The Underworld Podcast

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.

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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.
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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.

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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.

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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.
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