All That Glittered

by Nick Kolakowski

George Brightman, former director of business development, Cigar Aficionado: Tony was like a meteor flash. Guys like Rocky Patel and Tim Ozgener [of CAO] worked from the Tony script in terms of building a rollicking parade, marketing a boutique brand. He doesn’t have a long Cuban lineage like other cigar makers, so people saw him as an everyman, a trailblazer. But when you’re a one-man band, and you don’t have the people behind you, it all starts to unravel.

Borhani’s cigar life began when he was 14.

Tony Borhani: My father was a governor for the Shah of Iran. He was a lover of big cigars. I went into his office and took a Cuban, and went into the forest with a friend who smoked cigarettes. The first puff, I coughed for 10 minutes and my eyes were watery. I went home and my mom said, “What’s wrong?” I said, “Oh, nothing,” and went to my room. But my father found out. He said, “If you want to smoke a cigar, you should simply ask me how to smoke a cigar.” My father always retreated to his study after dinner for a smoke or drink. So I sat down, and he cut a cigar and gave it to me. He read poetry, and then we played chess.

Five years later, after serving in the Iranian army, Borhani secured a visa to Costa Rica. After a stint as a bodyguard there, he headed to the U.S., where he lived with his sister in California and, later, Hawaii.

Tony Borhani: I had no money, but was smoking cigars all day — Cubanas for $29.99 a box, Chateaus for 75 cents a stick. Then I had headed down to Costa Rica, where my brother had a successful nightclub, and we opened a second and third one — I was making decent money. After an argument with my brother, I took a break and headed back to the U.S. In Los Angeles, I met with my father’s friend Nick Nikka, who ran one of the top wine shops there. I called him uncle; he catered to all the studios in Burbank. I became a wine buyer for him, traveling all over California and Oregon. This was ’90, ’91, when a slight movement was starting in the cigar world.

Aaron Sigmond, former manager, Davidoff of Geneva, Rodeo Drive; publisher of The Cigar Report: I met Tony when he came into the store; he was working for his uncle, doing cigar events. And somehow he saw the future — the cigar boom had not yet really begun. Most young men in the industry had a familial tie to the business, but guys like him with no connections were unique.

Borhani started selling cigars — eventually doing around five figures a month in business — and hosting cigar events. But he was soon sick of life in L.A.’s fast lane.

Tony Borhani: I got married in Costa Rica and decided to stay there. It was pura vida, but there were no cigars. But there were three flights a week to Cuba, so I got brave, took my passport and decided to purchase cigars there. After about a year of going back and forth, I met with a lot of masters of Cuban tobacco. Eduardo Irrizari, the guy who started Cohiba, was rolling cigars in the factory when I visited. We got along because his great-great-grandfather was from Lebanon, and because I was from Iran, he thought there was a connection. He was instrumental to my developing a blend.

But in the meantime, my wife was getting uneasy about my travels to Cuba, and asked why couldn’t I find a source in Costa Rica. . . . I then found a factory in San Ramón, a little sweatshop with a tin roof, with eight people rolling cigars inside. The construction of the cigars was fantastic — but I wasn’t impressed with the flavors. So I met with the owner, a 60-year-old man from Spain who made only bundled cigars for hotels and airport gift shops. When I told him about the flavor profile I was looking for, he said, “Look, I make cheap cigars, but I can make you great cigars if you get me the material.”

Eventually, Borhani found a small batch of super-strong tobacco in Nicaragua, from which he made some sample cigars for Irrizari.

Tony Borhani: Eduardo thought the final result was fantastic. We were sitting in front of a hotel on Havana Bay, and he said — in Spanish — “There’s nothing better than this: drinking good rum, eating with a friend, watching the sunset.” But he said two words I didn’t understand — one of them was bahia, which means bay. The other was for sunset. I ended up calling the cigar Bahia — I thought nobody would be able to pronounce the other word.

Back in 1994, 80 percent of the cigars on the market were mild, and many were made with Connecticut shade wrapper. What was missing was a cigar that had a lot of flavor. Our Nicaraguan had a lot of filler and a lot of flavor — a lot of power. It was a monster.

George Brightman: Tony understood the simplicity of the business from the beginning of the cigar boom. From his own passion and enthusiasm, the drama and desire — by grasping what the hip cigar guys were interested in — he thought he could form a brand that would encompass all that.

I was unimpressed with the early cigars. They were simple, not at all what they would become. But he stuck with it, absorbing the feedback, and by dint of his enthusiastic exhorting, people began to give his venture a chance.

Tony Borhani: We sold the first 10,000 cigars in the first three months. Went back and rolled 30,000; they were gone in six months. The margins were mind-boggling. I had no overhead, because it was being done in small scale.

George Brightman: He wasn’t interested in building the next Altadis or Partagas. He wanted the cool brand that the insiders would go for.

Rocky Patel, founder of the eponymous cigar company: Tony and I got into the cigar business at the same time. I first met him in 1995, in Los Angeles; we were doing a joint cigar dinner for Arnold Schwarzenegger [at his restaurant Schatzi on Main] in Santa Monica. Our paths crossed at the Grand Havana Room, and we ran into each other at RTDA [Retail Tobacco Dealers of America, now the IPCPR] shows. He’s very charismatic; you have to give him credit for what he accomplished in such a short time.

Tony Borhani: My wife and I moved to an apartment in San Diego. One bedroom and the living room were full of cigars; I was handwriting the invoices, packing cigars in the car, driving them to UPS. I had to learn a lot of things on my own. And that’s how Bahia started.

But when I went back to the factory in Costa Rica, there was a new crew there. This was ’96, the middle of the boom. I was told a rich American gentleman had bought the factory and wanted to meet with me. He was staying at one the most expensive hotels in Costa Rica.

The rich American was “Don” Douglas Pueringer. At the hotel, he announced that wanted to partner with Borhani, who accepted the offer.

Rocky Patel: Don Douglas was a key factor in the manufacturing of those cigars. In this business, to keep growing, you need raw material and the capital to get it from the great growers.

Tony Borhani: We moved into a factory with 80 or 90 workers, tobacco from all parts of the world coming in. This was ’96, ’97 — we made a maduro, a 1993 vintage that became one of the hottest cigars on the market. Then we released Bahia Gold, which had a spicy, rich, evolved flavor, and we were the talk of the country. We couldn’t stop the freaking phones; I had to add four people just to take orders. I bought my first house, five bedrooms for $300,000. It reminds me of Scarface, when [Al Pacino] sees the sign that says The World Is Yours.

Michael Frey, proprietor, FreyBoy Tobacco, Las Vegas: I got into this business in 1996, just as Tony was starting. We hit it off right away, becoming good friends, hanging out whenever he was here. He was great at promoting himself and the brand — it became really big, one of our hottest-selling cigars.

David Kitchens, General Manager of Davidoff of Geneva — Madison Avenue: Tony’s intense. That’s the number-one way to describe him. He was running 24/7 around the country, promoting the brand. To own the retailers, you have to be there all the time — throwing the parties and everything else. And he was a one-man operation; he’s always been modest in terms of number of employees, because he was the best to impart his own message. He could party like a rock star.

Aaron Sigmond: Tony said, “Come to San Diego, be vice president of my company.” His offices were opulent by cigar-industry standards. One of his houses had four or five bedrooms; the other was a mansion on the hill. He said I could live in the old house, and he would leave the Bahia-orange Harley, and a turquoise ’55 T-bird that never seemed to run, in the garage.

Tony Borhani: Bahia sales were through the roof — there were events, dinners, entertaining. At this point, I trusted that the factory was doing a good job. I called Douglas and said sales were going up fast, and that I knew we had a shortage of tobacco, but he assured me that everything was fine. Instead of going every month to Costa Rica, I was going every three or four months.

Michael Frey: What I like about Tony is that he’s a hard-charger. He’s very opinionated, very confident.

Rocky Patel: It’s easy to make a few cigars. But when you need to make many, with the same standards and quality controls, you need to be there. I’m at the factory every other week for a reason; if you let someone else make your cigar, you need to watch over everything.

I’ve told Tony to be humble and focus on the business and have a longer fuse — not making enemies or getting people upset. People remember the one or two bad things you do to them. The world is round.

David Kitchens: Especially when it comes to cigars, Tony can go and go and go until he gets exactly what he wants. He has a vision of what he wants to do, and that’s singular — but it can also be like a broken record. He could really ruffle people’s feathers.

Aaron Sigmond: We were in the middle of so many projects, and it got him into these parties, onto all these lists. He had a Porsche and a Mercedes. He was working out in Prada shoes. Nothing Tony did was in moderation — even the photo shoots were more like parties, with music, girls, everything. We did this 14-hour shoot for an ad campaign, “Bahia Man,” with this one guy from an ad agency running around with a massive thing of blow he called “ziiiiip!”

So it was starting to get out of control. And Tony and I had one pact: we would never let working together interfere with our friendship. It wasn’t working out, so I left.

With business booming, Douglas Pueringer decided to bring in some new management to help run the factory.

Tony Borhani: It was this meticulous German named Jurgen. We walked into his office in Costa Rica, and he made us wait 15 minutes before walking in with a fake smile. He hands me a Cohiba Esplendido from a box with a clear top — now, I know Habanos are never made like that. I take three, four puffs and tell him, “There’s not even a leaf of Cuban tobacco in here.” We open the cigar, and inside is an electrical cable. Douglas starts laughing. The German turns red and starts screaming, “I’m going to kill this guy!” And I realize he’s full of it.

