The Underworld Podcast

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 authorities in all kinds of crazy directions — from French paramilitary hitmen to mobsters belonging to the feared Union Corse, Corsican dope traffickers who’d perfected “French Connection” routes from Southeast Asia and Turkey into Marseille, then onto New York to feed a ballooning American addiction crisis. Amid the chaos, one Frenchman fled Argentina to neighboring Paraguay. There he discovered a smuggler’s paradise, full of Nazis and narcos, whose reliance on drugs and contraband would grow so huge that US drug squads would refer not only to the French Connection, but to one named for Paraguay’s repressive, half-German dictator: The Stroessner Connection. He and the fugitive French mafioso would form a bond that, in many ways, has outlived both of them to today. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In 1960s Boston, Buddy McLean ignited a savage gang war after tensions with the McLaughlin brothers boiled over into open bloodshed. What started as neighborhood beef turned into a cycle of ambushes, barroom executions, and street hits that terrorized Boston. McLean’s Winter Hill crew proved more organized and ruthless, picking off rivals and seizing control as bodies piled up. By the end, the McLaughlins were shattered, and the war set the stage for the rise of Whitey Bulger and the modern Boston mob. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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 pristine shores and coral reefs for a handful of tumbledown buildings on the edge of Koror, its biggest town. It wouldn’t take long for the story to unfold. These men were the foot soldiers in a new crime wave hitting Palau: digital scammers at the sharp end of a trillion-dollar empire run by the world’s richest gangster, and orchestrated by one of China’s most infamous Triad kingpins. As Palauan cops dismantled the operation, they discovered it had more than a little to do with their nation’s recognition of Taiwan — and Beijing’s attempt to use organized crime to bring Asia’s states to heel. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

We're back with another Stash House and there's a hell of a lot of crazy stuff going on. Daniel Kinahan is spotted in Dubai palling around with a shady oil trader, Sebastian "The King of the South" Marset is bagged up in Bolivia and extradited to the US, Trump goes in hard on Ecuador's narcos and potentially the rest of Latin America, the Scam Lord King of Asia might be saying goodbye for good, and even more! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Melbourne has been gripped by a new wave of underworld gang wars, this time fueled by the booming billion dollar black-market tobacco trade. Firebombings, drive-by shootings, and extortion targeting shops across the city have roiled the city as middle eastern syndicates and biker gangs fight over profit. At the center of the chaos is underworld figure Kaz Hamad, whose name keeps surfacing as rival crime crews battle for control of a trade worth tens of millions. Deported to Iraq, he kept running the racket remotely until his arrest in early 2026, blazing a path of ruthlessness that authorities seem incapable of stopping. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

When a 2023 club brawl ended in a Freetown, Sierra Leone parking lot shooting, cops and reporters pointed the finger at “Omar Shariff,” a portly Turkish millionaire who’d spent much of the past six months throwing cash about at the city’s casinos and top-end restaurants. But Shariff wasn’t Turkish, and he wasn’t just any businessman. And as information about the strange man leaked over the coming year, officials in Africa and Europe began to realize that he was in fact one of the Netherlands’ biggest cocaine kingpins, one who’d been on the run from authorities for years — and whose commitment to cartel violence had extended to the construction of a shipping-container torture center. What happened next was a lesson in how organized criminals evade justice by corrupting power. And how cocaine traffickers, from Suriname to Sierra Leone, have taken over the world. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

We told you his life story in our 2022 episode, and now we're back with the sequel. El Mencho rose from poverty to build the CJNG into Mexico’s most violent and influential cartel, trafficking fent, meth and coke across the hemisphere. After years on the run with a huge U.S. bounty on his head, Mexican forces killed him in a daring military operation last week in Jalisco. The cartel responded with unprecedented retaliation: burning vehicles, massive roadblocks and bloody clashes with security forces that left dozens dead and airports and flights disrupted. His death has left a power vacuum in CJNG, sparking fear of a new wave of turf wars and uncertainty about what comes next in Mexico’s cartel wars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Not even the IRA scared Martin "The General" Cahill. He terrorized Dublin with audacious heists that left police scrambling. Rising from the gritty streets of Dublin, he became a criminal mastermind whose crew got so proficient at armed robberies and heists they sometimes did two jobs in a single day. From art heists to daring bank robberies, his exploits read like a thriller. Cahill remains Ireland’s most notorious, untouchable outlaw, a legend of crime that refuses to fade Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Monk Eastman ruled the depraved streets of turn-of-the-century Manhattan with fists and absolutely zero regard for human life, commanding an army of 1,200 thugs who terrorized the Lower East Side. At the height of his power, he was pulling cash from every racket you could think of while rigging elections for Tammany Hall and overseeing street violence so extreme that cops needed reinforcements just to enter his territory. Eastman represented a true transition in the evolution of the underworld, when crime became organized. All that, and he managed to become a war hero too, before the street life finally caught up with him. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Orphaned and kicked out of work, Kazuo Taoka was an unlikely candidate to become one of postwar Japan’s most important characters. But by combining violence with a talent for legitimate business and corruption, the immaculately-suited gangster would lead the Yamaguchi-gumi yakuza syndicate from a ragtag Kobe dockworkers’ gang to one of the world’s richest underworld forces, spreading from Japan into Southeast Asia and even the United States. That won Taoka plenty of enemies, which he almost always vanquished. But when a young rival yakuza saw Taoka celebrating at a Kyoto nightclub, the ensuing chaos would plunge Japan’s criminal scene into chaos — and the country’s one true Godfather would never be the same again. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

