Pushkin. All right, what do you want to start with? We have to start with green, just like if we were doing wines, we'd start with whites and then go to reds. I don't think we should blow out our pallets too early. I mean, if you do, you want to get to most of this, do you have time? Not long ago, a man named Tony Gebli came to my apartment, young guy, dark hair, grew up in New Jersey. He runs something called tea Epicure, which does for specialty tea what Robert Parker did for wine, analyzes it and rates it. Tony had a big backpack with him and carefully unwrapped its contents, a thermometer to make sure we didn't overheat the water. A mini Chinese teapot called a guy wan, some special Norwegian teacups and tea six kinds green, yellow, white, oolong, black, and fermented. Oh and a seventh kind. We'll get to that. So this is called lu Bal Luebal, and it's from Guangxi Province, and it is this tea was produced in two thousand and nine. Do you have to steep fermented tea for a long time? No? Typically not. I mean it instantly colored the water. Look at that. You called that the liquor. The liquor, yes, yeah, And if somebody put milk and sugar in his tea, you would you would shoot them. I do not like tea snobs, like I am against t snobbery. I was gonna say, this tea is special. It came from this famous collector. You're down to your last little bits of it. If I would have walked in and pour, like, you know, a big, a big chunk of half and half in it and and two to two sugarcubes, you would you would feel all upset. I would say, Malcolm, you're not fully appreciating this tea, but I respect your your preferences. Tony inhaled deeply into his tea cup, then looked thoughtful, all right, I'll let you you both just lift up the lid and sniffed that. Ooh it's I'm getting a little bit of a spinachy feel from that. Oh yeah, almost like a Swiss chart or something. Yeah, never gotten that from a tea before. We had had a lot of tea by this point. Me my producer, Jacob Tony. Tony says, it's an actual phenomenon called being te drunk. Jacob and I were definitely t drunk. Oh, it is interesting, Okay, tell me Tony. There's like a forest leaves, like a you know, mad on the forest floor of brown leaves. I've that bit of earthiness with a there's like a roasted carrot going on in there. For me, that's the vegetile note I'm getting from it. And then a little bit of like tire fire. That's like, that's the that proves you're from Jersey when you drink some tea and you're reaching to tire fire. My name is Malcolm Gladwell. You're listening to Revisionist History, my podcast about things overlooked and misunderstood. This episode is a special production in honor of America's birthday, the fourth of July. It's about the Boston Tea Party, one of the first and most critical steps on the path to American independence December sixty, seventeen seventy three, when dozens of Bostonians dressed as Mohawk Indians dumped three hundred and forty two chests of tea into Boston Harbor. Wait, wait, hold on, hold on, I know what you're thinking. The Boston Tea Party was a protest against British oppression. It was an act of principle. The gang that threw the tea overboard called themselves the Sons of Liberty. No taxation without representation, blah blah blah. We'll get to that, but let's start with the fact that is so glaringly obvious that it stuns me that so many Americans have overlooked it. It was the Boston Tea Party, not the Molasses Party, not the Pewter Mug Party. The whole thing was about tea. Wait, so we're going to set the scene, Tony. I want you to I want you to be ready. It is seventeen seventy. We are in Boston. We're unlike Newberry Street, where I don't know if Newbury was still around then, but we are having our We're at the home of like you know, Governor Grove. We're having afternoon tea and he's served up a little booh boohee, the dominant tea of colonial New England, shipped in from Fujian Province in China from the woo Yee Mountain range. Boohe is what the Sons of Liberty dumped overboard on the night of the Boston tea party, Tony, like you to tell us what is that experience for the people in Governor Grovenor's drawing room at three o'clock as they have their boohe. So everyone would be talking about the news of the day and sharing snacks various sweets and pastries, sweetmeats, preserved fruits, nuts, etc. Yeah, and sipping tea multiple cups of it. Can tell me about boohee. This particular boohe is very heavy on the smoke. I do get an aroma of tevo under that smoke. Now it has been steeped. I think I needed that that water to hit it that I wasn't getting in the dry leaf after steeping it for that long. And I put a lot of leaf in there. You saw how much I put in this in this vessel. It's about half full. It's much smoother than I thought it was going to be. I thought it was gonna be much more bitter and astringent and really require some sort of addition of milk or sugar. Delicious, refreshing, addictive. There's a very deep leathery taste. And when I say leathery, I mean like that smell of like your mother's purse. Or something a very earthy, leathery smell like dirty almost. So if you were drinking this stony in seventy sixty, you're putting milk in it? Yeah? Are you putting sugar in it? Because they're loading it up with sugar? Yeah? Yeah, back in that time, I would yes, if I was Colonial Tony. Absolutely, Colonial Tony drinks this with sugar. I don't know. I somehow think Colonial Tony even then, has his standards intact. I'll tell you this about colonial Tony. He would not have put on war paint in the middle of a December night and dumped three hundred and forty two chests of Boohey into Boston Harbor. If you love tea, if you yearn for that deep, leathery taste, fortified by milk and sugar, why would you throw it overboard? Well exactly. It's for questions like these that we have provisionist history. You'll remember, I'm sure the history of the American Revolution that you were taught in high school. The British were spending a lot of money in North America. They had a big army defending their colonies against Native American and a French. They wanted the colonists to help with at least some of that burden, so they imposed a series of tariffs and duties over the course of the seventeen sixties and early seventeen seventies, the Stamp Act, the Navigation Act, and so on. But the colonists object, no taxation without representation. They start a boycott of all imported British products, principally tea. Because tea is big business in the seventeen sixties, the colonists are drinking extraordinary amounts of it oolong sushong, lots of green tea, and of course boohe that deep leathery taste. They are addicted to it. In Boston, the boycott is led by some of the town's most prominent businessmen, and a few years ago a historian named John Tyler wonders, who are these merchants leading the fight against British tea? What is the nature of their business? So he goes to the Boston Athenaeum on Beacon Street, one of the oldest independent libraries in the United States, ornate, high ceiling, enormous lettered windows, founded in eighteen oh seven, full of all sorts of treasures, and Tyler starts digging through old insurance records in the Athenaeum archives. I mean, is this a bass set of boxes? I mean, what are we talking about here? We're talking about hundreds of policies that we're written during that period by a man named Ezekiel Price. Tyler is an elegant, man cultivated patrician, just retired after thirty six years teaching history at Groton, one of the exclusive