Speaker 1: Pushkin. All right, what do you want to start with?
Speaker 1: We have to start with green, just like if we
Speaker 1: were doing wines, we'd start with whites and then go
Speaker 1: to reds. I don't think we should blow out our
Speaker 1: pallets too early. I mean, if you do, you want
Speaker 1: to get to most of this, do you have time?
Speaker 1: Not long ago, a man named Tony Gebli came to
Speaker 1: my apartment, young guy, dark hair, grew up in New Jersey.
Speaker 1: He runs something called tea Epicure, which does for specialty
Speaker 1: tea what Robert Parker did for wine, analyzes it and
Speaker 1: rates it. Tony had a big backpack with him and
Speaker 1: carefully unwrapped its contents, a thermometer to make sure we
Speaker 1: didn't overheat the water. A mini Chinese teapot called a
Speaker 1: guy wan, some special Norwegian teacups and tea six kinds green, yellow, white, oolong, black,
Speaker 1: and fermented. Oh and a seventh kind. We'll get to that.
Speaker 1: So this is called lu Bal Luebal, and it's from
Speaker 1: Guangxi Province, and it is this tea was produced in
Speaker 1: two thousand and nine. Do you have to steep fermented
Speaker 1: tea for a long time? No? Typically not. I mean
Speaker 1: it instantly colored the water. Look at that. You called
Speaker 1: that the liquor. The liquor, yes, yeah, And if somebody
Speaker 1: put milk and sugar in his tea, you would you
Speaker 1: would shoot them. I do not like tea snobs, like
Speaker 1: I am against t snobbery. I was gonna say, this
Speaker 1: tea is special. It came from this famous collector. You're
Speaker 1: down to your last little bits of it. If I
Speaker 1: would have walked in and pour, like, you know, a big,
Speaker 1: a big chunk of half and half in it and
Speaker 1: and two to two sugarcubes, you would you would feel
Speaker 1: all upset. I would say, Malcolm, you're not fully appreciating
Speaker 1: this tea, but I respect your your preferences. Tony inhaled
Speaker 1: deeply into his tea cup, then looked thoughtful, all right,
Speaker 1: I'll let you you both just lift up the lid
Speaker 1: and sniffed that. Ooh it's I'm getting a little bit
Speaker 1: of a spinachy feel from that. Oh yeah, almost like
Speaker 1: a Swiss chart or something. Yeah, never gotten that from
Speaker 1: a tea before. We had had a lot of tea
Speaker 1: by this point. Me my producer, Jacob Tony. Tony says,
Speaker 1: it's an actual phenomenon called being te drunk. Jacob and
Speaker 1: I were definitely t drunk. Oh, it is interesting, Okay,
Speaker 1: tell me Tony. There's like a forest leaves, like a
Speaker 1: you know, mad on the forest floor of brown leaves.
Speaker 1: I've that bit of earthiness with a there's like a
Speaker 1: roasted carrot going on in there. For me, that's the
Speaker 1: vegetile note I'm getting from it. And then a little
Speaker 1: bit of like tire fire. That's like, that's the that
Speaker 1: proves you're from Jersey when you drink some tea and
Speaker 1: you're reaching to tire fire. My name is Malcolm Gladwell.
Speaker 1: You're listening to Revisionist History, my podcast about things overlooked
Speaker 1: and misunderstood. This episode is a special production in honor
Speaker 1: of America's birthday, the fourth of July. It's about the
Speaker 1: Boston Tea Party, one of the first and most critical
Speaker 1: steps on the path to American independence December sixty, seventeen
Speaker 1: seventy three, when dozens of Bostonians dressed as Mohawk Indians
Speaker 1: dumped three hundred and forty two chests of tea into
Speaker 1: Boston Harbor. Wait, wait, hold on, hold on, I know
Speaker 1: what you're thinking. The Boston Tea Party was a protest
Speaker 1: against British oppression. It was an act of principle. The
Speaker 1: gang that threw the tea overboard called themselves the Sons
Speaker 1: of Liberty. No taxation without representation, blah blah blah. We'll
Speaker 1: get to that, but let's start with the fact that
Speaker 1: is so glaringly obvious that it stuns me that so
Speaker 1: many Americans have overlooked it. It was the Boston Tea Party,
Speaker 1: not the Molasses Party, not the Pewter Mug Party. The
Speaker 1: whole thing was about tea. Wait, so we're going to
Speaker 1: set the scene, Tony. I want you to I want
Speaker 1: you to be ready. It is seventeen seventy. We are
Speaker 1: in Boston. We're unlike Newberry Street, where I don't know
Speaker 1: if Newbury was still around then, but we are having
Speaker 1: our We're at the home of like you know, Governor Grove.
