The Underworld Podcast

Cape Town’s underworld war was supposed to be about nightclub doors. Instead, it turned into a sprawling battle over drugs, extortion, government contracts, corrupt cops and control of an entire city.

In part two, Danny follows the bodies as they pile up: the “Gentleman Gangster” Mark Lifman is assassinated in a shopping mall parking lot, top gangsters are picked off one by one, and one of South Africa’s most respected detectives is murdered after warning that corrupt police were working against him. Meanwhile, the old nightclub protection rackets evolve into something much bigger, with criminal groups pushing into construction, public contracts and the state itself. Along the way, too many failed assassination plots to list.

By the end, Cape Town’s gang war looks less like a turf dispute and more like the anatomy of a mafia state.

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In a city on Colombia’s Caribbean coast, a young man rose through the ranks of a violent paramilitary organization to become one of its key leaders. But that wasn’t all. Throughout, he posted his criminal exploits to social media, crafting a Robin Hood image while robbing, dealing and killing the very people he claimed to help.

When the young man, going by the name of ‘Bendito Menor’, or ‘Little Blessing’, began taunting Colombia’s new tough guy president, folks began lauding him for showing the state who was really boss in Colombia’s remote north. But there was one wrinkle in the plan: the president was a chronic poster too, and no stranger to the narco world.

The two men were headed for a bloody showdown.

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Cape Town is one of the most beautiful cities in the world. It's also home to one of the most violent and tangled criminal underworlds on the planet, where drug lords, prison gangs, crooked cops, and millionaire businessmen wage bloody wars over everything from nightclub security to anabolic steroids.

When South Africa's notorious "Steroid King," Brian Weinstein, is executed in his bed in 2017, the murder exposes a sprawling network of gangsters battling for control of the city. But the story only gets stranger as the men accused of arranging the hit start turning up dead themselves.

This week, Danny and Sean dive into Cape Town's astonishing mafia wars, tracing decades of corruption, gang violence, international crime syndicates, and spectacular assassinations. And this is only Part One.

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How Cuba is Slipping into Drug Chaos

Since the beginning of the year, the US has placed Cuba under an oil embargo, crippling its public services and throwing a society that was already on its knees into chaos. Blackouts roll for days, trash piles high and locals are getting sick from a smorgasbord of airborne diseases.

Cuba has survived similar crises before: in the mid-1990s its people endured a calamity that wiped 90 percent off the economy. But today is different. And amid the madness, a new scourge has appeared on Cuba’s streets, a synthetic drug the locals call ‘quimico’. And as gangs coalesce to sell it, our correspondent got caught up in Cuba’s new street violence himself.

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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 takeover of Havana, building hotels, casinos, racetracks and bordellos as US tourism sought sun, sand, and vice off the Florida Strait.

Chief among all Havana’s crooks were Meyer Lansky and Lucky Luciano, who in 1946 welcomed the great and good of America’s underworld to a ‘Mob Conference’ that would decide the fate of a new, offshore Mafia. But trouble was brewing—mainly in the form of a young, bearded nationalist who’d practiced his own violent form of ‘gangsterismo’ in the past. And as Havana’s criminal-friendly dictatorship buckled, the island was about to face a new anti-Mafia crusade, Fidel Castro-style.

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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 organized crime increasingly tangled up with the state.

Elsewhere, Sydney’s latest gang war features teenage recruits and drone-assisted hits, Belgian investigators finally wrap a massive cocaine case, and Spanish cops try to catch narco speedboats that are literally faster than theirs. There are also fresh Kinahan developments, a gang threatening to “rule” Canada, and an alleged arms dealer accused of supplying both sides of Brazil’s deadliest gang war.

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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 sworn enemies. What followed was a sprawling campaign of revenge, with gunmen hunting their targets across borders and leaving dozens dead. How did a feud born in a tiny Adriatic town became an international bloodbath with a brutal house of horrors and hundreds of millions of dollars of coke at stake.

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In our final episode on the rise and fall and rise of the Pablo Escobar of Pakistan, he negotiates his own surrender to the DEA, maneuvers his way into the U.S. while dodging Pakistani intelligence agents out to kill him, and enjoys the hospitality of the American justice system. Then he returns to Pakistan, gets arrested again, and things get weird. Taliban weird.

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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.

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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.

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