Smoke Inn Blog Smoke Inn Cigar Talk
Holy Smokes! This is such a long story that I’m not sure where I should actually begin, but let’s say… the fall of 1972. Me and LaVonda had just moved back to Manhattan from “the middle of nowhere”. We had lived on a farm about 5 miles outside of Marion, Kansas in a place so remote that in the three years we lived there I only met our closest neighbor once, and that was in a head on collision on the dirt road we both lived on.
I had just graduated from college and theoretically would enter one of the Law Schools I had been accepted to, and LaVonda would resume her career as a model with the Wilhemena Agency, which had either merged with or acquired the Stewart Five Modeling Agency that LaVonda had previously been with.
That plan “went south” in a hurry as arriving back in the city I found that my dad was suffering from emphysema. He and my mom had opened a grocery story on 8th Avenue and 45th St. and it didn’t take a genius to realize that they were killing themselves trying to keep that place open — so I abandoned going to Law School and went to work in the grocery store instead. In hindsight, this was probably the smartest thing I ever did! And since it had already taken me 9 years to get my 4-year college degree, I probably woulda joined the AARP long before the New York Bar.
So, here’s where we get into the “Gangsta” part of the story:
I’m working in my parents’ grocery from 7 in the morning till 10 at night, and now I’m also ordering all the stuff for the place and dealing with the suppliers. The first thing I notice is that the guy from Hudson News is shorting us on the morning and afternoon papers. Back then, there were five, count ‘em… FIVE editions of the Daily News, plus the Mirror, the Times, The Tribune. There were lots of different papers, but the most important was the Daily news because that’s how people found out what “THE NUMBER” was! The mob controlled the numbers racket. This was long before all the crazy lottery tickets you see in the supermarket these days. Back then every form of gambling was illegal, so everybody played THE NUMBERS. You picked a number from 000 to 999, and if you guessed right, you got paid 600 times your bet (even though the odds were a thousand to one). Essentially the mobs (there were different mobs in control of different parts of the city) controlled the only available form of gambling, and the game they controlled guaranteed they would always be the big winner.
Well, where was I? Oh yeah… the newspaper guy is shorting us on the papers every day. So, I tell my father, “let’s get a different company to deliver the papers”, and he tells me “you can’t, Hudson News has this area exclusively, I think maybe it’s controlled somehow by organized crime”.
A week or so later, I’m having the same trouble with the milk deliveries — short every day! So, without asking my father, and on my own, I grab the Yellow Pages and call a different milk company, and order 60 quarts for 6 days a week and 30 on Sunday. Then I call the current milk supplier and cancel our order since I’ll be getting the milk from the new guys right away… “sure I will”! The next day, no milk is delivered by the new guys, and my father is ballistic! “You can’t switch milk suppliers. The whole milk industry in NY is controlled by the mob”! Well, my dad was right, because I called every milk company in the telephone book and ordered milk from all of them, and nothing came, not a quart. Then I had the same experience with the window washer, and then the private garbage men. Organized crime was so pervasive that it damn near ran the entire city. These guys weren’t just above the law, they were the law!
Okay, so now you kind of know what the city was like back then, and I can get to the more interesting part of the story. It’s now a couple of years later, and my parents have sold the grocery store on 8th Avenue, and me and LaVonda have opened our own store on the corner of 45th St. and 6th Avenue. The idea of my ever going to Law School is long over, and due to necessity, LaVonda puts a halt on her modeling career to work with me in the store.
In just a couple of years our little store that measured 15 feet wide and 31 feet long had become a destination point for the city’s cigar smokers. This was due to some insanely novel forms of advertising on my part, but also due to the fact that every guy in the city didn’t want to pass up a chance to buy a cigar from LaVonda, the most beautiful cigar clerk in the entire Solar System! 😍
The N.Y. Post wrote about us, The N.Y.Times, New York Magazine, NBC TV, we were a hot commodity, and among the many notables drawn to our shop were “GANGSTAS”.
