Afleveringen
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Born into a peasant family on the outskirts of Shanghai, Du Yuesheng grew up an inveterate gambler and opium addict. But as he forged alliances in the growing metropolis’ underworld, members of a secret society-turned-cartel saw promise.
Before long, ‘Big Ears Du’ was running gambling dens, opium divans and brothels. And as Shanghai, cleaved into foreign concessions and wildly unequal, became a global megacity, Du knew just who to befriend, best or kill to get his way. And by the mid-1920s, when China’s nationalists and communists were ready to throw down in Shanghai, Du stood ready to carve his name into Chinese history forever.
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Raymond “Shrimp Boy” Chow possesses one of the best mob nicknames out there. The San Francisco Chinatown gangster went from teenage immigrant hooligan from the streets of Hong Kong to one of the most infamous Asian organized crime figures in America. His story has everything: Chinatown tongs, Hong Kong triad influence, immigrant protection rackets, gambling dens, and the violent gang wars that turned San Francisco’s streets into a battleground. Then comes Shrimp Boy’s strange second act, when he reemerges from prison claiming to be a reformed community leader, even as the FBI is building a sprawling undercover case around him. It all ends in a wild corruption and organized crime scandal involving guns, money laundering, murder allegations, and a California state senator caught in the same net.
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Ibrahim Akasha was the kingpin of East Africa’s heroin highway, setting up a massive tracking empire that stretched from Afghanistan, Pakistan and Iran to Kenya, South Africa and Europe.
When he was gunned down in 2000, his sons stepped into the void, hungrier and even more violent...but also, more sloppy. They struck deals with Pakistani mobsters and Colombian cartels, turning Kenya’s ports into gateways for global dope. But their empire crumbled in a DEA sting straight out of a Hollywood script.
*Note: Sean disappeared while on vacation in Amsterdam, Danny had to be hospitalized post Knicks win, so we took a week off for the first time in a year. Enjoy this classic episode from last summer:
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When Mako Nishimura, the yakuza’s only female member, fell in love with a rival gangster, it would send her on a long and painful path from drug and sex trafficking, to painkiller addiction and finally a role helping ex-yakuza go straight.
Her journey would mirror the downfall of the yakuza at-large, from the world’s largest criminal gangs to social outcasts, outwitted by cops and outpaced by new, digital criminals taking over the Japanese underworld.
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On this week's Stash House: A fugitive Dutch cocaine kingpin dodges capture off the coast of West Africa. An Irish gang boss trades gangland warfare for electoral politics. Mexican officials accused of working for the Sinaloa Cartel surrender to U.S. authorities. A violent mafia feud erupts in southern Italy. Nigerian authorities uncover an industrial-scale meth lab allegedly linked to Mexican cartel cooks. And with the World Cup approaching, Mexico’s cartels reportedly decide that protecting tourists is simply good business.
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Mako Nishimura graduated from high school delinquent to kamikaze biker gang, street tough and, eventually, a fully made member of a yakuza syndicate - the first (or perhaps second?) woman to do so. Nishimura made her gang huge amounts of cash selling women plus selling, and taking, huge quantities of methamphetamines.
But by the end of the 1980s, Nishimura’s life was unraveling into a mess of addiction, violence and madness. When Japan’s economic bubble burst at the end of the decade, the yakuza would be staring at a long and painful decline. And Nishimura had bigger problems: she’d fallen in love.
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Nuevo Laredo is one of the most feared cartel cities in Mexico, a place where disappearances, gun battles, and corruption became part of daily life as the Cartel del Noreste, or CDN, tightened its grip on the border. Born from the remnants of the brutal Zetas organization, CDN turned the city into a battlefield, fighting for control of smuggling routes into Texas while allegedly terrorizing civilians, journalists, and anyone seen as a threat. The city became so cartel-corrupted that it dismantled its own police force entirely.
The documentary film Spring of the Vanishing adds another layer to the story, documenting how U.S.-trained Mexican marines deployed to fight the Zetas instead carried out their own wave of kidnappings and killings of civilians. Director Andrew Glazer pulls back the curtain on a city where families still search for missing loved ones, and where the line between organized crime and the state itself often seems impossible to separate.
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Meet the Stopwatch Gang: three polite Canadian crooks turned bank robbery into a precision sport, hitting over 140 banks across North America and walking away with $15 million without firing a single shot. They wore presidential Halloween masks, escaped from prison multiple times, and became so notorious that the boss landed on the FBI's Most Wanted list. At their peak, they stole millions while humiliating police forces across North America and becoming legends in the criminal underworld.
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Vassilis Paleokostas, and his big brother Nikos, grew up shoeless in a Greek mountain village. When the boys moved to a city, they discovered a talent for robbery — and honed it with a mysterious criminal known locally as The Artist.
Before long, the trio were pulling off some of the most daring heists in European history. At a volatile time of financial crashes, leftwing guerrillas and political corruption, the brothers dove into a new gig: kidnapping billionaire business magnates.
What confounded cops the most was how Vassilis Paleokostas distributed his loot among the poor, and how the Greek people loved him for it. If authorities did catch up with the country’s Robin Hood, there wasn’t a prison in the land that could hold him for long. Cue decades of capers that could keep a Hollywood writers’ room busy for months.
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When Mexican special forces killed El Mencho in February 2026, the throne of Mexico's most powerful cartel was up for grabs. But there's one man who many assumed would be taking over: Juan Carlos Valencia González, a 41-year-old California-born dual citizen known as "El 03," the stepson of the slain narco boss.
His cartel royalty bloodline is almost absurdly stacked, as his mother, Rosalinda González Valencia, dubbed "La Jefa," was El Mencho's wife and a key financial architect of the cartel's money laundering empire, while his uncles from the González Valencia clan were systematically arrested and extradited to the U.S. over the past decade. And his father just happened to be the founder of CJNG's predecessor, the Milenio Cartel.
Now an American citizen effectively runs a terrorist-designated drug empire responsible for flooding the U.S. with fentanyl, creating a legal nightmare for U.S. intelligence agencies with limited tools to go after one of their own.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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!
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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
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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.
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