Andrew Tate & the Romanian Mob: A Match Made in Criminal Heaven
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December 30, 2022. Bucharest, Romania. Or rather, a grey and red, strip-lit block on the edge of town. Supercars on the driveway, mirrors in the hall, and, on this particular chilly evening, around a dozen black-clad, balaclavid officers of the Gendarmerie Romana, the country's military cops. And they storm inside.

Official police video showed guns, knives and brass knuckles confiscated during the raid. But the cops' biggest prize is the villa's owner, Andrew Tate. Kickboxer, influencer, bloviator and, the cops say, mastermind of an elaborate sex trafficking ring. Centred on one of Romania's growing industries, camgirls.

There are rape charges too, and all kinds of media mud will be slung in the coming weeks, months and even years as Romania's authorities ponder whether they'll take Tate, nicknamed Top G, and his near-identical brother Tristan to court. For now, as he's led from the building in cuffs, Tate has just one thing to say to the waiting media.

The Matrix has attacked me. It's a common refrain. One Tate uses to describe a world of mundanity and subjugation to which men are subjected in the modern world. Not him, of course. Or the thousands of other, quote, high-value males who comprise the members of his $8,000-a-year Hustlers University, an online scheme he claims empowers men to earn money and get women, but which others say is little more than a pyramid scheme.

This is the real matrix, the tangled web of financial interests from which Tate is believed to have made tens, if not hundreds of millions of dollars. There is real estate, because of course there is, and there's webcams and social media reach that supercharges merch, Hustlers University, and a huge following on Rumble, the right-wing YouTube video platformer.

But there's way more to Tate's empire besides. And there's a reason why the building he's living in at the time of his arrest looks a lot like a particular brand of red and black casinos dotted across Bucharest and beyond. They're called Las Vegas, and they're run by a shadowy pair of Romanian brothers most people know to be part of the country's mafia.

And while Andrew Tate is just a foul-mouthed tip of the brother's criminal empire, he's the pinnacle of a Romanian underworld that since the fall of communism has married financial schemes and digital scams with one of the world's most brutal human trafficking industries. In short, Tate and the Romanian mafia, they're a match made in criminal heaven. Welcome to the Underworld Podcast. Underworld Podcast

Hello and welcome to the weekly show where two journalists, grizzled but in a kind of really good looking and sexy way, take you on a journey to the depths of global organised crime. I'm your host Sean Williams, I'm in New Zealand, I'm joined today by Danny Gold in New York City. We are contractually obliged to bring you one show per week, fully scripted.

And we do it not only with skill and research, but a lot of love because love is what makes the world go round, right? Whether you're a rover importer or a multimillionaire sex trafficker, I think. That and our sponsors who we love dearly. By the way, did you just drink like seven cups of coffee with like Bailey's in every one of those cups? I don't know.

I think I made a coffee with like two scoops in like an espresso thing. So I think I've just taken crack. Two scoops of meth. Yeah, let's see how long that lasts. Maybe I'll be crying by about 20 minutes.

Anyway, very quick housekeeping. If you want Underworld merch, head to our website, underworldpog.com. We've got all kinds of goodies for you and yours. And if you haven't already done so, please like and subscribe. Five stars on all the platforms, that kind of stuff. It really helps us get a toehold in the Michael Francesi gas scam cinematic universe. I actually think I might be able to talk about my $100 million lawsuit on the pod now, which is rather exciting too.

Did you win? Because if you win, the guy who sued has to give you $100 million, right? That's actually how it should work. Yeah, I think that is how it works. I've just got to go to this guy. He said he was in Lagos to pick up my $100 million. But yeah, I'm just going to get on that flight in the next week or so. Anyway, I'm solo parenting for the first time in my life. So maybe that's why I'm talking a bit quick and as if I'm having a breakdown.

Single parents, yeah, man. I actually salute you. Heroes. What's going on on your end, brother? You know, just the usual not sleeping to the point of delusional insanity.

Remember how like in our old episodes, we would just ask if our listeners were involved in certain contraband and if they were, they should hook us up. Now I just want to know if our listeners are like, you know, pulmonologists or ENTs because if they are, holler at me. Just, you know, real old man stuff going on over here. I mean, New Zealand is a long way away. So if anyone can get contraband here, then I'm still going to go down that road. You're still living life. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah, well, I don't know, marginal. Anyway, if you're breathing and you've got a hole in your ass, which is most of us, I guess, you have heard of a man named Andrew Tate and his brother Tristan. And you know he's a guy who sells a 12-year-old's brand of masculinity to young men lost in the modern world. Who isn't? I'd actually managed to avoid most stuff about him for the longest time because I knew I'd basically just feel sad when I did learn more about him. And guess what?

I'm sad. If my son started parodying any of the shit this guy says, I mean, I would be horrified and maybe move to a desert island or something. Yeah, I mean, you know, there's stuff he does. Like, he's an overall awful person, but there's stuff he does to the point of parody where... I think it's parody where it's almost funny in a way. You know, if it wasn't so annoying, like the thing where he's like having sex with women is gay or saying stuff like, if you don't have five kids, you're a failure when he's a guy who clearly has no children. So I don't...