Speaker 1: We're having afternoon tea and he's served up a little
Speaker 1: booh boohee, the dominant tea of colonial New England, shipped
Speaker 1: in from Fujian Province in China from the woo Yee
Speaker 1: Mountain range. Boohe is what the Sons of Liberty dumped
Speaker 1: overboard on the night of the Boston tea party, Tony,
Speaker 1: like you to tell us what is that experience for
Speaker 1: the people in Governor Grovenor's drawing room at three o'clock
Speaker 1: as they have their boohe. So everyone would be talking
Speaker 1: about the news of the day and sharing snacks various
Speaker 1: sweets and pastries, sweetmeats, preserved fruits, nuts, etc. Yeah, and
Speaker 1: sipping tea multiple cups of it. Can tell me about boohee.
Speaker 1: This particular boohe is very heavy on the smoke. I
Speaker 1: do get an aroma of tevo under that smoke. Now
Speaker 1: it has been steeped. I think I needed that that
Speaker 1: water to hit it that I wasn't getting in the
Speaker 1: dry leaf after steeping it for that long. And I
Speaker 1: put a lot of leaf in there. You saw how
Speaker 1: much I put in this in this vessel. It's about
Speaker 1: half full. It's much smoother than I thought it was
Speaker 1: going to be. I thought it was gonna be much
Speaker 1: more bitter and astringent and really require some sort of
Speaker 1: addition of milk or sugar. Delicious, refreshing, addictive. There's a
Speaker 1: very deep leathery taste. And when I say leathery, I
Speaker 1: mean like that smell of like your mother's purse. Or
Speaker 1: something a very earthy, leathery smell like dirty almost. So
Speaker 1: if you were drinking this stony in seventy sixty, you're
Speaker 1: putting milk in it? Yeah? Are you putting sugar in it?
Speaker 1: Because they're loading it up with sugar? Yeah? Yeah, back
Speaker 1: in that time, I would yes, if I was Colonial Tony. Absolutely,
Speaker 1: Colonial Tony drinks this with sugar. I don't know. I
Speaker 1: somehow think Colonial Tony even then, has his standards intact.
Speaker 1: I'll tell you this about colonial Tony. He would not
Speaker 1: have put on war paint in the middle of a
Speaker 1: December night and dumped three hundred and forty two chests
Speaker 1: of Boohey into Boston Harbor. If you love tea, if
Speaker 1: you yearn for that deep, leathery taste, fortified by milk
Speaker 1: and sugar, why would you throw it overboard? Well exactly.
Speaker 1: It's for questions like these that we have provisionist history.
Speaker 1: You'll remember, I'm sure the history of the American Revolution
Speaker 1: that you were taught in high school. The British were
Speaker 1: spending a lot of money in North America. They had
Speaker 1: a big army defending their colonies against Native American and
Speaker 1: a French. They wanted the colonists to help with at
Speaker 1: least some of that burden, so they imposed a series
Speaker 1: of tariffs and duties over the course of the seventeen
Speaker 1: sixties and early seventeen seventies, the Stamp Act, the Navigation Act,
Speaker 1: and so on. But the colonists object, no taxation without representation.
Speaker 1: They start a boycott of all imported British products, principally tea.
Speaker 1: Because tea is big business in the seventeen sixties, the
Speaker 1: colonists are drinking extraordinary amounts of it oolong sushong, lots
Speaker 1: of green tea, and of course boohe that deep leathery taste.
Speaker 1: They are addicted to it. In Boston, the boycott is
Speaker 1: led by some of the town's most prominent businessmen, and
Speaker 1: a few years ago a historian named John Tyler wonders,
Speaker 1: who are these merchants leading the fight against British tea?
Speaker 1: What is the nature of their business? So he goes
Speaker 1: to the Boston Athenaeum on Beacon Street, one of the
Speaker 1: oldest independent libraries in the United States, ornate, high ceiling,
Speaker 1: enormous lettered windows, founded in eighteen oh seven, full of
Speaker 1: all sorts of treasures, and Tyler starts digging through old
Speaker 1: insurance records in the Athenaeum archives. I mean, is this
Speaker 1: a bass set of boxes? I mean, what are we
Speaker 1: talking about here? We're talking about hundreds of policies that
Speaker 1: we're written during that period by a man named Ezekiel Price.