Gangstas wear custom made clothes, custom made shoes, silk ties, drink the best booze, and of course smoke the best cigars – and that was what we had become known for – the best handmade cigars. Now we didn’t originally know which of our customers were gangsters, or who were just rich people, or people with rich tastes. You don’t have to be rich to have rich tastes, you just have to treat yourself to something rich every now and then.
However, over a long period of time, or just through idle conversation it became apparent that the cigar smokers of the underworld had become our customers (even those incarcerated in prisons across the country that we supplied by mail) along with the many notable people from the entertainment world, the government, Journalists, Athletes… you name it, we had ‘em.
So, one day this gentleman, a regular customer, comes in to purchase 4 boxes of cigars made by an outfit in Miami named Camacho cigars, which claims it possesses genuine Cuban cigar leaf from 1959 well before the 1962 embargo. The veracity of this claim is the subject for another interesting story, but I’ll leave that for another day.
Anyway, I know the customer by the name “Willie”, but his real name is that of a well-known gangster, and because he is who he is (or since it’s now thirty years later, maybe it’s because he was who he was)… I’m not gonna mention his real name. Now bear in mind that at the time all I knew about this fellow was that he always wore a custom made Vicuna overcoat (a fact I learned from another customer named Rudy who was well known in the neighborhood as the Mafia’s Tailor) and that he bought 4 boxes of El Caudillo #1 Pre-Castro Havana filler cigars every month. Only this time we were out of stock on his cigars, a fact he did not take very well. (Inserting visual of the cigars!)
Now I had known we were running out of this particular item and called the Camacho factory several times to inquire when they would be shipping our orders, and each time I was told “any day now”, and I explained that to Willie. He asked me where I got the cigars from, and I told him: Camacho Cigars in Miami Florida.
Willie looked at his watch and said he was late for “the baths”, and left. The very next morning as me and LaVonda arrived to open our store at 8AM a man from Camacho Cigars was waiting at our door with a dozen boxes of El Caudillo cigars wrapped in twine. ”These are for Mr. Willie — no charge!” So that was the day I became aware that Mr. Willie was maybe not just Mr. Willie. He was a GANGSTA!
I somehow learned years later that “the baths” was a place where “GANGSTAS” met at the old St James Hotel, and where everyone was naked in this steam bath where they poured water over burning hot rocks and discussed “DA BIZNESS”!
Well, now we’re finally getting to the heart of the story. The little cigar store we started in 1972 has grown so fast that there’s no way we could keep enough cigars in inventory, so I rented a loft two blocks to the north, then I rented an office just a block to the south, opposite the N.Y.Times, and we’re having cigars shuttled back and forth from these places and also using them for a startup business in mail order which I’ll write about eventually, if I ever finish this story!
Anyway, one of our best customers is a guy named Seymour Durst. I didn’t know it at first, but Mr. Durst was one of the biggest real estate tycoons in New York. He was an avid smoker of H. Upmann Corona Majors, a five-and-a-half-inch cigar that came in an aluminum tube. Some of you ex-New Yorkers may remember Mr. Durst as the guy who had an electronic billboard on a rooftop high above Times Square that tracked the rise of the national debt. It had numbers on it that moved so fast you could hardly follow it – and that was 50 years ago when we used to talk about millions and billions, now it’s TRILLIONS!
One of his hobbies, and his kids, was building buildings and bridges with the empty Corona Major tubes.By the way, the oldest of Seymour’s kids murdered at least three people and evaded sentencing for about 20 years, but was finally convicted a few years ago, and then died in the Covid epidemic.
Well, I’m getting sidetracked a little, but Mr. Durst and his family are such an interesting topic. So, back to our story:
We’re shuttling stuff back and forth to our little shop on the corner, and Mr. Durst sees what’s going on and he says “I’ve got a 2500 square foot store right across the street that I’d let you have for a thousand dollars a month, and then you could use the space as an office and mail order location, or just move the whole store there. You can actually see the store from here, and it’s got a big hanging sign that’s grandfathered in that can easily be seen from 6th Avenue. It used to be The Peppermint Lounge, the one they wrote the song about.”
Our landlord on the tiny corner store was a real prick named Goldstein. Almost from the day we moved into that store he said, “when your lease is up, you’ll never be able to rent this place again”. Well, now we didn’t need to as we took Mr. Durst up on his offer and moved the whole store and the loft and office space to the old Peppermint Lounge place.