private boarding schools of New England. His theory is that insurance records are a pretty good way of finding out what someone's business really is, what they're buying, selling, where they're sourcing their goods, Because you may lie to the government or your competitors, but you have no reason to lie to your insure about what you're up to. So when you go in these insurance records. First of all, does this mean you're the first historian to have gone through the insurance records? Yes? Probably Yes. As Tyler works his way through Ezekiel Price his policies, he notices something unusual at the time. If you were a colony of the British Crown, you had to import all of your products through England on English ships, but in prices records. It showed that a lot of the cargo coming into Boston hadn't stopped in England at all. Other times, the customs records would say one thing, this ship has all the right clearances, but the insurance records on the same ship would say something completely different. And sometimes the premiums were really high, way too high for what should have been routine voyages. The patriots of Boston, Tyler realizes, are smugglers tea smugglers. Historians had always suspected as much because there was a lot of smuggling in those days, but Tyler shows that it's everywhere everyone. Some of the biggest names in Boston. John Hancock is in the middle of it. They're shipping in tea from China via Amsterdam and then onto America through some circuitous route you could touch at some remote port in the British Isles. Oftentimes, when they're coming from Amsterdam they go to the Orkney Islands. They allege that they have declared their cargo there and so therefore itsdam legal. They've found some obliging customs officer in the Orkneysers willing to stamp it as okay. In a trove of old documents at Harvard Business School, Tyler stumbled across another gold mine, a list made up by a big colonial era shipping company of every bribe and ruse they used to get tea into Massachusetts. In that case, they landed the cargo in Plymouth, just down the coast from Boston. Thomas Hutchinson, the governor of Massachusetts, was powerless to stop it. They run it ashore there and then bring it in into Boston. And that's really no way of telling them. The same thing happens if you could import things through Rhode Island, where Hutchinson refers to Rhode Island as that abandoned little colony still is where there's no regulation at all, and therefore it's that's poorous. In a place where all sorts of suggs can trickle them, then can the big boycott of British imports. It was called the non importation movement, supposedly a principled stand against taxation without representation. But who's behind that Many of the same group of smugglers. And if I'm a smuggler, I'm delighted with non importation. Yes, yes, because you can sell more a smuggled tea. So during non importation, the amount of legit British team must be shrinking to almost nothing. Correct, so the smugglers that have free reign. At this point, the British are trying to raise money to defend the colonies by taxing the tea the colonists drink. But the colonists aren't paying the tax. They're all drinking cheaper illegal tea. So the British do the logical thing. They passed the Tea Act of seventeen seventy three, which cuts the cost of the tea imported through proper channels. Now the legal stuff is as affordable as the illegal stuff. So what do the Patriots do. They dress up as Mohawk Indians, sneak out into Boston Harbor and throw three hundred and forty two chests of perfectly good Boohey into the water. The Tea Act was an attempt to put the smugglers out of business. The Boston Tea Party was the smugglers attempt to stay in business. Let me spell it out for you. Underneath the lofty rhetoric of the Patriots of New England was a criminal enterprise, a vast smuggling operation illicitly applying the residence of the New World with their drug of choice boohe, that deliciously addictive tea varietal with a dark liquor and a deep leathery taste. The foundational myth of the American Republic is not righteous, freedom loving citizens rising up against oppression. No, it's drug dealers defending their turf. You know why this episode is airing July fourth, that day when Americans jump up and down and detonate explosives to celebrate their independence from Britain. It's airing July fourth because you Americans have a problem. The story you tell each other about your nation's independence is full of holes. You need a new story. So I'm going to do you a favor. I'm going to give you one. But first I'm curious about whether in that era, in that sort of those first few generations and people are getting to know tea? Yeah, are they given instructions about how to make it? Are they how are they? Do we know how they're steeping it and how they're so One account I read was that someone steeped the tea and throughout the liquor and then use the leaves and put butter and salt on them and eat them as a salad that was in like one of the prominent families of diaries of the time. Really, yeah, have you ever tried that? But that tastes good? So many questions, all right, I think we need to start over take two on the real meaning of the American Revolution. Let me introduce you to Francis Ianni, an academic who had a theory about Americans and their criminal enterprises. Although calling Iani an academic seems a little limiting, he decided, I guess this is after we've been there about six months. He decided to drive to Nairobi and he it's I think I can't remember the exact iffence. It might be six seven hundred miles. But back then there were places where there literally wasn't a road. There were I don't think there was any paved road, and you'd be driving along and all of a sudden the road would just stand. Juanianni, that's frances Iianni's eldest son, talking about how his father moved his family to Ethiopia in the early nineteen sixties and decided one day to drive to Nairobi. All they had was a Volkswagen minibus, which isn't exactly built for off road adventures. Back then, people who made the journey did it in a convoy. Ianni was like, why bother, Let's go solo. This is a tangent because frances Ianni is one of my favorite people that I've never met. We'll get back to Tea, I promise. So you'd have to go by dead reckoning to figure out where you were to come out on the other side. And so you wait a second. Your dad has your parents have how many children? At this point? I have two brothers, so there's three of you. You're the eldest. I'm the eldest. My brothers are eight and ten years younger than I am. At the time there were this was nineteen sixty, so they were five and three, and of course my mother was go ahead. I'm just I'm just imagining this in my mind. So a young couple with a twelve year old to five year old and a three year old set across set out to drive in a Volkswagen minibus from Addis to Nairobi in nineteen sixty. Yeah, it's like the most hilarious I've ever heard. Frances Ianni ended up as a professor at Columbia University. What he was a professor of is slightly unclear, since he was the kind of person who did whatever he wanted, but some combination of anthropology and sociology and stuff Francis Ianni thought was interesting. He had two wolves, well, he had several wolves, but he had two, and I think I said actual, the actual wold. I sent you some pictures yesterday. There's a one with him with the wolves. Actually, he called his wolves Romulus and Remus. In his apartment in New York, he