Tempest in a Teacup

00:00:15
Speaker 1: Pushkin. All right, what do you want to start with?

00:00:21
Speaker 2: We have to start with green, just like if we were doing wines would start with whites and then go to reds. I don't think we should blow out our palettes too early. I mean, do you want to get to most of this? Do you have time?

00:00:36
Speaker 3: Not?

00:00:37
Speaker 1: Long ago, a man named Tony Ghebli 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, Oohlan, black and fermented oh and a seventh kinde. We'll get to that. So this is called.

00:01:17
Speaker 2: Lubell Luball, and it's from Guang Sea Province, and it is this tea was produced in two thousand and nine.

00:01:25
Speaker 1: Do you have to steep from ented tea for a long time?

00:01:28
Speaker 2: No? Typically not. I mean it instantly colored. Look at that.

00:01:33
Speaker 1: You call that the liquor. The liquor, yes, And if somebody put milk and sugar in his tea, you would you would shoot them.

00:01:44
Speaker 2: I do not like tea snops like, I am against tea snobbery.

00:01:48
Speaker 1: But 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 a two two sugar cubes, you would you would feel upset.

00:02:10
Speaker 2: I would say, Malcolm, you're not fully appreciating this tea, but I respect your preferences.

00:02:16
Speaker 1: Tony inhaled deeply into his teacup, then looked thoughtful.

00:02:21
Speaker 2: All right, I'll let you you both just lift up the liden and sniff that.

00:02:29
Speaker 1: Ooh it's I'm getting a little bit of a spina gea feel from that.

00:02:40
Speaker 4: Oh yeah, almost like a Swiss chart or something.

00:02:45
Speaker 1: 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 tea drunk. Jacob and I were definitely tea drunk. Oh it is interesting. Okay, tell me Tony.

00:03:05
Speaker 2: There's like a forest leaves, like a you know, a mat 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 vegetable note I'm getting from it. And then a little bit of like tire fire.

00:03:27
Speaker 1: That's like that proves you're from Jersey when you drink some tea and you're reaching to tire fire. My name is Malcolm Bladwell. 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 sixteenth, seventeen seventy three, when dozens of Bostonians dressed Mohawk Indians dumped three hundred and forty two chests of tea into Boston Harbor. Wait 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 a 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 gonna set the scene, Tony, I want you to be ready. It is. It is seventeen seventy. We are in Boston. We're on like Newbury Street or 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 Boohee. Boohee, the dominant tea of colonial New England shipped in from Fujan Province in China from the wu Yee Mountain range. Boohee 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 Grovener's drawing room at three o'clock as they have their boohee.

00:05:40
Speaker 2: 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.

00:05:59
Speaker 1: Tell me about boohee.

00:06:02
Speaker 2: This particular boohie is very heavy on the smoke. I do get in aroma of tea, though under that smoke, now that it's been steeped, I think I needed 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 vessel. It's about half fool. It's much smoother than I thought it was going to be. I thought it was going to be much more bitter and astringent and really require some sort of addition of milk or sugar.

00:06:35
Speaker 1: Delicious, refreshing, addictive.

00:06:40
Speaker 2: 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.

00:07:01
Speaker 1: So if you were drinking this Tony in seventy sixty, you're putting milk in it? Yeah, Are you putting sugar in it? Because they're loading it up with sugar?

00:07:13
Speaker 2: Yeah? Yeah, I yeah, back in that time, I would yes, if I was colonial Tony.

00:07:18
Speaker 1: 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 up 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 yearned 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 revisionist 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 soushong, lots of green tea, and of course boohee, 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 leathered 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?

00:09:22
Speaker 3: We're talking about hundreds of policies that were written during that period by a man named Ezekiel Price.

00:09:32
Speaker 1: 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?

00:10:05
Speaker 3: Yes? Probably Yes.

00:10:06
Speaker 1: 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 Price's 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.

00:11:13
Speaker 3: You could touch at some remote port in the British Ailese. 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 it's now legal. They've found some obliging customs officer in the Orkneys who's willing to stamp it as okay.

00:11:39
Speaker 1: 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.

00:12:04
Speaker 3: They run it ashore there and then bring it in into Boston. And there's really no way of telling them. The same thing happens if you could import things through RhoD 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 this porous place where all sorts of spuggle goods can trick it in.

00:12:37
Speaker 1: Then came 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 the same group of smugglers. And if I'm a smuggler, I'm delighted with non importation.

00:12:55
Speaker 3: Yes, yes, because you can sell more spuggle tea.

00:12:59
Speaker 4: Yeah.

00:13:00
Speaker 1: So during non importation, the amount of legit British tea must be shrinking to almost nothing, correct, so the smugglers have free reign at this point. Yes, the British are trying to raise money to defend the colonies by taxing the tea the colonists drink. But the colonists aren't paying attacks. 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 smuggler's 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 so applying to residents of the New World with their drug of choice boohee, that deliciously addictive tea varietyl 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.

00:15:10
Speaker 2: They're so One account I read was that someone steeped the tea and threw out 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 diaries of the time.