What's going on with the big Ryan Wedding arrest and extradition? The Canadian city that had to declare a state of emergency because of Indo-Canadian gangs extorting everyone. China executes 11 scammers. All that and more in this Stash House: Sean is moving continents edition. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In the late 1970s, as Sicily descended into all-out mafia war, the island’s allegiances split between the ruthless Corleonesi clan, led by Toto Riina, and southern gangsters fed up with Riina’s campaign of murder that was spilling innocent lives, and disgusting the Italian public. This schism would be the birth of the Stidda — Sicilian for ‘star’ — a group that fought and thrived for turf in southern Sicily, and became prominent enough that, even today, people know it as Italy’s “Fifth Mafia”. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Vincent “Chin” Gigante was the most powerful mob boss in America...and he was also the mob's best performance artist. By day, he wandered Greenwich Village in a bathrobe, muttering to himself, selling the world on the idea that he was crazy. By night, he ran the Genovese crime family with near-absolute discipline, avoiding wires, indictments, and the spotlight that destroyed flashier dons. For decades, he convinced the FBI and the courts he was too mentally ill to stand trial, all while green-lighting murders, controlling unions, and skimming millions, turning the Genovese family into the most powerful criminal group in America. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Ever hear about how Woody Harrelson's dad was a hitman who killed a federal judge? The Chagra brothers came up along the El Paso and Juarez border when smuggling weed became one of America's booming industries. With Lee a prominent criminal defense attorney and Jimmy an outlaw, they gambled millions in Vegas, lived lavishly, and made a lot of enemies, chief among them prosecutors and judges. When the feds finally closed in, Jimmy Chagra got desperate...so desperate, he put a hit out on a federal judge. This is the story of the Chagra brothers, one of America's wildest cartels. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

When the son of Suriname’s president offered to ship drugs and guns for a major terror group in 2013, it was the dimwitted denouement to decades of narco-fueled madness in the small, South American nation — which began when the two belligerents in its bitter civil war made so much cash ferrying product for Colombian cartels, that they buried their differences and worked together instead. The war ended. But the drugs never stopped flowing — particularly between Suriname and a new clique of criminals in its former colonial ruler, the Netherlands. A crazy episode, and one to add to the pantheon of the world’s true, out-and-out narco states. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

It's stash house time! We bring you all the news on organized crime, gangs, drugs, cartels and the holidays that you could ever want. And, at the end, Sean shows his feet in a special holiday new years gift to our most loyal fans. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In the last few years, Sweden’s gang wars have erupted into a brutal battlefield of shootings, bombings, and shifting allegiances even worse than the decade before. At the center is the Kurdish Fox, a shadowy figure who built his gang Foxtrot into the most formidable drug network in the entire country, all while not even living in Sweden. Using encrypted chats to recruit teenage gunmen, he sent Sweden's murder rate soaring. But when he took out his right hand man's own mother, it led to a civil war the likes of which Stockholm had never seen. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In the wake of the EncroChat bust, swaths of the world’s biggest narco traffickers have been swept up by European cops — from Balkan tough guys to Camorra capos. Somehow, though, the man who connects them all has kept his hands clean. How did Daniel Kinahan go from Dublin goon to global cartel leader? And how long can he stay out of trouble? Sean spoke to The New Yorker’s Ed Caesar, who’s written about Kinahan, to find out. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Starting in the mid 2010's, Sweden’s gang wars transformed from neighborhood disputes into a national crisis, driven by splintered immigrant-area crews who now recruit teenage hitmen willing to kill for a few thousand dollars. At the center of the chaos, the bitter feud between Shottaz and Death Patrol, two rival networks whose bombings, kidnappings, and retaliatory shootings have turned Stockholm’s suburbs into warzones. The murder of chart-topping rapper Einár shocked the country, a killing that symbolized how deeply the underworld had bled into mainstream Swedish life. How did one of Europe's safest countries turn into a gangland battleground? Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

With gunboats parked in the Caribbean, fast boats blown up, and the White House threatening to invade, we unpick some of the narratives surrounding Venezuela’s regime — and its gangs. Is the Tren de Aragua really exporting fentanyl to the US? Is Nicolas Maduro the head of a global narcotics trafficking organization? And is the Cartel of the Suns actually a thing? Featuring guest interviews and footage from a famous 1993 bust, we dive into the past, present — and uncertain future — of one of DC’s longest-standing regional feuds, and ask: is it truly all about drugs? Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices