60 Minutes - 07/20/2025: The Vatican’s Orphans, A Tutor for Every Student, The Mezcaleros

Episode Date: July 21, 2025

From 1950 to 1970, the Vatican sent thousands of Italian children to eager American Catholics for adoption. The children entered the United States on orphan visas. The trouble was most of the children were not orphans. They were the children of unwed mothers, many of whom were alive and searching for their children. How the Vatican got into the orphan business is the subject of The Price of Children, a book by author Maria Laurino. Bill Whitaker speaks to Laurino and to American adoptees still struggling with the decades of separation from their birth families. Correspondent Anderson Cooper explores AI in the classroom and learns how the education nonprofit Khan Academy teamed up with the AI company OpenAI to enhance teacher efficiency and deepen student learning. Cooper previews a voice and vision technology from OpenAI, and test-drives a pioneering online tutor named “Khanmigo” from Khan Academy to experience firsthand how the two companies are hoping to help shape the future of education. Mezcal is having its moment. This handcrafted Mexican spirit, made from agave, has seen exponential growth in popularity and production. Correspondent Cecilia Vega travels to Oaxaca and meets the mezcaleros laboring to quench the world’s thirst for mezcal. The deeper you travel into Oaxaca’s countryside, the harder mezcaleros cling to their ancestral methods and the louder they’ll tell you: there’s a price to pay for this mezcal boom. To learn more about listener data and our privacy practices visit: https://www.audacyinc.com/privacy-policy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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looking for. Their bodies are the scene of the crime. No symptoms in history or clues. You saved her life. We're doctors and we're detectives. I kind of love it if I'm being honest. Solve the puzzle, save the patient. Watson all episodes now streaming on Paramount Plus. Mary Rolato grew up in Ohio longing for a large family, only to find out that she had one in Italy. It was years before she could ask her birth mother the most painful question of all, why was she given away? The church convinced her that it was the best thing for her.

And so instead of helping her, it was better for them to make money selling babies. So am I angry at the church? Hell yeah. We're preparing a demo for 60 minutes to show people what ChatGPD can do with VoiceMode with Vision. We're about to show you a technological innovation that could one day change the way every child in every school in America is taught.

The location is spot on. The brain is right there in the head. As for the shape, it's a good start. Don't patronize me. It's an online tutor powered by artificial intelligence. You can ask a follow-up question. Designed to help teachers be more efficient and students learn more effectively. Good work, Gaila.

Tick, tick, tick, tick. Artisanal mezcal resists machinery. The agave is roasted in underground pits for days. Then it's crushed by horse-drawn mill. The mash is fermented in wooden barrels and distilled twice in copper vats. No temperature dials or controls. The mash is fermented in wooden barrels and distilled twice in copper vats. No temperature dials or controls.

Bubbles indicate the alcohol content. Who knows more about the process? I think he may know more. But I drink it more. I'm Leslie Staub. I'm Bill Whitaker. I'm Anderson Cooper. I'm Sharon Alfonsi. I'm John Stahl. I'm Bill Whitaker. I'm Anderson Cooper. I'm Sharon Alfonsi.

I'm John Wertheim. I'm Cecilia Vega. I'm Scott Pelli. Those stories tonight on 60 Minutes. The new BMO VI Porter MasterCard is your ticket to more. More perks. More points. More flights.

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Their bodies are the scene of the crime. Their symptoms and history are clues. You saved her life. We're doctors and we're detectives. I kind of love it if I'm being honest. Solve the puzzle, save the patient. Watson. All episodes now streaming on Paramount+. During the 1950s, the Catholic Church in Belgium separated thousands of newborns from their

unwed mothers and put them up for adoption, often without the mother's consent. The women were shamed into surrendering their babies by their families and a powerful church. Last fall, Pope Francis apologized for those forced adoptions. But Belgians weren't the only victims. From 1950 to 1970, the Vatican sent 3,500 Italian children to America on something called an orphan visa. The trouble was, most were not orphans. Like their Belgian counterparts, they too were the children of unwed mothers. Many mothers later went searching for their children only to discover they had been sent

across an ocean. As we first reported last year, thousands of American adoptees are still struggling to piece together their lost lives. It was a day he'll never forget. American adoptee John Campitelli was 28 years old when he was reunited with his Italian birth mother. He'd been searching for her for more than a decade, a mother he'd been told had abandoned him. My mom said, you know, 28 years had gone by. I've never been able to bake a cake for you for your birthday.

