Episódios
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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. A sprawling, shadowy empire of Chinese triads is running thousands of illegal grow ops across the U.S. From California suburbs to rural Maine, these operations are powered by slave labor, stolen utilities, and chemicals banned in America.
But it gets even crazier. Cause behind it all? Links to high-level officials in the Chinese Communist Party.
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When Argentine soccer wizard Diego Armando Maradona swapped Barcelona for lowly Napoli in 1984, it shocked the sporting world — and sent Naples’ deadly Camorra into overdrive. Corrupt from the very start, the move would send the world’s greatest player into a tailspin of drugs, sex and crime, even while his onfield performances won Napoli its first league in over six decades.
But as Maradona Mania gripped the Italian city, the star’s underworld friends realized how big a cash cow he was — and flooded Naples with drugs, smuggled cigarettes, guns and shady property deals. And it was right when Maradona was at his peak — an Italian league, and World Cup winner — that things really began to fall apart.
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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: Ryan Wedding, a former Olympic athlete and middle class Canadian kid who managed to build himself into a powerful narco kingpin.
But how the hell did a middle class kid from small town Canada go from being one of the world's best snowboarders to ordering numerous hits across Canada, moving thousands of kilos from Mexico through the US, and having a 10 million dollar bounty on his head?
This is a wild one!
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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 decade a team comprised mostly of Mexicans from the state of Sinaloa has been jumping aboard freight cars, sometimes at 70mph, and grabbing…Nike sneakers.
Yes, these enterprising thieves have got their eyes on a very particular prize: unreleased, limited-edition Nikes, mostly Air Jordans. And they’re good at it. This week’s show digs into the gang’s MO, what can be done, and some heists of yesteryears — including Butch Cassidy, Jesse James, and a remarkable gold heist that shocked Victorian London.
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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 frontiersman turned Chinese general — stares down death from a hotel room. From underground boxing rings to arms deals, Cohen fought the Japanese and Soviets, battled communists, warlords and mercenaries, and drank his way through China's bloodiest years. This is the story of the outlaw who ran guns and dodged death while becoming the bodyguard to the father of modern China.
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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 empires in U.S. history. Known as Los Muchachos, they moved mountains of cocaine through a city shaped by Cuban exiles, ambition, and an underworld that blurred the line between loyalty and lawlessness.
From funding anti-Castro revolutionaries to working with both the Medellin and Cali Cartel, this is the story of how they rose, ruled, and ran.
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Today the ‘Ndrangheta, Calabria’s clan-based Mafia, is one of the world’s richest and most powerful drug trafficking organizations, worth an estimated $55 billion. But it wasn’t always like that. From the 1960s, as European politics went mad, the group glommed onto a new fad taking Italy by storm: kidnapping. And it got them the capital to get into property, cigarette smuggling, and cocaine.
But they were far from gentleman thieves. The ‘Ndrangheta’s kidnapping streak cost lives, outraged the Italian public, and kicked off a feud between rival clans than continues spilling blood to this day.
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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 victims with his bare hands. But Frank didn't just leave the violence at work. He trained his sons Kurt and Frank Jr in the mob enforcer life since they were kids, through fear, intimidation and horrific abuse.
When the entire Calabrese family got locked up for extortion, his other son, Frank Jr, who had battled a bad drug problem and stolen hundreds of thousands of dollars from his dad, wrote a letter to the feds and offered to wear a wire on his own father.
Enter the infamous Family Secrets trial in Chicago. Kurt's father, who brutally abused him for years, is about to face numerous murder charges. His brother is about to become the most infamous rat in Chicago’s history. And Kurt is caught right in the middle of his family…and the biggest organized crime trial in Chicago’s history.
This is a special presentation of Season 3 of the Underbelly Podcast, Killing Kurt...produced by Underworld host Danny Gold.
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Will Grant, the BBC’s Mexico, Central America and Cuba correspondent, was recently on the ground at Jalisco’s Rancho Izaguirre, dubbed ‘Mexico’s Auschwitz’, and CECOT, Nayib Bukele’s megaprison in El Salvador. Will spoke to Sean about what he saw in both places, how politics and organized crime is coverging, what new Mexican President Claudia Scheinbaum can do without triggering full-scale war — and how populism and the mob have often gone hand-in-hand across Latin America.
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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 threatening for years and become the most powerful cartel boss on the planet? From avocados to abogados, weed to coke to fentanyl, Mencho is a narco so bloodthirsty his men are compared to ISIS. Can the Mexican state cut him down to size? Or will a lifelong quest to build a citadel in his home state of Michoacan come off, ruling local civilians with a sadistic iron fist? We look at the past, present and future of who might just be the scariest criminal we’re profiled on this show.
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South Africa's secretive Numbers Gangs almost defy description; they're one part cult, one part religion, and all parts violent psychopaths. Emerging originally as bandits preying on gold miners and policemen in colonial South Africa, they took shape in the brutal prison system of apartheid, where sometimes the only way to communicate was through stabbing whoever was around.
What formed was something more than a gang, it was almost a shadow universe where every single interaction was governed by the archaic and complex rules of the 26's, 27's and 28's. And when apartheid crumbled, and South Africa's drug markets opened up, the numbers gangs traded in their generations of rituals and rules to merge with powerful street gangs and bring the grim reality of South Africa's torturous prison out into the world.
