Underworld exposes the secret world of transnational criminal networks that have flourished since there were banks to bust, drugs to smuggle, and scams to run. ...
The Nazi Drug Kingpin, the Biggest Narco You've Never Heard Of & The Cocaine Coup
It’s January 5, 1982, and the central American state of Panama is playing host to one of the most extraordinary narco summits in history. Hosting the pow-wow is Manuel Noriega, chief of Panamanian military intelligence and just a year from siezing its control. Pablo Escobar, head of what will become the feared Medellin Cartel, is there too.
But even these criminal heavyweights aren’t the biggest gangsters in the room. That title belongs to Roberto Suarez Gomez, Bolivia’s so-called King of Cocaine, supplier of Andean coca paste to a global blow industry. Suarez, a former cattle rancher and heir to a rubber fortune, has never been more powerful. Just two years previous he’d backed Bolivia’s so-called ‘Cocaine Coup', tearing through capital La Paz and installing violent general Luis Garcia Meza as president.
Since then Suarez has built the modern cocaine market, cementing Escobar as his chief buyer, and pulling in Noriega and even the Castros of Cuba. But Suarez couldn’t have done all this without the fourth man in this room in Panama, quiet and slight, with a saturnine face that belies the litany of evil he’s managed in his 67 years. This is Klaus Barbie, fugitive SS officer and so-called ‘Butcher of Lyon’
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The Teenage Hitmen of Marseille's Gang Wars
You might recognize the city of Marseille as the home of one of the biggest drug trafficking operations in history, the French Connection. These days, though, it's no longer Corsican mobsters using France's second biggest city as a transshipment point to move heroin across the Mediterranean. Instead, the last two decades have seen street gangs of mostly North African teenagers warring over retail drug spots that can make over $100,000 a day.
2023 saw nearly 50 narco-homicides, as the French police call them, as a gang known as the DZ Mafia started to take control. And the violence is only increasing, as AK-47's become the guns of choice and 15 year old hitmen are hired off of telegram and paid 20,000 euros to kill other teenagers and then post about it on snapchat.
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The Nazi Fugitive Who Created The Modern Cocaine Cartel & Befriended Escobar
When Klaus Barbie, the “Butcher of Lyon”, escaped Europe at the end of the war and fled to Latin America, he didn’t follow his fellow Nazis into hiding. In fact, Barbie remained on the books of western spy agencies, including the CIA, and reaped enormous wealth, power, and protection.
Barbie then hooked up with the fascists and druglords of Bolivia, christened a death squad called the “Bridesgrooms of Death” — and took the country in a brutal coup backed so far to the hilt by marching powder, that Bolivians still call it the “Cocaine Coup”.
But Barbie’s work wasn’t done there. As reporters and Nazi hunters uncovered his true identity, the fugitive mass-murderer connected Bolivian “King of Cocaine” Roberto Suarez Gomez with the cartels of Colombia, birthing the modern-day blow industry. And he would even become friends with nascent narco-terrorist Pablo Escobar.
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In this holiday special, we get into some of the big stories of the month from Captagon updates, the Gulf Cartel leader and Zetas creator going free, a wild Russian crypto London drug dealing scam, and more!
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The Biggest American Weed Cartel Ever: The Cornbread Mafia
When the Cornbread mafia started to unravel in the late 1980's, the feds had no idea what they had stumbled upon. Within a few years, they had seized 400 million dollars in marijuana grown in 30 locations in 10 states, indicting 70 people. And it all started with some country outlaws.
These men were farmers, mechanics, and handymen by day, and by night, they transformed into savvy businessmen managing an underground empire. They recruited others from the local community, including friends, neighbors, and even family members, creating a tight-knit organization that was as much a fraternity as it was a criminal enterprise.
This is the story of the Cornbread Mafia, This is the story of how a bunch of good ol boys from the same rural county in central Kentucky built the biggest homegrown weed cartel in American history.
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Underworld exposes the secret world of transnational criminal networks that have flourished since there were banks to bust, drugs to smuggle, and scams to run. Journalists Danny Gold and Sean Williams bring their experience reporting on dangerous people and organizations to take listeners on a global tour of mobsters, warlords and crooks - from Brooklyn to Beijing, from the streets to the boardrooms - and everywhere in between. Underworld is a show about heroes, villains, and the barely visible mafias that affect all our lives, whether we know it or not.
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