Speaker 1: Tyler is an elegant, man cultivated patrician, just retired after
Speaker 1: thirty six years teaching history at Groton, one of the
Speaker 1: exclusive private boarding schools of New England. His theory is
Speaker 1: that insurance records are a pretty good way of finding
Speaker 1: out what someone's business really is, what they're buying, selling,
Speaker 1: where they're sourcing their goods, Because you may lie to
Speaker 1: the government or your competitors, but you have no reason
Speaker 1: to lie to your insure about what you're up to.
Speaker 1: So when you go in these insurance records. First of all,
Speaker 1: does this mean you're the first historian to have gone
Speaker 1: through the insurance records? Yes? Probably Yes. As Tyler works
Speaker 1: his way through Ezekiel Price his policies, he notices something
Speaker 1: unusual at the time. If you were a colony of
Speaker 1: the British Crown, you had to import all of your
Speaker 1: products through England on English ships, but in prices records.
Speaker 1: It showed that a lot of the cargo coming into
Speaker 1: Boston hadn't stopped in England at all. Other times, the
Speaker 1: customs records would say one thing, this ship has all
Speaker 1: the right clearances, but the insurance records on the same
Speaker 1: ship would say something completely different. And sometimes the premiums
Speaker 1: were really high, way too high for what should have
Speaker 1: been routine voyages. The patriots of Boston, Tyler realizes, are
Speaker 1: smugglers tea smugglers. Historians had always suspected as much because
Speaker 1: there was a lot of smuggling in those days, but
Speaker 1: Tyler shows that it's everywhere everyone. Some of the biggest
Speaker 1: names in Boston. John Hancock is in the middle of it.
Speaker 1: They're shipping in tea from China via Amsterdam and then
Speaker 1: onto America through some circuitous route you could touch at
Speaker 1: some remote port in the British Isles. Oftentimes, when they're
Speaker 1: coming from Amsterdam they go to the Orkney Islands. They
Speaker 1: allege that they have declared their cargo there and so
Speaker 1: therefore itsdam legal. They've found some obliging customs officer in
Speaker 1: the Orkneysers willing to stamp it as okay. In a
Speaker 1: trove of old documents at Harvard Business School, Tyler stumbled
Speaker 1: across another gold mine, a list made up by a
Speaker 1: big colonial era shipping company of every bribe and ruse
Speaker 1: they used to get tea into Massachusetts. In that case,
Speaker 1: they landed the cargo in Plymouth, just down the coast
Speaker 1: from Boston. Thomas Hutchinson, the governor of Massachusetts, was powerless
Speaker 1: to stop it. They run it ashore there and then
Speaker 1: bring it in into Boston. And that's really no way
Speaker 1: of telling them. The same thing happens if you could
Speaker 1: import things through Rhode Island, where Hutchinson refers to Rhode
Speaker 1: Island as that abandoned little colony still is where there's
Speaker 1: no regulation at all, and therefore it's that's poorous. In
Speaker 1: a place where all sorts of suggs can trickle them,
Speaker 1: then can the big boycott of British imports. It was
Speaker 1: called the non importation movement, supposedly a principled stand against
Speaker 1: taxation without representation. But who's behind that Many of the
Speaker 1: same group of smugglers. And if I'm a smuggler, I'm
Speaker 1: delighted with non importation. Yes, yes, because you can sell
Speaker 1: more a smuggled tea. So during non importation, the amount
Speaker 1: of legit British team must be shrinking to almost nothing. Correct,
Speaker 1: so the smugglers that have free reign. At this point,
Speaker 1: the British are trying to raise money to defend the
Speaker 1: colonies by taxing the tea the colonists drink. But the
Speaker 1: colonists aren't paying the tax. They're all drinking cheaper illegal tea.
Speaker 1: So the British do the logical thing. They passed the
Speaker 1: Tea Act of seventeen seventy three, which cuts the cost
Speaker 1: of the tea imported through proper channels. Now the legal
Speaker 1: stuff is as affordable as the illegal stuff. So what
Speaker 1: do the Patriots do. They dress up as Mohawk Indians,
Speaker 1: sneak out into Boston Harbor and throw three hundred and
Speaker 1: forty two chests of perfectly good Boohey into the water.