She says, I don't care what month it is. I'm going to bake you a cake. We need to celebrate, because our prodigal son has finally come home. John Campitelli was born Piero Davi in 1963 in Italy. His mother, Francesca, was unmarried and forced by her family to give him up. He was sent to a Catholic run institution

for the children of unwed mothers. Shunned and disgraced, Francesca handed her baby to the nuns. Immediately, her name was stripped from the birth records. With the stroke of a pen, Piero Davi became an orphan. Campitelli showed us the church documents that changed his life. It says here, they have been in since birth and their whereabouts are unknown. They knew damn well where my mom was. I mean, she showed her documents when she handed me over. So this is an outright lie. A lie John Campitelli has spent his life unraveling. As soon as he was declared an orphan, he was eligible for adoption and a U.S. visa.

He says his mother told him she had no idea. She had every intention of coming back for him. She said, I never signed a paper anywhere saying that I was willing to give you up. She thought placing you in the institution was temporary? She thought that it would be her right to be able to get me back someday once she got her life together.

She never signed you away? No, she said, I placed you because I couldn't keep you at that point in time because of the family situation, but I never consented to the adoption or to the fact that you would leave Italy and you'd be far from me for the rest of my life. Piero Davi was one of thousands of children

born out of wedlock that the Vatican repackaged as orphans. The Church arranged the visas, helped by a 1950 U.S. law that broadened the definition of orphan to include a child with one parent, but one who couldn't provide care. With that leeway, the orphan program boomed. For Piero's mother and thousands like her, it was devastating to learn the child

she'd entrusted to the church had disappeared. It seems that many of these mothers had no idea that their children were being sent to the United States. Could they do anything about it? No, absolutely not. You can't send a baby to the United States. Could they do anything about it? No, absolutely not. You can't send a baby to the United States and then tell the adoptive parents that the birth mother wants the child.

Author Maria Larino uncovered the Vatican's orphan program in her book, The Price of Children. She pieced the story together from hundreds of documents in the Church's own archives in New York. Larino told us the program hinged on a consent form the mothers were supposed to sign severing all rights to the child. But Larino told us doctors or lawyers sometimes signed the consent without telling the mother. Others were deliberately misled.

There were women who were trapped into this situation and tremendous pressure to relinquish their children. There were women who were tricked, who signed forms they didn't understand. And in the worst cases, there were women who were told their child had died. Told their child had died. Yes.

What do you make of that? Yeah, it's so horrible. The thinking, I've been told, was that it was an easier psychological closure to tell a birth mother that her child had died than to let her know that her child had been given up for adoption. So representatives of the church were telling these mothers that their children had died,

when in fact they had not, and they had been sent to the United States? Yes. Lorino told us many more women were told they could get their children back. She found letters from distraught mothers pleading for their return. Now these are letters that were found in the archives? That's correct. This is a letter to Reverend Landy, Monsignor Landy. I beg that my children be repatriated.

If I cannot again see my children, I will shorten my life. I find myself deceived and I do not even know how. Monsignor Landy was Andrew Landy, an American priest living in Rome who ran the orphan program. Landy's boss had the ear of the pope. In 1951, Pope Pius XII personally saw the first children off. Thousands more would follow. How could they be defined as orphans?

I know. If they still have a mother, or in many cases a father, still alive. Yes, and to talk to the adopted children today, they get very angry to say, I'm not an orphan. I spent years searching for my parents, but it was a linguistic construction. The church charged $475 per child, about $4,500 today. But Larrino told us the demand from eager American Catholics grew so fast that Monsignor Landy sent local priests to scour the countryside for more children. The correspondent shows that they traveled throughout Italy looking for cases for children

to send. Literally looking for babies born out of wedlock. It actually turned into a machine. Yes. Looking for babies to send to the United States. Right. John Campitelli told us he had a loving family in New York. But when he found out he was adopted,

he says he became obsessed with finding his birth mother. There were few clues. Even his surname, Davi, was a dead end, invented by the state to cut all ties. Finally, he persuaded an Italian newspaper to publish his story. And then, a breakthrough. Someone knew his mother. In 1991, he spoke to her for the first time. She said, all right, are you Piero? Well, no, I'm John. Oh, no, I'm really Piero. Okay, I'm your son.

