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 b ... Show More
Oct 6
Cuba: From Lansky’s Casinos to Castro’s Guns
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 tak ... Show More
59m 13s
Sep 29
Stash House: Cartel Wars, Coke Boats, and Gangs Gone Global
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 organiz ... Show More
1h 3m
Sep 22
Assassination Nation: The Balkan Clan War that Took Over Europe
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 swor ... Show More
1h 15m
Jan 2023
#46 Ioan Grillo - Cartel Wars & The Fentanyl Crisis
Cartels, drugs, money, corruption—author and award winning journalist Ioan Grillo has seen it all in his twenty-plus years' of covering Latin America. In this episode, we cover the unprecedented violence that broke out in the city of Culiacán after Mexican authorities recaptured ... Show More
3 h