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Old 11-03-2017, 09:19 AM   #1
ElkTwin
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Padron is on the cover of the new JR catalog

In other news, Lew is out on the lawn behind the Whippany store practicing rolling over in his grave.


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Old 11-03-2017, 09:41 AM   #2
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well I guess no grudge lasts forever
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Old 11-03-2017, 11:08 AM   #3
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After about two decades of getting them in the mail, JR has ceased sending catalogs to me.

But a Padron on the cover would have been an eye opener for sure, at least for us who grew up with JR.

Last edited by bsk; 11-03-2017 at 12:16 PM.
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Old 11-03-2017, 11:20 AM   #4
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one way to fight global warming, freeze hell over
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Old 11-03-2017, 11:45 AM   #5
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speechless.
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Old 11-03-2017, 12:27 PM   #6
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Could be worse. I had to move to stop Thompson catalogs.

Come to think of it, it's been at least a decade since I saw a JR catalog.
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Old 11-04-2017, 05:00 AM   #7
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I wrote a very long story about why we stopped handling Padron cigars on my Facebook page ( https://www.facebook.com/Lew-Rothman-1551547261815800/ ) and I'll just paste a small portion of it here so that people understand it was a decision based on my friendship with one brother and frankly not knowing the other very well. Both brothers in their own right were world class cigar makers.

It was Estelo Padron that ran the Villazon Factory in Danli and later in Cofradia Honduras as well…. as for his brother Orlando… I had never heard of him or bought a cigar from him till 1974. At that time his company was called Piloto Cigars out of Miami…. I think it still is. And, believe it or not, I still have one of his 1974 price sheets and one of our orders !

Well in the many years to come I would make trip after trip with Frank Llaneza to Villazon’s two Honduran factories, and listened to the stories Frank would tell on those long car rides sitting in the back seat of Estelo’s station wagon just in front of his cages of fighting cocks and half choking to death on the cigars Frank and Estelo were smoking with the windows closed and the smell of those roosters. We would drive from San Pedro Sula to Cofradia and then to Danli and stay in some really humble motels during those early years…. and one of the stories was about Estelo and how he came to work for Frank. These aren’t his exact words, but they’re pretty close and the spelling of people’s names are kinda phonetic because I never saw their names in print, just in conversation…. so here the story Frank told, and I’m not sure exactly what year he was talking about but I’m assuming it’s sometime in the late 60’s or very early 70’s.
Now, before I begin, and to make the story more understandable, I gotta tell you that I don’t think either Estelo or his brother Orlando were really “playing with a full deck”…. both of them are certifiably crazy as far as I’m concerned. I don’t know all of Orlando’s eccentricities, but I’m sure that he shared the same gene pool that dictated all the weird stuff Estelo did… and I got to know Estelo extremely well in about 30 years of seeing him on those trips.

Estelo was a guy that would eat and drink like someone going to the electric chair…. giant greasy portions of Oxtail and rice and beans and then immediately lay down and go to sleep for a few hours right after lunch just to make sure all those fats and oils came to rest in his arteries…. and drink? One time we were staying at the Pan American Motor Inn and because the rooms were just cinderblock 12 by 12 quadrants with no windows it was so freakin hot in there that we both slept outside on benches…. at least Estelo slept. I couldn’t sleep a wink out there, but then again I hadn’t drunk an entire bottle of Jack Daniels like Estelo….. another time, driving from Tegucigalpa, Estelo was raving about the nice hotel there and all the liquor and drinks in the mini-bar. Apparently Estelo thought that his room rate included the entire contents of the mini bar, because he had emptied out the entire mini-bar and had his whole duffle bag stuffed with those little liquor bottles they use on airplanes. But most of all, Estelo didn’t trust anyone…. and I mean no one. He was always thinking that people were trying to put one over on him…. years later, after General Cigar had purchased Villazon and Estelo was working for them, we were at an RTDA convention in Cincinnati and some guy was selling real Panama Hats… the kind that sell for six or seven hundred dollars. And because Estelo was being billed as a celebrity by General, the sales guy was anxious for Estelo to walk around wearing one of his hats…. well, Estelo thought the guy was GIVING him a hat, and when the guy asked for it back towards the end of the night, Estelo flipped out and was calling the guy all kinds of names and had to be ushered out of the convention…. then, on top of that, he discovered that his ring was missing, and claimed that the guy slipped it off his finger when he shook his hand….. it was a mess and he was pretty hard to control. I seem to remember that me and John Oliva got him out of there, but I could be mistaken.