Speaker 1: The Tea Act was an attempt to put the smugglers
Speaker 1: out of business. The Boston Tea Party was the smugglers
Speaker 1: attempt to stay in business. Let me spell it out
Speaker 1: for you. Underneath the lofty rhetoric of the Patriots of
Speaker 1: New England was a criminal enterprise, a vast smuggling operation
Speaker 1: illicitly applying the residence of the New World with their
Speaker 1: drug of choice boohe, that deliciously addictive tea varietal with
Speaker 1: a dark liquor and a deep leathery taste. The foundational
Speaker 1: myth of the American Republic is not righteous, freedom loving
Speaker 1: citizens rising up against oppression. No, it's drug dealers defending
Speaker 1: their turf. You know why this episode is airing July fourth,
Speaker 1: that day when Americans jump up and down and detonate
Speaker 1: explosives to celebrate their independence from Britain. It's airing July
Speaker 1: fourth because you Americans have a problem. The story you
Speaker 1: tell each other about your nation's independence is full of holes.
Speaker 1: You need a new story. So I'm going to do
Speaker 1: you a favor. I'm going to give you one. But
Speaker 1: first I'm curious about whether in that era, in that
Speaker 1: sort of those first few generations and people are getting
Speaker 1: to know tea? Yeah, are they given instructions about how
Speaker 1: to make it? Are they how are they? Do we
Speaker 1: know how they're steeping it and how they're so One
Speaker 1: account I read was that someone steeped the tea and
Speaker 1: throughout the liquor and then use the leaves and put
Speaker 1: butter and salt on them and eat them as a
Speaker 1: salad that was in like one of the prominent families
Speaker 1: of diaries of the time. Really, yeah, have you ever
Speaker 1: tried that? But that tastes good? So many questions, all right,
Speaker 1: I think we need to start over take two on
Speaker 1: the real meaning of the American Revolution. Let me introduce
Speaker 1: you to Francis Ianni, an academic who had a theory
Speaker 1: about Americans and their criminal enterprises. Although calling Iani an
Speaker 1: academic seems a little limiting, he decided, I guess this
Speaker 1: is after we've been there about six months. He decided
Speaker 1: to drive to Nairobi and he it's I think I
Speaker 1: can't remember the exact iffence. It might be six seven
Speaker 1: hundred miles. But back then there were places where there
Speaker 1: literally wasn't a road. There were I don't think there
Speaker 1: was any paved road, and you'd be driving along and
Speaker 1: all of a sudden the road would just stand. Juanianni,
Speaker 1: that's frances Iianni's eldest son, talking about how his father
Speaker 1: moved his family to Ethiopia in the early nineteen sixties
Speaker 1: and decided one day to drive to Nairobi. All they
Speaker 1: had was a Volkswagen minibus, which isn't exactly built for
Speaker 1: off road adventures. Back then, people who made the journey
Speaker 1: did it in a convoy. Ianni was like, why bother,
Speaker 1: Let's go solo. This is a tangent because frances Ianni
Speaker 1: is one of my favorite people that I've never met.
Speaker 1: We'll get back to Tea, I promise. So you'd have
Speaker 1: to go by dead reckoning to figure out where you
Speaker 1: were to come out on the other side. And so
Speaker 1: you wait a second. Your dad has your parents have
Speaker 1: how many children? At this point? I have two brothers,
Speaker 1: so there's three of you. You're the eldest. I'm the eldest.
Speaker 1: My brothers are eight and ten years younger than I am.
Speaker 1: At the time there were this was nineteen sixty, so
Speaker 1: they were five and three, and of course my mother
Speaker 1: was go ahead. I'm just I'm just imagining this in
Speaker 1: my mind. So a young couple with a twelve year
Speaker 1: old to five year old and a three year old
Speaker 1: set across set out to drive in a Volkswagen minibus
Speaker 1: from Addis to Nairobi in nineteen sixty. Yeah, it's like
Speaker 1: the most hilarious I've ever heard. Frances Ianni ended up
Speaker 1: as a professor at Columbia University. What he was a
Speaker 1: professor of is slightly unclear, since he was the kind
Speaker 1: of person who did whatever he wanted, but some combination
Speaker 1: of anthropology and sociology and stuff Francis Ianni thought was interesting.
Speaker 1: He had two wolves, well, he had several wolves, but
Speaker 1: he had two, and I think I said actual, the
Speaker 1: actual wold. I sent you some pictures yesterday. There's a
Speaker 1: one with him with the wolves. Actually, he called his
Speaker 1: wolves Romulus and Remus. In his apartment in New York,
Speaker 1: he had a monkey, a pet awful lot, a baby alligator,
Speaker 1: and it used to be a huge pointed contention between
Speaker 1: my parents because he would just bring these animals home. Anyway.
