Revisionist History - Tempest in a Teacup

Episode Date: July 4, 2019

Bohea, the aroma of tire fire, Mob Wives, smugglers, “bro” tea, and what it all means to the backstory of the American Revolution. Malcolm tells the real story on what happened in Boston on the night of December 16, 1773. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Pushkin. Alright, what do you want to start with? We have to start with green. Okay. Just like if we were doing wines, we'd start with whites and then go to reds. Yeah. I don't think we should blow out our palates 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 Gebley 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 gaiwan. 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 bao lu bao and it's from uh guangxi province and it says this tea was produced in 2009 do you have to steep fermented tea for a long time no typically not um i mean it instantly colored the water right look at that you call that the liquor the liquor yes yeah and if somebody put milk and sugar in this tea

you would you would shoot them I do not like tea snobs like I am against tea snobbery but I was going to say but 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 poured a big chunk of half and half in it and two sugar cubes, you would be a little upset. I would say, Malcolm, you're not fully appreciating this tea, but I respect your preferences. Tony inhaled deeply into his teacup, then looked thoughtful. All right, I'll let you both just lift up the lid and sniff that.

Ooh. I'm getting a little bit of a spinach-y feel from that. Oh, yeah. Almost like a Swiss chard 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 tea drunk.

Jacob and I were definitely tea drunk. Oh, it is interesting. Okay, tell me, Tony. There's like a forest leaves, like a mat on the forest floor of brown leaves. I get that bit of earthiness with a, there's like a roasted carrot going on in there for me. That's the vegetal 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 the 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 4th of July. It's about the Boston Tea Party, one of the first and most critical steps on the path to American independence, December 16th, 1773, when dozens of Bostonians dressed as Mohawk Indians dumped 342 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 going to set the scene. Tony, I want you to be ready. It is 1770.

We are in Boston. We're on, like, Newbury Street. 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 Grosvenor. We're having afternoon tea, and he's served up a little buhi. Buhi, the dominant tea of colonial New England. Shipped in from Fujian province in China from the Wuyi mountain range.

Buhi is what the Sons of Liberty dumped overboard on the night of the Boston Tea Party. Tony, I'd like you to tell us, what is that experience for the people in Governor Grosvenor's drawing room at 3 o'clock as they have their boo-hee? 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. Okay, tell me about Buhi. This particular Buhi is very heavy on the smoke. I do get an 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 full. 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. 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.

Very earthy, leathery smell um like dirty almost so if you were drinking this tony in 1760 you're putting milk in it yeah are you putting sugar in it because they're loading it up with sugar yeah aren't they? 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 342 chests of boohe 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 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 Americans and the 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 1760s and early 1770s. 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 1760s. The colonists are drinking extraordinary amounts of it. Oolong, principally tea, because tea is big business in the 1760s. The colonists are drinking extraordinary amounts of it. Oolong, Souchong, lots of green tea, and of course,

buhi, that deep, leathery taste. They're 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 ceilings, enormous leaded windows, founded in 1807, full of all sorts of treasures. And Tyler starts digging through old insurance records in the Athenaeum archives. I mean, is this a vast set of boxes? I mean, what are we talking about here?

We're talking about hundreds of policies that were written during that period by a man named Ezekiel Price. Tyler is an elegant man, cultivated patrician, just retired after 36 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, whether sourcing their goods. Because you may lie to the government or your competitors, but you have no reason to lie to your insurer 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's 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 on to 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 it's now legal. They've found some obliging customs officer in the Orkneys who's 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 wagons into Boston, and there's really no way of telling then.

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 this porous place where all sorts of smuggled goods can trickle in. 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 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 smuggled tea. Yeah. 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 the tax. They're all drinking cheaper illegal tea. So the British do the logical thing. They pass the Tea Act of 1773,

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 342 chests of perfectly good boohe 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 supplying the residents of the New World with their drug of choice, boohee, 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 4th, that day when Americans jump up and down and detonate explosives to celebrate their independence from Britain? It's airing July 4th, 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 when people are getting to know tea, are they given instructions about how to make

it? 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 threw out the liquor and then used the leaves and put butter and salt on them and ate them as a salad.

That was in one of the prominent families diaries of the time. Really? Have you ever tried that? Would that taste 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 Ianni an academic seems a little limiting. He decided, I guess this is after we'd been there about six months, he decided to drive to Nairobi. And he, it's, I think, I can't remember the exact distance. It might be 600, 700 miles. But back then there were places where there literally wasn't a road. I don't think there was any paved road, and you'd be driving along, and all of a sudden the road would just end.

Juan Iani. That's Francis Iani's eldest son, talking about how his father moved his family to Ethiopia in the early 1960s 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 Francis 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. 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 they were, this was 1960, so they were five and three. And, of course, my mother was. Go ahead. No, I'm just imagining this in my mind.

