The Underworld Podcast

In the picturesque Montenegrin port of Kotor, a cocaine trafficking partnership fractured into one of Europe’s bloodiest gang wars. A dispute over a drug shipment in Spain in 2014 split the organization into two rival...

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 into the U.S. while dodging Pakistani intelligence agents out to kill...

In Albania's turbulent Nineties, the small, seaside town of Vlore became a gangster’s paradise, playing host to hundreds of crooks ferrying drugs, weapons and people into nearby Puglia alongside Italian mafiosi. One of...

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...

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 precious metal came at the price of some eight million slaves. Some of...

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 heroin and hash empire that stretched from the mountains of Afghanistan...

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 Ukrainian tycoon, then someone takes out the assassin. Grenades, the...

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 nationalist leader Chiang Kai-shek. ‘Big Ears Du’ would then take over the...

By the mid-1920s, Green Gang Boss Du Yuesheng had conquered almost all before him — including his own underworld mentor Huang Jinrong. Shanghai’s opium scene, torn open by British gunboats, belonged to him. But the city...

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 Earth, accused of flying 45 tonnes of cocaine into Europe with his own...

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 bathrobe act, and the Bonannos—the forgotten, disgraced family left for...

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 growing metropolis’ underworld, members of a secret...

Raymond “Shrimp Boy” Chow possesses one of the best mob nicknames out there. The San Francisco Chinatown gangster went from teenage immigrant hooligan from the streets of Hong Kong to one of the most infamous Asian...

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...

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 sex trafficking, to painkiller addiction and finally a role helping...