had a monkey, a pet awful lot, a baby alligator, and it used to be a huge pointed contention between my parents because he would just bring these animals home. Anyway. One day in nineteen sixty four, Ianni is in Washington, d C. He's working for the Department of Education at that point, doing Francis Ianni kinds of things, and he runs into a man in a congressional waiting room who he would later call Uncle Phil, Philip al Como, a very wealthy, sophisticated man in his sixties. They start chatting. Uncle Phil tells Ianni that he's a lobbyist representing a group of Italian businessmen out of New York. Uncle Phil and Iyanni become friends. They start spending time together. Uncle Phil introduces him to some of his clients, and Ianni realizes, Oh, the group of Italian businessmen out of New York that Uncle Phil is talking about is actually one of the big mafia families. Ianni is the man who drove his family from Ethiopia tonight Arobi on a whim, and who later kept wolves, ocelots and alligators in his apartment. Ten guesses what he did next. He said to Uncle Phil, can I meet your mafia clients? In fact, do you think they'd mind if I studied them, like joined the family for a few years? And because Francis Ianni is Francis Ianni, Uncle Phil says sure. He convinces he convinced essentially a perfect stranger to let him infiltrate. Essentially, I mean, infl j baby's too strong a word, a crime family. And I don't know how he did it, but as I say, he could talk his way into or out of anything. And by the way, in the middle of his time hanging out with the mafia, Ianni talked his way onto the New York City Organized Crime Task Force. He became friends with a lot of the police, who we're working on this stuff. You know. He knew a lot of cops in New York, spent a lot of time with them, and he would manage to talk to both sides and convince both sides he was on their side. Ianni ended up writing a book about his experience, called A Family Business. He called the family he was embedded with the Loopolos, a pseudonym. All identifying names in the book were changed. Back in the day, there was a lot of speculation among mafia experts about who the Lopolos really were. After a lot of digging, I'm now convinced that it was the Luke Cases, one of the largest of the five major New York crime families. Serious gangsters. They had a lock on the trucking unions, particularly those working Kennedy Airport. Ianni spent a lot of time out on Long Island with a patriarch of the family, a man he called Giuseppe. I'm pretty sure that's his pseudonym for the legendary mob boss Tommy lu Casey, who came to America as a young man in nineteen eleven from Palermo. A Family Business came out in nineteen seventy two, nineteen seventy two, by the way, is the same year that the Godfather movie comes out. It's like the high watermark of America mafia fascination. But Iani's book is nothing like The Godfather. Nobody gets whacked, nobody goes to jail, nobody goes to the mattresses, nobody betrays anyone. It's not a crime book. It's a book about business. By nineteen seventy, Iani calculated that there were forty two fourth generation members of the family, and only four of those forty two were still involved in the family's crime businesses. The rest were all respectable members of the upper middle class. The kids went to fancy colleges. One daughter was married to a judge's son, another to a dentist. One was completing a master's degree in psychology. Another was a member of the English department at a liberal arts college. There were several lawyers, a physician, a stockbroker. Uncle Phil's son was an accountant who lived on an estate in the posh Old Westbury section of Long Island's north shore. His granddaughter rode horses and was a show jumper. His grandson was an up and coming yachtsman, and Uncle Phil himself lived in Manhattan, collected art and was a regular at the opera. The Lucases had gone legit. Now does that surprise you. The signature line in The Godfather is Michael Corleone saying, just when I thought I was out, they pulled me back in. He wants to go legit, and he can't. A lot of the mythology around crime says that's the pattern. Crime is addictive. Once you're in the underworld, you lose contact with the real world, you reject its values. But A Yanni's point is that the far more typical trajectory is the one he described with the Lucases. Here's another example of the lure of going legit. Salvatore Sammy the Bull Gravano, notorious mobster underboss of the Gambino family. Here he is being interviewed by Diane Sawyer in nineteen ninety seven on ABC Primetime. Look over the list of the murders you were involved in. There, how many nineteen serial killers don't have nineteen? We're worse than them. Gravano is totally matter of fact. You're half expecting him to count off all nineteen one by one on his fingers. Diane Sawyer does the full double take, then comes back at him again. One of the people on that list was Gravano's brother in law. How could you face yourself? She asks, how could you face your wife? Did you say? What have I become? With that blood on my hands? What am I? I'm a gangster? That's exactly what I am. Gravano is not just a gangster. He's on TV admitting he's a gangster. Gravano had rated at his boss, John Gotti in exchange for immunity for his crimes. He went into witness protection, but then he left witness protection and started up a drug trafficking ring with his wife, his daughter Karen, and his son. They grossed five hundred thousand dollars a week before it all came crashing down. In the middle of this, his daughter Karen meets a man named David Seabrook. So it was ninety six. I was at the China Club. All this is Seabrook remembering the moment in an interview on the New York radio station Hot ninety seven. At the China Club when it was popping, and I've seen Karen, Jennifer, Graziano, Drida and a couple of her friends. Okay, so you know, Karan was giving me the eye, Jennifer, and I was looking at you know, jail whatever, reckless eyeball meet Karl right. Seabrook is a convicted felon. Well, my first case I was fourteen, attempted murder. So back and forth from Recas Island Juvenile sys FRO New York State Division for Youth, and they're not filing with the prison. In eighty seven, I was nineteen. I came home. Mars twenty six, I went back. I was thirty two. I came on Mas forty one. Lord have mercy. Seabrook and Karen Gravano get engaged, have a daughter together named Karina. But before they can get married, David gets sent away in the last of those convictions for a drug dealing operation with his baby mama's father, Sammy the Bull Gravano. This is a serious crime family, except they all want to go to the jet. Karen Gravano got probation on the drug charge and ended up on the VH one reality show Mob Wives, where Sammy the Bull got to play doting granddad. And you know, even my father is very honest with the kids and it's like, don't be like me, be better than me. Learn from me. You know, my nephew is great in baseball. My father's like every day go to you know, be a gangster. In another way, I waxed people. You can whack balls. Myb wives ran for six seasons. Karen gave up a thriving career as a drug dealer for reality TV. David Seabrook meanwhile, got a bachelor's degree in prison and finished a business degree after his sentence, then found a company that would hire him despite five felony convictions. Minds, you started at the bottom, Well, long behold. I run the company now sixty employees. I'm the quality manager. So and we look into