The Underworld Podcast

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.

The Underworld Podcast is a society podcast hosted by Unknown Host, with 278 episodes on record and a Required Pod Score of 80. PitchCentric scores this show on Booking Probability, Listen Score, and live audience signals refreshed every 24 hours.

Unknown Host hosts The Underworld Podcast, a society show with 278 episodes published.

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  The Underworld Podcast

  How an Albanian Mobster Derailed MAGA Island

  Sep 8, 20261h 5m

  In Albania's turbulent Nineties, the small, seaside town of Vlore became a gangster’s paradise, playing host to hundreds of crooks ferrying drugs, weapons and people into nearby Puglia alongside Italian mafiosi. One of them was a slim, slick-haired former military man named Artur Shehu, who amassed a formidable property portfolio across Vlore — most reckoned, due to his friends in the Sacra Corona Unita, Italy's “fourth Mafia.” But when a 1999 bar gunfight forced Shehu into hiding, only to reappear in Miami two years later, his life was sent on a wild journey that would collide, in 2020, with America’s first family. And its fallout would echo to the highest levels of politics, crime and controversy in Albania and far beyond. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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  The Underworld Podcast

  The Biggest Unknown Drug Dealer in US History

  Sep 1, 20261h 11m

  He might just be the biggest US drug smuggler you’ve never heard of. 1.3 billion in product moved. 16 different aliases. Bank accounts in 10 countries. A phantom, and a logistical genius. Stewart Newton quietly built what feds called the biggest ever drug smuggling operation in New England’s history, before suffering the largest ever narco assets seizure in US history. And he did it by leaving his Long Island mansion and going to Pakistan to meet the country’s biggest drug syndicate, the mountain warlords who ran the country. It’s one of the wildest stories in American crime history, never before told, until now. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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  The Underworld Podcast

  Shafted: How Cartels are Killing for Rare-Earths

  Aug 25, 202645 min

  Bolivia's Cerro Rico has been spewing out tons of silver for centuries. It was the economic bellows of the Spanish Revolution, whose lust for the precious metal came at the price of some eight million slaves. Some of the empire's earliest gangs formed around the Cerro. They were called ‘Jukus,’ and one man stood above (or below) them all. Today's there's another, modern silver rush at Cerro Rico — and it's being led by the green energy revolution. EVs, wind turbines and data centers are all hungry for silver. Its price has almost quadrupled. That has brought a new wave of organized crime to Bolivia. This time they're smart, and armed. And the only people holding them back are a band of women packing nothing but dogs and sticks of dynamite. But Bolivia isn't alone. The race for rare-earth minerals has drawn cartels to mines across Latin America, killing miners and taking over entire operations from Quito to Cali. This documentary-style episode digs into organized crime's newest trend — and shows how dirty clean energy really is. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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  The Underworld Podcast

  The Heroin Warlord of Pakistan: Armed Tribesman, the CIA, & a Smuggling Empire

  Aug 18, 20261h 3m

  5000 armed tribesman at his beck and a call. A mountain compound in a lawless territory. A seat in Pakistan’s parliament bought and paid for. And a heroin and hash empire that stretched from the mountains of Afghanistan to million dollar mansions in Long Island. Ayub Afridi started life as a poor, illiterate truck driver in a mud hut and turned a trucking company into a global drug trafficking operation. And once the Soviet Union went to war with Afghanistan, his control of Pakistan’s tribal areas perfectly positioned him to become a kingmaker. The guns went up in his trucks, the the opium came down to be refined into heroin that would stretch across the world. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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  The Underworld Podcast

  Russian Mercenaries African Drug Empire, Israel’s Sushi Mob war & the murdered Assassin: Stash House

  Aug 11, 20261h 5m

  On this episode of Stashhouse: Wagner's leftover mercenaries are running a tramadol empire in the heart of Africa, while in Monaco a bomb takes out a Ukrainian tycoon, then someone takes out the assassin. Grenades, the mob, and Japanese food: an Israeli underworld war is being waged on the country's biggest sushi chain. Plus updates on friends of the show Kaz Hamad and Lawrence Bishnoi, two men proving you can run a thriving criminal empire from a prison cell. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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