Later that summer, we were at the Nashville RTDA. I walked into the CAO party with George Brightman and one of my clients from L.A. — and saw, on the TV screens, our rollers making cigars. Douglas and Jurgen — who were there — had gone ahead and made a cigar for CAO, the same exact size as my Bahia Gold, same box design. I went over and said hello in complete disbelief, and Jurgen ignored me. I went to Douglas at the bar and said, “This is the same cigar.” He said, “You don’t know what you’re talking about, Tony.” I don’t think CAO was [expletive] with me; it was Jurgen. They said, “we want something like Bahia Gold.” And they made it. I lost it.

Pueringer fired the “meticulous German” — but the problems weren’t over yet.

David Kitchens: When you’re spending every penny on traveling and promotions, and someone else shows up with the same blend that’s tweaked a bit — and ends up highly rated, putting them in the same orbit as you’re in — it’s enough to make anyone as angry as you can get. A lot of things happen in this industry where you don’t know the balance is tipping until you can’t recover.

Tony Borhani: I made the trip to Costa Rica and watched production for the first time in a year. The Ecuadorian wrapper used for Bahia Gold had been oily and thick, but these were fragile and greenish. It didn’t have the same strength. That’s when it started to fall apart.

I went to the warehouse and told them to open every cigar box. They were tight — so many of them wouldn’t draw. We were producing twice the amount that we used to, but the quality wasn’t the same. You go to a cigar store, you open a box and the wrappers look horrible. It’s devastating. It crushes you. Business had dropped 30–35 percent by the end of 2001.

George Brightman: The saddest part of Tony is that he lost focus; he thought he could always be the seller, always move product. But the guys at the base of the pyramid, the retailers, started feeling a little left behind; they didn’t feel the love anymore.

Michael Frey: The consistency of the product got a little shaky. They had maintained a high quality and standards that Tony had set — and Tony was a perfectionist — but he had supplier and production problems that affected the brand. People stopped carrying it. People got frustrated. We got frustrated. It wasn’t personal, just business.

Borhani moved to cigar-friendly Miami and took a more active role. Bahia production shifted to Nicaragua. Things improved — but not enough.

Tony Borhani: There was so much crap everyone was talking online — all these stories, people going around saying that Tony was a fraud with tax problems. This game, once you’re a little bigger, everybody [expletive] with you. I was burned out from working, not seeing my wife and kids, staying up until 3 in the morning — drinking, taking vendors everywhere, buying tables.

It’s so difficult to defend your honor when people are attacking you. The move to Miami produced a few people around me who were really into the nightlife scene. I’m not sure when I said, “Just [expletive] it. I’ll open a bottle of vodka and drink and dance.” It wasn’t a nightly thing. I was just trying to compensate. But I wasn’t the same person I had been when I started. Too many things were going on in my mind.

Then Douglas sends me a fax: “Señor Tony, I have decided that my time in this business has come to an end. I’m not able to make the number of cigars that will keep me in business.” That was devastating — I thought we were good friends. But he wanted to be an $80 million company, and he wasn’t going to get that big.

Aaron Sigmond: Tony was getting a bit out of control. He was in Nicaragua, looking for new factories; in Europe, accepting awards; in the States, meeting with retailers. After I moved back to New York, we stayed friends, but he was partying really hard. Borhani purchased the rest of his cigars back from Pueringer, but other expensive fights were erupting all around, including with large online retailer Cigars International. The brand was dying.

Tony Borhani: The only thing that kept me alive was going to events, even though my cigar numbers were dropping by a million a year. Problems at home started to arise. The more things happened, the more I tried to run away from it by going out with people. Nights of pain and drinking, doing crazy and stupid stuff — I didn’t see any light at the end of the tunnel. I left the house and ended up in divorce court. My wife and kids were the most precious things, and I lost them.

About a year ago, I looked at myself and said, “Enough self-pity.” And the retailers were telling me, “Tony, we want you back.”

George Brightman: He’s talented, and when he’s on, he’s a master. He has a great nose, a great palate. He understands on a fundamental level what it takes to make a great cigar.

Tony Borhani: I met some new friends. They said, “We want you to come back. We have a little factory in Nicaragua — why don’t you come down?” I asked what kinds of tobacco they had asked for three different blends. We stood at the rolling table and smoked these blends we did together. Two of the three were out of this world. That was how Bahia Icon was born, the one that premiered at the last RTDA.

David Kitchens: If I’d been kicked in the teeth as many times as he had by so-called “friends,” I wouldn’t be in the cigar industry anymore. But he’s still pushing.

Tony Borhani: I think this is my way back.