Meet the Stopwatch Gang: three polite Canadian crooks turned bank robbery into a precision sport, hitting over 140 banks across North America and walking away with $15 million without firing a single shot. They wore presidential Halloween masks, escaped from prison multiple times, and became so notorious that the boss landed on the FBI's Most Wanted list. At their peak, they stole millions while humiliating police forces across North America and becoming legends in the criminal underworld. Learn...
May 12, 2026•1 hr 6 min
Vassilis Paleokostas, and his big brother Nikos, grew up shoeless in a Greek mountain village. When the boys moved to a city, they discovered a talent for robbery — and honed it with a mysterious criminal known locally as The Artist. Before long, the trio were pulling off some of the most daring heists in European history. At a volatile time of financial crashes, leftwing guerrillas and political corruption, the brothers dove into a new gig: kidnapping billionaire business magnates. What confoun...
May 05, 2026•1 hr 4 min
When Mexican special forces killed El Mencho in February 2026, the throne of Mexico's most powerful cartel was up for grabs. But there's one man who many assumed would be taking over: Juan Carlos Valencia González, a 41-year-old California-born dual citizen known as "El 03," the stepson of the slain narco boss. His cartel royalty bloodline is almost absurdly stacked, as his mother, Rosalinda González Valencia, dubbed "La Jefa," was El Mencho's wife and a key financial architect of the cartel's m...
Apr 28, 2026•1 hr
When Paraguay extradited French-Corsican heroin kingpin Auguste Ricord to the US in 1972, some thought Paraguay’s narco trafficking days might be numbered. If anything they were just beginning. Within years the tiny nation had welcomed Hong Kong Triads and Lebanese militants — who, combined with considerable homegrown narco and cigarette trafficking, made Paraguay one of the world’s most lawless places, a hive of narco-contraband-terror madness. This nexus was focused not on the country’s sleepy...
Apr 21, 2026•58 min
The French Connection and Paraguay In 1968, a gang of smartly-dressed gangsters robbed a bank in Buenos Aires. The fallout from the raid would lead authorities in all kinds of crazy directions — from French paramilitary hitmen to mobsters belonging to the feared Union Corse, Corsican dope traffickers who’d perfected “French Connection” routes from Southeast Asia and Turkey into Marseille, then onto New York to feed a ballooning American addiction crisis. Amid the chaos, one Frenchman fled Argent...
Apr 14, 2026•1 hr 3 min
In 1960s Boston, Buddy McLean ignited a savage gang war after tensions with the McLaughlin brothers boiled over into open bloodshed. What started as neighborhood beef turned into a cycle of ambushes, barroom executions, and street hits that terrorized Boston. McLean’s Winter Hill crew proved more organized and ruthless, picking off rivals and seizing control as bodies piled up. By the end, the McLaughlins were shattered, and the war set the stage for the rise of Whitey Bulger and the modern Bost...
Apr 07, 2026•52 min
When fleets of young Chinese men arrived in the tiny, Pacific nation of Palau in 2018, authorities wondered why they’d eschewed the archipelago’s pristine shores and coral reefs for a handful of tumbledown buildings on the edge of Koror, its biggest town. It wouldn’t take long for the story to unfold. These men were the foot soldiers in a new crime wave hitting Palau: digital scammers at the sharp end of a trillion-dollar empire run by the world’s richest gangster, and orchestrated by one of Chi...
Mar 31, 2026•1 hr 17 min
We're back with another Stash House and there's a hell of a lot of crazy stuff going on. Daniel Kinahan is spotted in Dubai palling around with a shady oil trader, Sebastian "The King of the South" Marset is bagged up in Bolivia and extradited to the US, Trump goes in hard on Ecuador's narcos and potentially the rest of Latin America, the Scam Lord King of Asia might be saying goodbye for good, and even more! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices...
Mar 24, 2026•59 min
Melbourne has been gripped by a new wave of underworld gang wars, this time fueled by the booming billion dollar black-market tobacco trade. Firebombings, drive-by shootings, and extortion targeting shops across the city have roiled the city as middle eastern syndicates and biker gangs fight over profit. At the center of the chaos is underworld figure Kaz Hamad, whose name keeps surfacing as rival crime crews battle for control of a trade worth tens of millions. Deported to Iraq, he kept running...
Mar 17, 2026•1 hr 6 min
When a 2023 club brawl ended in a Freetown, Sierra Leone parking lot shooting, cops and reporters pointed the finger at “Omar Shariff,” a portly Turkish millionaire who’d spent much of the past six months throwing cash about at the city’s casinos and top-end restaurants. But Shariff wasn’t Turkish, and he wasn’t just any businessman. And as information about the strange man leaked over the coming year, officials in Africa and Europe began to realize that he was in fact one of the Netherlands’ bi...