So you were nervous. I was really nervous, because it's something that I always wanted to do, but when the moment comes, you're like... Kind of tongue-tied. Yeah, yeah, I was tongue-tied. I finally get to talk to the person that actually gave birth to me,

that held me, that had breastfed me for two or three days in the hospital. So I know that she loved me. What was her voice like to you? It brought me to tears, I must admit. And we said we were never gonna let go of each other from then on. Two months later, he was on a flight to Italy.

We had exchanged photographs, but I said I didn't need a photograph, and let go of each other from then on. Two months later, he was on a flight to Italy. We had exchanged photographs, but I said, I didn't need a photograph, because I saw that lady there in front of me, and I said, that's my mom. She looks identical to me. And after 28 years, I can say that, you know, I just ran over to her and I embraced her.

And I said, Mom, finally, I kissed her. I said, Mom, no one had to tell me who you were. I knew who you were. I just had to look at you. Campitelli moved to Italy and learned Italian to speak to his birth family. But he told us that didn't undo the suffering the church had caused. I felt that my whole life was based on a lie. They told her that they would take care of me, and that was a lie. They got rid of me. They didn't take care of me, and that was a lie. They got rid of me, they didn't take care of me.

They cut all relationship that I could possibly have with my birth family, and they shipped me overseas. I became a package for them. To this day, the church insists the orphan program was the only chance for a new life for these children. Lorino told us Monsignor Landy, who ran the program, died in 1999 without ever expressing any regrets. I think that he believed in the merit of the program,

that they were bringing children to good Catholic homes, and that these children would be raised well in the United States. How does that explanation sit with you now? Terribly, I mean, because this is how women were treated. And this is why I think of them as disposable women. Disposable? Yeah. It's a terrible thing to give up your child.

But nobody was thinking about these women then. Bella Familia, Mamma Mia. American adoptee Mary Rilotto travels off into Italy to see her birth family. She told us she had a happy life growing up in Ohio, but she says she longed for a large family only to find out she had one. It was 1992 when she first met Anna Maria, her birth mother. The only thing I could do was stare and look at every inch of her for at least an hour.

And you're dumbfounded. Not only does she look like me, but she acts like me. I act like her. We're the same weight. It's almost like this is my twin, but older. I know exactly what I'm gonna look like when I get older. So now I pay attention to my health. Mother and daughter say they're still learning

about each other. Rolado told us it was years before she could ask the most painful question of all. Why was she given away? I just needed to know her story, her truth, because no mother gives up their child so willingly without grief. Do you now understand why she gave you up?

Because she didn't have a piece of bread she said to give us. Poverty. She didn't have clothes for us. She was in a desperate situation, you know. So instead of the church helping her maintain a house and feed her children, instead they took her children. Instead, they took her children. Grazie, Jesus Christ. Anna Maria is now 83.

Molto bello. She agreed to speak with us if we withheld her last name. Even decades later, the stigma of having children out of wedlock remains. She told us about her other child, Christian, who was sent to a church-run institution when she became ill. But when she went to pick him up, she says the nuns told her he had died. I went into depression, Anna Maria told us.

I searched for him everywhere. How did he die? Where was he buried? Nobody could tell me. Did you believe that your son was dead? Something inside me didn't feel right, but I could do nothing about it. Ciao, Christian.

But Christian had not died. He told us he learned the truth about his mother at age 40. Anna Maria says the church had put him up for adoption without telling her. It was a swindle, she told us. They stole the child that they wanted. So what was it like for you when you found that Christian was in fact alive. I have no words, she told us. There were lots of tears and hugs.

The Vatican's orphan program ended in 1970, but the fallout continues, rippling across generations. Mary Rolato told us she never should have been sent to America. I think the church convinced her that it was the best thing for her. And so instead of helping her, it was better for them to make money selling babies. That's all I can think of. So am I angry at the church? Hell yeah, I am. I would have a different life, too.

