Advertise on podcast: The Underworld Podcast

Cape Town is one of the most beautiful cities in the world. It's also home to one of the most violent and tangled criminal underworlds on the planet, where drug lords, prison gangs, crooked cops, and millionaire businessmen wage bloody wars over everything from nightclub security to anabolic steroids. When South Africa's notorious "Steroid King," Brian Weinstein, is executed in his bed in 2017, the murder exposes a sprawling network of gangsters battling for control of the city. But the story only gets stranger as the men accused of arranging the hit start turning up dead themselves. This week, Danny and Sean dive into Cape Town's astonishing mafia wars, tracing decades of corruption, gang violence, international crime syndicates, and spectacular assassinations. And this is only Part One. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This week, the Bad Guy Movie Gang watches Gotti, a film with 58 producers and somehow nobody willing to tell John Travolta to calm the f-ck down. There's a lot of Pitbull, random mob cameos, and enough historical shorthand to make the whole thing feel like Paulie Walnuts having a stroke in a steakhouse. Travolta spends two hours growling through his own wigs and other people’s clothes, while the movie ricochets across decades with no interest in time, character development, or basic emotion. An impressive production for sheer force of will to completion.

How Cuba is Slipping into Drug Chaos Since the beginning of the year, the US has placed Cuba under an oil embargo, crippling its public services and throwing a society that was already on its knees into chaos. Blackouts roll for days, trash piles high and locals are getting sick from a smorgasbord of airborne diseases. Cuba has survived similar crises before: in the mid-1990s its people endured a calamity that wiped 90 percent off the economy. But today is different. And amid the madness, a new scourge has appeared on Cuba’s streets, a synthetic drug the locals call ‘quimico’. And as gangs coalesce to sell it, our correspondent got caught up in Cuba’s new street violence himself. Music licensed through Soundstripe.Code: 63IWXYBOI48IZKBY Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This week, the Bad Guy Movie Gang watches Bonded by Blood, a movie that follows three comprehensively unpleasant Essex gangsters. They deal drugs, brutalize people, abuse women, threaten everyone within arm’s reach, and somehow still manage to be boring. The film keeps insisting these men are terrifying, but mostly they come across as someone who bought a flea-market leather jacket and started calling himself “old school.” There is almost no storytelling. Things just happen near each other. Somebody screams. Somebody gets threatened. Somebody says “f-ck” for the 326th time. Then we cut to another beige room where another furious thumb with sideburns explains the plot badly. One of these boiled hams crashes a Porsche into a tree while receiving an exceptionally aggressive wank. The film spends nearly its entire runtime proving that every major character is a violent, misogynistic sack of sh-t, finally kills them, and then admits in a closing disclaimer those people may not have committed the central murders at all. It is 100 minutes of furniture-shaped men calling each other c-nts until somebody remembers there is cocaine to be huffed. Rating: one old haddock.

Sean got beaten up in Cuba! To celebrate this, we’ve thrown together a biopoly of crime in the tropics, beginning with the story of how American organized crime flocked to Havana in the 1920s as a Prohibition rum-runner’s paradise. After World War II, mobsters then executed a takeover of Havana, building hotels, casinos, racetracks and bordellos as US tourism sought sun, sand, and vice off the Florida Strait. Chief among all Havana’s crooks were Meyer Lansky and Lucky Luciano, who in 1946 welcomed the great and good of America’s underworld to a ‘Mob Conference’ that would decide the fate of a new, offshore Mafia. But trouble was brewing—mainly in the form of a young, bearded nationalist who’d practiced his own violent form of ‘gangsterismo’ in the past. And as Havana’s criminal-friendly dictatorship buckled, the island was about to face a new anti-Mafia crusade, Fidel Castro-style. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This week, Sean sits down with Jordan Harbinger to talk about the people who’ve spent their lives on both sides of organized crime. From FBI agents who spent years undercover inside the Gambino family to mobsters, art forgers, counterfeiters, and some of the strangest operators Jordan has interviewed, they get into what makes these people tick—and why so many of them seem addicted to the game itself. They also dig into the strange psychology of undercover work, Sammy “The Bull” Gravano, a master art forger who fooled major auction houses for decades, counterfeit fortunes, and the shadowy North Korean operation Jordan would most like to crack open. Along the way: fake identities, buried money, biker gangs, and a very ill-advised boat ride along the North Korean border.

