The Underworld Podcast

Danny and Sean jump in on all of your questions for this Christmas New Years week specia; Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

We 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. Among its key players, one man stands out—and though his career path is about as apocryphal as the average midnight mass, his impact is no less huge. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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. But Some of the U-boats surfaced, collected the survivors and brought them below decks for interrogation before being flung back to sea, shivering aboard a hopeless liferaft. The few US survivors described something odd about the ships: they were loaded with American goods, stuffed to the rafters like the backroom of a mafia hangout.And the strangest mystery of all that would set this whole story in motion and perplexed Naval intelligence: the Nazi UBoats had freshly baked American sliced bread. The US government thought there was only one man that could help figured things out. Problem was, he was locked up in prison in New York on the usual mafia racketeering charges. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Air America, a CIA front, ferried tons of raw opium during the Secret War against Communism. The podcast explores the corrupt officials, French mob, and heroin-producing tribes that benefited from Air America's operations. It also discusses the CIA's involvement in the opium and heroin trade during the Vietnam War.

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 Spanish skills to make him indispensable to the powerful five families who wanted to set up shop in Cuba.When his son, Santo Jr, took the reigns, they soon controlled casinos, nightclubs and luxury hotels, as well as narcotics trafficking routes, from Cuba to Miami to Tampa. But the heady days of Fulgencio Batista's Cuba was coming to a close, and the Cuban revolutionaries led by Fidel Castro were going to complicate things. So much so that Trafficante soon found himself in one of America's strangest alliances and even stranger assassination plots. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

El Salvador's warring street gangs-turned-armies may have finally been broken thanks to the heavy-handed policies of Nayib Bukele dumping anyone and everyone into prison. But before MS-13 and 18th Street had been taken down a notch, they ruled neighborhoods in El Salvador with a brutality rarely seen. It's not just face tattoos and machetes. We break down the origins of the gangs here and our time spent with them in El Salvador.Support our sponsors at butcherbox.com/underworld and use code underworld and uncommongoods.com/underworld Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

It 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 search of a home; establishes diplomatic relations with fellow micronations; tries to rebuild the Queen Mary oceanliner; and endures a bitter power struggle. Oh, and its current PM spent two hours shooting the breeze with Sean. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Back 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 era's greatest swindles, taking in bogus firms, Vegas slots, Hong Kong archdukes and Idy Amin's mansion.Then, with the backing of a mysterious Carpathian tribe, the Dominion of Melchizedek declared war on France. Part one of a frankly insane two-parter. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Carlos Marcello went from a small time produce hustler to heading up the New Orleans Mafia with a massive gambling empire and a hand in every pie in the city's notorious underworld. He even found himself in business with the heavyweights from New York's five families. And though he tried to keep himself out of the spotlight, the Kennedy brother's war on America's mafia, with John as president and Robert as attorney general, made sure the FBI knew he was and stayed on his case. In fact, RFK once had him kidnapped and deported to Guatemala and Marcello was overheard swearing to get revenge. But how far did he go? Could he have been involved in the assassination of a president? All that and the story of Sean's first arrest for public indecency on Bourbon Street. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices