Go Back   Cigar Weekly Community Forums and Discussion Groups > Smoking Post > Cigar Talk

Cigar Talk A place for cigar enthusiasts to discuss our hobby, legal cigars and related stuff.

 
 
Thread Tools Display Modes
Prev Previous Post   Next Post Next
Old 04-20-2017, 06:54 AM   #1
Lew
Starting Member
 
Join Date: Aug 2010
Location: NJ & Fl
Posts: 75
Since you guys seem to like my stories....

Before I went to Florida last fall I wrote some stories on my Facebook page about famous customers we have had....
So... since both me and you people have nothing better to do with our time, I'll post one of them here, and then put some more on if people seem interested.

Unfortunately, I don't know how to put the pictures that accompany the stories on.... so just use your imagination.

Famous Cigar Customers and What they bought

(hey ! Just so you know....we didn’t give away free cigars to anybody just because they were famous….. they paid exactly the same amount as every other customer – that was our policy from day one ‘till the day we sold JR.)

EDMUND MUSKIE – Two Term Democratic Governor of Maine
Well, we’re in the middle of a Presidential race so I guess I’ll start with a guy that ran for Vice President with Hubert Humphrey, and then ran for president on his own: that’d be Edmund Muskie and somewhere I have a picture of him trying to roll a Bances Aristocrat at the old Villazon Factory on North Armenia Avenue in Tampa….. it diidn’t turn out too good!

Muskie smoked a monster cigar. The Hoyo De Monterrey President in EMS, and he was a pretty regular customer even when he became Secretary of State under Jimmy Carter who was a self proclaimed non-smoker, non drinker, non anything that could possibly cost a vote.

And… since we’re on the subject of Hoyo Presidents in a Presidential race… let’s move on to MARIO PUZO – author of The Godfather and many other novels.
Mario was one of our all time biggest, best, and nicest customers…. And I doubt that anyone in the entire history of the planet ever smoked more gigantic cigars than this guy. We had him on a regular delivery of 100 Hoyo Presidents a month for years… so you’re talking about smoking more than three 8 ½ inch by 52 cigars per day…… but he actually smoked a lot more than that because he would call me a couple of times a year for an extra hundred cigars and some of his buddies would call me every now and then to send him boxes of cigars as gifts! So who knows how many cigars a day this guy smoked. I only met him once in person. He lived out on Long Island and just by chance passed by our 45th street store while he was in Manhattan for some reason. We had a great chat once I told him that Abe Vigoda (the guy that played Sally Tesio in the Godfather movie and was at the time starring in a TV series called FISH, and Robert DiNero who used our Casa Blanca Half Jeroboams in the movie Cape Fear had also been customers.

Hmm…. I guess I can now scratch off DiNero and Vigoda off my famous customer list and move on to one of the most interesting of all…. Uncle Milty…. Milton Berle.
Milto Berle belonged to the Lambs Club. It’s a social club for actors, screenwriters, and other people involved in the entertainment business, and it was just a block away from our store. Every month or so they would have a “Roast” where they would have guys like Milton Berle, and Don Rickles, and other famous comedians and actors poke fun at the guest of honor. So Uncle Milty would come into our store when he was in town to “roast” someone.
I don’t really know if he was the cheapest guy on the planet, but he would never buy anything that wasn’t on sale, or a second of some famous brand cigar.

I think the reason for that is that he had gone bankrupt once or twice. I guess you could look that up on Wikipedia or someplace else on the internet. At any rate, he never had any money with him, and after assembling his purchases one of our salespeople would have to call his wife in California to see if it was okay to give him the cigars, and then she would send us a check for them. He was a very loud talker and you could hear him anywhere in the store…. And he cursed A LOT…… so much so that we would have to threaten to throw him out of the store because other customers were casting dirty looks at him….. and as I recall, my brother Bernie may have actually thrown him out of the store once. More than likely Milty did that just to get attention because he had fallen from being TV’s biggest star in the early 50’s to what frankly was a “has been”….. kinda like what me and my friend Mark Goldman call ourselves right now – formerly the biggest players in the Cigar Industry and now just….. well, just “has beens”.

The one cigar that Berle bought every time he was in, was a brand that started out in a bundle called Pilot Run, and then became a boxed brand call Dominicana. These cigars were the way that General Cigar started their Dominican Factory when they were planning on moving production out of Jamaica and to the Dominican Republic. General had hundreds of trainees making these cigars by the hundreds of thousands and we had made a deal to buy them all under the Pilot Run name in a cellophane bundle, and then, once they got their box factory operating in the Dominican Republic, in a box called Dominicana.
Milton Berle, or anyone else for that matter, didn’t realize that they were buying the cigar that would become the Partagas brand for $7.95 for a box of 25 ! Within two years those same cigars would sell for ten times the amount, and today just one Partagas cigar sells for more that the whole box of 25 did way back then!

Baron Enrico DiPortanova – JR Ultimate Coronas
You might never have heard of this guy, but it was my understanding that he was one of the richest guys in the world…. In fact, when the Shah of Iran was deposed he rented this guys’ mansion in Acapulco to hide out in….. so you know it must have been a helluva place.
Anyway, the Baron’s secretary would call me every couple of months to order FIVE THOUSAND JR Ultimate Coronas in EMS…. That is a hell of a lot of cigars for one person to buy at a time, but she explained that DiPortanova was a heck of a cigar smoker, and always gave several boxes of JR Ultimates to any guest that was into smoking fine cigars.
I don’t know how this happened, especially with an order of this magnitude, but one time an error was made and they shipped him 5,000 JR Ultimate Rothschilds by mistake, and his secretary called me on it. What transpired next could not have happened with any other customer. I apologized and said I would have the cigars picked up and send out 5,000 coronas by next day delivery…. And she said “that’s not necessary. The Baron said he would keep the rothschilds, and would you please send him 5,000 coronas as soon as possible!”

Well…. That’s enough for today.

Last edited by BigJohn; 04-20-2017 at 06:50 PM.
Lew is offline   Reply With Quote
 

Bookmarks
Thread Tools
Display Modes

Posting Rules
You may not post new threads
You may not post replies
You may not post attachments
You may not edit your posts

BB code is On
Smilies are On
[IMG] code is On
HTML code is Off

Forum Jump

Similar Threads
Thread Thread Starter Forum Replies Last Post
Stories atvrider12764 Cigar Talk 47 01-04-2005 11:03 AM


All times are GMT -8. The time now is 01:50 PM.