go through it line by line and show you where the money's going. No obligation. Worst case scenario, you find out you're getting a fair deal, which, you know, in this industry would be a first. Go to goprimepay.com. That's g-o-p-r-I-M-E-P-A-Y.com. or call 888-58-488-4-260. Tell them Underworld sent you. Prime pay, transparent pricing, should not be a selling point, but here we are. Two and five Canadians will hear the words, you have cancer. That's why every step and dollar-raised matters.

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The DEA comes in hard on top of coffee small-town cop work. And by the spring of 1988, the police operation has gone quiet and technical. Affidavits, financial records, and a wire. Then on May 6, 1988, somewhere along Ireland, Stuart Newton picks up a telephone and the federal government is listening. The man of 16 names is on the phone with Nicholas Kukyelsky, and he has heard that the DEA is sniffing around a certain 1983 hash load, and he wants to know who talked. Across the recorder calls that spring, seven of them with his voice on tape played to a jury

the following winter and printed in the Providence Journal, or some quotes are, the shape of the man finally comes through, and it's not a bond villain. It's a middle manager in a crisis. He calls himself the brains of the operation, the guy just trying to hold everybody together. At one point he says, quote, I'm the brains behind. in par here, you know, but that's all about all I can do. I'm just trying to, you know, keep everybody going here. He frets repeatedly that Nicholas isn't lowering up to fight the seizure paperwork on his house, which the police are going after. He brings up a few times that maybe everybody

involved should leave the country until the whole thing blows over. And then on the May 6th call, Duden says, quote, you know your wife opened up her mouth. Nicholas responds, yeah, no kidding. Duden says, I don't think there's any problem here as long as nobody else, everybody keeps their mouth shut, which seems like kind of nice and respectful. You know, I feel like the most massive criminal organizations, like most massive criminal organizations, that's a death sentence for both Nicholas and his wife. And there would at least be some yelling, like he would raise his voice, you know? Yeah, I mean, this makes him way more interesting, right? Because he's not just some dark, grim narco. He's sort of like a combination of an accounting genius and a fish out of water.

Like, it's not, I mean, it's not ruthless. And it makes him way more fascinating. for me. I think the reference is the British drug trafficker Howard Marks. Oh Howard. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Mr. Nice, right? But he's got books written about him. He's very vocal about stuff. He had a wildlife too, but like, it's a similar thing where these guys are both non-violent and like don't really get mixed up in that.

And like, you know, nice guys from everything that we know about them. Yeah. Smeller. Then everything moves fast. The fall, and it takes about six weeks. Late May 1988, the Kukki-Ell. Fielskys feel the walls closing in. Sharon has been cooperating. Nicholas knows it's coming. On May 31st, they're seen at JFK Airport, and then they're gone. Out of the country, fugitives. Then Tuesday, June 7, 1988, LaGuardia Airport, New York. Federal agents arrest the traveler named Stuart Newton.

36 of Laurel Hall, Long Island. No shootout, no chase. A man with a suitcase and 11 lifetimes of paperwork. Taken out a gate and arraigned in Brooklyn, where the U.S. attorney tells reporters of his own prisoner, quote, whatever his name may or not be. And that's the feds basically admitting they don't know the guy's real name. Nobody does at this point, writes Newsday, quote, his identity is so unclear that federal officials had separate cases going

in several places against the suspect's various names, which means that they didn't even know this was all the same guy. The feds also expressed shock that the guy is not connected to either Colombian cartels or organized crime in any way. I mean, I've only been through Providence once, but isn't it supposedly like a big, it's a big mafia place going back years, right?