As for Orlando, other than him calling me from time to time to tell me that Juan Bermejo was stealing from me, or that his son Triki was stealing from me, or that people in the factory were stealing from me….. I really didn’t have much interaction with him over the years…. and we were a relatively minor account of his until his brother’s 75th birthday. On the occasion of Estelo hitting 75, General Cigar made a commemorative Estelo Padron cigar, and Orlando immediately filed suit to stop Estelo from having his name on the cigars. The two brothers had already been estranged for many years and this was the final straw that broke the camel’s back. So being a close friend of Estelo and just an acquaintance of Orlando, I decided to stop selling Padron cigars entirely to support my good friend…. oof! ….what a mistake that was! Who knew that the Padron brand would get so popular…. and worst of all, a couple of years later Estelo and his brother finally made peace and started talking to each other, but the same could not be said between our company and Padron…. so our company now suffered from a lack of one of the most sought after brands during and after the Cigar Boom era of 1993 through 1997

Well, this post is getting rather long, so let me get to what I know about the relationship and split between the Padron brothers, and remember…. most of what I know about Orlando (other than the distrust factor which is obvious to anyone who knows them) came from Frank’s stories on those long car rides and in dumpy motels.

This is what Frank said:
“I went to Danli to check on how things were going in our first factory and became pretty sure that our factory manager, a guy named Fontesaya was making all kinds of side deals for himself and robbing us blind, so I fired him. A little while later, I was walking down the street in Danli smoking a Hoyo and coming up the street in the opposite direction is a guy walking toward me smoking a cigar, and he stops at a beat up car with a bale of tobacco strapped to the roof. And so I stopped too and we started talking to each other. And I offered him one of my Hoyos and introduced myself as the manufacturer, and he looked at the Hoyo de Monterrey band on the cigar I handed him and was very impressed to see that famous trademark… and in return he hands me a cigar and says “here’s one of mine”…. a Padron.”

Now what are the odds of what happened next actually happening?….. I mean you just can’t make up a story like this because there’s a better chance of hitting the trifecta at Yonkers Raceway than what happened next. Estelo says to Frank that he has just had a big argument with his brother and quit ….. and this is less than a half hour after Frank has just fired his factory manager Fontesaya! So Frank has him come back to the Villazon factory to show him around, and to make a very long story very short, Estelo ends up running both Villazon factories in Honduras for the next few decades!

Frank said that Estelo told him the reason for the fallout between the two brothers that day was over a bank loan that Estelo needed to buy a house in town. Estelo and his wife Nery had been running the entire manufacturing operation from day one, while his brother Orlando ran the sales and shipping from Miami… and, according to Estelo they were equal partners. So when Estelo went to the bank for a loan, they asked him about his assets and he told them he owned half of Piloto or Padron cigars….. and the bank then called Orlando to confirm the fact…. BUT Orlando told the bank that Estelo didn’t own any part of the business…. nothing! Estelo was in shock… done in by his own brother….and I guess that’s why he never trusted anyone ever again. As for Orlando’s mistrust of other people, I can only assume, based on the story about Estelo, that he never trusted anyone because he himself was not trustworthy.

I believe this story about Estelo is true, and when I was in Estelo’s home one time his wife Nery spoke about it…. but it was in Spanish and Cubans talk incredibly fast and so I just kind of caught the gist of it…. but enough to understand that it was basically the same story. Out of sheer curiosity I took a look at the Padron Cigars website today and read the history of the company (you can go to their web site and read it too)…. in it you will not see a single word that mentions that Estelo and his wife Nery ever worked there for even a second ! Maybe it’s because it’s an embarrassing subject that’s easier to omit than to admit.

For me, there’s a lesson to be learned here, but I learned it much too late: Don’t get mixed up in other people’s wars, especially family wars… you’re always gonna come out a loser.

Well, over the years both brothers became successful in two distinctly different ways. Working for Frank and having a stable full of World Famous Brands like Hoyo, Punch, Rey del Mundo, Belinda, and yes, the JR Ultimates and Alternatives, Estelo ran factories producing upwards of 100,000 predominantly hand bunched and hand rolled cigars per day…. and Orlando concentrated on making a limited production of micro-managed extraordinarily fine cigars which today sell at what seem like astronomical prices to an old gaffer like me who remembers being in shock when they raised the fare on the subway from a dime to fifteen cents.
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Old 11-04-2017, 05:32 AM   #8
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Good story Lew!
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