Episode 67 Part 2 Skip Martin Roma Craft Tobac

Episode Summary

Part two of A Cigar Hustler's Podcast sit-down with Skip Martin, co-founder of RoMa Craft Tobac, digs deep into how a Nicaraguan cigar factory actually runs. Skip explains the labor reality of Estelí: most rollers and bunchers are effectively seasonal employees who are let go and rehired around November and January so factories avoid career-employee obligations like indemnización, while workers chase vacation payouts, the seventh-day pay and the Aguinaldo 13th-month bonus. That churn, plus company payday loans, is why so many pairs bounce through ten, fifteen, even twenty factories in a career.

Skip walks through the experiments he and partner Esteban Disla ran at Nica Sueño to break that cycle — putting everyone on bank accounts and debit cards (which nearly caused a revolt), a dollar-for-dollar savings match, subsidized private-clinic doctor visits and prescriptions, and eventually paying 100% of education costs for employees and their kids who keep good grades. The payoff: out of 67 total employees in the factory's history they've lost only about seven, and their pairs can switch between a 5x50 perfecto, a Churchill, Cromagnon and Aquitaine sizes across a single week. He also tells the story of Mancho, the elderly overnight security guard whose tenure ended in spectacular fashion, and of an employee who turned up on CNN in a migrant caravan.

The second half is Skip's origin story: losing his mother to domestic violence when he was four, being raised by an 18-year-old sister, attending 67 schools between kindergarten and 12th grade (a fact the FBI turned up during his Navy nuclear-program security clearance), living on Social Security survivor benefits and food stamps, and hustling everything from donated eggs to laminated porn cutouts. He covers baseball (American Legion ball alongside Todd Van Poppel and Reid Ryan), the Navy, selling a business to Xerox, nearly dying in Nicaragua and the defibrillator he now carries.

The episode closes with the show's five questions. Skip names his mother as the person he'd most like to share a cigar with, picks the Eladio Díaz birthday cigar as his all-time favorite smoke, and rattles off the RoMa Craft sticks in his own humidor — Intemperance, Aquitaine Mastodon, Cromagnon Mastodon, Neanderthal, Wunderlust and more — smoking ten to twelve a day. He finishes with an extended argument for why cigar shops and barbershops should be places where people can still have civil conversations about politics and policy.

In This Episode

1. 01
   How Estelí Factory Labor Really Works
   Skip breaks down seasonal vs. career employees, indemnización pensions, the Aguinaldo 13th month, and why rollers constantly rotate between factories.
2. 02
   Payday Loans and the Bank Account Experiment
   Putting factory workers on debit cards and savings accounts nearly caused a revolt, but gave employees their first bank accounts.
3. 03
   Savings Matching, Private Doctors and Paid Education
   How RoMa Craft's share of factory profits funds matched savings, private clinic visits, prescriptions and full education costs for employees and their kids.
4. 04
   Low Turnover and Versatile Pairs at Nica Sueño
   Only seven departures out of 67 lifetime employees, and why every pair has to roll perfectos, Churchills, Cromagnon and Aquitaine sizes interchangeably.
5. 05
   Factory Stories: Mancho and the Caravan
   The night security guard's spectacular firing, and watching a former employee turn up on CNN walking to the U.S. border.
6. 06
   Skip's Origin Story
   Losing his mother at four, 67 schools in 13 years, food stamps and welfare, an FBI security-clearance interview, and childhood hustles.
7. 07
   Baseball, the Navy and Life After Almost Dying
   American Legion ball with Todd Van Poppel and Reid Ryan, the Navy nuclear program, the Xerox exit, and the defibrillator he now carries.
8. 08
   The Five Questions and Talking Politics in Cigar Shops
   Skip's favorite cigars, his advice about earning an honest C, and why he thinks cigar lounges should be places for civil political discussion.

Brands & Cigars Discussed

Linked items are in our shop. Mentions without a link aren’t currently stocked or couldn’t be matched with confidence.

Transcript

Welcome to A Sicar Hustlers Podcast, Episode 66! This is part two of the Skip Martin Chronicles. Hope you're comfortable, because we're gonna keep going. Enjoy the show!

Mike, Mike, Mike, Mike, Mike, Mike, Mike squared, Mike squared, Mike squared, Mike squared, Mike squared, Mike squared. Um, you know, what's the average churn ratio of, like, pairs in the factories in Esteli? Um, I think you know the answer to this. I do.

Well, I know all the answers to the majority of the questions that I'm fucking asking you. Um, so, So the majority of people who work in cigar factories are not actually employees of the factory. Right. And what I mean by that is, you're kind of more like a temporary employee.

Mm-hmm. And then twice a year, they let you go, they give you a vacation payout, and then you come back and you kind of essentially start your tenure over again. Right. Particularly in November, you leave and then you kind of come back in January.

Right. Or the end of November. So the reason why they do that is because there's a differentiation in the labor laws of Esteli where there are career employees and then there's just employee employees. Right.