Mar 10, 2026•53 min
We told you his life story in our 2022 episode, and now we're back with the sequel. El Mencho rose from poverty to build the CJNG into Mexico’s most violent and influential cartel, trafficking fent, meth and coke across the hemisphere. After years on the run with a huge U.S. bounty on his head, Mexican forces killed him in a daring military operation last week in Jalisco. The cartel responded with unprecedented retaliation: burning vehicles, massive roadblocks and bloody clashes with security fo...
Mar 03, 2026•1 hr 12 min
Not even the IRA scared Martin "The General" Cahill. He terrorized Dublin with audacious heists that left police scrambling. Rising from the gritty streets of Dublin, he became a criminal mastermind whose crew got so proficient at armed robberies and heists they sometimes did two jobs in a single day. From art heists to daring bank robberies, his exploits read like a thriller. Cahill remains Ireland’s most notorious, untouchable outlaw, a legend of crime that refuses to fade Learn more about you...
Feb 24, 2026•1 hr 16 min
Monk Eastman ruled the depraved streets of turn-of-the-century Manhattan with fists and absolutely zero regard for human life, commanding an army of 1,200 thugs who terrorized the Lower East Side. At the height of his power, he was pulling cash from every racket you could think of while rigging elections for Tammany Hall and overseeing street violence so extreme that cops needed reinforcements just to enter his territory. Eastman represented a true transition in the evolution of the underworld, ...
Feb 17, 2026•1 hr 4 min
Orphaned and kicked out of work, Kazuo Taoka was an unlikely candidate to become one of postwar Japan’s most important characters. But by combining violence with a talent for legitimate business and corruption, the immaculately-suited gangster would lead the Yamaguchi-gumi yakuza syndicate from a ragtag Kobe dockworkers’ gang to one of the world’s richest underworld forces, spreading from Japan into Southeast Asia and even the United States. That won Taoka plenty of enemies, which he almost alwa...
Feb 10, 2026•1 hr 3 min
What's going on with the big Ryan Wedding arrest and extradition? The Canadian city that had to declare a state of emergency because of Indo-Canadian gangs extorting everyone. China executes 11 scammers. All that and more in this Stash House: Sean is moving continents edition. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Feb 03, 2026•52 min
In the late 1970s, as Sicily descended into all-out mafia war, the island’s allegiances split between the ruthless Corleonesi clan, led by Toto Riina, and southern gangsters fed up with Riina’s campaign of murder that was spilling innocent lives, and disgusting the Italian public. This schism would be the birth of the Stidda — Sicilian for ‘star’ — a group that fought and thrived for turf in southern Sicily, and became prominent enough that, even today, people know it as Italy’s “Fifth Mafia”. L...
Jan 27, 2026•53 min
Vincent “Chin” Gigante was the most powerful mob boss in America...and he was also the mob's best performance artist. By day, he wandered Greenwich Village in a bathrobe, muttering to himself, selling the world on the idea that he was crazy. By night, he ran the Genovese crime family with near-absolute discipline, avoiding wires, indictments, and the spotlight that destroyed flashier dons. For decades, he convinced the FBI and the courts he was too mentally ill to stand trial, all while green-li...
Jan 20, 2026•1 hr 12 min
Ever hear about how Woody Harrelson's dad was a hitman who killed a federal judge? The Chagra brothers came up along the El Paso and Juarez border when smuggling weed became one of America's booming industries. With Lee a prominent criminal defense attorney and Jimmy an outlaw, they gambled millions in Vegas, lived lavishly, and made a lot of enemies, chief among them prosecutors and judges. When the feds finally closed in, Jimmy Chagra got desperate...so desperate, he put a hit out on a federal...
Jan 13, 2026•1 hr 18 min
When the son of Suriname’s president offered to ship drugs and guns for a major terror group in 2013, it was the dimwitted denouement to decades of narco-fueled madness in the small, South American nation — which began when the two belligerents in its bitter civil war made so much cash ferrying product for Colombian cartels, that they buried their differences and worked together instead. The war ended. But the drugs never stopped flowing — particularly between Suriname and a new clique of crimin...
