Episodes
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When a bizarre group of international gangsters shook on a massive meth deal with a DEA agent in Bangkok, Thailand eight years ago, it kicked off a manhunt ensnaring Hong Kong Triads, Outlaws bikers and an ex-US Army sniper’s band of contract killers. But the bust also shone a light on the shady drug network of North Korea, part of a crime machine fuelling the world’s maddest dictatorship. This is the story of how a war-torn Hermit Kingdom became a narco-trafficking, cash-counterfeiting, pimping Mafia state.
An Underworld Classic
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Danny and Richard Wolfe were barely even teenagers when they formed the Indian Posse in their mother's basement with a handful of friends, but they had already been living the street life since they were in grade school, robbing, stealing and fighting. Never did they expect that within a few short years, the gang would balloon to hundreds and then thousands of members, taking shape in Winnipeg's poor and violent North End where there was no shortage of poor indigenous teens from broken families looking for brotherhood. Drug-dealing, pimping, armed robberies and murders went along with it.
The Indian Posse exploded into Canada's western prairies in the 1990's and soon came to dominate the prisons, enforcing their reign with brutal violence. This the story of how the Wolfe brothers founded the gang, and then succumbed to its violent nature.
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Missing episodes?
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Jon Lee Anderson is an author and staff writer at The New Yorker. Anderson recently profiled Ecuador’s young president Daniel Noboa for a piece entitled “Ecuador’s Risky War on Narcos”.
Jon Lee spoke about his weeks long visit to the embattled nation, its place in the wider drug world, and how political movements across Latin America have metastasized into the biggest and most violent underworld on the planet.
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As Colombia's cocaine industry exploded in the 1980's, Pablo Escobar's Medellin cartel became the dominant player, capturing headlines across the world. But there was a second cartel rising up, one that operated more in the shadows and would soon grow more powerful - and more profitable - than even Medellin.
The Gentlemen of Cali were slick, sophisticated and always looking for a solution that wouldn't attract headlines. They fancied themselves businessmen and aristocrats, and as Pablo went to war on the state, they invested hundreds of millions into businesses and politicians all over Colombia. Though originally good-natured rivals, the Cali and Medellin cartels maintained decent relations...only they didn't.
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When gunmen ambushed a Mexican-Chinese businessman outside his Guatemala City casino in 2016, few outside the DEA paid much attention. But the shootout presaged the downfall of a man who, feds would later say, hadn’t just made a tidy living out of money laundering, but pioneered it.
But Xizhi Li, who grew up in the border town of Mexicali, was just one of a new army of Chinese money launderers who, tooled with millennia of underground banking skills, and China’s own economic policies, have become the go-to guys for Latin American cartels looking to wash their dirty cash. And with fentanyl flooding America’s streets, their work is becoming deadlier by the day.
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Something about Bum Farto, Key West’s fire chief, stunk. And it wasn’t just his red suits, bling and lime green company car. By the early 70s Florida’s farthest-flung outpost was a lawless drug enclave. And Bum was smack bang in its center.
((NOTE: This isn't just our best episode, it might be the podcast episode ever, in the history of podcasts.))
When the state’s governor dispatched a multi-agency task force to Key West, however, they stumbled on something far darker than an errant Farto. Out poured a world of murder, mafiosi and massive shipments. What happened next remains a mystery to this day.
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The Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia fought a guerrilla war against Colombia’s government - as well as against right wing militias and drug cartels - for over four decades before signing a peace treaty in 2016 and then dissolving in 2017, though splinter faction known as The Dissidents still prowls the jungles.
As the FARC were coming up, another violent group in Colombia hellbent on taking over territory was also growing: the country’s infamous drug cartels. In this episode, we’re joined by longtime cartel correspondent and frequent guest, author Toby Muse to detail the history of the FARC and what exactly was their role in Colombia’s cocaine trade.
Toby is the author of Kilo: Life and Death Inside the Secret World of the Cocaine Cartels
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The Tren de Aragua grew out of disastrous regime policies to give gang leaders more power in prisons. Its mysterious leader, Niño Guerrero, soon controlled an entire facility, and installed a prison bar, a nightclub—and even a zoo.
More state bungling allowed the Tren to take over entire city neighbourhoods unchallenged. So when Venezuela’s economy plummeted and hundreds of thousands fled the nation, it became a key player in the booming migrant smuggling trade, spreading into neighboring Latin American states.
Now the Tren is in the US. But is there really a full-scale invasion, as media are beginning to say? We unpick the fact and fiction of this dangerous new group.
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In the chaos of 1970’s New York, it took a lot to shock the city. But the Westies managed to leave quite the impression. Dubbed the last of the Irish mob despite being more like an anarchic gang, they terrorized the Hell’s Kitchen neighborhood of Manhattan, garnering headlines due to their penchant for daytime hits and chopping up their victims bodies.
They even managed to attract the attention of New York’s five mafia families, who took notice of their numerous hits and started contracting out to them. In less than a decade though, things would get a little too messy, and they would tear themselves apart.
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This year, the Phoenix suburb of Gilbert has been rocked by the death of 16-year-old Preston Lord, at the hands of a group calling themselves the ‘Gilbert Goons,’ jocks and hicks combining forces to unleash violence on the city’s streets.
The craziest thing? This happened before. And back then, the group’s godfather was none other than Sammy the Bull, Gambino consigliere turned super-snitch. The 90s are well and truly back in fashion.
