Well, they blew up the Chicken Man in Philly last night. And they blew up his house too. And the racket boys, they really did have a fight...a brutal one that lasted decades and saw Skinny Joey Merlino come out on top. He's not just America's next top crime podcaster and patreon star, he's also the one-time boss of the Philadelphia mafia and (allegedly!) still the don of Philly, if you believe the feds.

Merlino, though, is no joke. Surviving by the skin of his teeth and dodging multiple assassinations in the 80's and 90's, he went from the son of shunned one-time underboss Chuckie Merlino to the top position when him and his crew of young gunners took on all comers.

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Medellin was once the world's most violent city, torn about by Pablo Escobar's murderous cartel warfare and later, Don Berna's meteoric rise to control the city's drug trade. Over the last decade, though, the city has grown quite safe, becoming a tourism hotspot and hub for digital nomads attracted to it's people, parties and culture.

But a recent spate of robbery turned murders, mostly targeting foreigners through dating apps like Tinder and Bumble, is once again throwing the city's rep into question and garnering international headlines. But who, exactly, is behind it? We're joined by Underworld favorite and Colombian underworld specialist, reporter and producer Toby Muse.

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Olive Yang—or Miss Hairy Legs, or Two-Gun Mulan, or any number of nicknames folks gave her—was the gunslinging princess of Kokang who bucked the royal yolk to become one of the Golden Triangle’s biggest narco traffickers. With DC’s backing she built an empire all over Asia, and did some pretty impressive spycraft on the side.

Part one of this crazy two-parter tracks the rise of Olive and her “Boys,” the gangsters of the Kokang bush, a stint in prison, 999 dope and something Olive’s sister called, euphemistically, the “special belt.”

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From Ponzi schemes to shitcoins, phishing scams and Nigerian princes, we’re living in a golden age of online crime. But hasn’t it always been this way? Cory Doctorow’s latest novel “The Bezzle” dives into some of these recesses, and America’s prison-industrial complex—all part of something he’s dubbed the “enshittification” of the World Wide Web

Get 20% off and free shipping with the code Underworld at Manscaped.com.

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Tony "Joe Batters" Accardo aka the Big Tuna (!) was one of the most powerful Mob Bosses that the American Mafia has ever seen, sitting atop the brutal Chicago Outfit for 40 years. From being an errand boy turned hitman for none other than Al Capone to taking the Outfit from a local prohibition gang to a national powerhouse with multiple Vegas casinos, Accardo's seven decade career in the underworld is legendary.

And you'll never guess which current NFL all stars are his great-grandsons...

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Two years ago, Kyle MacLachlan, the star of Twin Peaks, called investigative journalist Joshua Davis with a strange story. Kyle had heard a rumor that Pablo Escobar did a deal in the early 1980s with a remote, coastal Southern town of 300 people. In exchange for vast wealth and limitless cocaine, Escobar would be allowed to land planes and ships in the area. Over the last 24 months, Josh and Kyle investigated the rumor, journeying to Varnamtown to knock on doors and find out what really happens when a firehose of money and cocaine is turned on a small, tight knit community. Listen to Varnamtown wherever you get your podcasts. 

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When Chinese-American reporter Henry Liu was gunned down in his Daly City garage in 1984, it brought the Bamboo Union, Taiwan’s most powerful Triad, to global attention. But while the killing frayed ties between the island and DC, authorities skipped over a guy in California pulling the strings all along—a silver-tongued philosophy grad who’d gone from Taipei street fighting to restauranteur and the Bamboo Union’s point-man in the United States.

His name was Chang An-lo, and he’d soon be behind bars for a massive narco bust in New York. But insiders knew him by another, far more fearsome name: White Wolf. And his story—one that would weave between the States, Taiwan and the Chinese mainland—was just getting started.

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You may have seen the news last week, about a Yakuza boss caught in Bangkok trying to sell nuclear material to a fake Iranian general. Takeshi Ebisawa and a group of co-conspirators are behind bars, awaiting extradition to the US, the dopes in a sting operation that could’ve been lifted straight from Hollywood. But how legit is the bust? And who is Ebisawa, the stout, goateed gangster cops have been saying for years is a Yakuza don—despite that not really being a thing?

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When members of the fearsome and brutal Zetas cartel kidnapped her daughter, Miriam Rodriguez did what they asked and paid the ransom. But it wasn't enough, and she never saw her daughter again. Fed up with a lack of help from the police, she went on a one-woman crusade for justice, tracking down the men responsible for killing her daughter by any means possible. New York Times reporter Azam Ahmed joins us to talk about his new book, Fear is Just a Word, about Miriam Rodriguez and the quest for hard to find justice again Mexico's cartels.

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On the face of it, Toni Musulin and Redoine Faïd couldn’t be more different: one a quiet, skinflint armored vehicle driver, the other a flamboyant gang leader who went on the lam in Tel Aviv disguised as religious.

But the crimes of both men captured French hearts and minds, catapulting them to infamy and prompting some, in the wake of the global financial crash, to describe them as Robin Hoods. But neither man fit that particular bill—even if their money-grabbing plots could’ve been ripped from a Hollywood script.

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