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 w...
2024-02-27 05:40:09 +0000 UTC View PostWhen 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 daugh...
2024-02-20 03:33:45 +0000 UTC View PostOn 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 ...
2024-02-13 03:03:18 +0000 UTC View PostIn the 1980's a tiny rural town in North Carolina with a population of around 300 people made a deal with Pablo Escobar to become a stateside cocaine smuggling hub for the Medellin Cartel. Seriously. We're joined by journalist Joshua Davis who teamed up with Twin Peaks Star Kyle MacLachlan (seriously) to investigate this crazy story in the...
2024-02-12 20:37:14 +0000 UTC View PostThe Wa tribe, an indigenous tribe residing in the mountainous Burma China borderlands, has long had a reputation as a people not to be trifled with. And yes, they were actually headhunters, well into the 20th century. Known as powerful warriors who weren't keen on outsiders telling them what to do, they were able to carve out their own autonomou...
2024-02-06 03:17:05 +0000 UTC View PostGraham Barrow is an experienced banking and finance pro—specifically in compliance, where he’s unearthed all kinds of criminal practices over the years.
He’s also a speaker and adviser on money laundering, offshore fraud and financial crime, and he’s co-host of The Dark Money Files, a show about how quote “money laundering, corr...
Danger in Nassau, a Fijian Megabust, US-China coopeartion on Fentanyl and a crazy trafficking story from the US, UK and India
2024-02-02 21:12:32 +0000 UTC View PostThis month armed men stormed an Ecuadorean TV station, shocking the world and plunging the nation into gang hell. Prosecutors have been assassinated and gangs are looting offices, universities and even hospitals, as martial law takes hold.
It might seem like Ecuador has gone from Latin American idyll to narco-state overnight. The truth, t...
Episode 2 of our weekly crime update for subscribers is here, let us know if you like these and if we should keep doing 'em in addition to the patreon interviews.
2024-01-25 22:18:38 +0000 UTC View PostDubbed the Cocaine Godmother and the Black Widow, Griselda Blanco rose to power when the cocaine boom was taking off and Colombian cartels started pumping product into the US, mainly through Miami. As the floodgates opened and tens of millions of dollars were being made on the streets, everyone wanted to be on top of pyramid, including Griselda....
2024-01-23 07:44:27 +0000 UTC View PostThe last few episodes have been really substandard, and I want to apologize to you guys for that. They shouldn't be sounding so low quality. We had some screwups on our end regarding the process and quality control. I've re-uploaded the last three main episodes. This won't be happening again. If you do notice a drop off, or sound quality issues,...
2024-01-20 03:57:44 +0000 UTC View PostTrying something new here folks, let us know what you think:
Our first weekly news roundup heads first to Ecuador, where narcos have taken over TV stations, held prison guards hostage and used the famed Galapagos Islands as transshipment points.
Papua New Guinea’s gang-torn capital city Port Moresby descended into chaos last wee...
When a team of cops drove a truck laden with Sinaloa Cartel product out of a Tijuana warehouse in November, experts predicted violence even worse than the city had suffered in recent years, as roiling fentanyl and meth industries had made it Mexico’s most dangerous city by far.
The reprisals began just hours later—and they still haven...
The mysterious Chinese-born criminal mastermind Tse Chi Lop didn't raise too many eyebrows when he was arrested in Canada in the 1990's for running heroin with the Hong Kong Triads known as the Big Circle Gang in a partnership with the Rizzuto family, a Canadian-Italian mafia clan. But after serving nearly a decade in prison, the laid back, soft...
2024-01-09 03:20:38 +0000 UTC View PostKevin Knodell is a Honolulu-based reporter with the Star Advertiser. He spoke to Sean about the increasingly dangerous world of fisheries, how drug cartels are getting more and more into the trade, the death of an observer and a trial set to blow Hawaii's organized crime scene wide open.
Sources:
2024-01-04 19:03:56 +0000 UTC
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Hey, the guys need a break sometimes too.
2024-01-02 02:51:48 +0000 UTC View PostHey all, we're doing a Q+A for the New Years show, if you have any questions about episodes, assignments, or Sean's personal life, shoot us a message and we'll do our best to answer in next week's show.
2023-12-26 02:46:10 +0000 UTC View PostWe do Christmas shows different. Using ancient desert trade routes made famous by megarich kings, narcos, terrorists and arms traffickers have turned the Sahel region into one of the world’s deadliest drug caravans.
In recent years cigarette traders, Tuareg separatists and religious rebels have coalesced into a giant, lucrative underworld. ...
Long before Pearl Harbor the US had already lost 243 mariners at sea. German UBoats came close enough to NY harbor to sink US merchant ships just by looking for their dark silhouettes against the lights of the city. American bodies washed back to American shores as if they had just gotten stuck in the riptide. The lucky ones were dead on impact....
2023-12-19 03:38:01 +0000 UTC View PostOf all the mad agents running around Laos during the CIA’s Secret War, Anthony Poshepny, aka Tony Poe, was surely the most unhinged. Living in a jungle villa and keeping the heads and ears of communists as trophies, Poe ran illegal missions into Mao’s China, shipped drugs for local tribes, and wound up a violent alcoholic. No wonder folks th...
2023-12-17 18:16:22 +0000 UTC View PostAt one point in the 1960s Air America was the largest carrier on the planet. It was also a CIA front, and its ragtag pilots ferried tons of raw opium up and down Laos during Washington’s “Secret War” against Communism.
This week’s show gets into the history of the illicit airline, and the corrupt officials, French mob and heroin-produ...
The Trafficante crime family ruled Florida for decades, earning the respect and admiration of powerful mobsters like Lucky Luciano, Meyer Lansky and Sam Giancana. Santo Trafficante Sr arrived in Tampa as a boy from Sicily and took to the underworld with a talent for business, setting up the illegal lottery known as the Bolita before using his Sp...
2023-12-05 03:42:06 +0000 UTC View PostLloyd Saxon’s brother Ian was a famed Kiwi crooner who moved to Australia and became a big player in its record industry. Soon he was in LA, meeting the most famous musicians on earth and becoming their go-to man for promo and tours down under.
But the Saxon brothers had another, more lucrative business—namely, shipping huge quantitie...
Zeke Faux is an NYC-based reporter with Bloomberg Businessweek. His new book, “Number Go Up”, is a wild ride into the criminal heart of cryptocurrency - from missing billions and cartel money-laundering, to Tether, FTX, bros in the Bahamas and crypto slaves in Southeast Asia.
2023-11-28 03:21:19 +0000 UTC View PostNo new episodes this week as we're off for Thanksgiving, but enjoy this classic episode about our reporting in El Salvador on the warring street gangs there before Bukele sent everyone to prison.
2023-11-21 04:13:57 +0000 UTC View PostIt is a truth universally acknowledged that a single man in possession of a fake country and a global scam operation, must be in want of a wife with a penny-stock mining operation who can stalk government officials in their dreams.
In the second instalment of our Dominion of Melchizedek two-parter, the conman mothership ventures out in se...
Hey guys, quick little mini-ep with some updates on the current day Camorra clans that wasn't included in the two-part series.
2023-11-11 23:41:33 +0000 UTC View PostBack in the early 1980s David and Mark Pedley were little more than a father-son real estate scam duo. Then came prison, escape, and a self-penned Bible, named for an obscure Jerusalem priest and the foundation for a micronation called the Dominion of Melchizedek.
It was no ordinary secession movement. The Dominion would become one of its ...
2023-11-07 02:59:00 +0000 UTC View Post