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.
271 episodes transcribedOn 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...
On this week's Stash House: A fugitive Dutch cocaine kingpin dodges capture off the coast of West Africa. An Irish gang boss trades gangland warfare f...
Mako Nishimura graduated from high school delinquent to kamikaze biker gang, street tough and, eventually, a fully made member of a yakuza syndicate -...
Nuevo Laredo is one of the most feared cartel cities in Mexico, a place where disappearances, gun battles, and corruption became part of daily life as...
Meet the Stopwatch Gang: three polite Canadian crooks turned bank robbery into a precision sport, hitting over 140 banks across North America and walk...
Vassilis Paleokostas, and his big brother Nikos, grew up shoeless in a Greek mountain village. When the boys moved to a city, they discovered a talent...
When Mexican special forces killed El Mencho in February 2026, the throne of Mexico's most powerful cartel was up for grabs. But there's one man who m...
When Paraguay extradited French-Corsican heroin kingpin Auguste Ricord to the US in 1972, some thought Paraguay’s narco trafficking days might be numb...
The French Connection and Paraguay In 1968, a gang of smartly-dressed gangsters robbed a bank in Buenos Aires. The fallout from the raid would lead a...
In 1960s Boston, Buddy McLean ignited a savage gang war after tensions with the McLaughlin brothers boiled over into open bloodshed. What started as n...
When fleets of young Chinese men arrived in the tiny, Pacific nation of Palau in 2018, authorities wondered why they’d eschewed the archipelago’s pris...