So a young couple with a 12-year-old, a 5-year-old, and a 3-year-old. Yeah. Set out to drive in a Volkswagen minibus from Addis to Nairobi in 1960. Yeah. This is like the most hilarious thing I've ever heard. Francis 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? Actual wolves? I sent you some pictures yesterday. There's 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 ocelot, 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, one day in 1964, 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 Alcamo, a very wealthy, sophisticated man in his 60s. 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 Ianni 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 to Nairobi 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, join the family for a few years? And because Francis Ianni is Francis Ianni, Uncle Phil says, sure. He convinces, he convinces essentially a perfect

stranger to let him infiltrate a, essentially, I mean infiltrate, maybe it'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 were 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 Lupolos, 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 Lupolos really were. After a lot of digging, I'm now convinced that it was the Lucchesis, 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 Lucchesi, who came to America as a young man in 1911 from Palermo. A family business came out in 1972. 1972, by the way, is the same year that the

Godfather movie comes out. It's like the high-water mark of America mafia fascination. But Ianni'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 1970, Ianni calculated that there were 42 fourth-generation members of the family, and only four of those 42 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 Lucchesis 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 pull 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 Ianni's point is that 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 1997 on ABC Primetime. Look over the list of the murders you were involved in. There how many? 19. Serial killers

don't have 19. We're worse than them. Gravano is totally matter of fact. You're half expecting him to count off all 19 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'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 $500,000 a week before it all came crashing down. In the middle of this,

his daughter Karen meets a man named David Seabrook. It was 96. I was at the China Club. All right, popular spot. This is Seabrook remembering the moment in an interview

on the New York radio station Hot 97. We was at the China Club when it was popping, and I seen Karen, Jennifer Graziano, and Drita, and a couple of her friends. So you know Karen was giving me the eye, Jennifer and I was looking at, you know, Jay or whatever. Don't reckless eyeball me, Karen. Seabrook is a convicted felon. Well, my first case, I was 14, attempted murder. So I was back and forth from Rikers Island Juvenile System, New York State Division for Youth,

and then I finally went to prison in 87. I was 19. I came home, I was 26. I went back, I was 32. I came home, I was 41. 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 on 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 legit. Karen Gravano got probation on the drug charge and ended up on the VH1 reality show Mob Wives, where Sammy the Bull got to play doting granddad. 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 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. Mob 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. Mind you, I started at the bottom. Well, lo and behold, I run the company now. It's 60 employees. I'm the quality manager. So, and we're looking to expand to about 120 employees within the next six months.

So, I mean, in my opinion, that's a success story. In my opinion, considering where I came from. Yeah, I don't think anybody would ever question whether or not you had a success story. So, how long were the Gravanos actually a crime family? Well, Sammy the Bull'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. 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. 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. Sammy the Bull's been out of prison on the drug trafficking rap for two years. No, you know, you've got to look at possible mistakes that change your whole future. No, you're right. I know in New York you can get on the wrong track real easy. This was the great insight of Francis Ianni's work. Organized crime is not what people do when they have rejected the American dream.

It's the opposite. People like the Lucchesis 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, I was talking to Sandra Lansky, Meyer Lansky's daughter. This is Nick Pelleggi, the mob expert who wrote the book on which the movie Goodfellas was based. Meyer Lansky was a legend in organized crime, and Pelleggi 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 50s, but Meyer Lansky was about as famous as you can get. I mean, that's the world's 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, 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 Fairlane convertible. And Paul would not take it. Gave him the keys back. It's okay, Pa. 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 1770s? Well, they're 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 defies them, they retaliate with hot tar and feathers. It's interesting that in American history textbooks, tarring and feathering comes out as some sort of cute little thing

the patriots do, when it's a really hideous thing to have hot tar poured all over you and to have second or third degree burns as a result. You'd be scarred for life. And then have to have this tar removed from your skin, from your hair, from... I mean, it was a hideous thing to do, to say nothing 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 Lucchesis and the Gravanos and the Lanskys. 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 frock 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 4th. Enough with the fireworks and the parades. In light 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 Colombia?

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 4th, it should be tea. Me, I'm thinking of some Lapsang Sushong, which is a super smoky black tea that I love. Or at least I did, until I talked to Tony Geble 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.

An issue? I don't know if it's an issue. You, you gave me that look when I said I like Lapsang, and then. I'll be frank with you. There's a real, um, like bro thing about Lapsang Souchong going on in the specialty tea world right now you didn't even know it but you were a tea bro you're a tea 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 smoky you know like oh like a scotch like a scotch 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 4th, with a steaming cup of Lapsang Sushong in my hand as I toast the drug smugglers, thugs, and mobsters who saw in the promise of these United States a chance to go legit. Happy birthday, America. Visionist History is produced by

Mia Lobel and Jacob Smith with Camille Baptista. Our editor is Julia Barton. Flan Williams is our engineer. Fact-checking by Beth Johnson. Original music by Luis Guerra. Special thanks to Carly Migliore, Heather Fane, Maggie Taylor,

Maya Koenig, and El Jefe, Jacob Weisberg. Revisions History is brought to you by Pushkin Industries. I'm Malcolm Gladwell. The reason I said Lapsang Sushong is a bit of a bro tea is because I feel like males really took to that style of tea. And when that happened, 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. It's out of control. But I'm intrigued by the notion that people like me are ruining tea that's kind of I'm now feeling a little guilty I'm not ruining tea

I don't want to look like a bad guy I'm part of the bro over smoking no you didn't know it's alright and I don't know what type of lab sang-su-shang you're drinking it could be great