Right. So like seasonal employees. That's like part-time, full-time shit here. The guy who runs the farm is a career employee.

Right. This week it's 50 people. Next week it's 100 people. The week after that it's 300 people.

Then for six months there's nobody. Right. Those guys are seasonal employees. Right.

Factory people, they kind of take advantage of the rule a little bit, and they essentially let them go and then bring them back. Right. So the reason why they do that is because once you become a career employee, you have to essentially start funding a pension, which is called indemnization, and essentially they earn so much per year that you pay them out at the end of their career. Right.

The other thing that happens is while they're working they earn a seventh day, they get paid for Sunday, they earn a 13th month called Aguinaldo, and Arlen would be the one to ask this question too, by the way, she's the one that knows all these rules, but what happens is a lot of people live paycheck to paycheck, and a big number of people in the factories borrow money from the factory, like Preston was what they call it. They call it basically a payday loan, company store loan. So people come and they'll be like, when I first started in Nicaragua, it was, you know, we had our first two employees, the very first thing they did was borrow money. And it was, you know, and then the next three employees borrowed money.

And then I, and then I started realizing that everybody's on these, you know, they borrowed $400 and they're paying it back $5 a paycheck or something. Right. And it's, and then what happens is, you know, a lot of the factories won't let them get too far over their skis. So that their last pay period, they can always cover the entire amount if they decide to leave.

Right. The other thing that happens is people will just leave so they can get a payout on their accumulated vacation in Aguinaldo. So like, if you work January, February, March, April, and they won't let you take a loan, then you'll just leave, get paid out, you know, three quarters of your vacation, whatever, And then you go to another factory who just a lot. Most people who are both rollers and bunchers, they've worked in 10, 15, 20 factories and they constantly rotate.

And people who sort tobacco, same thing. People work in packaging, even more so. So in our factory, a couple of things happened early on. One, I just don't like the idea of my employees owing me money.

Right. It's not a good look. Mm-hmm. So, you know, being, you know, a genius, I was the first guy ever, obviously, to think, hey, we'll just put everybody on direct deposit.

Right. Because everybody pays payroll and cash. Everybody lines up outside of the office at the end of the day on Friday. Every day you pay everybody a whole week's pay in cash.

And then they put it in an envelope, and then they live out of the envelope for the week. And I thought, well, one of the big problems, the reason why these people have to borrow money is because they don't have a savings account. Right. So I said, well, here's what I'm gonna do.

I went to our Bank of America rep, came over, back, and they came over and said, well, we'll give all your employees a checking account, a debit card, and a savings account. And I'm like, well, that's what we need to do. That's genius. And so, we did that, and there was like a near revolt.

They all lined up on Friday, where's my money? Hey, here's a card, all your money's at the bank, they're like, fuck this, they all went and lined up at the ATM, not one of them knew how to use an ATM, they're immediately pissed off, that lasted about two weeks before they literally tarred and feathered me. So, part of the byproduct of that was, though, that everybody ended up with a savings account, which they'd never had before, because you can't really open, like, if you're a roller in a factory, going to the bank and actually open a bank account is not easy to open a bank account. Right.

But because of our relationship with the bank we did it this way so they all actually all ended up with a bank account. So we went to back and so I started my second genius idea was here's what we'll do: you tell us how much every month you want to put into your savings account, we'll do a deduction out of your check, you won't get that in cash in your envelope, we'll put it in the bank and then we'll match it. So you can do up to 100% of your paycheck, so if you make $80 a week or $100 a week, if you put $5, we'll match $5. If you do $20, we'll match $20.

If you put the whole paycheck in, we'll match 100%. But you have to put it in your savings account, we're a co-owner of your savings account, and then next time you come to me and say I need my roof fixed, I need to buy a motorcycle, I need school supplies, whatever it was, then we'll let you take that money out. So anything that we would give you a loan for, we would allow you to take 100% of that savings out for that purpose. So essentially, borrow the money from yourself and we're funding half of that.

So that also went over like a lead balloon because there was, at that time I think we had 35 employees, 12 of them were guys. So I think like 23 women and one guy contributed to that, and the one guy was because his wife worked at the factory and she made him do it. 50, $5. I mean, it's kind of fucked up.

I mean, these guys don't make a lot of money. And then what I realized what people were still coming and asking for loans for were mainly school-related things or health-related things. So, you know, again, because I'm the smartest guy in Esteli, and everybody else has already learned all these things, by the way, so I said, well, here's what we'll do. I have a doctor.

My doctor's not super expensive. Instead of getting, you know, we don't have enough people to have like a health clinic at the factory, like AJ and Placencia and those guys do, but also the ENCE system is total dog shit. It's like worse than sick call in the Navy. I mean, it's, you show up, sit for six hours, get who knows how many more diseases, and then they give you some Right.

So we start allowing to pay for them or their kids to go to the private clinic, which is almost, I mean, it's almost no money. It's negligible. And we would also pay for half of their prescriptions. S.

