The Underworld Podcast

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 confounded cops the most was how Vassilis Paleokostas distributed his loot among the poor, and how the Greek people loved him for it. If authorities did catch up with the country’s Robin Hood, there wasn’t a prison in the land that could hold him for long. Cue decades of capers that could keep a Hollywood writers’ room busy for months.
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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 money laundering empire, while his uncles from the González Valencia clan were systematically arrested and extradited to the U.S. over the past decade. And his father just happened to be the founder of CJNG's predecessor, the Milenio Cartel.

Now an American citizen effectively runs a terrorist-designated drug empire responsible for flooding the U.S. with fentanyl, creating a legal nightmare for U.S. intelligence agencies with limited tools to go after one of their own.
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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 capital city Asunción, but the so-called “Triple Frontier”, where Paraguay, Argentina and Brazil met. And thanks to a 2018 conspiracy involving a local trafficker, a money mule and an up-and-coming senator, we know it’s very much alive and kicking today.
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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 Argentina to neighboring Paraguay. There he discovered a smuggler’s paradise, full of Nazis and narcos, whose reliance on drugs and contraband would grow so huge that US drug squads would refer not only to the French Connection, but to one named for Paraguay’s repressive, half-German dictator: The Stroessner Connection. He and the fugitive French mafioso would form a bond that, in many ways, has outlived both of them to today.
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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 Boston mob.
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