00:15:27
Speaker 1: Really, yeah, have you ever tried that? 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 Iani, an academic who had a theory about Americans and their criminal enterprises. Although calling Iyani an academic seems a little limiting.

00:15:59
Speaker 5: 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 eff. 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.

00:16:20
Speaker 1: Just Standjaniani that's Francis Eani'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. Eanni was like, why bother, Let's go solo. This is a tangent because Francis Iani is one of my favorite people that I've never met. We'll get back to Tea, I promise.

00:16:53
Speaker 5: So you'd have to go by dead reckoning to figure out where you were to come out on the other side.

00:16:58
Speaker 1: And so you wait a second, your dad has your parents have how many children? At this point? I have two brothers, so the three of you, you're the eldest.

00:17:08
Speaker 5: 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 true, go ahead, No.

00:17:20
Speaker 1: I'm just I'm just imagining this in my mind. So a young couple with a twelve year old of five year old and a three year old, yeah, 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. Francis Eanni 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.

00:17:56
Speaker 5: He had two wolves, well, he had several wolves, but he had two, and I think.

00:18:00
Speaker 1: I said actual the actual wolf.

00:18:02
Speaker 5: Did I sent you some pictures yesterday? There's one with him with the wolves.

00:18:08
Speaker 1: Actually, he called his wolves Romulus and Remus.

00:18:12
Speaker 5: In his apartment in New York, he had a monkey, a pet ofsalot, a baby alligator, and it used to be a huge point of contention between my parents because he would just bring these animals home anyway.

00:18:28
Speaker 1: One day in nineteen sixty four, Eanni is in Washington, DC. He's working for the Department of Education at that point, doing Francis Eanni kinds of things, and he runs into a man in a congressional waiting room who he would later call Uncle Phil, Philip Alcamo, a very wealthy, sophisticated man in his sixties. They start chatting. Uncle Phil tells Eanni that he's a lobbyist representing a group of Italian businessmen out of New York. Uncle Phil and Eanni 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 that mind if I studied them, like join the family for a few years? And because Francis Eanni is Francis Ianni, Uncle Phil says, sure. He convinces, he convinces essentially a perfect stranger to let him infiltrate essentially, I mean iffilciate. Maybe he's too strong a word a crime family.

00:19:52
Speaker 5: And I don't know how he did it, but as I say, he could talk his way into or out of anything.

00:19:58
Speaker 1: 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.

00:20:06
Speaker 5: He became friends with a lot of the police who working on this stuff.

00:20:10
Speaker 3: You know.

00:20:11
Speaker 5: 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.

00:20:23
Speaker 1: Iani 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 Lucases, one of the largest of the five major New York crime families. Serious gangsters. They had a lock on the trucking unions, particularly those were in Kennedy Airport. Iani spent a lot of time out on Long Island with the patriarch of the family, a man he called Giuseppe. I'm pretty sure that's his pseudonym for the legendary mob boss Tommy Lucasey, who came to America as a young man in nightnineteen 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, Iyani 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 Coleone 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 Iyanni'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.

00:23:32
Speaker 5: Look over the list of the murders you were involved in? Are there?

00:23:35
Speaker 2: How many nineteen serial killers don't have? Nineteen? Way worse than them.

00:23:43
Speaker 1: Gravano is totally matter of fact. You're half expecting him to count off all nineteen one by one on his fingers. Diane Sayer 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?

00:24:06
Speaker 5: What with that blood on my hand?

00:24:09
Speaker 4: What am I?

00:24:12
Speaker 2: I'm a gangster?

00:24:14
Speaker 3: That's exactly what I am.

00:24:15
Speaker 1: Gravano's not just a gangster. He's on TV admitting he's a gangster. Gravano had ratted out 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.

00:24:45
Speaker 6: So it was ninety six. I was at the China Club.

00:24:49
Speaker 1: This is Seabrook remembering the moment in an interview on the New York radio station Hot ninety seven.

00:24:55
Speaker 6: Was at the China Club when it was popping, and I've seen Karen, Jennifer Graziano, Drita and a couple of her friends. So you know, Karen was giving me the eye. Jennifer Number was looking at you know, Jay or whatever, reckless eyeball me.

00:25:07
Speaker 1: Karen Seabrook is a convicted felon.

00:25:10
Speaker 6: Well, my first case I was fourteen attempted murder. So back and forth from Regazzana and juvenile sis from New York State Division for Youth, and then I finally went to prison in eighty seven. I was nineteen. I came home as twenty six. I went back I was thirty two. I came on as forty one.

00:25:25
Speaker 2: Lord have mercy.

00:25:26
Speaker 1: 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 legit. 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.

00:25:57
Speaker 7: And you know, even my father's very honest with the kids, and it's like, don't be like me, be better than me. Learn from me. You know, my my nephew is great in baseball. My father's like every day go to you know, be a gangster. In another way, I whacked people. You can whack balls.

00:26:14
Speaker 1: My 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.

00:26:31
Speaker 6: Mind you, I started at the bottom. Well, lo and behold. I run the company now sixty employees. I'm the quality manager. So and we're looking to expand to about one hundred 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. Yeah, I don't think anybody would ever question whether or not you.