Speaker 1: One day in nineteen sixty four, Ianni is in Washington,
Speaker 1: d C. He's working for the Department of Education at
Speaker 1: that point, doing Francis Ianni kinds of things, and he
Speaker 1: runs into a man in a congressional waiting room who
Speaker 1: he would later call Uncle Phil, Philip al Como, a
Speaker 1: very wealthy, sophisticated man in his sixties. They start chatting.
Speaker 1: Uncle Phil tells Ianni that he's a lobbyist representing a
Speaker 1: group of Italian businessmen out of New York. Uncle Phil
Speaker 1: and Iyanni become friends. They start spending time together. Uncle
Speaker 1: Phil introduces him to some of his clients, and Ianni realizes, Oh,
Speaker 1: the group of Italian businessmen out of New York that
Speaker 1: Uncle Phil is talking about is actually one of the
Speaker 1: big mafia families. Ianni is the man who drove his
Speaker 1: family from Ethiopia tonight Arobi on a whim, and who
Speaker 1: later kept wolves, ocelots and alligators in his apartment. Ten
Speaker 1: guesses what he did next. He said to Uncle Phil,
Speaker 1: can I meet your mafia clients? In fact, do you
Speaker 1: think they'd mind if I studied them, like joined the
Speaker 1: family for a few years? And because Francis Ianni is
Speaker 1: Francis Ianni, Uncle Phil says sure. He convinces he convinced
Speaker 1: essentially a perfect stranger to let him infiltrate. Essentially, I mean,
Speaker 1: infl j baby's too strong a word, a crime family.
Speaker 1: And I don't know how he did it, but as
Speaker 1: I say, he could talk his way into or out
Speaker 1: of anything. And by the way, in the middle of
Speaker 1: his time hanging out with the mafia, Ianni talked his
Speaker 1: way onto the New York City Organized Crime Task Force.
Speaker 1: He became friends with a lot of the police, who
Speaker 1: we're working on this stuff. You know. He knew a
Speaker 1: lot of cops in New York, spent a lot of
Speaker 1: time with them, and he would manage to talk to
Speaker 1: both sides and convince both sides he was on their side.
Speaker 1: Ianni ended up writing a book about his experience, called
Speaker 1: A Family Business. He called the family he was embedded
Speaker 1: with the Loopolos, a pseudonym. All identifying names in the
Speaker 1: book were changed. Back in the day, there was a
Speaker 1: lot of speculation among mafia experts about who the Lopolos
Speaker 1: really were. After a lot of digging, I'm now convinced
Speaker 1: that it was the Luke Cases, one of the largest
Speaker 1: of the five major New York crime families. Serious gangsters.
Speaker 1: They had a lock on the trucking unions, particularly those
Speaker 1: working Kennedy Airport. Ianni spent a lot of time out
Speaker 1: on Long Island with a patriarch of the family, a
Speaker 1: man he called Giuseppe. I'm pretty sure that's his pseudonym
Speaker 1: for the legendary mob boss Tommy lu Casey, who came
Speaker 1: to America as a young man in nineteen eleven from Palermo.
Speaker 1: A Family Business came out in nineteen seventy two, nineteen
Speaker 1: seventy two, by the way, is the same year that
Speaker 1: the Godfather movie comes out. It's like the high watermark
Speaker 1: of America mafia fascination. But Iani's book is nothing like
Speaker 1: The Godfather. Nobody gets whacked, nobody goes to jail, nobody
Speaker 1: goes to the mattresses, nobody betrays anyone. It's not a
Speaker 1: crime book. It's a book about business. By nineteen seventy,
Speaker 1: Iani calculated that there were forty two fourth generation members
Speaker 1: of the family, and only four of those forty two
Speaker 1: were still involved in the family's crime businesses. The rest
Speaker 1: were all respectable members of the upper middle class. The
Speaker 1: kids went to fancy colleges. One daughter was married to
Speaker 1: a judge's son, another to a dentist. One was completing
Speaker 1: a master's degree in psychology. Another was a member of
Speaker 1: the English department at a liberal arts college. There were
Speaker 1: several lawyers, a physician, a stockbroker. Uncle Phil's son was
Speaker 1: an accountant who lived on an estate in the posh
Speaker 1: Old Westbury section of Long Island's north shore. His granddaughter
Speaker 1: rode horses and was a show jumper. His grandson was
Speaker 1: an up and coming yachtsman, and Uncle Phil himself lived
Speaker 1: in Manhattan, collected art and was a regular at the opera.