Having everything in one place was a Godsend, and our business continued to grow, and everything was just hunky-dory… until one day I arrived to open the store and found that someone had cut down the big hanging sign over the street and taken it! It was gone!
Now understand that it is much easier to get an original copy of The Declaration of Independence than getting a new permit to erect a hanging sign over the street in New York City, but as Mr. Durst had explained when he first offered us the space, our hanging sign was grandfathered in! Unfortunately, having had the experience of having store signage made I was sure it would take months to get a new hanging sign made, and maybe whoever cut it down would just do it again?
That same morning, By the sheerest stroke of luck , I was walking by the St. James hotel right across the street from our store and this immense guy who lived there, and I mean truly immense guy, named Joe Young (yes! the same name as the giant gorilla in the Mighty Joe Young Movie!) called out to me and he said “ I couldn’t sleep last night, and I was out here sitting on the steps when I saw two guys from the Peep Show next to your store cut down your sign”.
Well, just as an aside, since this story is already way too long anyway, let me tell you a little about Joe Young. He was so incredibly fat that one day he came into our shop to get some cigars and proudly announced that he had gone to Duke University and taken the Rice Diet and lost a couple of hundred pounds in just a few months. And incredible as it may seem, I couldn’t tell he had lost any weight at all… that’s how fat he was. This was a guy who would go to Central Park and rent out an Ice Cream Cart, ostensibly to sell Ice Cream on the street, and eat most of it himself!
Okay, so now I know the guys from the Peep Show cut down my sign, and I go in there to confront them, and they say they know nothing about it, and I say they were seen doing it, and they say “so what…. Whatta ya gonna do?”
What am I gonna do? Well, I call the police and say I want to register a complaint… a complaint against who? The cops say the lease on this peep show is somehow sub-leased to so many entities that they can’t even figure out who owns the shop, but… “they’re working on it”!
Well, now it’s late in the afternoon, and I’m pretty much disgusted and sulking, and in comes Willie, stopping in for his cigars on the way to “the Baths” — yeah, the same Willie that mysteriously got Simon Camacho to send a guy up from Florida with a dozen boxes of cigars to give to Willie for free the very next morning, when I couldn’t seem to get them even though I was willing to pay for them! And Willie says, “Louie, you look upset”, and I tell him the whole story about the sign getting cut down and the assholes next door, and that without the hanging sign you can’t even see where our store is from 6th Avenue. And Willie just says: “So It’s the guys from next door, huh?”. And then he picks up his cigars and walks out of the store without another word.
Well, the rest of the day was spent in utter gloom. While the sign might not seem like that big of a deal to someone else, it was a real big deal to us and that’s about all we could talk about at home that night.
And then the miracle on 45th St. occurs!
As we get to our cigar store a little before eight in the morning, the two shmucks from the peep show are at our front door with a guy named Lloyd Waters, who owns a company named the Borough Sign Company. Not only do they apologize for cutting down our sign, but they introduce Mr. Waters and say “just design any sign you want, neon, illuminated, anything, and Mr. Waters will have that sign hanging in front of your store TOMORROW MORNING!
Now, I have made literally hundreds of signs in the many shops and strip centers, and free-standing buildings we have had over the years, and never, never, never, not once, has it ever taken less than a month or so to get a completed installation… yet somehow, and I am assuming UNDER PAIN OF DEATH, we were going to have a new sign the next day! This was obviously Willie’s doing!
I have no clue as to why Willie took such a liking to us, but I’m certainly glad he did. There were other incidents and occasions where Willie stepped in to help us where “normal” help was unobtainable, and perhaps I’ll write about them another day.
Eventually, Willie was forced to live on a boat outside the 12-mile limit in International Waters, and we would send him his cigars to a boat slip in Miami, where they would be taken out to him. Over the years the “Gangsta” business involved such notables as Mark Fein, Tony Provenzano, John Gotti, John Gotti Jr., and a goodly number of other “Gangstas” both in and out of prison.
Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of Smoke Inn, its employees, or its affiliates.