If it wasn't, if he didn't have to go so far, I could see it being funny, like in a Nick Adams sort of way, but he does. And it's, you know, pretty terrible. Well, on the children thing, I think he's got a bunch. I mean, he says he's got a bunch and there was some bodyguard that popped up in a pre-trial hearing that was like,

slightly biased i think he was like i believe everything andrew says he is top g i don't believe any women have said anything bad about him but he was also saying he's ferrying him around bucharest to like meet baby mamas and he's got loads of kids and i don't think he says like even even my daughters love me which is a big red flag um so yeah i don't know maybe he's got kids maybe doesn't the guy's pretty unpredictable with what he says but today's show

It's not about interrogating Tate, the media personality, or kind of hand-wringing about whether boys need some direction in their lives or whether they should get it from a guy who's openly admitting to raping women. And if you think I have to say allegedly here, yeah, I don't. There's a whole universe of evidence Tate himself has sent out in the form of abusive voice notes to former girlfriends and worse. It really is bad. Take my word for it again. I am.

Anyway, today's show is going to dive instead into why the Tate brothers moved to Romania specifically, which if you don't know, is this mid-sized country around 20 million people wedged between the Carpathian Mountains and the Black Sea, southeastern Europe. And today it's a part of the European Union.

But of course, it was behind the Iron Curtain during the Cold War when Romania was governed from 1965 until 1989 by a vampiric wavy-haired dictator named Nicolae Ceausescu. Vampiric being apt given that Transylvania, which is a huge forested swath of Romania, right in the middle of it that's going to come up again in this show, was the home of Vlad Draculaia or Vlad the Impaler, who inspired Bram Stoker's Dracula. So that's interesting, isn't it?

So here we are. I've definitely taken you from Andrew Tate's Bucharest villa to Nicolae Ceaușescu, because in this show, not only will you learn about the Tate brothers and their links to Romanian organized crime, and there are many of them, but we'll learn how the modern Romanian mafia was born and how its biggest assets have all kind of led in the direction of Tate for decades. It's really interesting. And despite the billions of column inches written about Tate, I don't think I've really seen this. I'm proud of myself, Danny. Are you?

Proud of me? I actually am. I think this is a wonderful idea. And I just want to reiterate for our newer listeners, our old catchphrase was don't Instagram your crimes, which was sort of like the central message there is like don't broadcast to the world that you're doing something illegal. And it was referring to like teenagers on Instagram, right?

If you have a massive presence, you know, like this is basically the best possible example of this ever. And it's an important lesson that I hope all of you take out of this. Yeah. I mean, Tate's whole shtick is do Instagram crime. Yeah. I'm doing crimes. I want to tell my massive audience about all the crimes that I'm doing and brag about how I'm getting away with it, which is like I advise against that. I'm not a lawyer. I know some lawyer things. I would advise against doing that.

Yeah, we do know some lawyers, if anyone in particular is listening to this show. Yeah, and bragging actually is going to become a big part

of the later part of this show so uh just think about bragging it's uh it's gonna be a big issue for mr tate funnily enough just this week so good timing maybe we get bumped up to spotify rankings or something a romanian court declared that andrew tate will stand trial for trafficking and rate charges so if you've stumbled on us from that spotify algorithm or search or after reading the news welcome we do do loads of other cool topics as well

But more on Tate a little later. For now, let's stay in that Cold War era when the Socialist Republic of Romania under the dictator Nicolae Ceausescu is switching from an agricultural country to an industrialized one, focusing mostly on chemicals, metalworks and machine building. Now, this stuff requires experts, engineers, engineers,

chemists, and Romania, unlike its Soviet neighbor Moldova, educates a generation of highly educated intellectuals who are running factories and manufacturing plants and so on.

But in the 1980s, Romania's economy buckles and Ceausescu implements a really brutal policy of austerity, plunging the country's standard of living through the floor and forcing thousands of Romanians to eke out livings on the black market. Romania's infant mortality rate is the highest in Europe. Ceausescu needs to wipe out $10 billion of sovereign debt.

but he doesn't. In December 1989, as communist states are toppling all over Europe, Romanian revolutionaries launch their own anti-government campaign in the Black Sea city of Timisoara. Hope I've said that right, or I don't hope that much, and quickly spread across the nation. Ceausescu's secret police bite back,

But they and the army are, of course, outnumbered. And within a fortnight, riots are blooming all over Romania with people chanting, or, or, I'll be taking no notes today on my Romanian accent.

On December 21st, Ceausescu addresses around 100,000 people from a balcony in Bucharest's Palace Square, really impressive place, and he begins to denounce the demonstrators. But a minute in, screams ring out from the crowd. Ceausescu is rushed inside the building as chaos breaks out. Protesters charge security forces who fire and club people to death in return. Rather than flee Bucharest, Ceausescu and his wife Elena, they stay.

On the 22nd, the couple try escaping in a helicopter, but they're grounded, then captured 50 miles outside the capital.