expand to about one hundred and twenty employees within the next six months. So I mean, in my opinion, that's a success story. In my opinion, considering, I think it's a I don't think. I don't think anybody would ever question whether or not you have. So how long would the Gravano's actually a crime family. Well, Sammy the Ball's parents were dressmakers in benson Hurst, Brooklyn. They were legit. Sammy went bad as a teenager and stayed bad for his whole life. That's one generation. Then came Karen and David, but they were only crooked until they saw a middle age approaching. It's one and a half generations. That's it. It stops there. I don't know if I want to stay on Staten Island. Karen and David's daughter, Karina, wants nothing to do with the crooked life. And I have so much bigger dreams and bigger plans that I have to keep my head straight and I want to break the pattern of my family. Karina was actually briefly on a reality show herself made in Staten Island. In the first episode, she takes a call from her grandfather. When you go to college, where you're going to go, it's going to stay in New York. Send me the bull has been at a prison on the drug trafficking rap for two years. You never know what can happen for me on the East Coast. I could do one this. You're at an age now that you know you got to look at possible mistakes that change your whole future. Oh, you're right, and normal New York. You could get on the wrong track. Really, this was the great insight of Francis Ianni's work organized crime. It's not what people do when they have rejected the American dream. It's the opposite. People like the Lucases and the Gravanos desperately believed in the American dream, but they felt marginalized, locked out, so they took a temporary detour. There's even a wonderful phrase coined by the sociologist James O'Kane for that temporary detour, the crooked ladder. You climb the crooked ladder until you get high enough to get to the straight part of the ladder. The greatest example of it was he was talking to Sandra Lansky meyer Lansky's daughter. This is Nick Poleggi, the mob expert who wrote the book on which the movie Goodfellas was based. Mayer Lanski was a legend in organized crime, and Poleggi asked meyer Lansky's daughter, Sandra about her dad's happiest moment. She said, we drove up to West Point to see my brother Paul graduate from West Point. Now this had to be like the fifties, but meyer Lansky was about as famous as you can get. That's the world the worst bad guy. And she said, I looked over and my father was crying, Oh my God, that his son was graduating from West Point. He was so this Meyer Lansky in the middle of West Point with all those guys throwing up their gloves crying. It was so he was so happy. And so when Paul, the son, Paul came over, everybody hugged and kissed Meyer. She said, my father reached in his pocket and gave Paul the keys to a brand new fair Land convertible, and Paul would not take it, gave him the keys back, So Kapa, he would not take the car because he knew what the car came from. The Lanskys were a one generation crime family. So what are the sons of Liberty back in the seventeen seventies. Well, the criminals, there's no question about that. During the non importation movement in particular, they get very nasty with anyone who dares to defy them. John Tyler lays it all out, intimidation, blackmail, violence. When someone fids them, they retaliate with hot tar and feathers. It's interesting that an American history textbooks, turring feathering comes out as some sort of cute little thing the patriots do. It's a really hideous thing. To have hot tar poured all over you and you have second or third degree burns as a result, you'll be scarred for life and then have to have this tar removed from your skin, from your hair from it. I mean, it was a hideous thing to do, to say, not thinking of these people were terrified of their lives when the mob got a hold of them. Yeah, the mob. That's where the mob came from, the streets of colonial Boston. But if they are mobsters, they are mobsters in the same sense as the Lucases and the Gravanos and the Landskis, because the minute they can go straight, they do. I mean, what's the signing of the Declaration of Independence? It's a bunch of criminals dressing up in wigs and coats and rebranding themselves as the founding fathers. Isn't this the real lesson of the Great American experiment, that the promise of the American dream is so powerful, so enthrawling, that even the most hardened criminals want nothing more than to climb the ladder to respectability. Oh and by the way, after the birth of the American Republic, what do you think the newly formed Congress and state governments did with imported tea. They taxed it higher than before, because what looks like oppression when you're climbing the crooked ladder looks totally legitimate once you're on the straight narrow. Here is my suggestion for July fourth. Enough with the fireworks and the parades, a let of everything we've just heard that would be a little unseemly. Do they have a big holiday in Miami to celebrate the anniversary of the first cocaine shipment from Columbia? No, they don't. And the whole beer by the barbecue situation. Personally, I would rethink that too. If you're going to be drinking anything this July fourth, it should be tea. Me. I'm thinking of some Lap Sang Sushan, which is a super smoky black tea that I love, or at least I did until I talked to Tony Gabli about this and he said, I'm quoting. Hopefully I can change that notion of yours. What's your You have a you have an issue with smokey with smokey teas an issue. I don't know if it's an issue. You gave me that look when I said I like lap saying and then I'll be frank with you. There's a real um like brow thing about lap Sang sushan going on in especially T world right now, because I know it. But you're a te bro. You're a T bro. That's what I'm That's what I'm saying. You mean, it's like for it's like the it's the macho choice. Is that what you mean? It's the macho choice? Oh? I like it smokey, you know, like, oh my gosh, yeah, like a powerful smoky punch, like akin to like I like to grill a lot kind of thing. Stop right there, Tony, as it happens, I do like to grill a lot, And I'll be grilling some steaks this July fourth with a steaming cup of Lapsang sushung in my hand as I toast the drug smugglers, thugs and mobsters who saw in the promise of these United States a chance to call la Ja Happy Birthday. America. Vision's History is produced by Meilabal and Jacob Smith with Camille Baptista. Our editor is Julia Barton. Flawn Williams is our engineer. Fact checking by Beth Johnson. Original music by Luis Gara. Special thanks to Carly Migliori, Heather Fane, Maggie Taylor, Maya Kanig, and l Hefe Jacob Weisberg. Religion's history is brought to you by Pushkin Industries. I'm Malcolm Batwa. The reason I said Lapsang Sushong is a bit of a bro tea, uh, is because I feel like males really took to that style of tea. And when that happened, when when the tea producers saw that happening, the level of smoke kept getting more and more extreme, to the point where like it's just all smokey, it's out of control. But I mean, I'm intrigued by the notion that people like me are ruining tea. That's kind of that's it. I'm now feeling a little guilty. I don't want to look like a bad guy. I'm part of the bro. I'm part of the bro over smoking. You didn't no, it's it's all right. And and and I don't know what type of lapsang sushong you're drinking. It could be great

