The Underworld Podcast
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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.
163 Episodes
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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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When hitmen shot dead Sikh activist Hardeep Singh Nijjar near Vancouver last June, Canadian cops blamed the government of India’s strongman leader Narendra Modi. Subsequent assassination plots in NYC, the UK and Germany have pointed at two men.
One is India’s most notorious mobster. The other is its most decorated spy, a man whose undercover ops—and willingness to dip into the underworld—has earned him the nickname “India’s James Bond.”
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Louis Sarcella might be one of the most corrupt NYPD detectives ever, though he was once heralded as a master at getting confessions on homicides. A slick dressing, tough talking cigar smoker who could bench 400 pounds, he got such a good reputation that he was invited on the Dr. Phil show.
But while he was waging a war on the streets, his uncle, Nicky Black Grancio, was waging a mafia war as the third Colombo family civil war heated up and bodies started to drop. Both Nicky and Louis's luck would soon run out. We're joined by the host of The Burden, journalist Steve Fishman.
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Haiti's gangs have effectively taken over the country, plunging into chaos and violence as warring gangster warlords like the infamous Barbeque fight for territorial control. In February gangs stormed police stations, shot up the airport and freed thousands of prisoners after storming the country's biggest prisons, causing a humanitarian crisis. Things have gotten so bad that Kenya is sending in 1,000 police officers to try to regain some sort of control.
We're joined by reporter Jason Motlagh, who's been reporting down there for years and has hung out with Barbeque before.
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In the late 2000's, the Mexico government put together a list of dozens of Narco kingpins it wanted to bring down. Only one name from that list is not imprisoned or dead, and still sitting stop the Mexican cartel world: El Mayo. Nearing 80, he's never so much as been arrested despite co-founding and then co-leading the Sinaloa cartel for decades.
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Everyone knows El Chapo, the infamous leader of the Sinaloa Cartel, one time most powerful kingpin that Mexico has ever seen. The man who revolutionized the Mexican cartels' drug trade. But...what if he never actually was at the top of the food chain?
Some have long suspected that the head of the Sinaloa cartel has always been Ismael Zambada Garcia, also known as El Mayo. Nearing his 80's, little is known about his early life, but he's always managed to stay two steps ahead of the cartel wars and the police. He's never been arrested. He's always played the background, avoiding the spotlight and letting Chapo get the notoriety even though they cofounded and shared leadership of the Sinaloa Cartel.
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With influencer and living meme Andrew Tate about to face trial in Romania, we dive into his connections to a powerful pair of Mafia brothers and their casino empire—and how the Tates pivoted from MMA to a gang that has terrorized the European nation for years.
We also go deep on the history of Romanian organized crime, from Ponzi schemes to ATM skimming gangs and Europe’s biggest human trafficking syndicate—and show how Romania and the Tates had been on a criminal collision course for decades
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Boris Nayfeld's life is like something out of a movie; orphaned in the former Soviet Union, he served time in a brutal penal colony before establishing himself as a top tier street criminal before escaping for America. No stranger to violence, he got involved in the burgeoning Russian mafia factions rising up in Brooklyn's Brighton Beach during the 1980's.
But he’s way more than just a two bit gangster. He’s been involved in organized crime from Odessa to Thailand to Antwerp, survived 5 assassination attempts, done prison in the US and the former soviet union, and been involved in diamond heists, heroin trafficking, extortion, shootouts, tangled with Russian Thieves in Law…the guy’s name carries weight. And somehow, through it all, he survived when nearly everyone else he came up with didn't.
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Lo Hsing Han was a Burmese narco so powerful that Richard Nixon called him a Godfather. But the Kokang king tried one too many shady deals, sending the Golden Triangle’s heroin industry on a helter-skelter path toward a bloody, 2023 shootout with Chinese cops—at a lawless casino town on the edge of nowhere.
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Well, they blew up the Chicken Man in Philly last night. And they blew up his house too. And the racket boys, they really did have a fight...a brutal one that lasted decades and saw Skinny Joey Merlino come out on top. He's not just America's next top crime podcaster and patreon star, he's also the one-time boss of the Philadelphia mafia and (allegedly!) still the don of Philly, if you believe the feds.
Merlino, though, is no joke. Surviving by the skin of his teeth and dodging multiple assassinations in the 80's and 90's, he went from the son of shunned one-time underboss Chuckie Merlino to the top position when him and his crew of young gunners took on all comers.
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Medellin was once the world's most violent city, torn about by Pablo Escobar's murderous cartel warfare and later, Don Berna's meteoric rise to control the city's drug trade. Over the last decade, though, the city has grown quite safe, becoming a tourism hotspot and hub for digital nomads attracted to it's people, parties and culture.
