Welcome to Erin Mankie's Cabinet of Curiosity's, a production of I Heart Radio and Grimm

and Mild.

Our world is full of the unexplainable.

And if history is an open book, all of these amazing tales are right there on display,

just waiting for us to explore.

Welcome to the Cabinet of Curiosity's.

It's one of the most coveted substances on Earth.

It's responsible for $515 million worth of one country's gross domestic product and

has been the target of several illegal operations over the years.

It's completely natural and widely available, and yet its production and distribution have

been controlled by a single cartel since the 1960s.

This dark, viscous liquid is trafficked all over the world in barrels, and between 2011

and 2012, over 9,500 of those barrels went missing, resulting in one of the biggest

heists in history.

It all started hundreds of years ago, when the indigenous people of Canada's eastern

woodlands harvested this substance for themselves, cooking with it and boiling it down for long-term

storage.

Eventually, European colonists from France arrived and found out what they were doing.

They learned how to extract it for themselves and studied their preservation techniques,

and unsurprisingly they soon pushed the indigenous people out and built a whole industry around

the product to make themselves rich.

Then, in 1966, a group of individual producers from Quebec got together and came up with

...