Pushkin. All right, what do you want to start with? We have to start with green, just like if we were doing wines, we'd start with whites and then go to reds. I don't think we should blow out our pallets too early. I mean, if you do, you want to get to most of this, do you have time? Not long ago, a man named Tony Gebli came to my apartment, young guy, dark hair, grew up in New Jersey. He runs something called tea Epicure, which does for specialty tea what Robert Parker did for wine, analyzes it and rates it. Tony had a big backpack with him and carefully unwrapped its contents, a thermometer to make sure we didn't overheat the water. A mini Chinese teapot called a guy wan, some special Norwegian teacups and tea six kinds green, yellow, white, oolong, black, and fermented. Oh and a seventh kind. We'll get to that. So this is called lu Bal Luebal, and it's from Guangxi Province, and it is this tea was produced in two thousand and nine. Do you have to steep fermented tea for a long time? No? Typically not. I mean it instantly colored the water. Look at that. You called that the liquor. The liquor, yes, yeah, And if somebody put milk and sugar in his tea, you would you would shoot them. I do not like tea snobs, like I am against t snobbery. I was gonna say, this tea is special. It came from this famous collector. You're down to your last little bits of it. If I would have walked in and pour, like, you know, a big, a big chunk of half and half in it and and two to two sugarcubes, you would you would feel all upset. I would say, Malcolm, you're not fully appreciating this tea, but I respect your your preferences. Tony inhaled deeply into his tea cup, then looked thoughtful, all right, I'll let you you both just lift up the lid and sniffed that. Ooh it's I'm getting a little bit of a spinachy feel from that. Oh yeah, almost like a Swiss chart or something. Yeah, never gotten that from a tea before. We had had a lot of tea by this point. Me my producer, Jacob Tony. Tony says, it's an actual phenomenon called being te drunk. Jacob and I were definitely t drunk. Oh, it is interesting, Okay, tell me Tony. There's like a forest leaves, like a you know, mad on the forest floor of brown leaves. I've that bit of earthiness with a there's like a roasted carrot going on in there. For me, that's the vegetile note I'm getting from it. And then a little bit of like tire fire. That's like, that's the that proves you're from Jersey when you drink some tea and you're reaching to tire fire. My name is Malcolm Gladwell. You're listening to Revisionist History, my podcast about things overlooked and misunderstood. This episode is a special production in honor of America's birthday, the fourth of July. It's about the Boston Tea Party, one of the first and most critical steps on the path to American independence December sixty, seventeen seventy three, when dozens of Bostonians dressed as Mohawk Indians dumped three hundred and forty two chests of tea into Boston Harbor. Wait, wait, hold on, hold on, I know what you're thinking. The Boston Tea Party was a protest against British oppression. It was an act of principle. The gang that threw the tea overboard called themselves the Sons of Liberty. No taxation without representation, blah blah blah. We'll get to that, but let's start with the fact that is so glaringly obvious that it stuns me that so many Americans have overlooked it. It was the Boston Tea Party, not the Molasses Party, not the Pewter Mug Party. The whole thing was about tea. Wait, so we're going to set the scene, Tony. I want you to I want you to be ready. It is seventeen seventy. We are in Boston. We're unlike Newberry Street, where I don't know if Newbury was still around then, but we are having our We're at the home of like you know, Governor Grove. We're having afternoon tea and he's served up a little booh boohee, the dominant tea of colonial New England, shipped in from Fujian Province in China from the woo Yee Mountain range. Boohe is what the Sons of Liberty dumped overboard on the night of the Boston tea party, Tony, like you to tell us what is that experience for the people in Governor Grovenor's drawing room at three o'clock as they have their boohe. So everyone would be talking about the news of the day and sharing snacks various sweets and pastries, sweetmeats, preserved fruits, nuts, etc. Yeah, and sipping tea multiple cups of it. Can tell me about boohee. This particular boohe is very heavy on the smoke. I do get an aroma of tevo under that smoke. Now it has been steeped. I think I needed that that water to hit it that I wasn't getting in the dry leaf after steeping it for that long. And I put a lot of leaf in there. You saw how much I put in this in this vessel. It's about half full. It's much smoother than I thought it was going to be. I thought it was gonna be much more bitter and astringent and really require some sort of addition of milk or sugar. Delicious, refreshing, addictive. There's a very deep leathery taste. And when I say leathery, I mean like that smell of like your mother's purse. Or something a very earthy, leathery smell like dirty almost. So if you were drinking this stony in seventy sixty, you're putting milk in it? Yeah? Are you putting sugar in it? Because they're loading it up with sugar? Yeah? Yeah, back in that time, I would yes, if I was Colonial Tony. Absolutely, Colonial Tony drinks this with sugar. I don't know. I somehow think Colonial Tony even then, has his standards intact. I'll tell you this about colonial Tony. He would not have put on war paint in the middle of a December night and dumped three hundred and forty two chests of Boohey into Boston Harbor. If you love tea, if you yearn for that deep, leathery taste, fortified by milk and sugar, why would you throw it overboard? Well exactly. It's for questions like these that we have provisionist history. You'll remember, I'm sure the history of the American Revolution that you were taught in high school. The British were spending a lot of money in North America. They had a big army defending their colonies against Native American and a French. They wanted the colonists to help with at least some of that burden, so they imposed a series of tariffs and duties over the course of the seventeen sixties and early seventeen seventies, the Stamp Act, the Navigation Act, and so on. But the colonists object, no taxation without representation. They start a boycott of all imported British products, principally tea. Because tea is big business in the seventeen sixties, the colonists are drinking extraordinary amounts of it oolong sushong, lots of green tea, and of course boohe that deep leathery taste. They are addicted to it. In Boston, the boycott is led by some of the town's most prominent businessmen, and a few years ago a historian named John Tyler wonders, who are these merchants leading the fight against British tea? What is the nature of their business? So he goes to the Boston Athenaeum on Beacon Street, one of the oldest independent libraries in the United States, ornate, high ceiling, enormous lettered windows, founded in eighteen oh seven, full of all sorts of treasures, and Tyler starts digging through old insurance records in the Athenaeum archives. I mean, is this a bass set of boxes? I mean, what are we talking about here? We're talking about hundreds of policies that we're written during that period by a man named Ezekiel Price. Tyler is an elegant, man cultivated patrician, just retired after thirty six years teaching history at Groton, one of the exclusive