Speaker 1: The Lucases had gone legit. Now does that surprise you.
Speaker 1: The signature line in The Godfather is Michael Corleone saying,
Speaker 1: just when I thought I was out, they pulled me
Speaker 1: back in. He wants to go legit, and he can't.
Speaker 1: A lot of the mythology around crime says that's the pattern.
Speaker 1: Crime is addictive. Once you're in the underworld, you lose
Speaker 1: contact with the real world, you reject its values. But
Speaker 1: A Yanni's point is that the far more typical trajectory
Speaker 1: is the one he described with the Lucases. Here's another
Speaker 1: example of the lure of going legit. Salvatore Sammy the
Speaker 1: Bull Gravano, notorious mobster underboss of the Gambino family. Here
Speaker 1: he is being interviewed by Diane Sawyer in nineteen ninety
Speaker 1: seven on ABC Primetime. Look over the list of the
Speaker 1: murders you were involved in. There, how many nineteen serial
Speaker 1: killers don't have nineteen? We're worse than them. Gravano is
Speaker 1: totally matter of fact. You're half expecting him to count
Speaker 1: off all nineteen one by one on his fingers. Diane
Speaker 1: Sawyer does the full double take, then comes back at
Speaker 1: him again. One of the people on that list was
Speaker 1: Gravano's brother in law. How could you face yourself? She asks,
Speaker 1: how could you face your wife? Did you say? What
Speaker 1: have I become? With that blood on my hands? What
Speaker 1: am I? I'm a gangster? That's exactly what I am.
Speaker 1: Gravano is not just a gangster. He's on TV admitting
Speaker 1: he's a gangster. Gravano had rated at his boss, John
Speaker 1: Gotti in exchange for immunity for his crimes. He went
Speaker 1: into witness protection, but then he left witness protection and
Speaker 1: started up a drug trafficking ring with his wife, his
Speaker 1: daughter Karen, and his son. They grossed five hundred thousand
Speaker 1: dollars a week before it all came crashing down. In
Speaker 1: the middle of this, his daughter Karen meets a man
Speaker 1: named David Seabrook. So it was ninety six. I was
Speaker 1: at the China Club. All this is Seabrook remembering the
Speaker 1: moment in an interview on the New York radio station
Speaker 1: Hot ninety seven. At the China Club when it was popping,
Speaker 1: and I've seen Karen, Jennifer, Graziano, Drida and a couple
Speaker 1: of her friends. Okay, so you know, Karan was giving
Speaker 1: me the eye, Jennifer, and I was looking at you know,
Speaker 1: jail whatever, reckless eyeball meet Karl right. Seabrook is a
Speaker 1: convicted felon. Well, my first case I was fourteen, attempted murder.
Speaker 1: So back and forth from Recas Island Juvenile sys FRO
Speaker 1: New York State Division for Youth, and they're not filing
Speaker 1: with the prison. In eighty seven, I was nineteen. I
Speaker 1: came home. Mars twenty six, I went back. I was
Speaker 1: thirty two. I came on Mas forty one. Lord have mercy.
Speaker 1: Seabrook and Karen Gravano get engaged, have a daughter together
Speaker 1: named Karina. But before they can get married, David gets
Speaker 1: sent away in the last of those convictions for a
Speaker 1: drug dealing operation with his baby mama's father, Sammy the
Speaker 1: Bull Gravano. This is a serious crime family, except they
Speaker 1: all want to go to the jet. Karen Gravano got
Speaker 1: probation on the drug charge and ended up on the
Speaker 1: VH one reality show Mob Wives, where Sammy the Bull
Speaker 1: got to play doting granddad. And you know, even my
Speaker 1: father is very honest with the kids and it's like,
Speaker 1: don't be like me, be better than me. Learn from me.
Speaker 1: You know, my nephew is great in baseball. My father's
Speaker 1: like every day go to you know, be a gangster.
Speaker 1: In another way, I waxed people. You can whack balls.
Speaker 1: Myb wives ran for six seasons. Karen gave up a
Speaker 1: thriving career as a drug dealer for reality TV. David
Speaker 1: Seabrook meanwhile, got a bachelor's degree in prison and finished
Speaker 1: a business degree after his sentence, then found a company
Speaker 1: that would hire him despite five felony convictions. Minds, you
Speaker 1: started at the bottom, Well, long behold. I run the
Speaker 1: company now sixty employees. I'm the quality manager. So and
Speaker 1: we look into expand to about one hundred and twenty
Speaker 1: employees within the next six months. So I mean, in
Speaker 1: my opinion, that's a success story. In my opinion, considering,
Speaker 1: I think it's a I don't think. I don't think
Speaker 1: anybody would ever question whether or not you have. So
Speaker 1: how long would the Gravano's actually a crime family. Well,
Speaker 1: Sammy the Ball's parents were dressmakers in benson Hurst, Brooklyn.