On the 24th, Christmas Eve, everyone's just getting ready for their lovely dinner. Revolutionary leaders try the Ceausescus at a two-hour kangaroo court, which if anyone's had dinner with my family at Christmas, they'll recognize. They're convicted of five charges, including genocide. You didn't. You got to give me enough time to do a but umpt or like have Dale put, you know, the cat scales at the punchline right there. But I mean, you're doing great. I'm enjoying all your jokes this episode. Full support.

Thank you so much. It means a lot. Anyway, genocide. Yeah. Ceausescu is sentenced to death for genocide and a bunch of other bad stuff.

And moments later, in true Soviet style, he is marched around the building, thrown against the wall and executed by a firing squad. 120 bullets found in the couple's bodies. Do we do a little ba-dum-tsch after that as well? I don't think so. But I do think it's an important lesson up there. We're donating to the game of crime, except for like dictators and tyrants.

Like just just go to the south of France, you know, like no one's going to you likely won't get bothered, you know, and I'm sure you've squirreled away enough money or Dubai or Damascus or wherever, wherever you can when you get the opportunity to do so. Like the tides turn like that, you know, just live out the rest of your life without being shot 120 times.

Yeah, you know, like do do the pro sports thing, you know, get out early, get out ahead. Don't become a 45 year old chugger. Just don't be me. That's pretty depressing. Yeah. Anyway, so far, so Romanov. And of all the communist dictators to fall during that time, the fate of the Ceausescu's remains by far the bloodiest. I mean, yeah, they cut to ribbons, but Romania is free.

Kind of. Political fighting continues well into the early 90s, such that by 1992, that post-Soviet market economy is really slapping hard. Unemployment is up around 10%. The giant industries that now have to compete on the global market, they are falling to shreds. And inflation is into three digits. It's like proper Zimbabwe level stuff. And the average salary was only 50 bucks to begin with. I got to imagine. I mean, the 10% number,

has got to be inaccurate, right? Maybe official unemployment. It's got to be three to four times that, no? That's what I assumed as well. Because I mean, I guess it's government posting these stats, right? And they're a shit show. So yeah, I would assume it was horrendous. I mean, things are really, really grim. It's a perfect breeding ground for crime, as any listeners of this show will know very well. So

Welcome to the show, the first of today's Romanian gangsters, a man by the name of Ion Stoica. Ian? I'm going to just call him Ian because it's a name that I know. Now, Ian Stoica is a particularly un-extraordinary looking guy. He's dumpy, flat cap, bald head, looks a bit like every guy driving a Lada in Eastern Europe from memory of my backpacking days in the region. And this makes sense because Stoica isn't your top G kickboxing champ. He's an accountant.

for the Transylvanian city of Cluj, which is, by the way, where my auntie is from. And in 1992, Stoica founds a financial scheme called Caritas, which is also, I think, the name of the Catholic charity. Anyway, this thing is a self-described self-help plan for Romanians struggling in the economy. And Stoica promises investors an eightfold payout.

People flock to his office in Cluj and, for a while, he pays. Everybody happy. Only soon, of course, that ends. Because Caritas is a Ponzi scheme, one of many to hit Europe and beyond during the era. You've got MMM in Russia, the Dominion of Melchizedek, where we got into at the end of last year. All kinds of stuff happened in the Pacific, including a tale I'll be telling here very soon.

And of course, Albania's pyramid schemes, which pretty much caused the civil war. Albania mentioned drink. I was going to mention that it sounds exactly like that. I think you broke that down in one of our early Albania gang episodes. But yeah, I didn't realize this. This this sounds exactly similar sort of pyramid scheme that brought that country down pretty much.

Yeah, very similar. Everybody's sad. Make them happy for a very short while and then piss them off pretty, pretty big time. For several months, Caritas publishes a list of its big winners in local newspapers. A bit like a lottery, which should have maybe been a red flag because in late 1993, it begins delaying the lists and the public soon learns that Stoica's scheme is almost half a billion dollars in the red.

Rumors swirl that Stoica is actually funneling his loot to a Cluj-based, ultra-nationalist political party. But when the payments dry up altogether and Transylvanians threaten to lynch him, or impale him maybe, the party's leader denounces Caritas as a, quote, spin-off of the chaotic economic changes in Romania. So even the fascists don't want anything to do with him.

And it might not be the best known of all the mad financial scams of the 1990s, but Caritas is definitely one of the biggest. And by the time Stoica is arrested in 1994, he's thought to have made between $1 and $5 billion, with around a fifth of all Romanians giving him their cash. I'm sending my Aunt Tina money directly to her bank account in the Philippines with Western Union. She's the self-proclaimed bingo queen of Manila, and I know better to interrupt her on bingo night, even to pick up cash. Hey!

Sending money direct to her bank account is super fast, and Aunt Tina gets more time to be the bingo queen. Western Union. Send money in-store directly to their bank accounts in the Philippines. Services offered by Western Union Financial Services, Inc., NMLS number 906983, or Western Union International Services, LLC, NMLS number 906985. Licensed as money transmitters by the New York State Department of Financial Services. See terms for details.

