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Quick hit for you guys, we know we've been slacking but we have a bunch more coming in the next few weeks to make up for it.

This month a Lego thieving ring was busted with over $300,000 of the Danish toy in an LA home. But the daring duo aren’t alone: across the US and Europe gangs are targeting Lego, whose value has gone through the roof since COVID. Why? And how did a California thief get spooked by his own shadow?

For years the Pacific region, and its tiny, tropical nations, steered clear of the global meth and cocaine trade. But politics, war and wild profit margins have pushed ships and planes out from Latin America to Australia across a new ‘drug highway.’
The phenomenon is prompting mass murder, crippling governments, and creating a wave of addiction where none existed. Locals are getting corrupted into becoming cartel ‘doors.’ And local gang underworlds have been upended, uprooted and hunted down like never before. Unless something changes, it'll be Paradise Lost.
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The Hells Angels Motorcycle Club first chapter emerged in the US in the 1940's but didn't reach Canada until 1977. Less than 20 years later, they would be neck deep in the bloodiest motorcycle gang war ever fought as the Quebec chapter sought to monopolize the cocaine trade, utilizing car bombs and death squads to turn the city of Montreal into a war zone. Led by the psychotic and brilliant Maurice "Mom" Boucher, the Hells got so powerful they not only took on any and all rival biker gangs and criminal organizations, but the state itself.
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Since 2019, Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele has smashed the country’s two main gangs, MS-13 and Barrio 18, throwing almost 80,000 people into megaprisons and implementing a harsh but effective “state of exception,” aka martial law. Murder rates have plummeted and, for the first time in years, Salvadorans can live without the fear of violence, extortion, or death.
But the sneaker-wearing “world’s coolest dictator” has also gerrymandered El Salvador’s political map, silenced the press, and packed out the judiciary with sycophants and wallflowers. And as human rights NGOs cry foul, Bukele has gone full-tilt, telling citizens not to call him a dictator, but a “philosopher king.” Is his fragile peace about to come crashing down?
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Denis O’Reilly is lifetime member of Black Power, one of New Zealand’s longest-running gangs. Sean met Denis at home recently to talk about his early life, how a well-read Catholic boy wound up brawling with gangsters, and how New Zealand’s authorities are looking in the wrong places if they want to stop the country’s criminal underworld getting truly out of hand.

When hitmen shot dead Sikh activist Hardeep Singh Nijjar near Vancouver last June, Canadian cops blamed the government of India’s strongman leader Narendra Modi. Subsequent assassination plots in NYC, the UK and Germany have pointed at two men.
One is India’s most notorious mobster. The other is its most decorated spy, a man whose undercover ops—and willingness to dip into the underworld—has earned him the nickname “India’s James Bond.”
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