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When Paraguay extradited French-Corsican heroin kingpin Auguste Ricord to the US in 1972, some thought Paraguay’s narco trafficking days might be numbered. If anything they were just beginning. Within years the tiny nation had welcomed Hong Kong Triads and Lebanese militants — who, combined with considerable homegrown narco and cigarette trafficking, made Paraguay one of the world’s most lawless places, a hive of narco-contraband-terror madness. This nexus was focused not on the country’s sleepy capital city Asunción, but the so-called “Triple Frontier”, where Paraguay, Argentina and Brazil met. And thanks to a 2018 conspiracy involving a local trafficker, a money mule and an up-and-coming senator, we know it’s very much alive and kicking today. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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

Crashout Media founder and longtime Mexico-based crime reporter Ioan Grillo brings us all you need to known on El Mencho, CJNG, his death, and what the future, including the World Cup, holds for Mexico.

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

Yeah man. Hot dog wars...the WORST kind of wars. Martin "the General" Cahill, Ireland's most notorious armed robber and ganglord, decides he wants in on the hot dog stall business selling the food of the gods to drunken Dublin club-goers. His business methods for entering and capturing the market? Less than orthodox.

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

Throughout the 1990s, the Stidda played local gang roles across Sicily, as their bigger neighbor the Cosa Nostra went white-collar. But over time things changed - and despite raids that swept up the killers of a 1999 gas station massacre, and the murder of judge Rosario Livatino, Italy’s “Fifth Mafia”, too, got involved in financial frauds and scams that would see them spread all over the country.