Pentecostalism has exploded everywhere—and with it a whole new wave of grifters, crooks and machine gun-toting zealots. Sean spoke to Elle Hardy, author of “Beyond Belief: How Pentecostal Christianity is Taking Over the World”, to learn about some of the movement’s less salubrious characters—beginning with the dark tale of a megapastor’s brutal slaying in Rio de Janeiro, and moving through Central America and even Papua New Guinea, where a new kind of theocratic gangster has emerged. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This week we bring you guys an episode swap with the good folks at History Daily. In the first segment on February 16, 2003, five thieves break into the vault of the Antwerp Diamond Centre and pull off one of the biggest heists in history. In the second, from January 31, 1874, the outlaw Jesse James and his gang pull off one of the most infamous crimes in the American Old West with the Gads Hill Train Robbery. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Even the best laid plans of mice and men don't stand a chance when the federales get involved. In this episode, Danny recounts the time he linked up with a prominent member of the Sinaloa Cartel's Los Chapitos (El Chapo's kids) faction operating in the Mexican state of Sonora. As the head of the armed faction and a group called The Delta, El Durango was in the midst of a brutal war fighting the Caborca Cartel led by none other than Rafael Caro Quintero of Narcos Mexico fame, otherwise known as El Narco De Los Narcos. El Durango was keen on having visitors with video cameras over to his compound. Some other folks in Mexico, on the other hand, were not. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

For thousands of years, Nepali farmers grew some of the world’s trippiest marijuana, in Himalayan valleys so fertile they were considered sacred. In the 1960s western hippies flocked to capital city Kathmandu, and divined wisdom at the thick end of a hash pipe. Nepal was suddenly the world’s cannabis capital. Then Richard Nixon’s White House launched the War on Drugs, and pressured Nepal’s young king to ban the drug. Cops sent the hippies packing, and torched farmers’ cash crops. The result? Poverty, a black market in hard drugs—and a brutal Communist uprising that ripped through rural valleys like wildfire. Today, though, Nepal is poised to legalize weed once more. Sean took a trip from Kathmandu into the Himalayan foothills in search of OG Purple Haze with two former heroin addicts—and got way more than he bargained for. Sound design, scoring and production by the ever-brilliant Dale Eisinger. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

For generations, northern Ireland has been no stranger to armed militant groups willing to dispense violence. But whereas those groups once fought over political ideals, now they fight over drug routes and money. Since The Troubles ended and the Good Friday Agreement was signed, the battle-hardened youth of the north have started to put their skillset to use in the drug game. Journalist Adam Doyle breaks down the evolution of northern Ireland's new narco-paramilitaries and the frightening hold they have on their territory.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

With slick hair, a wry smile and a penchant for violence, John Griggs was the picture of a Sixties California greaser. His gang caused chaos across Anaheim, and Griggs himself was a habitual user of hard drugs. Until, one night in 1966, they robbed a Hollywood pool party for its acid, Griggs took a bunch, and almost overnight pivoted to becoming one of America's leading proponents of psychadelics—right when hippie culture and the Summer of Love was at its peak. Griggs' cult-like Brotherhood of Eternal Love became a lodestar for America's counterculture—and a gigantic smuggling operation from Mexico and the States, to the so-called Hippie Trail, stashing Afghan and Nepali hash in cars, film reel cans or even surfboards before reaping the thousand-percent markup back home. Griggs' goal was to flood America with so much LSD that every man and woman would get high and help create a new, peaceful utopia. When renowned academic and acid-lover Timothy Leary joined Griggs' cause, the Brotherhood may have looked unstoppable. Then it was stung by disaster after disaster—from hardened criminals and police informants, to Leary's manic downfall and a plucky local cop named Neil Purcell. Part 1 of our show on the Brotherhood of Eternal Love charts John Griggs' irresistable rise to messianic stardom, and his group's creation of a new, potent acid named Orange Sunshine, just before his utopian vision began metastasizing into something most folks would later know as the "Hippie Mafia". Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The Wall Street of Patrick Bateman was just ramping up, and rap had taken over the Bronx and Brooklyn as Jamaican-American deejays like Kool Herc were inventing and spreading the new genre. But there was another group of Jamaicans that had come to America with a different plan. As the Cold War played out in 1970’s Jamaica, the two main political parties competing for the country each had a street gang they used to get the vote out in certain neighborhoods and keep the vote from getting out in others. The street gangs grew powerful and skilled in violence, but soon turned their attention from politics to getting paid. And that meant cocaine, and getting cocaine onto American streets. Rival crews like the infamous Shower Posse and the Spangler Posse set up shop all over the East Coast and then the heartland during the heydey of the crack era and soon turned their guns on each other, driving the murder rate to unprecedented heights and fighting bloody battles all over the east coast.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