private boarding schools of New England. His theory is that insurance records are a pretty good way of finding out what someone's business really is, what they're buying, selling, where they're sourcing their goods, Because you may lie to the government or your competitors, but you have no reason to lie to your insure about what you're up to. So when you go in these insurance records. First of all, does this mean you're the first historian to have gone through the insurance records? Yes? Probably Yes. As Tyler works his way through Ezekiel Price his policies, he notices something unusual at the time. If you were a colony of the British Crown, you had to import all of your products through England on English ships, but in prices records. It showed that a lot of the cargo coming into Boston hadn't stopped in England at all. Other times, the customs records would say one thing, this ship has all the right clearances, but the insurance records on the same ship would say something completely different. And sometimes the premiums were really high, way too high for what should have been routine voyages. The patriots of Boston, Tyler realizes, are smugglers tea smugglers. Historians had always suspected as much because there was a lot of smuggling in those days, but Tyler shows that it's everywhere everyone. Some of the biggest names in Boston. John Hancock is in the middle of it. They're shipping in tea from China via Amsterdam and then onto America through some circuitous route you could touch at some remote port in the British Isles. Oftentimes, when they're coming from Amsterdam they go to the Orkney Islands. They allege that they have declared their cargo there and so therefore itsdam legal. They've found some obliging customs officer in the Orkneysers willing to stamp it as okay. In a trove of old documents at Harvard Business School, Tyler stumbled across another gold mine, a list made up by a big colonial era shipping company of every bribe and ruse they used to get tea into Massachusetts. In that case, they landed the cargo in Plymouth, just down the coast from Boston. Thomas Hutchinson, the governor of Massachusetts, was powerless to stop it. They run it ashore there and then bring it in into Boston. And that's really no way of telling them. The same thing happens if you could import things through Rhode Island, where Hutchinson refers to Rhode Island as that abandoned little colony still is where there's no regulation at all, and therefore it's that's poorous. In a place where all sorts of suggs can trickle them, then can the big boycott of British imports. It was called the non importation movement, supposedly a principled stand against taxation without representation. But who's behind that Many of the same group of smugglers. And if I'm a smuggler, I'm delighted with non importation. Yes, yes, because you can sell more a smuggled tea. So during non importation, the amount of legit British team must be shrinking to almost nothing. Correct, so the smugglers that have free reign. At this point, the British are trying to raise money to defend the colonies by taxing the tea the colonists drink. But the colonists aren't paying the tax. They're all drinking cheaper illegal tea. So the British do the logical thing. They passed the Tea Act of seventeen seventy three, which cuts the cost of the tea imported through proper channels. Now the legal stuff is as affordable as the illegal stuff. So what do the Patriots do. They dress up as Mohawk Indians, sneak out into Boston Harbor and throw three hundred and forty two chests of perfectly good Boohey into the water. The Tea Act was an attempt to put the smugglers out of business. The Boston Tea Party was the smugglers attempt to stay in business. Let me spell it out for you. Underneath the lofty rhetoric of the Patriots of New England was a criminal enterprise, a vast smuggling operation illicitly applying the residence of the New World with their drug of choice boohe, that deliciously addictive tea varietal with a dark liquor and a deep leathery taste. The foundational myth of the American Republic is not righteous, freedom loving citizens rising up against oppression. No, it's drug dealers defending their turf. You know why this episode is airing July fourth, that day when Americans jump up and down and detonate explosives to celebrate their independence from Britain. It's airing July fourth because you Americans have a problem. The story you tell each other about your nation's independence is full of holes. You need a new story. So I'm going to do you a favor. I'm going to give you one. But first I'm curious about whether in that era, in that sort of those first few generations and people are getting to know tea? Yeah, are they given instructions about how to make it? Are they how are they? Do we know how they're steeping it and how they're so One account I read was that someone steeped the tea and throughout the liquor and then use the leaves and put butter and salt on them and eat them as a salad that was in like one of the prominent families of diaries of the time. Really, yeah, have you ever tried that? But that tastes good? So many questions, all right, I think we need to start over take two on the real meaning of the American Revolution. Let me introduce you to Francis Ianni, an academic who had a theory about Americans and their criminal enterprises. Although calling Iani an academic seems a little limiting, he decided, I guess this is after we've been there about six months. He decided to drive to Nairobi and he it's I think I can't remember the exact iffence. It might be six seven hundred miles. But back then there were places where there literally wasn't a road. There were I don't think there was any paved road, and you'd be driving along and all of a sudden the road would just stand. Juanianni, that's frances Iianni's eldest son, talking about how his father moved his family to Ethiopia in the early nineteen sixties and decided one day to drive to Nairobi. All they had was a Volkswagen minibus, which isn't exactly built for off road adventures. Back then, people who made the journey did it in a convoy. Ianni was like, why bother, Let's go solo. This is a tangent because frances Ianni is one of my favorite people that I've never met. We'll get back to Tea, I promise. So you'd have to go by dead reckoning to figure out where you were to come out on the other side. And so you wait a second. Your dad has your parents have how many children? At this point? I have two brothers, so there's three of you. You're the eldest. I'm the eldest. My brothers are eight and ten years younger than I am. At the time there were this was nineteen sixty, so they were five and three, and of course my mother was go ahead. I'm just I'm just imagining this in my mind. So a young couple with a twelve year old to five year old and a three year old set across set out to drive in a Volkswagen minibus from Addis to Nairobi in nineteen sixty. Yeah, it's like the most hilarious I've ever heard. Frances Ianni ended up as a professor at Columbia University. What he was a professor of is slightly unclear, since he was the kind of person who did whatever he wanted, but some combination of anthropology and sociology and stuff Francis Ianni thought was interesting. He had two wolves, well, he had several wolves, but he had two, and I think I said actual, the actual wold. I sent you some pictures yesterday. There's a one with him with the wolves. Actually, he called his wolves Romulus and Remus. In his apartment in New York, he