Danny and Sean take another lap around the criminal world, where somehow everything is getting bigger, stranger, and more international. Sinaloa’s cartel war grinds on, Romanian crews allegedly drain millions from American food-benefit accounts, and South Africa confronts organized crime increasingly tangled up with the state. Elsewhere, Sydney’s latest gang war features teenage recruits and drone-assisted hits, Belgian investigators finally wrap a massive cocaine case, and Spanish cops try to catch narco speedboats that are literally faster than theirs. There are also fresh Kinahan developments, a gang threatening to “rule” Canada, and an alleged arms dealer accused of supplying both sides of Brazil’s deadliest gang war. Some music licensed through Soundstripe.Code: 1VDUSIE5HAQQOMKK, ICXE0MTBHKMQDI84 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This week, the Bad Guy Movie Gang watches Mobsters, a $23 million reminder that having Christian Slater, Patrick Dempsey, Anthony Quinn and roughly 400 Tommy guns does not automatically constitute a great film. The plot follows Lucky Luciano and friends as they rise from street punks to criminal royalty through a series of 20-second scenes apparently edited by a man being chased by dogs. Christian Slater starts with a heavy New York accent, quietly abandons it, and nobody seems to care where it went. Anthony Quinn eats spaghetti. Michael Gambon gets to third base with your dad. Patrick Dempsey repeatedly reminds everyone that he is Jewish. Occasionally someone gets murdered, but don’t worry: the film makes sure you feel absolutely nothing. Then, after 104 minutes of expensive costumes explaining the plot to each other, Lucky finally takes over the American mob. A Wikipedia article performed at gunpoint.

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 clans, the Kavač and Škaljari, turning former allies into sworn enemies. What followed was a sprawling campaign of revenge, with gunmen hunting their targets across borders and leaving dozens dead. How did a feud born in a tiny Adriatic town became an international bloodbath with a brutal house of horrors and hundreds of millions of dollars of coke at stake. Some music licensed through Soundstripe.Code: 1VDUSIE5HAQQOMKK, ICXE0MTBHKMQDI84 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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 him, and enjoys the hospitality of the American justice system. Then he returns to Pakistan, gets arrested again, and things get weird. Taliban weird. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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 them was a slim, slick-haired former military man named Artur Shehu, who amassed a formidable property portfolio across Vlore — most reckoned, due to his friends in the Sacra Corona Unita, Italy's “fourth Mafia.” But when a 1999 bar gunfight forced Shehu into hiding, only to reappear in Miami two years later, his life was sent on a wild journey that would collide, in 2020, with America’s first family. And its fallout would echo to the highest levels of politics, crime and controversy in Albania and far beyond. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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 what feds called the biggest ever drug smuggling operation in New England’s history, before suffering the largest ever narco assets seizure in US history. And he did it by leaving his Long Island mansion and going to Pakistan to meet the country’s biggest drug syndicate, the mountain warlords who ran the country. It’s one of the wildest stories in American crime history, never before told, until now. One scam can cost you everything. Use the code UNDERWORLD for up to 76 percent off at coveron.com/underworld Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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 the empire's earliest gangs formed around the Cerro. They were called ‘Jukus,’ and one man stood above (or below) them all. Today's there's another, modern silver rush at Cerro Rico — and it's being led by the green energy revolution. EVs, wind turbines and data centers are all hungry for silver. Its price has almost quadrupled. That has brought a new wave of organized crime to Bolivia. This time they're smart, and armed. And the only people holding them back are a band of women packing nothing but dogs and sticks of dynamite. But Bolivia isn't alone. The race for rare-earth minerals has drawn cartels to mines across Latin America, killing miners and taking over entire operations from Quito to Cali. This documentary-style episode digs into organized crime's newest trend — and shows how dirty clean energy really is. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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 to million dollar mansions in Long Island. Ayub Afridi started life as a poor, illiterate truck driver in a mud hut and turned a trucking company into a global drug trafficking operation. And once the Soviet Union went to war with Afghanistan, his control of Pakistan’s tribal areas perfectly positioned him to become a kingmaker. The guns went up in his trucks, the the opium came down to be refined into heroin that would stretch across the world. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Introducing Bad Guy Movie Gang, a new Patreon-only Underworld feature in which Sean and Dale watch terrible gangster movies and complain about them until the credits roll. First up: Capone, a movie where Tom Hardy spends 104 minutes in pajamas, grunting through advanced syphilis, smoking carrots, hallucinating, firing a gold-plated Tommy gun, and repeatedly losing control of his bowels. Is it a misunderstood masterpiece? No. Is it useful as history? Absolutely not. Did Sean pay four New Zealand dollars for it and remain angry about this throughout the recording? Very much so. Welcome to cinema’s lowest tier.