Big, big mafia place. Even the mayor was wrapped up with it. But yeah, that's the thing. And this is the 80s, right? You need to have permission for this stuff. I guess he's doing it off the, not in Providence, but off the coast of Rhode Island. But the Colombian thing is also surprising

because a lot of the weed coming into the U.S. back then was Colombian, right? So he's not connected to either. And the fact that he was able to operate and keep his head attached to his body, let alone on this largest scale, it's super, super surprising. Three days later in Providence, the U.S. Attorney stands up and announces the case

and gives the town its first look at a drug ring that smuggled 10 tons of hash, according to them at this point, that's all they know, $40 million worth into Rhode Island. Run out of a rented Jamestown mansion by a man with an alias, cracked by the persistence of the Little Compton police

who kept digging after the federal agents have backed off. The U.S. attorney calls it one of the largest smuggler rings ever broke in New England, and it is about to get so much larger, because like I said, they don't know the half of it. Then the seizing starts, The Long Island Mansion ceased, along with three volvos and Mercedes in a Ford van. Inside the house, agents grab money counting machines, coastal charts, navigation beacons,

and a ship to shore radio. The deed, meanwhile, sits in the name of Newton's wife, Laura, with other assets parked with her mother. The Sandra and Cindy, Cindy, that's the boat. It's also taken. Here's Newsday writing up some of it, quote, In addition to the Lloyd Neck estate, authorities yesterday confiscated $44 million worth of Newton's assets, including 30 million in Swiss bank accounts, 7 million in real estate, including the Laurel Hollow House,

another house at 5 Fort Salonga Road, Centerport, and the two condominiums at 150 West 51st Street, Manhattan valued at 500,000 each, 5 million in brokerage accounts in Singapore, 1.2 million in New York bank accounts, 700,000 in New York brokerage accounts, and 565,000 in cash, coins, vehicles, and a boat. Again, I'm a broken record, but this is in 1988 money.

So just like, I don't know, 5x that, 4x that, 3.5x that? It's a lot of money. Guy was doing well. Newton, meanwhile, goes in front of a federal magistrate for bail in late June, and the hearing is a preview of everything to come. Guy with all these passports, international bank accounts, huge cash and properties, no chance, bail denied, and he's sent to Otisville, the upstate New York federal lockup.

A grand jury hangs five counts on him, with the top count being engaging in a continuing criminal enterprise, the kingpin statue. First time it's ever been charged in the history of the district of Rhode Island. It's a life sentence that's now on the table. The Kukyeltsky's meanwhile, despite the drug problem, have managed to flee to Malawi, which makes no sense until you remember he's South African. And having been to Malawi, it's an incredibly poor landlocked country where you can disappear pretty easily.

Beautiful, though, especially the Lake Malawi area, but watch out for that Belarusia because it is not fun. At the time, it's also a one-party state under a president for life. Should we ask what you were doing in Malawi at this point, or is your attorney advised you not to? You know, we don't really have time to get into it. Maybe we'll save that for the Patreon. Okay. For the lore. That whole thing, though, their, like, getaway doesn't last long.

Because when you're that poor of a country in the U.S. comes calling you fold. Around September 1988, the Malawians arrest them on an international warrant out of Providence, and Malawian custody is not American custody. Nicholas will later testify about a stretch in a Malayan prison, and it sounds deeply unpleasant. Three potatoes a day for food, bucket toilet, and he manages to see seven people executed by hanging in the short time that he's there. I imagine it also was not that clean.

And again, come on. Like, come on, Hollywood. This is a movie scene. Like, how many scenes are there in this one? I mean, what are we doing, folks? Make with a check. Get it. When the marshals finally fly to a couple back in November,

into the airport in Rhode Island on a commercial flight at 645 on a Sunday evening, the Providence Journal's reporter is there and describes two people who look thin and sick. Nick gets sent to federal prison in Plymouth. Sharon goes to the state woman's facility, and he decides, Nick does, he's had enough, he's going to start talking. That same month, the prosecutors announced the running total of the asset hunt so far. $48 million seized across four states and two continents. It's going to keep going, guys, by the way.

And the inventory now includes the $10 million island estate at Lloyd's Neck. That was Kaplan's, the Georgia Acreage, the Manhattan condos we mentioned, Gilbert's Farm. And the prosecutor tells the journal, quote, there's nothing even close and we're still seizing. So that is not the final number. I think it ends around 70 million. Wow. Also around that beginning of November. Newsday reveals that Stuart Newton isn't a real name.