Jan 06, 2026•57 min
It's stash house time! We bring you all the news on organized crime, gangs, drugs, cartels and the holidays that you could ever want. And, at the end, Sean shows his feet in a special holiday new years gift to our most loyal fans. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Dec 30, 2025•47 min
In the last few years, Sweden’s gang wars have erupted into a brutal battlefield of shootings, bombings, and shifting allegiances even worse than the decade before. At the center is the Kurdish Fox, a shadowy figure who built his gang Foxtrot into the most formidable drug network in the entire country, all while not even living in Sweden. Using encrypted chats to recruit teenage gunmen, he sent Sweden's murder rate soaring. But when he took out his right hand man's own mother, it led to a civil ...
Dec 23, 2025•1 hr 3 min
In the wake of the EncroChat bust, swaths of the world’s biggest narco traffickers have been swept up by European cops — from Balkan tough guys to Camorra capos. Somehow, though, the man who connects them all has kept his hands clean. How did Daniel Kinahan go from Dublin goon to global cartel leader? And how long can he stay out of trouble? Sean spoke to The New Yorker’s Ed Caesar, who’s written about Kinahan, to find out. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices...
Dec 16, 2025•53 min
Starting in the mid 2010's, Sweden’s gang wars transformed from neighborhood disputes into a national crisis, driven by splintered immigrant-area crews who now recruit teenage hitmen willing to kill for a few thousand dollars. At the center of the chaos, the bitter feud between Shottaz and Death Patrol, two rival networks whose bombings, kidnappings, and retaliatory shootings have turned Stockholm’s suburbs into warzones. The murder of chart-topping rapper Einár shocked the country, a killing th...
Dec 09, 2025•1 hr 2 min
With gunboats parked in the Caribbean, fast boats blown up, and the White House threatening to invade, we unpick some of the narratives surrounding Venezuela’s regime — and its gangs. Is the Tren de Aragua really exporting fentanyl to the US? Is Nicolas Maduro the head of a global narcotics trafficking organization? And is the Cartel of the Suns actually a thing? Featuring guest interviews and footage from a famous 1993 bust, we dive into the past, present — and uncertain future — of one of DC’s...
Dec 02, 2025•1 hr 17 min
In this special Thanksgiving episode, the guys are in the studio together and do a deep dive on the insane Louvre Heist of the French Crown Jewels. They also get to the bottom of the Mafia rigged poker games and the absolutely insane NBA gambling scandal that rocked professional sports recently. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Nov 25, 2025•57 min
When feds convicted Honduran cocaine kingpin Juan Matta Ballesteros in 1990, authorities hoped it would spell an end to the Central American nation’s growing reputation as a narco state — a status that had caused havoc across the region. Those hopes were dashed almost immediately — and not just by Matta’s family, who carried on his legacy of cartel wheeler-dealing. In the jungles of eastern Honduras, another power was on the rise, forging ties with crooked cops and banking magnates. The Cachiros...
Nov 18, 2025•1 hr 3 min
When the godfather Miguel Ángel Félix Gallardo got busted in '89, he divvied up his empire from a prison cell and handed the coveted Tijuana plaza to the Arellano Felix Brothers, who transformed it into one of the most violent drug organizations in Mexico. At their peak, the brothers, led by Benjamin, were pumping an estimated 40 percent of America's cocaine through their border kingdom recruiting both rich kids from elite Tijuana families and gangbangers from the states as sicarios. But when ps...
Nov 11, 2025•1 hr 1 min
Juan Ramon Matta Ballesteros began life as a pickpocket in his hometown of Tegucigalpa, before heading out on the perilous border roads of Latin America as an emerald smuggler. Soon he was making friends in high places, scoring deals on consignments of cocaine - and connecting coca producers in the Andes with up-and-coming narcos in Mexico. All the while, Matta forged ties with the elites and corrupt soldiers who’d run Honduras for a century, capturing the small state and ensuring its future as ...
Nov 04, 2025•1 hr 2 min
Along the blood-soaked border between Mississippi and Tennessee, a ruthless crime empire ruled the night where whiskey flowed, dice rolled, and anyone who crossed the wrong person disappeared into the darkness. The State Line Mob, bankrolled by a hammer-wielding madam and led by a wannabe southern Capone, turned a stretch of highway into America's most lawless strip, where corrupt cops looked the other way and violence was the only language spoken. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megapho...
Oct 28, 2025•58 min
Starting at the tail end of the wild cowboy days of 1980's Miami, undercover FBI agent Martin Suarez didn’t just infiltrate a cartel...he nearly rose to the top. As a smuggler, he helped move a billion dollars worth of product while rising through the ranks of the Medellin cartel before moving into the secretive world of elite money launderers for cocaine kingpins. For years, he lived a double life inside the most dangerous syndicates, surviving hits, betrayals, and near-death missions. And he d...
Oct 21, 2025•1 hr 19 min