He's sentenced to seven years jail, but shortly after it's reduced on appeal to just 18 months, most of which he's served already. And incredibly, after bankrupting the entire country, Ian Stoiker walks free in 1996.

You know, on a pure cost benefit analysis, you got to kind of worth it, right? 100%. For him? Yeah. I would bankrupt Romania for 18 months. I would definitely bankrupt Moldova anyway. I'm just saying that.

Anyway, stranger still, despite all of this, Stoica hasn't washed his ill-gotten gains or invested in real estate. Big no-no. And he actually manages to fall into poverty living in a tiny apartment in the Transylvanian city of Brasov, which is where most people wrongly think Dracula lived back in the day. He dies destitute in 2019.

Not Dracula, that's Stoica. But Stoica's legacy runs way, way deeper, just like Dracula's. It breeds a deep distrust of democracy, financial institutions, and the ability of authorities to go after scam artists and criminals. Some even believe at the time that Stoica's riches have come from the hidden swag siphoned off by none other than Nikolai Ceausescu himself.

It is practically impossible to know the real data because Caritas' accounting of books were a joke, writes Vice Romania. The scheme literally worked with bags of money. In addition, many victims never filed complaints.

So here we have a nation full of clever Soviet STEM graduates, but it's stumbling through economic disasters. Its politics is a mess. A fifth of the nation just invested in a massive pyramid scheme. And to make things worse, Romania, sandwiched between the war in Balkan states and the criminal hotbeds of Bulgaria and Ukraine, becomes a sinkhole for black market goods, from cigarettes to Soviet weaponry.

Gangs proliferate, using networks of Romanian expats who've fled over the past decades across Western Europe and the US. This then accelerates after 2007, when Romania joins the EU. Crime increases, and gangs of Romanian thieves and pickpockets target tourists in hotspots like London, Barcelona, Rome and Paris.

And I think this is where it's crucial to point to the background of all this I've just mentioned, because Romania has been through a lot that has gotten it here. And there are still some pretty shoddy stereotypes floating around about Romanian crime, in particular folks belonging to Roma Gypsy ethnic groups, which make up around 10% of the Romanian population.

I mean, this crime exists. Of course it does. And it's true that Romania is a comparatively poor country. It contributes just 1.2% of the EU GDP, despite being home to around 4-5% of its population.

So, of course, folks are going to do crime. That's just how crime works. But of all the venus stereotypes to have survived the war in 20th century, the stereotype that Romani people are thieves and pickpockets seems to have completely survived the Nazi period. Remember, Nazis in their quislings killed up to half a million Roma and Sinti gypsies during the Holocaust.

And this isn't the right show to get too deep into it, of course, but I've left some really good resources on the reading list for Patreon subscribers and a link to the book Reign of Ash by Ari Yoskovitz, which I've skimmed a bit of. It was really, really interesting. It's about how Roma turned to Jewish institutions as they sought recognition for the crimes the Nazis carried out against them because they weren't getting any.

Anyway, these stereotypes exist. I actually used to work at a rough old pub when I was a teenager. It was just across from a field where Irish travelers, another gypsy group, used to rock up. And there were actual signs saying not to serve them, which is nuts. One of my first jobs in Germany was also booking the leader of a Hungarian Roma community leader to go on telly to talk about their persecution under Viktor Orban there. So,

When you're talking about gypsy pickpocketing gangs, it's good to know that a lot of this stuff is still riven with these prejudices. And trust me, like I have read a lot of sources for this story and even stuff that's written in the last couple of years. It's like pretty shot through with these things. I'm not saying that these groups don't exist. They do. But we do get a lot of wingnuts telling us we're woke for pointing out basic facts.

And here are some other facts to go with your own. I kind of like how you did the, you know, like that, that like podcast way of talking, like you're making a, yeah, you're making a, you're doing a monologue on network TV. But yeah, I mean, just to, just to combat some Romania slander that you're spreading. I hear, I hear amazing things about Bucharest. It's just like an amazing city. Great people, great place to live. I almost took a job there once years ago, maybe like six years ago.

But, uh, yeah, for a, for a cam industry. No, not for a camera. So you think, I mean, I was going to be performer. I wasn't working for the actual, you know, Oh, you were going to be on the, on the casting couch. Cool. Yeah. Um, it was, uh, it was, uh, it was a corruption thing, but moving on anyway, go ahead. Yeah. Corruption thing.

Yeah, I actually went to Bucharest like a couple years back. I was doing a writing week with a friend of mine in Spain. And the only cheap, cheap flights that I could get back to the, I think it was the UK at the time, was like via Bucharest for 22 hours. So I spent a long, long day from like morning till late night there. And it was so, so cool. It's like really beautiful, so...

So many ancient churches and all kinds of cool stuff. I wish I'd spent more time there. And is it the National Palace or the National Parliament building? It's like by square footage, I think it's the biggest building in the world.

It's like gigantic, bigger than the Pentagon. Yeah, it's worth going. Go to Bucharest, Miss Moldova, forget that place. But yeah, Romania. Cool. Anyway, crime. In recent years, these gangs have coalesced with Romania's technical track record to produce gangs specialized in something very specific. That is ATM card skimming.