And while it might have been difficult, I am. I would have a different life too. And while it might have been difficult, I still would have survived it without this kind of grief that I have inside of me now. Tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick Brought to you by Square. You're not just running a restaurant, you're building something big. And Square's there for all of it. Giving your customers more ways to order, whether that's in person with Square Kiosk or online. Instant access to your sales,

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Whenever it hits you, wherever you are, grab an O. Henry Bar to satisfy your hunger. With its delicious combination of big, crunchy, salty peanuts covered in creamy caramel and chewy fudge with a chocolatey coating. Swing by a gas station and get an O. Henry today. O. Hungry, O. Henry. We're about to show you a technological innovation that could one day change the way every child

and every school in America is taught. It's an online tutor powered by artificial intelligence designed to help teachers be more efficient and students learn more effectively. It's called Conmigo. Conmigo means with me in Spanish, and Khan is its creator, Sal Khan, the well-known founder of Khan Academy, whose lectures and educational software have been used for years by tens of millions of students and teachers in the U.S. and around the world.

As we first reported last year, Khanmigo was built with the help of OpenAI, the creator of ChatGPT. Its potential is staggering, but it's still very much a work in progress. It's being piloted in 266 school districts in the U.S. in grades 3 through 12. We went to Hobart High School in Indiana to see how it works. Good morning. Just a normal day in chem, right? At 8 in the morning, Melissa Higginson knows it's not always easy to get 30 high schoolers excited about chemistry. Are you ready? Are you ready? All right. That's not always easy to get 30 high schoolers excited about chemistry.

Are you ready? Are you ready? Yeah. All right. That's what I want to hear. But these days, she has help. This is acetic acid. The pipette's not going to fell all the way.

That lesson Higginson has displayed behind her and is explaining to her ninth and tenth graders was created with the assistance of Conmigo. She told the AI tutor she wanted a four-day course in which her students would investigate the physical and chemical properties of matter. This next section is your research section. It took Conmigo minutes to come up with a detailed lesson plan that would have taken Higgison a week to create.

You pull that computer back out, you're gonna go back to Conmigo research. And the students have Conmigo on their laptops, too, ready to help them with their questions. We have a couple of questions that we need to ask Conmigo. So for example, I asked it, what are three examples of acids? And if I wanted to know more... So it gave you three examples of acids, like hydrochloric acid, citric, and sulfuric. Yeah, like, can you give me more examples?

And if I wanted to know even more I could ask it like what specifically some of the acids do. So it's giving you acids and then it's asking you a question. Can you think of any other household items that might contain acid? Yeah, so like it wants to help you understand like what it's telling you and not just like give you the information. Finding creative ways to help kids learn is something Sal Khan has been doing since 2005. He'd gotten degrees in math, computer science and engineering from MIT and an MBA from Harvard and was working as a hedge fund analyst when he started recording math tutorial videos in his closet for his young cousins. Not long after, with the help of donors including Bill Gates, he quit his career in finance

and started the non-profit Khan Academy. From the beginning of Khan Academy, the true north was how do you give more students at least approximations of the type of personalization they would get if they had a personal tutor. A wealthy family can afford a tutor for their child if every kid could have a private tutor that would level the playing field. Yeah, that's the dream. Co-founders of OpenAI Greg Brockman and Sam Altman were fans of Khan Academy and hoped to evaluate their AI using Khan's database of test questions and content.

So they gave Sal Khan early access to an advanced AI technology that today underpins ChatGPT. What did you immediately think? It was pretty obvious this technology was gonna transform society. So it was pretty heady stuff. But on the education side, it was like, wow, people are gonna be able to use this for doing deep fakes and fraud and cheat

but if Used well with the right guardrails It center could also be used to support students to give them more feedback to support teachers for all this Lesson planning and progress report writing that they spend hours a week doing item level analysis educators and engineers at Khan Academy used openAI's technology to build Conmigo. We're going to be using Conmigo for this. And for the last year and a half, the teachers and kids at Hobart High School and others have been testing it out. I'll ask you a question.