Speaker 1: They were legit. Sammy went bad as a teenager and
Speaker 1: stayed bad for his whole life. That's one generation. Then
Speaker 1: came Karen and David, but they were only crooked until
Speaker 1: they saw a middle age approaching. It's one and a
Speaker 1: half generations. That's it. It stops there. I don't know
Speaker 1: if I want to stay on Staten Island. Karen and
Speaker 1: David's daughter, Karina, wants nothing to do with the crooked life.
Speaker 1: And I have so much bigger dreams and bigger plans
Speaker 1: that I have to keep my head straight and I
Speaker 1: want to break the pattern of my family. Karina was
Speaker 1: actually briefly on a reality show herself made in Staten Island.
Speaker 1: In the first episode, she takes a call from her grandfather.
Speaker 1: When you go to college, where you're going to go,
Speaker 1: it's going to stay in New York. Send me the
Speaker 1: bull has been at a prison on the drug trafficking
Speaker 1: rap for two years. You never know what can happen
Speaker 1: for me on the East Coast. I could do one this.
Speaker 1: You're at an age now that you know you got
Speaker 1: to look at possible mistakes that change your whole future. Oh,
Speaker 1: you're right, and normal New York. You could get on
Speaker 1: the wrong track. Really, this was the great insight of
Speaker 1: Francis Ianni's work organized crime. It's not what people do
Speaker 1: when they have rejected the American dream. It's the opposite.
Speaker 1: People like the Lucases and the Gravanos desperately believed in
Speaker 1: the American dream, but they felt marginalized, locked out, so
Speaker 1: they took a temporary detour. There's even a wonderful phrase
Speaker 1: coined by the sociologist James O'Kane for that temporary detour,
Speaker 1: the crooked ladder. You climb the crooked ladder until you
Speaker 1: get high enough to get to the straight part of
Speaker 1: the ladder. The greatest example of it was he was
Speaker 1: talking to Sandra Lansky meyer Lansky's daughter. This is Nick Poleggi,
Speaker 1: the mob expert who wrote the book on which the
Speaker 1: movie Goodfellas was based. Mayer Lanski was a legend in
Speaker 1: organized crime, and Poleggi asked meyer Lansky's daughter, Sandra about
Speaker 1: her dad's happiest moment. She said, we drove up to
Speaker 1: West Point to see my brother Paul graduate from West Point.
Speaker 1: Now this had to be like the fifties, but meyer
Speaker 1: Lansky was about as famous as you can get. That's
Speaker 1: the world the worst bad guy. And she said, I
Speaker 1: looked over and my father was crying, Oh my God,
Speaker 1: that his son was graduating from West Point. He was
Speaker 1: so this Meyer Lansky in the middle of West Point
Speaker 1: with all those guys throwing up their gloves crying. It
Speaker 1: was so he was so happy. And so when Paul,
Speaker 1: the son, Paul came over, everybody hugged and kissed Meyer.
Speaker 1: She said, my father reached in his pocket and gave
Speaker 1: Paul the keys to a brand new fair Land convertible,
Speaker 1: and Paul would not take it, gave him the keys back,
Speaker 1: So Kapa, he would not take the car because he
Speaker 1: knew what the car came from. The Lanskys were a
Speaker 1: one generation crime family. So what are the sons of
Speaker 1: Liberty back in the seventeen seventies. Well, the criminals, there's
Speaker 1: no question about that. During the non importation movement in particular,
Speaker 1: they get very nasty with anyone who dares to defy them.
Speaker 1: John Tyler lays it all out, intimidation, blackmail, violence. When
Speaker 1: someone fids them, they retaliate with hot tar and feathers.
Speaker 1: It's interesting that an American history textbooks, turring feathering comes
Speaker 1: out as some sort of cute little thing the patriots do.