This is where criminals put a device over the bit of an ATM where you insert your card. It then reads the information on your card before the criminal removes the device, takes the information and burns it onto another one. Then they take that card

and withdraw tons of cash. All your cash. Romanian mobs have targeted APMs all over the world, of course, but it's increasingly active in California, which is home to over 60,000 people of Romanian origin. Just this year, actually, news broke of a Romanian skimming ring in Orange County, just south of LA, that was far advanced of its competition. Again, that technical pedigree

You know, it's interesting always to learn about immigrant communities in the States that I had no idea about. So, you know, now I know. Yeah, we got into some of this with my show, Trevor Aronson as well. His podcast that he'd done, Alphabet Boys, we did a bonus on that. And he was talking about Romanian organized crime and how they kind of like snuck in under the radar in Vegas, especially when it was a, what was it like uncontested place? What did they call those during the mafia days? Yeah, it was a...

I don't know. I don't know the exact term. Safe cities or something. I don't know. Safe space. Yeah, it was something along those lines. I mean, I'm on like two hours of sleep, but it was something along those lines where any organized crime group was allowed to work there. No one controlled it. So you didn't have to check in or do anything like that. Yeah. Yeah. I think they were flourishing around that time. But here is a prosecutor this year speaking to Fox News. Quote.

They'll have people sitting outside a Walmart or a Target and it looks like they're panhandling. Sometimes they'll have a couple of kids and they're actually using Bluetooth technology that's connected to the skimmers inside the stores. So it's like a two for one, getting cash that people give them and stealing the number off the skimmers. It's pretty ingenious stuff.

Romanian gangsters have also been doing this to tourists in Cancun. They're pretty prolific. And while prosecutors think the organized skimming stuff is worth around $9 million a month for these groups, which isn't insane money by OC crime standards, right? I mean, it's like pretty small fry compared to the cartels, of course. It's all part of this shifting world of criminal organizations.

where Romanians are now getting smuggled through the southern border of the US, sometimes alongside folks working for the Latin American cartels. Everybody's skimming, to pardon the pun, off the top.

One of these guys was Romania's most wanted, 39-year-old Florin Dudianu, who Feds found guilty of a bunch of identity fraud cases this year and is expected to be sentenced to 30 years prison. Pretty huge sentence for non-violent crime, but there are bigger reasons in the world to shed a tear. The biggest fish of all these Romanian ATM skimming mobsters, however, is a guy named Florian Tudor, aka El Tiburon, or The Shark, who

who built an empire on Mexico's Riviera Maya. Although I think sharks are mammals, technically.

I can't. Is that some sort of Sean joke that I don't understand? Or do you need to watch some more planet Earth? Big fish, big fish, shark, mammal. I don't know. Yeah, that's my at number a bit. Anyway, Tudor had his own crazy rise and fall story. And I'm actually going to post it as a bonus for Patreon subscribers, because as you already know, we love you more than our families. And it's a great, great story. Ongoing, actually. Plenty of action, mad twists and turns, a couple of hits in there. So look out for that this week.

But I hope you get in the picture, right? Broken economy, bad politics, gangs reaching out across the world with a ruthless post-Soviet edge and a wealth of technical know-how. But ATM crime is just one part of the equation that gets us to Andrew Tate and his mafia pals. The other, far bigger part, is human trafficking.

Just think about that geography. Bulgaria, the Balkans, Ukraine, Moldova, which is a lovely place full of nice people, of course, well, despite everything that I've just said, especially the men who work at the Casino Europa in Chisinau. This is a major route for sex trafficking in Western Europe, of course. So rich has it made a handful of Romanian gangsters that they've essentially built their own fiefdom in a tiny town near the Black Sea called Tandere.

This place isn't called the, quote, Beverly Hills of Romanian gangsters, but nothing. It's a crazy place of haves and have-nots, of criminals and peasants living side by side amid one of the world's darkest trades. Here's a Telegraph journalist visiting the town in 2019. Garish, multi-storey properties with grand statues and polished gates line the streets of Tandere in southern Romania, while on the other side of town, horse-drawn carts trundle along potholed roads.

The Tony Soprano style properties were allegedly built using UK benefits payments and the spoils from trafficking hundreds of children to British cities, where they were forced into begging and prostitution.

I don't know about that, Lee. You reckon that's a good Sopranos reference, Danny? A Tony Soprano style property? I mean, not really. He just kind of had like your average McMansion in the suburbs, but they could do better. I also reckon I just had an idea that might save us financially. Underworld podcast tourism trips, whatever you want to call it. Like we'll head to that place, you know, in Southern Romania. We could go to Among Laws, another. I think there's money in this and that people should hire us to invest in it.

I mean, that's genuinely something that I want to do. I don't really know if there's money in it, but I'll go to Mondawo, a bunch of 30-somethings from the Midwest. Yeah, sounds great. Nothing could go wrong. Human trafficking is... What's that? Nothing. I was just laughing. You're doing great. I'm just not used to the sound. Yeah. Human trafficking has always been a thing in Tandoray's part of the world.