We sat down with two students from that morning chemistry class, Austin and Abigail, as well as Leydon and Maddie, who use Conmigo in business class, and Lou and Lily, who use it in English and for SAT preparation. I heard people at Khan Academy came and asked students to break it. Yes. Yes. That was the fun part. That was.

Some students would try and trick it into just giving you the answer. The superintendent I talked to said that some students were bullying Conmigo for the answer. Yeah, I think that was the elementary school kids. Oh yeah, okay, blame it on the elementary school kids. Yeah. It's very helpful for those students who maybe don't feel comfortable asking questions within class.

Does it have a personality? It's very much there for you. Like, it's very positive, it's very reassuring. It's getting me thinking and it's not just giving me an answer. Do you ever just want to be like, can you just give me the answer? Yeah. That was the hardest part for I know like me and a lot of other students. Like, why isn't it giving me answers?

At the end of the day, that's where your better answer is going to be. It's not going to be whatever the AI gives you. It's going to be whatever you create. So your hypothesis going into the last test is? Teachers at Hobart High don't just use Conmigo to help plan lessons and save dozens of hours a week. They also monitor their students' understanding of subjects in ways they never could before. You can track how a student is actually using Conmigo.

Yeah. I'm going to click usage. And then if I wanted to pick a specific student, I could come down here and really dive into what that student's been looking at Conmigo. And this is real time, because you saw Abigail this morning looking at acids and bases. So wait a minute.

These are the footprints of Abigail's work. these are the footprints of Abigail's work. These are the footprints of Abigail's work. At 8 AM she was asking about acids and chemical reactions. So even though you may not be hovering over the student at any given moment, you're somewhere else in the classroom, you can later check, oh, this is what Abigail was looking, I understand her thought process on why she got these answers.

Absolutely. So it gives me a lot of insight as a teacher in terms of who I need to spend that one-on-one time with. Maybe Conmigo throws in a mastery challenge or something. SoundCon says they won't sell the data they collect through Conmigo or give it to other tech companies. They do use it, however, to improve Conmigo's memory and personalization. It'll guide them to sort of what to do first.

Sarah Robertson, a former English teacher who's now a Conmigo product manager, showed us a new feature they've developed to help kids write better and think more critically. I found this essay that I wrote. To test it, I gave Conmigo a paper I wrote in sixth grade about my mom, Gloria Vanderbilt. So go ahead and click Next Start Revising.

After just 90 seconds, Conmigo delivered a very detailed evaluation of my essay. Okay. It liked some of what I wrote. The use of a quote to start the essay is effective and sets the tone for the rest of the biography. But suggested I should revise several paragraphs and my topic sentence.

So I'm going to rewrite my sixth grade paper. After a few minutes of tweaking. Ask it what it thinks. What do you think? It says connecting childhood events to our later life will make your essay more cohesive and insightful. I mean yeah, it's good advice. I can tell you as a former seventh grade English teacher when I assigned an essay I would limit myself to 10 minutes per essay. I had 100 students. So it would take me 17 hours to give feedback on every single student's first draft. The burden that we place on teachers to give that specific, timely, actionable feedback is just so great that it's not possible.

So I've now plugged in... To see if Conmigo could catch me cheating, I asked ChatGPT to write a paragraph about my mom and pasted it into my essay. I now see that there's a critical flag. Conmigo immediately sent an alert to Sarah Robertson. It says that you pasted 66 words while revising from an unknown source. So if I click on that now, it's gonna load your essay

and it's gonna show me exactly what you just did. I'm so busted. You're busted. Do you want to work with a three-digit or a four-digit number? Conmigo is free for all teachers in the U.S., but school districts have to pay up. Fifteen dollars per student per year to cover computation costs, and it's still being improved. We got a hint of how Conmigo might evolve when Greg Brockman, president of OpenAI, stopped by Sal Khan's office

to give us an early look at their new vision technology. You could show a historical painting or artifact. We're preparing a demo for 60 minutes to show people what ChatGPD can do with voice mode with vision. It can actually see what someone is doing through live video and interact with them in real time. Brockman was talking with it on his phone. Got it.

How about an anatomy lesson? You're going to quiz him and ask him to draw whatever body part you want to quiz him on and have him label it. How does that sound? That sounds like a fantastic plan. When Brockman pointed his phone's camera at the blackboard, the AI started to quiz me.