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In recent years, Sebastian Marset has emerged as the first narco kingpin out of Uruguay. He rose from a mid-level weed dealer to an international cartel boss in less than 10 years, even with half that time being spent in prison, pioneering Latin America's southern route; trafficking blow from Bolivia to Paraguay and Uruguay, and then Europe, where he's allegedly behind record-breaking multi-ton busts from Germany to Belgium.
He’s a master at money laundering, setting up front companies, and winning over everyone from high ranking politicians to massive criminal organizations like the 'Ndranghetta and Brazilian gang First Command of the Capital. He also always seems to be one step ahead of law enforcement, and travels under numerous alias with fake documents.
There's just one little flaw in his master plans...he's obsessed with soccer. So obsessed, he keeps buying teams and putting himself in the game as a player despite being wanted by nearly half a dozen countries
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When Mohammed Alaa Allawi, a former US military interpreter, moved to Texas in 2012, selling weed was a side hustle. But when a company asked him to design a website, the young Iraqi soon realised his American dream was better forged online.
Soon Allawi was making millions on the dark web, selling counterfeit pills with precursors from China—including the deadly opioid fentanyl. When a Marine OD’d on the gear, the heat on Allawi intensified. Before long he was trapped in a spectacular multiagency sting.
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Bombshell out of Mexico, El Mayo (!!!!!) is in US federal custody after arriving on a small private plan alongside El Chapo's son, Joaquin Guzman Lopez. What. The Hell. Is going on. How does the most elusive, powerful narco kingpin in Mexico's history, whose avoided arrest for decades and operated like a ghost in the shadows, end up being gift-wrapped for feds? Alongside 1/4 of Los Chapitos? In this hastily thrown together episode, we try to get to the bottom of exactly what's known, what isn't known, and what is actually happening.
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When Nelson Mandela and the ANC delivered South Africa from Apartheid in the 90s, hopes were high that the country could become a beacon of freedom and fairness. A generation later, those dreams lie in tatters. Elites have plundered state coffers to the tune of billions, mines have been taken over by illegal “chancers,” and the ghettoes of South Africa’s largest city, Cape Town, are suffering levels of violence unseen since segregation.
Left with few opportunities, corrupt cops and hundreds of gangs, locals have turned to private security firms, the country’s new boom trade. Others have thrown up roadblocks and christened whip-wielding vigilante groups, as the country descends into ever more hellish levels of organized crime.
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Sam Walker already had a huge rap sheet in his native Liverpool before 2018, when he took off across Europe and through the Sahara Desert into Sierra Leone - posting on social media the whole time. There he crafted a new life as a saviour of Freetown’s slums. But is there another, darker motive for Walker’s second act?
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With El Chapo locked up in a supermax prison and never going home, there's been a battle to maintain the power of his feared Sinaloa cartel. Many thought his sons, groomed to take his place, would falter. Seen mostly as spoiled rich kid "narco juniors" who possessed neither the intelligence nor the strength to outmaneuver older, more experienced druglords, the men known as Los Chapitos have surprised many by turning their faction of the cartel into a ruthless powerhouse pumping out fentanyl into the US.
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In the mid 90's, the Quebec Hells Angels made an offer to every drug trafficking organization in Montreal: buy from us or die. The Rock Machine motorcycle club refused to bend the knee, allying with a secretive group of business owner drug dealer money launderers known as the Dark Circle.
What followed was 8 years of unparalleled violence, resulting in over 160 killed and turning the streets of Montreal into a war zone. Meanwhile, the Hells Angels and their leader Mom Boucher kept up their war on the authorities and sought to monopolize the entire drug market, raking in hundreds of millions in the process.
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For years the Pacific region, and its tiny, tropical nations, steered clear of the global meth and cocaine trade. But politics, war and wild profit margins have pushed ships and planes out from Latin America to Australia across a new ‘drug highway.’
The phenomenon is prompting mass murder, crippling governments, and creating a wave of addiction where none existed. Locals are getting corrupted into becoming cartel ‘doors.’ And local gang underworlds have been upended, uprooted and hunted down like never before. Unless something changes, it'll be Paradise Lost.
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The Hells Angels Motorcycle Club first chapter emerged in the US in the 1940's but didn't reach Canada until 1977. Less than 20 years later, they would be neck deep in the bloodiest motorcycle gang war ever fought as the Quebec chapter sought to monopolize the cocaine trade, utilizing car bombs and death squads to turn the city of Montreal into a war zone. Led by the psychotic and brilliant Maurice "Mom" Boucher, the Hells got so powerful they not only took on any and all rival biker gangs and criminal organizations, but the state itself.
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Since 2019, Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele has smashed the country’s two main gangs, MS-13 and Barrio 18, throwing almost 80,000 people into megaprisons and implementing a harsh but effective “state of exception,” aka martial law. Murder rates have plummeted and, for the first time in years, Salvadorans can live without the fear of violence, extortion, or death.
But the sneaker-wearing “world’s coolest dictator” has also gerrymandered El Salvador’s political map, silenced the press, and packed out the judiciary with sycophants and wallflowers. And as human rights NGOs cry foul, Bukele has gone full-tilt, telling citizens not to call him a dictator, but a “philosopher king.” Is his fragile peace about to come crashing down?
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