But 2007's EU accession opens up new, very easy routes through which to traffic women and children into rich cities, particularly London. I think there was something in Ben Judah's book years ago about this as well. I mean, I think it's called This is London. It's a great book. Kids can earn $120,000 a year in the British capital just by begging.

And their IDs act as a useful second revenue stream when Fagan-style ringleaders use them to pwn millions in welfare benefits from the British state.

All in all, experts believe some of these gangs are making around 30 million bucks a year and there are several of them. The kids never go to school of course and if they resist, they are beaten. Some are even believed to be mutilated deliberately so they can earn more cash. And it's far worse for girls. When they reach puberty, the gang turns them out into sex work, sleeping with clients in prison like brothels.

They're slaves, sold to the gangs by desperate parents who've been told that their children will get a better life in London. No wonder gang leaders have nicknames such as Millionaire, The Executioner, Gypsy King and The General, saying nothing about Tyson Fury of course. Tandere is home to about 300 of these mansions, most of which have fancy cars parked in the yard.

That is pretty horrific stuff. Not the cars in the mansions, but the... The sex slavery stuff. Yeah, I don't know, man. The selling, the parents selling their kids. Yeah, it's just horrific, dude. Yeah, there's a few more details that I haven't mentioned, but it just makes me really annoyed about that Telegraph lead, actually. It should have been a lot better. Anyway, by around 2009, British cops are sniffing around these guys and they launched something called Operation Golf with Romanian counterparts.

In 2010, cops raid the mansions of 26 Tandere gangsters, confiscating piles of cash and AK-47s. They also bust a trial trafficking ring in Essex, just to the east of London, to discover 181 Roma kids. Many are infested with head lice, malnourished and in desperate need of medical care. Others have scars from cigarette burns. The youngest child the authorities rescue? Just months old. And his stuff is really awful.

The British cops make a bunch of arrests and a number of Tandere traffickers are sent to prison for long sentences.

Says Operation Golf Leader Superintendent Bernie Gravitt, quote, They are proper gangsters. These are not just a few people making a few bob. This is an international organized crime ring, one of the largest. We recovered hundreds of thousands of British pounds, euros, dollars, Romanian lei, 10.5 kilos of gold, AK-47s, and all of these guys has huge houses, BMWs and Audis. I mean, I've got an Audi. I'm not a sex trafficker.

The Romanian police opened similar proceedings and there's hope authorities could bust Europe's biggest trafficking syndicate once and for all. But suddenly, in February 2019, hence that Telegraph article, the case collapses and all of the accused walk free. Rumours of payoffs, witness intimidation and corruption swirl, while UK cops seethe.

There was tons of evidence against that gang, says Gravit. Dozens of child witnesses were interviewed and we found hundreds of forged birth certificates. It beggars belief that all 26 suspects have walked free. If we cannot trust Romanian courts to convict the most serious crimes, it has an impact across the whole of Europe.

Bro, what is with the UK and that stuff? Didn't a bunch of those like grooming gangs get off too? Oh God, the grooming gangs. That's an absolute nightmare. Yeah. That is a really complex case. I mean, this one is actually less complex. The UK did all right. The UK actually convicted the guys it managed to keep in Romania. And it was like, we trust you guys to convict these guys in Romania. And the cops are like, yeah, nah.

So, yeah, the Telegraph report even catches up with one of the Tandem I accused at this point. It doesn't even try that hard to deny it. Quote, these children begging, stealing, whatever they are doing. The point is they're with their family members, so they are not being trafficked. I mean, what?

child sex slavery on a technicality. It's not really the best moral defense, is it? And so this whole thing tragically continues. The Tandere Mafia are still in full swing today, only they've allegedly shift attentions for the UK to Germany. According to Europol, Romania is classified as the main country of origin for traffic people across the continent, something that has actually gotten worse with the war in Ukraine and sending thousands of people across the Moldovan and Romanian borders.

This is all massively embarrassing for the Romanian government and the vast majority of its people. Just like it was with Caritas and the dictatorship that preceded it, the Tandere Mafia has proven that blatant, shameless crime pays and that justice is nothing but a pipe dream. Bear that in mind, because it's important now that we get into the star of our show, Mr. Andrew Tate.

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free wherever you listen to podcasts. Now, Emery Andrew Tate III. Like I said, I'm not going to interrogate his case here, nor am I going to go too deep into his backstory. I mean, it's been done a lot and you can get 99% of what you need to know with a cursory glance at Google. What I think isn't known a huge amount, firstly, is why Romania?

I mean, Tate was born in D.C. His old man was a Chicago-born chess champion. And then he moved to the U.K. to live with his mother in Luton, a town about 30 miles north of London, which is why he sounds like this kind of Mickey Mouse, Lloyd Grossman, really weird accent.

So whatever his background, there certainly ain't no Romania. Tate says he first moved to the country in 2017. This was just after he'd been booted off the British version of reality show Big Brother, when footage appeared to show he'd attacked a woman. And he's claimed he moved to Romania because Britain were too woke and because in Romania, quote, corruption is accessible to everybody.