Let's start with the heart. Anderson, can you draw and label where the heart is in the body? It understood what I was doing, even though my drawing was pretty crude. The location is spot on. The brain is right there in the head. As for the shape, it's a good start. The brain is more of a...

Don't patronize me. It also seemed to pick up on my anxiety. Anderson, how about the liver? Give it a shot and show us where you think it's located in the body. Okay, this is a little tough. This is how we learn. Absolutely, no pressure Anderson.

I put the liver on the wrong side of the body. JetGPT corrected me politely. Anderson's placement is close, but it's primarily on the right side, just below the diaphragm. So can you critique this diagram overall? Anderson's diagram is a solid effort, especially for an impromptu drawing. The AI caught my mistake, but it's not foolproof. The formula is simple. One half times the base times the height.

Watch what happened when Khan asked it to calculate the area of a triangle and intentionally misidentified the height. Is this the height over here? This four? Is that right? The AI said he was right. Yes, that's correct. It didn't catch the error, however this technology improves quickly, and it is fun to interact with.

Greg Brockman asked it to write a song about the formula for the area of a triangle, to make it rhyme, and sing it using a British accent. Absolutely, let's give it a try. To find a triangle space. Here's what you do Multiply the base by the height. It's true Then take that product and divide by two now You've got the area of four formula to pursue. How is that? That was really fantastic. That's It's incredible. It is.

It feels like we're in a science fiction book, really. Yeah, I mean, it just feels like to actually see it, I mean, I'm sort of speechless. The first time you see this stuff, it really does just feel like this magic and almost incomprehensible. And then after a week, then you start to realize how you can use it.

That's been one of the really important things about working with Zolland and his team has been to really figure out what's the right way to sort of bring this to parents, and to teachers, and to classrooms, and to do that in a way so that the students really learn and aren't just asking for the answers, and that the parents can have oversight, and the teachers can be involved in that process.

You can ask a follow-up question. Sal Khan hopes this vision technology can be incorporated into KhanMigo and available to students and teachers in two to three years. But he wants it to undergo more robust testing and meet strict guidelines for privacy and data security. I can imagine a lot of teachers watching this and thinking, okay, well, this is just going to replace me. Why would I want this in my classroom?

It's like a Trojan horse. I'm pretty confident that teaching any job that has a very human-centric element of it is, as long as it adapts reasonably well in this AI world, they're going to be some of the safest jobs out there. You think there will always be a need for teachers in the classroom talking with the student, looking the student in the eye? Oh, yeah.

I mean, that's what I'll always want for my own children and frankly for anyone's children. And the hope here is that we can use artificial intelligence and other technologies to amplify what a teacher can do so they can spend more time standing next to a student, figuring them out, having a person-to-person connection. Two tens. Two tens. You got it. Good work, Gaila. Shh. Tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick,

For years, Mezcal sat in the shadow of its popular cousin Tequila, known for its worm and deemed too smoky for a spot on the same shelf as premium spirits, but not anymore. Once banned and later sold in plastic jugs for pennies, the handcrafted spirit has found its way into cocktail bars and Michelin-starred restaurants. As we first told you last fall, no other liquor has seen a greater increase in production in the past decade.

Mezcal gets its name from the Aztec word for cooked agave, a thorny plant sacred to Mexico for thousands of years. The vast majority of mezcal is made in the southern state of Oaxaca, where family-owned distilleries dot the landscape. We went to meet the mezcaleros as they labored to quench the world's thirst for mezcal. Mescaleros harvest agave year-round, but it's no low-hanging fruit. Pride from the earth, the spikes are removed by machete,

revealing the heart, the piña, which looks like a hundred pound pineapple. Agave takes its sweet time to ripen, up to 30 years for some varieties. It grows in the valleys that run between the Sierra Madre Mountains, here in Oaxaca. The crossroads of indigenous and Spanish colonial cultures, the birthplace of Mezcal, and Santiago Matatlán is its cradle.

The Hernández brothers, Armando and Álvaro, are fourth generation mezcaleros from an indigenous Zapotec family. They learn the craft from their father, Silveiro. Today they run Mal de Amor, one of Matatlán's largest distilleries, or Palenques. We make mezcal without hurry. one of Matatlan's largest distilleries, or palenques. We make mezcal without hurry, meaning everything in its time.