had a monkey, a pet awful lot, a baby alligator, and it used to be a huge pointed contention between my parents because he would just bring these animals home. Anyway. One day in nineteen sixty four, Ianni is in Washington, d C. He's working for the Department of Education at that point, doing Francis Ianni kinds of things, and he runs into a man in a congressional waiting room who he would later call Uncle Phil, Philip al Como, a very wealthy, sophisticated man in his sixties. They start chatting. Uncle Phil tells Ianni that he's a lobbyist representing a group of Italian businessmen out of New York. Uncle Phil and Iyanni become friends. They start spending time together. Uncle Phil introduces him to some of his clients, and Ianni realizes, Oh, the group of Italian businessmen out of New York that Uncle Phil is talking about is actually one of the big mafia families. Ianni is the man who drove his family from Ethiopia tonight Arobi on a whim, and who later kept wolves, ocelots and alligators in his apartment. Ten guesses what he did next. He said to Uncle Phil, can I meet your mafia clients? In fact, do you think they'd mind if I studied them, like joined the family for a few years? And because Francis Ianni is Francis Ianni, Uncle Phil says sure. He convinces he convinced essentially a perfect stranger to let him infiltrate. Essentially, I mean, infl j baby's too strong a word, a crime family. And I don't know how he did it, but as I say, he could talk his way into or out of anything. And by the way, in the middle of his time hanging out with the mafia, Ianni talked his way onto the New York City Organized Crime Task Force. He became friends with a lot of the police, who we're working on this stuff. You know. He knew a lot of cops in New York, spent a lot of time with them, and he would manage to talk to both sides and convince both sides he was on their side. Ianni ended up writing a book about his experience, called A Family Business. He called the family he was embedded with the Loopolos, a pseudonym. All identifying names in the book were changed. Back in the day, there was a lot of speculation among mafia experts about who the Lopolos really were. After a lot of digging, I'm now convinced that it was the Luke Cases, one of the largest of the five major New York crime families. Serious gangsters. They had a lock on the trucking unions, particularly those working Kennedy Airport. Ianni spent a lot of time out on Long Island with a patriarch of the family, a man he called Giuseppe. I'm pretty sure that's his pseudonym for the legendary mob boss Tommy lu Casey, who came to America as a young man in nineteen eleven from Palermo. A Family Business came out in nineteen seventy two, nineteen seventy two, by the way, is the same year that the Godfather movie comes out. It's like the high watermark of America mafia fascination. But Iani's book is nothing like The Godfather. Nobody gets whacked, nobody goes to jail, nobody goes to the mattresses, nobody betrays anyone. It's not a crime book. It's a book about business. By nineteen seventy, Iani calculated that there were forty two fourth generation members of the family, and only four of those forty two were still involved in the family's crime businesses. The rest were all respectable members of the upper middle class. The kids went to fancy colleges. One daughter was married to a judge's son, another to a dentist. One was completing a master's degree in psychology. Another was a member of the English department at a liberal arts college. There were several lawyers, a physician, a stockbroker. Uncle Phil's son was an accountant who lived on an estate in the posh Old Westbury section of Long Island's north shore. His granddaughter rode horses and was a show jumper. His grandson was an up and coming yachtsman, and Uncle Phil himself lived in Manhattan, collected art and was a regular at the opera. The Lucases had gone legit. Now does that surprise you. The signature line in The Godfather is Michael Corleone saying, just when I thought I was out, they pulled me back in. He wants to go legit, and he can't. A lot of the mythology around crime says that's the pattern. Crime is addictive. Once you're in the underworld, you lose contact with the real world, you reject its values. But A Yanni's point is that the far more typical trajectory is the one he described with the Lucases. Here's another example of the lure of going legit. Salvatore Sammy the Bull Gravano, notorious mobster underboss of the Gambino family. Here he is being interviewed by Diane Sawyer in nineteen ninety seven on ABC Primetime. Look over the list of the murders you were involved in. There, how many nineteen serial killers don't have nineteen? We're worse than them. Gravano is totally matter of fact. You're half expecting him to count off all nineteen one by one on his fingers. Diane Sawyer does the full double take, then comes back at him again. One of the people on that list was Gravano's brother in law. How could you face yourself? She asks, how could you face your wife? Did you say? What have I become? With that blood on my hands? What am I? I'm a gangster? That's exactly what I am. Gravano is not just a gangster. He's on TV admitting he's a gangster. Gravano had rated at his boss, John Gotti in exchange for immunity for his crimes. He went into witness protection, but then he left witness protection and started up a drug trafficking ring with his wife, his daughter Karen, and his son. They grossed five hundred thousand dollars a week before it all came crashing down. In the middle of this, his daughter Karen meets a man named David Seabrook. So it was ninety six. I was at the China Club. All this is Seabrook remembering the moment in an interview on the New York radio station Hot ninety seven. At the China Club when it was popping, and I've seen Karen, Jennifer, Graziano, Drida and a couple of her friends. Okay, so you know, Karan was giving me the eye, Jennifer, and I was looking at you know, jail whatever, reckless eyeball meet Karl right. Seabrook is a convicted felon. Well, my first case I was fourteen, attempted murder. So back and forth from Recas Island Juvenile sys FRO New York State Division for Youth, and they're not filing with the prison. In eighty seven, I was nineteen. I came home. Mars twenty six, I went back. I was thirty two. I came on Mas forty one. Lord have mercy. Seabrook and Karen Gravano get engaged, have a daughter together named Karina. But before they can get married, David gets sent away in the last of those convictions for a drug dealing operation with his baby mama's father, Sammy the Bull Gravano. This is a serious crime family, except they all want to go to the jet. Karen Gravano got probation on the drug charge and ended up on the VH one reality show Mob Wives, where Sammy the Bull got to play doting granddad. And you know, even my father is very honest with the kids and it's like, don't be like me, be better than me. Learn from me. You know, my nephew is great in baseball. My father's like every day go to you know, be a gangster. In another way, I waxed people. You can whack balls. Myb wives ran for six seasons. Karen gave up a thriving career as a drug dealer for reality TV. David Seabrook meanwhile, got a bachelor's degree in prison and finished a business degree after his sentence, then found a company that would hire him despite five felony convictions. Minds, you started at the bottom, Well, long behold. I run the company now sixty employees. I'm the quality manager. So and we look into