The Billion Dollar Scam Cult King who tried to Take Over an Island

The Billion Dollar Scam Cult King who tried t...

Up next

Italy's Unknown 5th Mafia, The Stidda

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 ...  Show more

America’s Craziest Mob Boss (Sort of!) Vincent Gigante

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 fa ...  Show more

Recommended Episodes

CLASSIC: Gregor MacGregor Invented a Country and Convinced People to Invest in It
Ridiculous History

When His Serene Highness Gregor the First, Sovereign Prince of the State of Poyais and its Dependencies, and Cacique of the Poyer nation visited London, he made a huge impression. Hundreds of people jumped at the chance to buy land in his remote, Central American paradise. There ...  Show more

Lou Blonger: “Million Dollar Bunco Ring”
Con Artists

In the early 20th century, a man many knew only as “the King” grew to be the most powerful man in Denver—the head of an empire of confidence tricksters who swindled victims across the United States. Lou Blonger seemed untouchable… Until a headstrong district attorney and a handfu ...  Show more

543. Death in the Amazon: Aguirre, the Wrath of God
The Rest Is History

“Anyone who even thinks of abandoning this mission will be cut up into a thousand pieces…I am the wrath of God!” At the height of the age of exploration, during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, one story in particular gripped the imagination of European colonialists: El Do ...  Show more

185. The God Kings of Angkor Wat
Empire: World History

In the 9th century AD, two years after the Holy Roman Empire was established in Western Christendom, another world-shaking empire was rising in the east, more powerful even than that of Charlemagne and far wealthier. Born in what is today Northern Cambodia but long before the hor ...  Show more