We don't add or do anything to speed up production, but we make it non-stop, 365 days a year, the entire day. Is it different from the way your father made it? No, it's the same. We conserve all the traditions, everything we were taught, and everything is done by hand. Agave was first distilled here in the 1600s. Mexicans have been drinking mezcal at baptisms, funerals, and every occasion in between ever since.

And let's clear this up early. Tequila is a type of mezcal, made with blue agave, mostly in the state of Jalisco. But most tequila has been mass produced, made by machines since the 70s. Artisanal mezcal resists machinery. The agave is roasted in underground pits for days. Then it's crushed by horse-drawn mill.

The mash is fermented in wooden barrels and distilled twice in copper vats. No temperature dials or controls. Bubbles indicate the alcohol content. Who knows more about the process? I think he may know more. But I drink it more. At Mal de Amor, they offer Napa-style tours of their agave fields. Mezcal is now a half-billion-dollar-a-year industry. But in the 1980s and 90s,

Armando and Alvaro told us production of mezcal could barely support the family. The price of mezcal was very low. It was miserable. What was it? Seven pesos for a liter of mezcal. Less than a dollar. And we were 10 children.

Sunday was the only day we could afford a cup of milk and a piece of bread. So we decided to go. Armando left Mexico first, alone, bound for California. Do you remember the day you left? Yes. It was the 3rd of December, 1992. I was 12 years old. I have children of my own now, and I could never bring myself to let them cross the border alone.

It was a sad goodbye. Very painful to leave the family behind. How did you get there? Like all migrants, with a coyote, smuggled across the border. Álvaro eventually joined him in Los Angeles. They spent a decade working in bars and restaurants. When the plot twisted, artisanal became hip, and mezcal's popularity boomed. Álvaro began to dream about returning to the family business. I had plans drawn up for the Palenque, and I showed Armando. Álvaro came in with the plan for his palenque, and he spread it on the bed and said,

I'm going to do this. And I told him, you're crazy. How are you going to make a living? Armando was skeptical, until he noticed shots of mezcal going for $10 each. He says he looked down at the label on a bottle one day and it was from their hometown. And you finally told your brother I told you so. So Armando and Alvaro went back home to ramp up the family Palenque. Enter John Rexor and Gilberto Marquez of the Mezcal brand Ilegal. Made from 100% espadin, a variety of agave that ripens the fastest. So how far out does the Ilegal agave go?

Is this all Ilegal? Yeah, there's about 2,500 plants per acre. There's about five acres out here. This is a lot of espadin,al? Yeah. There's about 2,500 plants per acre. There's about five acres out here. This is a lot of espadín, right? Today, Ilegal is one of the top-selling mezcal brands. It, too, started humbly. Rexer, an ex-pat New Yorker, was in search of a steady supply of mezcal to serve at a bar he owned in Guatemala.

I would take a bus up from Guatemala. It's a 24 he owned in Guatemala. I would take a bus up from Guatemala. It's a 24-hour bus ride. Along the way, you can pull a string in that bus and say, I want to stop here, walk to a village, wait until lights came on somewhere, and say, hey, do you know anybody who makes good mezcal around here?

And invariably, someone would have an uncle, a brother, a cousin. Tengo un tío. Tengo un tío. See? Yeah, that's exactly it. Everybody has an uncle. As the name on the bottle suggests,

Rexor's operation wasn't exactly legal. Is it true that you once dressed like a priest to have to get this across a border? Listen, I went through 12 years of Catholic school. Me too. I knew how to play the role. It was his friend, Gilberto Marquez, who introduced him to the Hernandez brothers. And we rolled down here, and it was very, very, very tiny, and they were making very

small amounts. And he asks me, do you have more of this mezcal? And we said, yes, we have 10,000 liters, and it took us like two years to make. And John says to us, I want it all. A sidebar, and this may go without saying, but Rexor has swigged his fair share of mezcal. Excuse me. Do you want a water?