expand to about one hundred and twenty employees within the next six months. So I mean, in my opinion, that's a success story. In my opinion, considering, I think it's a I don't think. I don't think anybody would ever question whether or not you have. So how long would the Gravano's actually a crime family. Well, Sammy the Ball's parents were dressmakers in benson Hurst, Brooklyn. They were legit. Sammy went bad as a teenager and stayed bad for his whole life. That's one generation. Then came Karen and David, but they were only crooked until they saw a middle age approaching. It's one and a half generations. That's it. It stops there. I don't know if I want to stay on Staten Island. Karen and David's daughter, Karina, wants nothing to do with the crooked life. And I have so much bigger dreams and bigger plans that I have to keep my head straight and I want to break the pattern of my family. Karina was actually briefly on a reality show herself made in Staten Island. In the first episode, she takes a call from her grandfather. When you go to college, where you're going to go, it's going to stay in New York. Send me the bull has been at a prison on the drug trafficking rap for two years. You never know what can happen for me on the East Coast. I could do one this. You're at an age now that you know you got to look at possible mistakes that change your whole future. Oh, you're right, and normal New York. You could get on the wrong track. Really, this was the great insight of Francis Ianni's work organized crime. It's not what people do when they have rejected the American dream. It's the opposite. People like the Lucases and the Gravanos desperately believed in the American dream, but they felt marginalized, locked out, so they took a temporary detour. There's even a wonderful phrase coined by the sociologist James O'Kane for that temporary detour, the crooked ladder. You climb the crooked ladder until you get high enough to get to the straight part of the ladder. The greatest example of it was he was talking to Sandra Lansky meyer Lansky's daughter. This is Nick Poleggi, the mob expert who wrote the book on which the movie Goodfellas was based. Mayer Lanski was a legend in organized crime, and Poleggi asked meyer Lansky's daughter, Sandra about her dad's happiest moment. She said, we drove up to West Point to see my brother Paul graduate from West Point. Now this had to be like the fifties, but meyer Lansky was about as famous as you can get. That's the world the worst bad guy. And she said, I looked over and my father was crying, Oh my God, that his son was graduating from West Point. He was so this Meyer Lansky in the middle of West Point with all those guys throwing up their gloves crying. It was so he was so happy. And so when Paul, the son, Paul came over, everybody hugged and kissed Meyer. She said, my father reached in his pocket and gave Paul the keys to a brand new fair Land convertible, and Paul would not take it, gave him the keys back, So Kapa, he would not take the car because he knew what the car came from. The Lanskys were a one generation crime family. So what are the sons of Liberty back in the seventeen seventies. Well, the criminals, there's no question about that. During the non importation movement in particular, they get very nasty with anyone who dares to defy them. John Tyler lays it all out, intimidation, blackmail, violence. When someone fids them, they retaliate with hot tar and feathers. It's interesting that an American history textbooks, turring feathering comes out as some sort of cute little thing the patriots do. It's a really hideous thing. To have hot tar poured all over you and you have second or third degree burns as a result, you'll be scarred for life and then have to have this tar removed from your skin, from your hair from it. I mean, it was a hideous thing to do, to say, not thinking of these people were terrified of their lives when the mob got a hold of them. Yeah, the mob. That's where the mob came from, the streets of colonial Boston. But if they are mobsters, they are mobsters in the same sense as the Lucases and the Gravanos and the Landskis, because the minute they can go straight, they do. I mean, what's the signing of the Declaration of Independence? It's a bunch of criminals dressing up in wigs and coats and rebranding themselves as the founding fathers. Isn't this the real lesson of the Great American experiment, that the promise of the American dream is so powerful, so enthrawling, that even the most hardened criminals want nothing more than to climb the ladder to respectability. Oh and by the way, after the birth of the American Republic, what do you think the newly formed Congress and state governments did with imported tea. They taxed it higher than before, because what looks like oppression when you're climbing the crooked ladder looks totally legitimate once you're on the straight narrow. Here is my suggestion for July fourth. Enough with the fireworks and the parades, a let of everything we've just heard that would be a little unseemly. Do they have a big holiday in Miami to celebrate the anniversary of the first cocaine shipment from Columbia? No, they don't. And the whole beer by the barbecue situation. Personally, I would rethink that too. If you're going to be drinking anything this July fourth, it should be tea. Me. I'm thinking of some Lap Sang Sushan, which is a super smoky black tea that I love, or at least I did until I talked to Tony Gabli about this and he said, I'm quoting. Hopefully I can change that notion of yours. What's your You have a you have an issue with smokey with smokey teas an issue. I don't know if it's an issue. You gave me that look when I said I like lap saying and then I'll be frank with you. There's a real um like brow thing about lap Sang sushan going on in especially T world right now, because I know it. But you're a te bro. You're a T bro. That's what I'm That's what I'm saying. You mean, it's like for it's like the it's the macho choice. Is that what you mean? It's the macho choice? Oh? I like it smokey, you know, like, oh my gosh, yeah, like a powerful smoky punch, like akin to like I like to grill a lot kind of thing. Stop right there, Tony, as it happens, I do like to grill a lot, And I'll be grilling some steaks this July fourth with a steaming cup of Lapsang sushung in my hand as I toast the drug smugglers, thugs and mobsters who saw in the promise of these United States a chance to call la Ja Happy Birthday. America. Vision's History is produced by Meilabal and Jacob Smith with Camille Baptista. Our editor is Julia Barton. Flawn Williams is our engineer. Fact checking by Beth Johnson. Original music by Luis Gara. Special thanks to Carly Migliori, Heather Fane, Maggie Taylor, Maya Kanig, and l Hefe Jacob Weisberg. Religion's history is brought to you by Pushkin Industries. I'm Malcolm Batwa. The reason I said Lapsang Sushong is a bit of a bro tea, uh, is because I feel like males really took to that style of tea. And when that happened, when when the tea producers saw that happening, the level of smoke kept getting more and more extreme, to the point where like it's just all smokey, it's out of control. But I mean, I'm intrigued by the notion that people like me are ruining tea. That's kind of that's it. I'm now feeling a little guilty. I don't want to look like a bad guy. I'm part of the bro. I'm part of the bro over smoking. You didn't no, it's it's all right. And and and I don't know what type of lapsang sushong you're drinking. It could be great