The Chechen Mafia Strikes Back: War Profiteering, School Sieges and a Turncoat Named Kadyrov

On Christmas Day, 1941, as bombs tear Hong Kong apart, gunrunner Morris "Two Gun" Cohen — a street hustler from the slums of London turned Canadian frontiersman turned Chinese general — stares down death from a hotel room. From underground boxing rings to arms deals, Cohen fought the Japanese and Soviets, battled communists, warlords and mercenaries, and drank his way through China's bloodiest years. This is the story of the outlaw who ran guns and dodged death while becoming the bodyguard to the father of modern China. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

29 Apr 1h

In 1980s Miami, amid the glitz, gunfire, and power boats, two Cuban-American friends Sal Magluta and Willy Falcon, built one of the most powerful drug empires in U.S. history. Known as Los Muchachos, they moved mountains of cocaine through a city shaped by Cuban exiles, ambition, and an underworld that blurred the line between loyalty and lawlessness. From funding anti-Castro revolutionaries to working with both the Medellin and Cali Cartel, this is the story of how they rose, ruled, and ran. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

22 Apr 57min

Today the ‘Ndrangheta, Calabria’s clan-based Mafia, is one of the world’s richest and most powerful drug trafficking organizations, worth an estimated $55 billion. But it wasn’t always like that. From the 1960s, as European politics went mad, the group glommed onto a new fad taking Italy by storm: kidnapping. And it got them the capital to get into property, cigarette smuggling, and cocaine. But they were far from gentleman thieves. The ‘Ndrangheta’s kidnapping streak cost lives, outraged the Italian public, and kicked off a feud between rival clans than continues spilling blood to this day. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

15 Apr 52min

Kurt Calabrese grew up in the Chicago mafia known as The Outfit. His father, Frank Calabrese Sr, was the premier hitman, known for strangling his victims with his bare hands. But Frank didn't just leave the violence at work. He trained his sons Kurt and Frank Jr in the mob enforcer life since they were kids, through fear, intimidation and horrific abuse. When the entire Calabrese family got locked up for extortion, his other son, Frank Jr, who had battled a bad drug problem and stolen hundreds of thousands of dollars from his dad, wrote a letter to the feds and offered to wear a wire on his own father. Enter the infamous Family Secrets trial in Chicago. Kurt's father, who brutally abused him for years, is about to face numerous murder charges. His brother is about to become the most infamous rat in Chicago’s history. And Kurt is caught right in the middle of his family…and the biggest organized crime trial in Chicago’s history.  This is a special presentation of Season 3 of the Underbelly Podcast, Killing Kurt...produced by Underworld host Danny Gold. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

8 Apr 46min

Will Grant, the BBC’s Mexico, Central America and Cuba correspondent, was recently on the ground at Jalisco’s Rancho Izaguirre, dubbed ‘Mexico’s Auschwitz’, and CECOT, Nayib Bukele’s megaprison in El Salvador. Will spoke to Sean about what he saw in both places, how politics and organized crime is coverging, what new Mexican President Claudia Scheinbaum can do without triggering full-scale war — and how populism and the mob have often gone hand-in-hand across Latin America. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

1 Apr 1h 18min

He’s a recluse, a cockfighting high-roller, a former cop and a maniac. But will Nemesio Oseguera Cervantes, aka El Mencho, do what he’s been threatening for years and become the most powerful cartel boss on the planet? From avocados to abogados, weed to coke to fentanyl, Mencho is a narco so bloodthirsty his men are compared to ISIS. Can the Mexican state cut him down to size? Or will a lifelong quest to build a citadel in his home state of Michoacan come off, ruling local civilians with a sadistic iron fist? We look at the past, present and future of who might just be the scariest criminal we’re profiled on this show. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

25 Mar 57min

South Africa's secretive Numbers Gangs almost defy description; they're one part cult, one part religion, and all parts violent psychopaths. Emerging originally as bandits preying on gold miners and policemen in colonial South Africa, they took shape in the brutal prison system of apartheid, where sometimes the only way to communicate was through stabbing whoever was around. What formed was something more than a gang, it was almost a shadow universe where every single interaction was governed by the archaic and complex rules of the 26's, 27's and 28's. And when apartheid crumbled, and South Africa's drug markets opened up, the numbers gangs traded in their generations of rituals and rules to merge with powerful street gangs and bring the grim reality of South Africa's torturous prison out into the world. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

18 Mar 58min

Sean Williams reports from the Philippines, where former President Rodrigo Duterte’s brutal drug war cost up to 30,000 lives and tore Philippine society to shreds. But was it all cover for his family’s own involvement in the drug trade? Reporting from Duterte’s stronghold of Davao, where he ran a decades-long death squad, and capital Manila, which bore the brunt of that bloody blueprint, we expose the genesis of the war — and its longtime link to Triads and other criminal groups.  Duterte's connections to the drug trade have rarely been reported on in English and are just starting to make waves. This episode, backed by exclusive sources and firsthand accounts, challenges mainstream narratives and sheds new light on one of the most controversial anti-drug campaigns in modern history. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

11 Mar 55min