It's a name purchased through lawyers by a man named Howard Dats. And even then, with his real name in print, prosecutors are quoted essentially shrugging like they still don't fully know who this person is. And the same day's reporting hangs the case at second mystery man. The wholesale buyer who moved much of the product onward, some of it into Canada, a Long Islander called David Kaplan, holder of 13 aliases himself and a 10-acre $7 million estate, I think they said 10-acre, 10 million and the other seizure,

in Lloyd-neck Long Island, seized that week, its owner missing since June. The government does not know Kaplan's real name either. So again, this guy's a phantom. We got two phantoms,

two dozen names between them, one in custody, one in the wind. Kaplan is never found. Mr. Kaplan, the Underworld Podcast at Gmail.com. The Statue of Limitations,

it's got to pass by now, right? Like, for weed? I mean, let's say it. If he's going to email us, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Oh, it definitely has.

Definitely has. Mm-hmm. In a Providence courtroom that December, the federal judge throws out a plea deal from the prosecutors for Peter Underwood, who was offered three years in exchange for a guilty plea. Underwood, if you don't remember, he's one of the Boltman hired by Gilbert, the distro guy he would experience but looked like a preacher. He's a bit player, but there's a reason coming down the road for why I'm mentioning it.

The judge actually throws it out as being too lenient. The case he rules goes to trial the following January. The trial has a lot of crazy moments, but you guys know we'd like to keep the sort of court back and forth stuff somewhat brief because it just doesn't make for the best podcasting. It opens with a bang, though, before the jury's even picked. Monday, January 9th, Nicholas Kukyelski-il-ki walks in and pleads guilty, importation of conspiracy up to 10 years, signs on as a government witness. Peter Underwood, I think the government star really of the case.

Peter Underwood repledes under a new deal, and the prosecution drops every charge against Sharon because the U.S. assistant U.S. attorney basically says that what she did was minimal, and her information is basically what caused the whole thing, right? So Sharon Kukielski, the wife at the end of her rope, walks out of the story of free woman but gives up a massive 100-tong dron-grig to do so yeah i mean i just keep reading this

as a love story between the kukyelskis like she's squawk but she stayed with him he never blinked like he protected her throughout it's just a nice i mean if anyone's listening who is a producer that's that's a b narrative right or is it of course because you're like a artistic long-form writer of course you see as a love story between them i want the scenes in pakistan with him

running from the cops and with his desert tribal warlord or trying to tell him that the, that's the movie. Well, I mean, you know, when we get this deal, you're going to write those action scenes and I'm going to write some hideous sex scene between the Kugiyoskis. Jesus, dude, too far. So the trial proper ends up being two men at the defense table. Newton, mid-30s only.

Dark curls giving the room nothing. And Gilbert, 50, the Pennsylvania veteran of the industry. The U.S. Attorney opens for the government, and his opening is a tour of everything. The boats, the freighter, the bricks, and then he does the money, the mansions, property in Georgia, accounts in Switzerland. And about Gilbert, next to Newton, he says, Mr. Gilbert is a small fry. So good thing you want to hear if you're Gilbert, not great, if you're Newton. Gilbert's lawyer stands up and gives the defense and inadvertently makes my case telling the jury the government story, quote, sounds like a preview for a movie.

It's not just me. Then the flippers take the stand, Nicholas Kukyelski, two days. on the stand, sunken-eyed, rail thin, the Joeberg accent making everything sound like a documentary narration, St. Thomas, the man he called Jaffe is actually Newton, the pitch in a long island mansion, the travel agent's house in Pakistan, the Vaseline, the lost load, the ships, the maps he drew himself. Peter, he's the brother, tells of the basement salvage, the wet bricks, the cellophane, 500 a day, the boss-weighing product beside him, the routes that change daily so we can never learn the address. In the morning at the dock, the radio in Newton's hand, the drugs arriving

safely. The man he worked for all summer, he says he knew only a Stuart Mitchell. So that's like, I don't know, 17th name, 14th name, who knows what it was. Even the psychologist who sold Newton the names of the mental cases testifies, saying they were friends since the mid-60s and walks the jury through selling the 16 names. A Swiss police inspector flies in from Geneva, carrying that three-page document, the banking one we mentioned with all the details of Hong Kong and Kualdunpur and Amsterdam. But there's more in the document. There's no signature. There's no date. Those few pages are the whole operation written down. Newton's aliases are next to the Swiss account

numbers, the names of the actual bankers, not just the banks, like the guys. An instruction to call Tom at a phone number that traces at Thomas Gilbert's long-time girlfriend. A line about his lawyer, and I'm quoting the actual document here. This is in the federal appeals record. My lawyer, Milton Shapiro, knows me as Joseph Jaffe.