But a recent spate of robbery turned murders, mostly targeting foreigners through dating apps like Tinder and Bumble, is once again throwing the city's rep into question and garnering international headlines. But who, exactly, is behind it? We're joined by Underworld favorite and Colombian underworld specialist, reporter and producer Toby Muse.
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Olive Yang—or Miss Hairy Legs, or Two-Gun Mulan, or any number of nicknames folks gave her—was the gunslinging princess of Kokang who bucked the royal yolk to become one of the Golden Triangle’s biggest narco traffickers. With DC’s backing she built an empire all over Asia, and did some pretty impressive spycraft on the side.
Part one of this crazy two-parter tracks the rise of Olive and her “Boys,” the gangsters of the Kokang bush, a stint in prison, 999 dope and something Olive’s sister called, euphemistically, the “special belt.”
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From Ponzi schemes to shitcoins, phishing scams and Nigerian princes, we’re living in a golden age of online crime. But hasn’t it always been this way? Cory Doctorow’s latest novel “The Bezzle” dives into some of these recesses, and America’s prison-industrial complex—all part of something he’s dubbed the “enshittification” of the World Wide Web
Get 20% off and free shipping with the code Underworld at Manscaped.com.
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Tony "Joe Batters" Accardo aka the Big Tuna (!) was one of the most powerful Mob Bosses that the American Mafia has ever seen, sitting atop the brutal Chicago Outfit for 40 years. From being an errand boy turned hitman for none other than Al Capone to taking the Outfit from a local prohibition gang to a national powerhouse with multiple Vegas casinos, Accardo's seven decade career in the underworld is legendary.
And you'll never guess which current NFL all stars are his great-grandsons...
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1Two years ago, Kyle MacLachlan, the star of Twin Peaks, called investigative journalist Joshua Davis with a strange story. Kyle had heard a rumor that Pablo Escobar did a deal in the early 1980s with a remote, coastal Southern town of 300 people. In exchange for vast wealth and limitless cocaine, Escobar would be allowed to land planes and ships in the area. Over the last 24 months, Josh and Kyle investigated the rumor, journeying to Varnamtown to knock on doors and find out what really happens when a firehose of money and cocaine is turned on a small, tight knit community. Listen to Varnamtown wherever you get your podcasts.
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When Chinese-American reporter Henry Liu was gunned down in his Daly City garage in 1984, it brought the Bamboo Union, Taiwan’s most powerful Triad, to global attention. But while the killing frayed ties between the island and DC, authorities skipped over a guy in California pulling the strings all along—a silver-tongued philosophy grad who’d gone from Taipei street fighting to restauranteur and the Bamboo Union’s point-man in the United States.
His name was Chang An-lo, and he’d soon be behind bars for a massive narco bust in New York. But insiders knew him by another, far more fearsome name: White Wolf. And his story—one that would weave between the States, Taiwan and the Chinese mainland—was just getting started.
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You may have seen the news last week, about a Yakuza boss caught in Bangkok trying to sell nuclear material to a fake Iranian general. Takeshi Ebisawa and a group of co-conspirators are behind bars, awaiting extradition to the US, the dopes in a sting operation that could’ve been lifted straight from Hollywood. But how legit is the bust? And who is Ebisawa, the stout, goateed gangster cops have been saying for years is a Yakuza don—despite that not really being a thing?
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When members of the fearsome and brutal Zetas cartel kidnapped her daughter, Miriam Rodriguez did what they asked and paid the ransom. But it wasn't enough, and she never saw her daughter again. Fed up with a lack of help from the police, she went on a one-woman crusade for justice, tracking down the men responsible for killing her daughter by any means possible. New York Times reporter Azam Ahmed joins us to talk about his new book, Fear is Just a Word, about Miriam Rodriguez and the quest for hard to find justice again Mexico's cartels.
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On the face of it, Toni Musulin and Redoine Faïd couldn’t be more different: one a quiet, skinflint armored vehicle driver, the other a flamboyant gang leader who went on the lam in Tel Aviv disguised as religious.
But the crimes of both men captured French hearts and minds, catapulting them to infamy and prompting some, in the wake of the global financial crash, to describe them as Robin Hoods. But neither man fit that particular bill—even if their money-grabbing plots could’ve been ripped from a Hollywood script.
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Excellent book. Thanks to the author for the hard work and to the podcast for the recommend.
Got to love when someone moves from the armpit of the earth to Aus and slags the shit out of everything in Aus they can.
geyser- pronounced 'guyzur'
Yes there are African gangs and they call themselves the Apex Gang
confused i thought this was about the Gangster disciples but it seems like this podcast leans more into the politics of people being in gangs, ya talk about how the poltics lead to it but not really go into the actual gangs!!
find it interesting. I'm not sure I learned a lot. it
been looking for something like this for a while. good show
Fantastic - well researched+ clearly described.
Leaning a bit much on “political correctness out of control” shit for journalists don’t you think?