Kingpins

In the late 1970s, George Jung and Carlos Lehder Rivas would team up to become one of the most infamous trafficking duos... Read more

In the late 1970s and early 1980s, Dawood Ibrahim, a young Muslim-born Indian would rise from a small time street thief ... Read more

After meeting in a Connecticut prison in 1974, George Jung and Carlos Lehder Rivas began to build what was to become a m... Read more

By 1987, Carlos Lehder Rivas and George Jung had scraped together a cocaine smuggling empire fit for kings. Yet as profi... Read more

After growing up surrounded by the Sicilian mafia in the early 1900s, Carlo Gambino immigrated to America and put the kn... Read more

In 1963, at the age of twenty-five, Sonny Barger sat at the top of the burgeoning empire known as the “Hell’s Angels.” T... Read more

Mafia life came with plenty of rules, and Anthony Casso loved that. He was a criminal, but an honorable criminal, and hi... Read more

In the early years of the Mexican drug world, there were no cartels - there were only kingpins. The border region was a ... Read more

During the 1970s, Howard Marks became one of the biggest cannabis smugglers in Europe. Through a series of networks, whi... Read more

As Prohibition and unsustainable economic growth spread across America in the early 1920s, a new wave of organized crime... Read more

We are thrilled to bring you a brand new episode of Kingpins today and for the foreseeable future. We thank you for your... Read more

In the 1980s, John Alite grew up in Queens with a promising career in baseball. But when that career was shattered in co... Read more

The two brothers that made up half of the Cali Cartel in Colombia, Gilberto and Miguel Orejuela became the leaders of on... Read more

Before becoming “El Patron” and trafficking 80% of the world’s cocaine market, Pablo Escobar was nothing more than a pet... Read more

Known as the “Ivory Queen,” Yang Feng Glan was a Chinese smuggler who helped move nearly 2-tons of illegal ivory out of ... Read more

In the 1970s, cocaine was seen as a “rich man’s drug” - reserved for the wealthy elites in the Hollywood Hills. That is,... Read more

With the Hell's Angels making inroads as a drug dealing empire, Sonny Barger was on top of the world... until his Angels... Read more

The woman who would become one of Colombia's first major cocaine traffickers in the 1970s got her start as a criminal at... Read more

The leader of one of Chicago's most dangerous gangs in the 1970s, Larry Hoover was only 23 when he was sent to a maximum... Read more

In the mid-1880s, immigrant Joseph Petrosino joined the NYPD as one of the few Italians on the force. Over the next two ... Read more