So his own lawyer does not know his name. And then at the bottom of the laundering memo, if the author dies, the money gets split between his family and Laura, which happens to be the name of Newton's wife, which is how we know that this is Stuart Newton who wrote the document. Peter Underwood actually refuses to testify now, even though his plea dale grants him immunity, so he keeps his mouth shut, which is very impressive.

The government closes his case with the tapes, the wires, you know, eight reels played in a silent courtroom, Newton's actual voice on seven of them, the brains of the operation holding everybody together, they're fretting about the house paperwork, saying let's leave the country, everyone keep their mouth shut. And one more tape for the co-defendant Peter Kukyelsky on May 11th, warning Thomas Ging, Gilbert that the DEA has him down as deeply involved and knows the offload happened at the Rhode Island port and Gilbert in his own recorded horse answering that he's worried. And the defense calls this case. It's only one witness in the entire defense of the biggest drug prosecution in New England history at that point.

And it's the captain of the Sondra and Cindy, the boat where to testify, he testifies that the boat never did any such thing. It is an alibi for the 4th of July. He was at a picnic. It does not hold up in court. In the closing argument, Dunes' defense, lawyer has to explain the 16 identities. And his explanation is actually the single most Long Island thing I've ever heard. No disrespect to my Long Islanders. I love you guys. His client

quote is a philanderer and he uses different names when he's with women. So the HALIS is they're not smuggling infrastructure, ladies and gentlemen of the jury. They are adultery infrastructure. I mean, that actually sounds way more exhausting and miserable than 16 drug smuggling names. The jury comes back, guilty, both defendants, Gilbert and Newton, all. all counts, Stuart Newton, the first man ever convicted in the District of Rhode Island of running a continuing criminal enterprise staring down a maximum of life plus 20. A lot of superlatives in this episode, which is great. Great for the press, my friend, great for the movie. One detail I can't get my head around, back in the fall of that year, when six people are indicted, one of the six

indictments is apparently sealed, and to this day in everything I've read, that six sealed defendant is never named. I think that's an addition to that David Kaplan who was never found. There's just a lot of mysteries here that, you know, we're continuing to work on this. Like, I have a lot of irons in the fire. Yeah, man, it's so, it's so interesting. Like, we're going to keep building on this. We're, like, on it. So this is not the at last. You're going to hear of this. That February, a plane from Geneva lands in Rhode Island and Marshall's walk off with Kenneth Bloomfield, 43 of Dobbs Ferry, the banker of the operation, X-rated at last, photographed on the tarmac clutching a package. He'd been in Wisconsin since June when Geneva police are grabbed

him entering the country on a false passport in the name of David Blow, which, come on, buddy, you're a judge trafficker. Don't give yourself a last name Blow. Remember, that's also where they found that three-page wiring diagram or document of the entire fortune. He fought extradition for eight months, and the timing of his surrender is not subtle. He stops fighting right afternoon and is convicted, and while he sits in Geneva, he does something no one else in the inner circle ever really does. He talks to the DA at Lent. I mean, the other guys, I guess, talked to the Rhode Island courts, but not the DA, right? That's the only way this makes sense.

And his confession, which his lawyer is now desperately trying to keep out of court, is the widest window we ever get into the true size of this thing. And that's where we get the final number, 100,000 tons to the country over five years, the Virginia loads, the five wholesale buyers, New York, Michigan, Massachusetts, and the Pakistani supplier with the House of Singapore that Bloomfield offered, helpfully, to point out.