Yeah, no, take a break, you're good. He's like, do I want a water? You know, there's an expression, the best mezcal is the one in front of you. It's not entirely true. You don't want to cover it in smoke. You want to taste the agave. A lot of people say they don't like mezcal because of the smoke.

Obviously you're in a smoky environment. When you dig up the pit oven, there's smoke everywhere. So there's a lot of early mezcals that came into the States that are heavy smoked. Has mezcal gotten a bad rap on that front? I think in the early days it did, but people began to discover, no, the agaves have particular unique flavors. Rexor asked brothers Armando and Álvaro to go into business,

and he made a promise. If they could produce the mezcal, he'd sell it around the world. They'd been burned by false promises before, so they weighed his offer in their native language. You spoke in Zapotec so he wouldn't understand? I said to Alvaro in Zapotec, do you believe him? And he said, I don't know.

But we figured, let's see. I said, listen, I'll pay you upfront so that we can get started. Two days later, we had the deposit in our account for all 10,000 liters. He said, each month I'll keep making deposits. So we made more, 500 liters, 1,000, 2,000, and it grew like that. Now their partnership produces 3,000 bottles of mezcal a day, almost all of them for export. And every bottle is certified by the Mexican government, stamped with a hologram to mark

denomination of origin, like champagne or cognac. We'd heard there are rules about how to drink this artisanal mezcal. The good stuff isn't for shots or diluting in cocktails. It's for sipping. So we asked Marquez, the former bartender who now promotes Ilegal. Favorite way to drink it? Spicy margarita. Oh, wait a second. I thought you weren't supposed to drink mezcal

and a margarita. You do want to enjoy mezcal neat, but there's nothing wrong with having it in a cocktail, especially if we're trying to get folks to try it for the first time. It's an introduction to mezcal. Marquez poured us a joven, the colorless mezcal you'll find in most bottles. This is 100% espadín.

So joven means young. Joven means young, unaged. Salud. This one tastes spicy to me. So smoke is not the first thing that you taste? It's definitely there, but I would not call this smoky. Yes. Aging mezcal is a Mexican tradition.

Ilegal does it in American oak, the same way bourbon is made. So this is the anejo, and this is aged 15 months. The color is definitely darker. Yep. Wow. So good. How would you drink this one? Absolutely neat. 100%. Has anyone ever said to you,

hey, what's a gringo like you doing selling Oaxaca? In a place like this. Oaxaca and mezcal? Yes. I've gotten pushed back over the years. You're a foreigner. But I'm someone who fell in love

with the rhythm and the pace of O'm someone who fell in love with the rhythm and the pace of Oaxaca and fell in love with Mezcal. He's no longer the only foreigner in this partnership. Bacardi, the largest privately held global spirits company, acquired Illegal last year in a deal worth a reported $100 million. When we started to grow the brand, one of the questions I asked myself was, how do you

fall in love with something and then not destroy the thing you fell in love with by making it grow? Can you do that with an international conglomerate like Bacardi? I think it's a great question because it's not just the beautiful liquor, but it's certain things that we're trying to preserve and believe in. This is a family business. We have to respect the artisanal production. We can never let this become industrial.

What does the deal with Bacardi mean for you? What's going to change is many people's lives in this community. It's a benefit for the whole community. The Palenque now employs a hundred people from Matadlan and beyond, including their 87-year-old father, the mezcalero emeritus. Armando and Alvaro translated from Zapotec to Spanish.

We asked what Senor Hernandez thought of his son's mezcal. Does it live up to the family name? Sí. That's why I drink it. If not, I wouldn't drink it. The Hernandez brothers are expanding the family Palenque. Construction is already underway. So if there's the American dream, is this the Mexican dream? It's the Mexican dream. It's something we never imagined. We're sad to report Silvete Hernandez,

patriarch of the Hernandez family, died in March. His sons say his legacy will live on in every drop of their mezcal. I'm Cecilia Vega. We'll be back next week with another edition of 60 Minutes. Now streaming. Everyone who comes into this clinic is a mystery. We don't know what we're looking for. Their bodies are the scene of the crime.

Those symptoms and history are clues. We saved her life. We're doctors and we're detectives. I kind of love it if I'm being honest. Solve the puzzle, save the patient. Watson. All episodes now streaming on Paramount+.