When Florida state wildlife officials begin to suspect that someone is illegally harvesting alligator eggs, they launch Operation Alligator Thief. At its heart: a veteran officer named Jeff Babauta...
In the 1980s, Philadelphia was in the midst of a trash crisis. A sanitation workers’ strike had left the city with an immense backlog of garbage. The solution: Ship it overseas, on a rusting cargo ...
Today, Lawless Planet brings you an episode from our friends at Drilled Media. Season 12 of their flagship podcast is called SLAPP’d, and it tells another side of a story we covered earlier in our ...
We’re doing something different on Lawless Planet this week. We’re sharing an episode from our friends Scamfluencers — a show that unpacks the wildest true stories of high-profile scams and the con...
When scam artist Gregory Zaoui got out of prison in 2004, he had a plan to go straight – by selling solar panels. But when he learned about a new carbon trading system that was supposed to reduce C...
When oil tankers, freighters and cruise ships reach the end of their lives, nearly all wind up on just three beaches in South Asia. There, unskilled workers earning just a few dollars a day tear th...
Humans have a long history of deploying wild beasts in wartime, from horse-mounted cavalry to Hannibal riding into Rome on an elephant. After Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, a mysterious group of d...
Note: This episode originally aired on July 28, 2025.When a Montana coal mine executive goes missing it exposes the dirty underbelly of one of America’s largest coal mines. Now, with the help of Pr...
What occurred shortly after midnight in Bhopal, India on December 3, 1984 is still being felt – and fought over – four decades later. The scale of the tragedy, involving a pesticide factory an...
On April 20, 2010, the crew aboard the Deepwater Horizon oil rig was in the final stages of sealing up an exploratory well off the coast of Louisiana. It should have been a routine procedure, but s...
In April 2010, the Deepwater Horizon offshore oil rig exploded in the Gulf of Mexico, killing 11 workers and leading to the biggest oil spill in U.S. history. But for Deepwater’s operator, BP, it w...
When a young oil worker goes missing on Fort Berthold Indian Reservation in North Dakota, an indigenous amateur detective named Lissa Yellow Bird-Chase becomes determined to solve the mystery of hi...
The daughter of civil rights activists, Catherine Coleman Flowers grew up in Lowndes County, Alabama, one of the poorest parts of the Deep South. When she learned that some residents were being jai...
Greenpeace has a long history of successful direct action protest, but their work has made a lot of enemies. Recently, the U.S. arm of the environmental group was found liable for $660 million in d...
Two years after Hamas attacked Israel on October 7th, 2023, Israel continues its brutal military assault in Gaza. But long before the current conflict, Israeli strikes on infrastructure, control ov...
In the aftermath of a right-wing coup in 2009, Honduras invested in several new clean energy projects, including a hydroelectric dam on a river sacred to the local indigenous population. When activ...
Less than a year after the Russian invasion of Ukraine, a series of undersea explosions rocked the Baltic Sea. The target: the Nord Stream pipelines, which supply Russian natural gas to Western Eur...
The urgency of solving the climate crisis makes finding a quick fix very tempting. So a few years ago when Nikola CEO Trevor Milton unveiled a hydrogen-powered truck that only emitted water, compan...
In the Democratic Republic of the Congo, a massacre of gorillas in Virunga National Park highlights the constant threat of violence from militias, poachers and gangsters. All that stands in their w...
For nearly 40 years, New York’s private waste removal industry was the domain of the mob, until an undercover cop risked everything to take it down. The gripping tale of what happened next also rai...