Meanwhile, Peter Underwood, our old friend who tried to keep his mouth shut, gets sentenced to three years for doing so. His plea deal gets rejected again, and the court hears evidence he was involved in importing drugs even earlier. In 81 and 82, he faces a full trial, the greatest hits of all the drug trafficking played again for the jury. And somehow, miraculously, the jury acquits him of everything. His contempt sentence even gets reduced to only six months. There's so much fishy business here, given the times we're in, like the Cold War, Soviet, Afghanistan, Pakistan, this den of spite.

I mean, you got into this in like part one, right? surely the state is holding stuff back to get a free D, right? No, no, no. So what is happening? I mean, because you'll see what happens later on because eventually, I don't want to give it up just now, but you'll hear, I mean, it's like two more, two more pages in this script and you'll hear what happens. But no, they're not holding back on a freebie then. Not at all. Wow.

They don't know too much about it yet, but you're going to see what happens. On March 30th, 1989, Stuart Newton, otherwise known as Howard Dats, Joseph. Jaffy, Stuart Mitchell, Cary Rivers, and all trespro, stands up in front of the judge to be sentenced, and the government swings for the fences. Life without parole on the kingpin count. The defense tells the judge his client is no gangster, look at the record, no violence anywhere in it. He's just an investor. Meanwhile, in Brooklyn, federal prosecutors in New York are actively building a second case involving money laundering and other loads. So usually, when a defendant is awaiting sentencing, they're going to testify or their interview, they tell this story to ask for

leniency, you know, the sob story. This is why. I did this, this is blah, blah, blah. I'm sorry about it. Newton declines to do so, partially for fear it could affect this next imminent trial. This is what's going on with Mangione right now, right?

This is the same kind of thing, isn't it? It's got like a federal and a state thing and he's given quite a state thing. Don't throw news angles on it. Focus on the task at hand. What are you doing? Don't derail me. And the judge tells him,

you're the mastermind. This took planning and ingenuity and you supplied it. You're a man of intelligence and talent who could have gotten rich the legal way. Get sentenced to four. years plus a $240,000 fine, which is nothing but it's the maximum when the statute allows, with parole impossible for he serves 27 years.

He's 36 years old, and that number means he will be deep into his 60s before the possibility of freedom. And that's going to figure into the next round, because this story does not end here. Later, Gilbert gets 14 years, Nicholas Kukyalsi gets three. As 1989 turns into 1990, 36-year-old Stuart Newton is sitting in Oswald Federal Prison, staring at 40 years. And what's worse is, the feds in Brooklyn, on our busy building that other massive case.

It's really only one choice for him. That year in 1990, Stuart Newton starts cooperating and he swears out an affidavit for the government of the U.S. And even though he's the head of the operation in the U.S., he's got the goods to give up because Newton is the rarest thing

in narcotics enforcement in the States, a Western buyer who went to the source himself, the top of the food chain, repeatedly in sat in rooms with the men who control the whole thing, the men in the mountains, and he can name them, and he does name them,

the top of the top, sitting untouched and unbothered in the Pakistani tribal areas. Until now. Well, this starts the until now part, but you guys will see. On May 17, 1990, a federal indictment out of the eastern district in New York comes down and a nationwide sweep wrapping up the rest of the organization, 34 defendants arrested or sought in a single morning, and the DEA now describes the full organization in numbers. 200,000 pounds, 100 tons, moved into this country across the decade,

10 of it through Point Judith, 35 tons of it into Virginia, between 83 and 85, the rest through channels across the country. And Rhode Island, the sweep looks like this. Sixth through in the morning, agents had a house in Charleston, arresting a 27-year-old Narragansett fisherman named Todd Chapel at his father's place, one node of a distribution web nobody local ever saw. Casey Affleck, you think he's too old for that role now? Well, I mean, that was going to be my next question.

Like, who are these people going to be in the film? Yeah, yeah. And then back in Brooklyn, the man himself, as Howard Dats, pleads guilty to running a criminal enterprise, the judge hands him eight years concurrent, so it folds into the Rhode Island time, which gets significantly reduced for him cooperating. And that same judge,

five years from that sentencing, in the same Brooklyn courthouse, is going to be staring at another defendant, one implicated by Dats, who has just arrived voluntarily in business class, straight from Pakistan, expecting bail, which he does not get. And that man is Ayubh Afridi.