Well, actually, it's probably because he was running for rape allegations in the UK. Amazingly, in a rebuke of our own catchphrase, he's mentioned this too, saying that, quote, probably 40% of the reason he moved was to evade charges. I'm not a rapist, he adds, but I like the idea of just being able to do what I want. I like being free. Yeah, I mean, do you think don't move to a small country trying to clean up its image of endemic corruption and then brag about doing corruption would fit on a T-shirt? Yeah.

Yeah, maybe, maybe. It might sell better anyway. But Tate's involvement with Romania goes way further back. In fact, the Rise Project, which is an independent journalist community allied with the OCCRP, has traced the first public appearance by Andrew and Tristan Tate in Romania to August 4th, 2014.

That's when the brothers visit a quote, Las Vegas style MMA tournament on the Black Sea coast. Andrew does have a background in kickboxing, although his world champion claim is just pure wrong. But neither brother is fighting that day. Instead, they're supporting a Polish fighter for their Luton gym, Storm. Luton, not coincidentally, is home to a large Polish and Romanian community. So it's likely the Tates have made their connections there.

The Tates then hook up with an MMA franchise called RXF, or Romanian Extreme Fighting, which rebrands to Real Extreme Fights in 2016 as it spreads out beyond Romania and across Europe, hosting second-rate tournaments in casinos and other minor venues. The Tates actually become pretty well-known commentators for RXF, and they're popular for, naturally, outlandish statements and loud Rogan-style yells,

What a world we're in. But RXF's leaders soon fold into a bigger and shadowy Romanian group called DMS. What is it with these three-letter names? And this is where it gets really juicy.

DMS stands for Doroftai, Mihajca and Sorin. Doroftai being the surname and Mihajca and Sorin being two brothers from Romania's far eastern city of Iasi, on the Moldovan border, who relocate to Brasov. Remember that place, the Transylvanian city that was the home of Caritas, Dracula's alleged home, criminal hotbed, but I mean, where in Romania isn't at this point.

Sorin is a massive guy, built like a strongman champion with the intellect to match. His brother Mihaitsa, he's the brains behind the operation. The family grows up motherless in 1990s crumbling Romania, in a poor neighborhood of Brasov. Mihaitsa doesn't go to school, doesn't like it. Instead he helps out his dad with the family business, which is getting food to markets, buying random stuff like candles and selling them wheeler-dealer stuff.

Later, he tries to live in Germany, but this is pre-Romania in the EU. And they chuck him out, he says, eight times. I mean, if you fail once, try, try. I mean, I'm not going to do the rest of that sentence anyway. I think it's undersold. And you really only see it if you're in Central and Eastern Europe in person. The main cultural and economic lodestar for folks in, say, Czechia, Slovakia, Hungary, Romania, etc. actually isn't the UK or France to a big extent, or even the US.

is Germany. You're always seeing German shops and pubs and folks speak a lot of German in those countries. Historical reasons for that, of course, not least that these countries have huge Germanic populations going back beyond the Reformation. But again,

Anyway, I don't know why I got into that bit of history. Anyway, Mihaitsev's German dream falls flat on its backside no less than eight times. And instead, he heads from Romania into Turkey to buy goods before selling them back home. And slowly, over time, the family figures out that the big money isn't in candles or toys or goulash, but gaming machines.

Mihaita buys his first three machines in Poland. Soon he's got 20 of them, and he's getting far more from them than any other stuff his family is trading, and he focuses the gaming business in Bucharest, the capital. He expands into buying actual venues, and he brands them Las Vegas. Boxy buildings, red and black colors, garish logo. Sound familiar?

He also grows RXF, the MMA brand, and soon he's got a pretty formidable empire on his hands. And he's not impartial to a lofty statement or 10 like us. Quote, children see the past in their parents. Parents see the future in their children. We now, without realizing it, are building the future. Slot machines, guys. This guy is buying slot machines.

It is the OCCRP. They've done some really great work on this and other Romanian crime stories. Quote, looking for old wiretap conversations, it becomes clear that in 2019, a Polish, quote, investor brought together mafia clans from across Romania to launch a casino business together. This Pole is Mihai Cedorovte, the elder brother, who is a Polish citizen.

So, I mean, look, this stuff doesn't sound criminal, but it will in a moment. OK, the plot thickens. The Tates get involved with RXF. Then they make a bunch of land deals with DMS, which by about 2021 has 800 Las Vegas venues across Romania.

It is a dense web of companies, each seeming to serve the core casino business. But actually, a ton of these brands seem to be just money washing exercises. For example, just before the 2022 arrests of the Tates from the show's cold open, cops also raid venues linked to DMS. They arrest a bunch of mobsters who've been hired as betting machine technicians, ostensibly.

But they're actually dispatched to beat up punters who win jackpots and smash up rival casinos. So there's more of your criminal stuff.