For decades the ‘Ndrangheta rose to become the world’s most powerful organized crime group—and barely anybody knew who they were. Then the deaths and defiance of women trapped in their medieval, ultra-patriarchal systems exposed the grim truth behind the ‘Ndrangheta’s centuries-old myths. Alex Perry, author of The Good Mothers, joins us to speak about his discoveries writing the book, Mafia fact and fiction—and the dreaded “Lupara Bianca”, or “White Shotgun”. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In the 1960's, Jamaica's leading politicians saw an opportunity in the street gangs that were forming up in Kingston's slums. Pretty soon, each gang leader, known as a don, had a political party backing him that came calling whenever they needed some dirty work done, some votes turned out or an opposition neighborhood attacked. In exchange, the dons received favors, money and guns, turned their neighborhoods into garrisons and went to war with each other. With the cold war looming in the background, the violence reached a level that shocked everyone...but no one could have expected it would lead to the world's most iconic Jamaican being shot down in his own home.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Sydney has long been Australia’s “Sin City”, a pot of gold for crooks with the right connections and friends in the police. But over the past two years an altogether more deadly war has broken out for control of the city’s streets, pitting two Lebanese families and so-called “Postcode Gangs” in a feud that has shocked the nation. And at the top of it all is a fearsome biker-in-exile who has risen beyond even the Italian mob. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

International organized crime has rarely seen a figure as powerful and connected as Vito Rizzuto, Montreal's underworld king. When his father Nic left Italy for Montreal with his 8-year-old son, Nic was a small-timer looking to capitalize on his family connections and Sicilian upbringing. With the Calabrians and Sicilians at each other's necks in Canada's vice capital, Nic eventually worked his way to the top of Montreal's underworld in no small part due to his in-law mafioso contacts in drug trafficking hubs like Venezuela and Sicily. Montreal's heroin king partnered with New York's La Cosa Nostra while paving the way for his son Vito to take over, and Vito proved to be even more capable than his father, doing business with organized crime groups everywhere from Lebanon to China to Venezuela and uniting Montreal's warring factions into a massive unified front...before it all came crashing down. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Castor de Andrade might just be the most powerful mobster you’ve never heard of. Born into a life of crime in Rio’s suburbs, he graduated from local lotteries to an empire encompassing Cali and Sicily—and he had his own soccer club. Even Brazil’s military dictators were terrified of Castor. But that didn’t scare off Joao Havelange, son of a gun-runner and a successful businessman who, as chief of FIFA, took a parochial, Eurocentric sport and turned it into a global powerhouse. But as Castor, the country’s “Carnival King”, began eliminating his rivals, the relationship with soccer’s most powerful man turned it—and the game—into something very different. As journalist Conor Powell, host of the Lords of Soccer podcast, tells us, it was a trend that has only gotten bigger today Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The Last Resort explores big, crazy, dangerous ideas – ideas that no one took seriously, but which may now be our best options. What would actually happen if we put these ideas into practice? In season one, we ask: what if California seceded from the United States? To do so, we follow the rise and messy fall of Yes! California, the state’s most prominent independence movement. The Last Resort is a timely exploration of political polarization in America, at a time when many Americans feel anxious about the future and don’t understand – at all – the people on the other side of the aisle. With the mid-term elections looming, and actual sitting members of Congress calling for a “national divorce,” we indulge the fantasy of escaping it all. Could we just wipe the slate clean and start over? https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-last-resort/id1644754112 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

When a fascist killer plunged his sword into Japan’s socialist leader on live TV, few could have predicted its consequences. But gangs of sailor-suited ‘girl bosses’ and pompadour-wearing, ex-kamikaze fighting bikers probably weren’t top of the list. Then again who’d expect Japanese youth, rallying against Yakuza mobsters and corrupt politicians, to birth individuals less mad than Bosos who scream ‘Doki-Doki’ at their foes, and a boss called K-Ko and her weaponized bra? (It’ll make sense in the show we promise) Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This is the story of Pistol Pete, one of the most revered killers to ever walk the streets of New York City, who found infamy after the small click he founded in the Bronx, Sex Money Murda, linked up with a newly burgeoning prison gang federation called the United Blood Nation. Together, both groups would spread up and down the east coast and have such a powerful influence in the streets than 30 years later, one of rap's biggest stars would be linked to them after a massive gang arrest in Atlanta. For bonus episodes, subscribe on itunes or on Patreon at patreon.com/theunderworldpodcast. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

As things heat up in the 2022 FIFA World Cup in Qatar, Sean meets soccer journalist Philippe Auclair in a London pub (of course) to talk about the many crimes stalking the Beautiful Game—from bribery and fraud within FIFA, to the covered-up deaths of workers in Doha, and crypto and betting scams that have slipped into the sport’s top tiers. Subscribe for bonuses on Itunes and Patreon.com/Theunderworldpodcast Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In less than 3 decades, a Brazilian gang formed during a prison soccer tournament has become one of, if not the most powerful gang in all of Latin America, branching out from the jails cells, to the streets of Sao Paolo, to all over Latin America and working hand in hand with groups like the Ndranghetta, Russian mobsters, and a who’s who of global organized crime. This is the story of how the PCC, or The First Command of the Capital, took on the Brazilian state with everything from riots to attacks on police stations, holding the entire city of Sao Paolo, population 20 million, hostage and has since grown outwards in unrivaled expansion. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Sean met Atlanta crime reporter George Chidi to talk about the city's rap labels and their role in its spiraling gang violence—from Young Thug and Lil Baby to the even more extreme drill scene, and the corruption, poverty and racism that underpins a murder rate far beyond Chicago's. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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When the pandemic took punters from Southeast Asia’s most notorious gambling dens, their gangster owners turned to the web, entrapping thousands of unwitting slaves and putting them to work in high-rises, aiming to scam western marks out of millions. Nathan Paul Southern and Lindsey Kennedy took a trip along the Mekong this summer. What they discovered was incredible and tragic in equal measure—and few are doing anything to combat it. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices