The Underworld Podcast

When his Green Gang goons killed thousands of leftists in 1927’s Shanghai Massacre, Du Yuesheng was welcomed into the political scene of China’s nationalist leader Chiang Kai-shek. ‘Big Ears Du’ would then take over the country’s biggest city wholesale — running transport, water, electrical grids and even a major bank. All the while Du’s profits from narcotics and vice soared, making him one of the richest organized criminals in world history.

But events in Asia were spiraling beyond Du’s control. China’s communists regrouped after the Green Gang had almost wiped them off the map. And Japan, its imperial ambitions supercharged by hypernationalist yakuza gangsters, eyed an invasion of Manchuria to fuel its war machine. Caught between a rock and a hard place, there was only one way for Du: down. And his fall would be almost as spectacular as his rise.
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By the mid-1920s, Green Gang Boss Du Yuesheng had conquered almost all before him — including his own underworld mentor Huang Jinrong. Shanghai’s opium scene, torn open by British gunboats, belonged to him.

But the city was about to become the crucible for a far more bloody showdown: one that would define modern China until today. With Communist Party agitators chipping away at his labor force, Du decided to pledge his allegiance to the city’s nationalist forces. And he would do it in terrible, gangster style.
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They call him Brazil's Pablo Escobar. Sérgio de Carvalho was an elite Brazilian police major who became one of the most wanted drug traffickers on Earth, accused of flying 45 tonnes of cocaine into Europe with his own private fleet of planes. Along the way he burned through ten fake identities, ran his empire from a prison cell, collected a police pension the entire time, and faked his own death from COVID. Then one morning in Budapest, it all ended over breakfast.
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In 1992, the New York Mafia is falling apart. The Gambinos are in chaos, the Colombos are at war, the Genoveses are hiding behind Chin Gigante’s bathrobe act, and the Bonannos—the forgotten, disgraced family left for dead after the Donnie Brasco disaster—are waiting on one man: Joey Massino. Known as “The Last Don,” Massino quietly rebuilds the Bonanno family into the most powerful mob outfit in America, using paranoia, discipline, and an almost supernatural instinct for survival. Then, after a lifetime preaching silence and loyalty, he does the one thing no Five Families boss had ever done before: he flips.

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Born into a peasant family on the outskirts of Shanghai, Du Yuesheng grew up an inveterate gambler and opium addict. But as he forged alliances in the growing metropolis’ underworld, members of a secret society-turned-cartel saw promise.

Before long, ‘Big Ears Du’ was running gambling dens, opium divans and brothels. And as Shanghai, cleaved into foreign concessions and wildly unequal, became a global megacity, Du knew just who to befriend, best or kill to get his way. And by the mid-1920s, when China’s nationalists and communists were ready to throw down in Shanghai, Du stood ready to carve his name into Chinese history forever.
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