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.
255 episodes transcribedIbrahim Akasha was the kingpin of East Africa’s heroin highway, setting up a massive tracking empire that stretched from Afghanistan, Pakistan and Ira...
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 cen...
Amado Carrillo Fuentes was one of the most powerful drug traffickers of the 1990s, moving hundreds of tons of cocaine and amassing billions while forg...
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 lea...
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...
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 mile...
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 ha...
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...
When Argentine soccer wizard Diego Armando Maradona swapped Barcelona for lowly Napoli in 1984, it shocked the sporting world — and sent Naples’ deadl...
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...
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 dec...
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 fr...
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...
Today the ‘Ndrangheta, Calabria’s clan-based Mafia, is one of the world’s richest and most powerful drug trafficking organizations, worth an estimated...
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 vict...
Will Grant, the BBC’s Mexico, Central America and Cuba correspondent, was recently on the ground at Jalisco’s Rancho Izaguirre, dubbed ‘Mexico’s Ausch...
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 threateni...
South Africa's secretive Numbers Gangs almost defy description; they're one part cult, one part religion, and all parts violent psychopaths. Emerging...
Sean Williams reports from the Philippines, where former President Rodrigo Duterte’s brutal drug war cost up to 30,000 lives and tore Philippine socie...
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...