In November 2022, again, just before those Tate raids, Romanian feds charged Mihaitsa and Sorin with being part of an organized criminal group. Mihaitsa goes to ground. He's got plenty of places to hide. I did a quick dig online and I found him listed as director of a Greek Cypriot firm in Nicosia and the head of a Warsaw-based biotech company. So he's got a lot of pokers in the fire or whatever that phrase is.

spinning plates, fingers in pies. One of those anyway, pick them. By this point, the Tates are deep in bed with DMS. They've got real estate and MMA and other more complicated business ties. I'm sorry, but every time you say DMS, like I'm trying not to do it, but I keep picturing there was like a hardcore crew in New York, I think in the 90s. I don't remember hearing about that much lately. That was called DMS, like Doc Martin Skins that used to

you know, not mess around. But I just keep envisioning Andrew Tate with them. And I don't think that that partnership would have worked out. So it's good that he found the Romanian DMS. It sounds like it actually probably didn't work out well for him either. But anyway, we'll see. I thought you were going to come in with some kind of DMX like holler after each of these. No, DMS, DMS. Those dudes were those dudes were were hardcore, which

Which makes sense because they were a hardcore crew. They were hardcore, yeah. Most of this is going through the Tate's company, Talisman Enterprises.

But Tate has got his own webcams, right? Now, at first, Tate has said he was actually writing messages to men pretending to be cam girls. That's how he got his toehold in this thing. Quote, the girls would sit on a webcam and an old dude would sit there. I was training these girls and it got to the point where it's easier if I typed myself. We had two girls on camera with a keyboard that wasn't plugged in. I was behind the screen talking to the dudes, saying the right things to start dragging the money out of the Internet.

That became my new life, he adds. I went from a kickboxer to a pretend girl on the Internet. Once the girls learned they could do it for themselves, I needed some more chicks. That was the beginning of the Cam Empire. I mean, I guess he's making a lot of money. That sounds very sad. And also, he's doing what he always does is basically saying, I am defrauding people on the Internet. Anyway, this is thought to have made him several millions of dollars.

And it dovetails, of course, with a growing webcam industry of Romania that itself is kind of the perfect product of those 80s, 90s that we spoke about, the financial crime, the trafficking, the technical can, the organized crime. It all fits neatly into place with this one industry. Yeah. I mean, from what I've heard, it's huge. Lots of organized crime groups involved in essentially, you know, webcam pimping. It's a giant industry there right now.

Yeah, and I mean, I don't want to sully the good name of the people doing legit webcam work, but from what I looked around at the last couple of weeks, it is pretty gross.

And just think of the timing with all this stuff here, right? Romania has been embarrassed by the breakup of the Tandere Mafia case. It's having its image dragged all over the world. Romanian gangsters are out scamming people from Cancun to Calais. There's this mad DMS Mafia laundering cash through casinos and hiring actual MMA fighters to beat other people up. And it's looking like a chance to crack down on anyone, anybody and take power.

This loudmouthed, misogynist, influencer guy is living in a McMansion, flaunting his wealth, boasting about Romanian corruption and sex crimes via his burgeoning webcam empire. I mean, he's saying this. Quote, my job was to meet a girl, go on a few dates, sleep with her, test if she's quality, get her to fall in love with me to where she'd do anything I say, and then get her on webcam. This is something called the lover boy sex trafficking approach.

which, yeah, it's been spoken about a lot. Here's another quote. I'm all over the place, so I end up with all these chicks just stuck in a house, sitting there, bored, completely in love with me. Yeah, I guess this is one of those so mad it's funny bits. And of course they don't go out. Oh, that's not so funny. They're not allowed out.

You stay in the house. You don't go nowhere. No restaurants, no clubs, nothing. That's a crime, man. That is a crime. Just before the 2022 rates, Tate says openly that he's partnered with some, quote, brothers, mafia guys who own, quote, 400 locations from Estonia all the way down to the east of Europe. So for once, he's actually underestimating one of his business partners. So they've actually got 800 locations.

And he says they've helped him push his own competitors out of business, which I guess you can do if you've got a bunch of meatheads who've just come out of the octagon. The OCCRP have even discovered bona fide profit sharing agreements between Tate, his company Talisman and DMS.

Oh yeah, and add to this Hustlers University, which Tate has rebranded as something called The Real World, that Matrix thing again, and which according to the Times of London, quote, ostensibly offered online business advice, but which also paid subscribers almost half the money generated from any new subscribers they went on to lure in. Some called it a pyramid scheme, end quote. So yeah.

Mafia, Ponzi schemes, human trafficking. I mean, it's kind of a wonder Andrew Tate isn't actually Romanian, the way all his wacky criminal schemes slot so neatly into Romania's underworld, past and present. And I did all of that without quoting Tate's tweets or even mentioning toxic masculinity, baguettes or cigars, which is definitely a record of some kind. So well done me. I'll give myself a pat on the back. Maybe a maybe a sixth coffee.

You know what? I'll give you one too. That was well done. It was great. Thanks everyone for tuning in. As always, patreon.com slash underworldpodcast or sign up through Spotify or iTunes for bonus episodes to support us and keep us going. We're going to launch our own Hustlers University soon, so stay tuned. Stay tuned for that. It'll basically just tell you what not to do. Yeah, good. Until next week.

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