Mike drop. I mean, I've got a mic in front of me, but I'm not going to drop it, but that is a no, don't drop it in a much good bit. Yeah. Not to spoil next week's episode, but Afridi is going to end up serving 44 months in an American prison,

then gets sent home to Pakistan where his seven-year sentence doesn't arrive until 10 weeks after September 11th, and five days into him serving that sentence, he's going to become a free man. And that's before you get sentenced to death. We'll get deep into that next week, but we're not finished with Newton just yet.

The New York case also produces the big money number. For that case, Brooklyn's forfeiture judgment against Newton's fortune, this is personal fortune comes to roughly $51 million, which is the largest narcotics money forfeiture in American history to that point. Another superlip, Sean. I'm killing it here. In December of 1990, the U.S. Attorney's Office announces where this case now stands in history.

72 million seized, that's from everyone, the whole network, the second largest drug asset sees her in the history of the United States at that point. And the largest ever taken from a single criminal organization, outseized only. by polar cap, which involved the Colombian cartels money launderers. By the end, 18 more people are convicted in New York on top of the Rhode Island roster, 22 and all from a case that started with a fed up wife talking to a small town cop. And I know our audience, especially Sean, loves a good asset, she's their story, but what happens with all the money sees and assets is that it creates a windfall for these small Rhode Island police forces who are entitled to some of it.

There's a plethora of stories in the months and years afterwards from these small local papers of all these police departments splitting millions. enough to build new buildings and police facilities and stuff. Coffees Department at Little Compton, the seven-member force, ends up with something around $4 million to spend. Funny enough, the town ends up in a big fight over how to spend it, and a town council member is quoted calling the money possibly the worst thing that ever happened to the town. Also, Little Compton's request to spend forfeiture money on a combined police and fire building

ends up changing national DOJ policy for small towns so that police departments become able to use asset forfeiture funds for non-police-related items. Yeah, I think the little Compton side of all this is actually my favorite part of the entire story. It's so cool. Of course it is. You freaking square. Sergeant Weinal Coffee, a little Compton, and Sergeant Thomas Mungo, who we haven't heard of Narragansett, the two local cops who started pulling this thread in 1983 and never let go.

They get out of as heroes. They get plaques and a banquet, and the Justice Department has formerly called theirs the most significant drug case of 1989. and coffee, 36 or all the time, 11 years on a tiny force, gives the paper the line that should be the last shot of whatever this becomes. Quote, nobody thought it was going to be as big as what it is. Also, the original Bono-Role line, does Sandra and Cindy. It gets sold for $10 at auction to a shrimp man for Maine,

which is a great deal, really. Which leaves the man himself, Stuart Newton, Howard Dats. He does his federal time with his mouth closed and his 14 pages filed. And around 1996, if the concurrent arithmetic that held, quietly with no press and no photograph, he is released. And he does the thing he always was best at. He vanishes. No interview ever.

No memoir, obviously. No podcast series, no YouTube. No DJ Vlad interview. If he's alive, he's in his mid-70s. Yeah. We're finding him. We are finding him. Don't, if he wants to be found.

We're not done yet. Next week, the finale, the strangest surrender in the history of the the DA, a letter with guarantees in it, a hundred thousand dollars in a carry-on, a business class seat, a bail hearing in front of a judge, a death sentence, a resurrection, and the only man in this entire saga who took the flight into an American courtroom and walked home, also some 9-11, Taliban, war on terror orders, all that thrown in. We get the fall and the rise of Ayub Afridi in part three. Wow, we, man. That was a heck of a story. Maybe people should email us in if they want to

suggest some actors that are going to play Stuart Nguer or maybe Iberfridi and you don't get any Marks for saying, Def Patel. Yeah, that was incredible. Yeah, thanks guys for tuning in. And this is your first time listening to the show. Keep, keep listening. They're not all as good as this, but, you know, we have some fun here. Patreon.com, has a new podcast.

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