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Sean Williams reports from the Philippines, where former President Rodrigo Duterte’s brutal drug war cost up to 30,000 lives and tore Philippine society to shreds. But was it all cover for his family’s own involvement in the drug trade? Reporting from Duterte’s stronghold of Davao, where he ran a decades-long death squad, and capital Manila, which bore the brunt of that bloody blueprint, we expose the genesis of the war — and its longtime link to Triads and other criminal groups.
Duterte's connections to the drug trade have rarely been reported on in English and are just starting to make waves. This episode, backed by exclusive sources and firsthand accounts, challenges mainstream narratives and sheds new light on one of the most controversial anti-drug campaigns in modern history.
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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 with their rivals the Flying Dragons and the White Eagles. And that was before they linked up with one of the Triad-connected tongs to run the neighborhood protection and gambling rackets, earning millions every year despite being barely out of their teens.
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When they finally went down on RICO charges in the mid 80's, they were tied to 13 murders. But it wasn't the rival gangs that tore the Ghost Shadows apart; it was a power struggle between the street generals that proved to be the biggest challenge. And it's then when Peter Chin arrived on the scene to claim the role of Dai Lo, or big brother.
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When Adnan Khashoggi, Saudi arms dealer and self-styled world’s richest man, met with US officials to discuss the Ayatollah, it may have seemed like a chance to cash in corporate power for political clout. But the affair — and an ill-advised friendship with the kleptocratic leaders of the Philippines — would send Khashoggi’s businesses into a tailspin, and land him jail.
What came next was one of the most spectacular court cases of the era. And it finally shined a spotlight on the life and legends of a man whose lavish lifestyle was the envy of world leaders, and an up-and-coming Donald Trump.
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The Dixie Mafia terrorized the southern US for decades before authorities were finally able to bring them down. Starting off as a loose collective of career criminals who specialized in burglaries and robberies, they grew more organized after starting to use the infamous Biloxi strip of undercover brothels and gambling houses as a base, eventually shifting to everything from drug smuggling to contract killing to even running national romance scams.
We're joined by Jed Lipinski of Gone South to break down everything from carnie robberies to corrupt sheriffs and murdered judges.
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Adnan Khashoggi was born in Mecca — but his life was anything but pious. The billionaire had multiple wives, girlfriends and armies of callgirls, not to mention gambling sessions and club nights whose costs ran into the millions of dollars.
Khashoggi made his first riches shipping arms from the US to Saudi Arabia. But soon his “fees,” and the ways he got them, began to catch up with him. And dalliances in politics, bad investments, and some friends in dark places, would send the life of the ‘world’s richest man’ into a criminal tailspin.
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Michael Miske came from a broken home through years of petty crime to lead a gang of lost boys in Honolulu, cornering its drug scene and befriending cops to build an empire of pain in the Aloha State.
But when Miske’s son slammed his car into a truck and died, it sent the kingpin on a spiral of misplaced rage — ending in murder, conspiracy and even a chemical weapon attack. Even when the law caught up with him, Miske had one last trick up his sleeve.
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What started as a small gang of white prisoners in a California state prison in the 1960's is now one of, if not the most powerful prison gang across America, with tens of thousands of soldiers across federal and state lines. Though they're alleged to only have approximately 150 full-fledged members, the Aryan Brotherhood has found ways to dominate prison economies and expand their rackets into the outside world.
The Brand, as the Aryan Brotherhood is sometimes called, has morphed from a self-described white supremacist prison gang into an all-encompassing criminal syndicate putting profit and power over their ideological stances.
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Mickey once said of himself, quote, “I was a pretty fair replica of the devil.” He also killed a bunch of people, and got away with it. A street hustler since he was 6, Cohen gained a rep as a hard-fighting professional boxer despite his short stature, and a rep as a wild-haired stick up kid that never backed down from a gunfight or a robbery.
But when he got the call to head back to LA to serve as the number 2/bodyguard for Bugsy Siegel, everything changed. Under Bugsy, Mickey's statue rose sky-high, and he learned about the organized part of organized crime: legit businesses, using charm instead of guns, high society, and all that. He slept with A list actresses, was known for his insanely expensive wardrobe, ran LA's gambling rackets, high class prostitution, controlled labor unions, extortion rackets, was tied into all the movie studios and had an army of shooters. He mixed with politicians, newspaper editors, and every famous actor, and actress, of the era...all while fighting a deadly multi-year war with Jack Dragna over control of LA and the race wire.
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It’s January 5, 1982, and the central American state of Panama is playing host to one of the most extraordinary narco summits in history. Hosting the pow-wow is Manuel Noriega, chief of Panamanian military intelligence and just a year from siezing its control. Pablo Escobar, head of what will become the feared Medellin Cartel, is there too.
But even these criminal heavyweights aren’t the biggest gangsters in the room. That title belongs to Roberto Suarez Gomez, Bolivia’s so-called King of Cocaine, supplier of Andean coca paste to a global blow industry. Suarez, a former cattle rancher and heir to a rubber fortune, has never been more powerful. Just two years previous he’d backed Bolivia’s so-called ‘Cocaine Coup', tearing through capital La Paz and installing violent general Luis Garcia Meza as president.
Since then Suarez has built the modern cocaine market, cementing Escobar as his chief buyer, and pulling in Noriega and even the Castros of Cuba. But Suarez couldn’t have done all this without the fourth man in this room in Panama, quiet and slight, with a saturnine face that belies the litany of evil he’s managed in his 67 years. This is Klaus Barbie, fugitive SS officer and so-called ‘Butcher of Lyon’
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