00:26:51
Speaker 1: So, how long would the Gravano's actually a crime family. Well, Sammy the Boll's parents were dressmakers in Bensonhurst, 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 middle age approaching. It's one and a half generations. That's it. It stops there.

00:27:17
Speaker 2: I don't know if I want to stay on Staten Island.

00:27:19
Speaker 1: Karen and Davids's daughter, Karina, wants nothing to do with the crooked life.

00:27:22
Speaker 2: 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.

00:27:30
Speaker 1: Karina was actually briefly on a reality show herself made in Staten Island. In the first episode, she takes a call from her grandfather.

00:27:39
Speaker 7: When you go to college, where you're going to go, it's going to stay in New York.

00:27:42
Speaker 1: Send me the bull has been out of prison on the drug trafficking wrap for two years.

00:27:46
Speaker 7: You never know what can happen for me on the East Coast.

00:27:48
Speaker 6: I could do one this. You're at an age now that you know you've got to look at possible mistakes that change your whole future.

00:27:55
Speaker 7: No, you're right, I know in New York you could get on the road track really easy.

00:28:00
Speaker 1: This was the great insight of Francis Eanni's work. Organized crime is not what people do when they have rejected the American dream. It's the opposite. People like the Lukeses and the Gravano's 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'Kaine 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.

00:28:34
Speaker 4: The greatest example of it was he was talking to Sandra Lanski, Mayor Lansky's order.

00:28:42
Speaker 1: This is Nick Poleggi, the mob expert who wrote the book on which the movie Goodfellows was based. Mayor Lansky was a legend in organized crime, and Pelegi asked Mayor Lansky's daughter Sandra about her dad's happiest moment.

00:28:55
Speaker 4: 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.

00:29:07
Speaker 1: As you can get.

00:29:08
Speaker 4: I mean, that's the world the worst bad guy. And she said, I looked over and my father was crying, Oh my god. His son was graduating from West Point. He was so, this is Meyer Lansky in the middle of West Point with all those guys throwing up their gloves crime. 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 Lane convertible, and Paul would not take it, gave him the keys back, Sokapa. I know he would not take the car because he knew what the car came from.

00:29:44
Speaker 1: The Lanski's 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 fies them, they retaliate with hot tar and feathers.

00:30:12
Speaker 3: It's interesting that in American history textbooks, turing feathering comes out of some sort of cute little thing the patriots do.

00:30:19
Speaker 2: But it's a.

00:30:19
Speaker 3: Really hideous thing to have hot tar poured all over you, and they'd have second or third degree burns as a result. You'll be scarf for a 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 nothinking of these people were terrified of their lives when the mob got hold of them.

00:30:45
Speaker 1: 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 Gravano's and the Lanskis, 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 front 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 enthralling, 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 and narrow. Here is my suggestion for July fourth. Enough with the fireworks and the parades in lot 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.

00:32:20
Speaker 5: Me.

00:32:21
Speaker 1: I'm thinking of some Lapsang Sushan, which is a super smoky black tea that I love, or at least I did until I talked to Tony Gebli 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 smoky With smoky teas.

00:32:41
Speaker 2: An issue, I don't know if it's an issue you.

00:32:45
Speaker 1: You gave me that look when I said I like lap saying, and then I'll.

00:32:47
Speaker 2: Be frank with you. There's a real like bro thing about Lapsang sush going on in especially tea world right now because they know it.

00:32:57
Speaker 4: But you are a T bro.

00:32:58
Speaker 2: You're a t bro. That's what I'm That's what I'm saying.

00:33:00
Speaker 1: You mean it's like for it's like the it's the macho choice.

00:33:03
Speaker 2: Is that what you mean? It's the macho choice?

00:33:05
Speaker 6: Oh?

00:33:05
Speaker 2: I like a smoky you know, like oh, like a Scotch Like oh gosh, yeah, like a powerful smoky punch, like akin to like I like to grill a lot kind of thing.

00:33:16
Speaker 1: 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 soushung in my hand as I toast the drugs smugglers, thugs and mobsters who saw in the promise of these United States a chance to go li chair. Happy Birthday America. Vision's History is produced by Meelabel and Jacob Smith with Camille Baptista. Our editor is Julia Barton. Lawn Williams is our engineer. Fact checking by Beth Johnson. Original music by Luis Giera. Special thanks to Carle Migliori, Heather Fame, Maggie Taylor, Maya Kanig, and el Hefe. Jacob Iceber. Revision's history is brought to you by Pushkin Industries. I'm Malcolm Battler.

00:34:24
Speaker 2: The reason I said Lapsang Soushong is a bit of a bro tea, it's 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 smoke.

00:34:52
Speaker 1: It's out of control. But I I'm intrigued by the notion that people like me are ruining tea. That's kind of that's it. I'm not feeling a little guilty.

00:35:01
Speaker 2: Ruining t I don't want to look like a bad guy, a.

00:35:04
Speaker 1: Part of the bro, A part of the bro over smoking.

00:35:09
Speaker 2: No, it's it's all right. And and and I don't know what type of lap thanks to showing you're drinking, it could be great.

00:35:18
Speaker 1: Mm hmm.