Speaker 1: It's a really hideous thing. To have hot tar poured
Speaker 1: all over you and you have second or third degree
Speaker 1: burns as a result, you'll be scarred for life and
Speaker 1: then have to have this tar removed from your skin,
Speaker 1: from your hair from it. I mean, it was a
Speaker 1: hideous thing to do, to say, not thinking of these
Speaker 1: people were terrified of their lives when the mob got
Speaker 1: a hold of them. Yeah, the mob. That's where the
Speaker 1: mob came from, the streets of colonial Boston. But if
Speaker 1: they are mobsters, they are mobsters in the same sense
Speaker 1: as the Lucases and the Gravanos and the Landskis, because
Speaker 1: the minute they can go straight, they do. I mean,
Speaker 1: what's the signing of the Declaration of Independence? It's a
Speaker 1: bunch of criminals dressing up in wigs and coats and
Speaker 1: rebranding themselves as the founding fathers. Isn't this the real
Speaker 1: lesson of the Great American experiment, that the promise of
Speaker 1: the American dream is so powerful, so enthrawling, that even
Speaker 1: the most hardened criminals want nothing more than to climb
Speaker 1: the ladder to respectability. Oh and by the way, after
Speaker 1: the birth of the American Republic, what do you think
Speaker 1: the newly formed Congress and state governments did with imported tea.
Speaker 1: They taxed it higher than before, because what looks like
Speaker 1: oppression when you're climbing the crooked ladder looks totally legitimate
Speaker 1: once you're on the straight narrow. Here is my suggestion
Speaker 1: for July fourth. Enough with the fireworks and the parades,
Speaker 1: a let of everything we've just heard that would be
Speaker 1: a little unseemly. Do they have a big holiday in
Speaker 1: Miami to celebrate the anniversary of the first cocaine shipment
Speaker 1: from Columbia? No, they don't. And the whole beer by
Speaker 1: the barbecue situation. Personally, I would rethink that too. If
Speaker 1: you're going to be drinking anything this July fourth, it
Speaker 1: should be tea. Me. I'm thinking of some Lap Sang Sushan,
Speaker 1: which is a super smoky black tea that I love,
Speaker 1: or at least I did until I talked to Tony
Speaker 1: Gabli about this and he said, I'm quoting. Hopefully I
Speaker 1: can change that notion of yours. What's your You have
Speaker 1: a you have an issue with smokey with smokey teas
Speaker 1: an issue. I don't know if it's an issue. You
Speaker 1: gave me that look when I said I like lap
Speaker 1: saying and then I'll be frank with you. There's a
Speaker 1: real um like brow thing about lap Sang sushan going
Speaker 1: on in especially T world right now, because I know it.
Speaker 1: But you're a te bro. You're a T bro. That's
Speaker 1: what I'm That's what I'm saying. You mean, it's like
Speaker 1: for it's like the it's the macho choice. Is that
Speaker 1: what you mean? It's the macho choice? Oh? I like
Speaker 1: it smokey, you know, like, oh my gosh, yeah, like
Speaker 1: a powerful smoky punch, like akin to like I like
Speaker 1: to grill a lot kind of thing. Stop right there, Tony,
Speaker 1: as it happens, I do like to grill a lot,
Speaker 1: And I'll be grilling some steaks this July fourth with
Speaker 1: a steaming cup of Lapsang sushung in my hand as
Speaker 1: I toast the drug smugglers, thugs and mobsters who saw
Speaker 1: in the promise of these United States a chance to
Speaker 1: call la Ja Happy Birthday. America. Vision's History is produced
Speaker 1: by Meilabal and Jacob Smith with Camille Baptista. Our editor
Speaker 1: is Julia Barton. Flawn Williams is our engineer. Fact checking
Speaker 1: by Beth Johnson. Original music by Luis Gara. Special thanks
Speaker 1: to Carly Migliori, Heather Fane, Maggie Taylor, Maya Kanig, and
Speaker 1: l Hefe Jacob Weisberg. Religion's history is brought to you
Speaker 1: by Pushkin Industries. I'm Malcolm Batwa. The reason I said
Speaker 1: Lapsang Sushong is a bit of a bro tea, uh,
Speaker 1: is because I feel like males really took to that
Speaker 1: style of tea. And when that happened, when when the
Speaker 1: tea producers saw that happening, the level of smoke kept
Speaker 1: getting more and more extreme, to the point where like
Speaker 1: it's just all smokey, it's out of control. But I mean,
Speaker 1: I'm intrigued by the notion that people like me are
Speaker 1: ruining tea. That's kind of that's it. I'm now feeling
Speaker 1: a little guilty. I don't want to look like a
Speaker 1: bad guy. I'm part of the bro. I'm part of
Speaker 1: the bro over smoking. You didn't no, it's it's all right.
Speaker 1: And and and I don't know what type of lapsang
Speaker 1: sushong you're drinking. It could be great