And at the end of the day, we didn't have a lot of people getting sick. Really, it was more their kids. Right. And then their kids would get sick.

Then they would be out of work for three days. Right. And then that's twelve hundred cigars. And then, you know, et cetera, et cetera.

It starts to add up. It scales. Yeah. So it's like, OK.

So since we've started, Esteban owned half the factory. I own half the factory. And I never took my money out of the factory. So we had this huge account that was kind of not huge.

I mean. Right. And as to leave a sense. We had this chunk of money that would just accumulate.

Right. I didn't want to pay taxes on it because if I took it out, I had to pay 40 percent tax on it. Right. So what I did is I just moved my share of the business into the So we had this fund that would fund the matching for the savings accounts, it would fund the private doctor, that would fund, so the next thing was, people would ask for school supplies, or school stuff, and it's everything from my kids, so I have two kids, one's in public school, so I have to buy a uniform and notebooks and pens, and then some of them it was, my daughter's in medical school and she wants to maturiculate and I have to pay the $500 fee to get it out.

So what we started to do at that point was we said, we'll pay 100% of any education related expenses as long as they're getting good grades. So we would fund the school supplies and uniform stuff up front, and then we would matriculate if they graduated with good grades. So we started doing that. So we started to chip away at all these reasons people would borrow money.

So eventually, we just eventually put a policy in place we would not lend money anymore, which, if a factory won't do payday advances or lend money, that would be one of the first reasons why people would leave. But because we'd addressed a lot of the reasons, we never had that issue. And at this point, the only things we really lend money for now are for someone to buy land or to buy things like they can't go to the bank and get a loan. Right.

So we've had someone that was like our second or third employee, Sylvia, who recently just bought some land two years ago. She borrowed money. We paid half of the land. She paid half.

She eventually paid that loan back. Now we give her a new loan to build a house. Svon's like the general contractor on the house. If you know how cheap and it's been the greatest thing for her having him.

Right. It was like a whole delivery of bricks that weren't the highest quality. He rejected them. It was great.

It's a great story. Mike, this isn't Lajero Bricks, send us back? Mike, yeah, so at the end of the day, it's not because I'm some big altruist, it's because, first of all, it's very inexpensive. Mike, I make really good money on the Roma side.

I mean, I had money before Roma, Arlen and I live a pretty decent life, but on the factory side, I haven't had to really put a lot of my own money in, it's really just my share of the factory profits that take care of these things. but the main thing is this we have 12 pairs okay um out of those 12 pairs we're one of the very so arlen's sister works at another factory and it's been in nicaragua a long time an undisclosed name yeah that we can't say her parents actually worked this for this factory for decades okay and um she's rolled the same size cigar for like nine years right if she wanted a job at our factory She couldn't get a job at our factory. Because she only does that one size? Because she only knows how to make that one size in the way that they make it.

Right. Everybody in our factory has to be able to make a 5x50 Perfecto on Monday and Tuesday, switch Tuesday afternoon to making a 5x56, switch to making a Churchill on Wednesday, doing Cro-Magnon on Monday and Tuesday, doing Audepodaca on Thursday and Friday. I mean there are four or five pairs that do the more difficult sizes, but everybody switches stuff all the time, and if they weren't there long term, that's a very hard thing to replace. Right.

So, we have 67 employees in the entire history of our factory. We've only lost, I think, seven employees. Okay. two have gone to spain one is a nurse went to spain to be like a take care of old people right um one of them is is doing um daycare stuff in spain and then money you can't resist it right um one of them became a preacher one of was an alcoholic right i like that guy yeah he's a great guy same guy preacher and alcohol no that's a different guy totally different guy um and then you know there's one or two that just didn't work out right um like a packaging girl and a One of our cleaning ladies had a baby.

She left. She had had enough of being a cleaning lady. She had a college degree, and she was way underperforming. And then we've had a few people that, you know, we've paid their way through school.

They've graduated as a nurse or as a social worker or as whatever, and they've moved on. Gladly. You know, if they didn't, I would have fired them. Seriously, go do something with your life.

But you know, making cigars or working in a cigar factory, a good roller or a buncher can make us more than a teacher and about as much as like a notary, like a lawyer. Right. Or a nurse. Wow.

We have three or four people that work in our factory that are finished nursing school. Right. And they make more packaging cigars than they make… As a nurse. Yeah.

But your turn ratio is extremely low, obviously. Our turn ratio is really low, to your original question. Right. The turn ratio, in general, in factors is pretty high.

Right. I mean, there are factors that have, this lady's been here for 34 years, this lady's been here for 20 years. Yeah, of course. But like, I go on to the Nikasuenio, and it's the same faces.

Almost every, yeah, almost, you've been there for years, and it's the same people. Right. " Right. Right.

I can see the, I mean, I could tell the new guys that come in, but you know, a year later, they're still there. you know we did have one guy he was one of the younger guys who whose main job was kind of moving tobacco around and um and um handing the tobacco to the bunchers and that stuff and it was funny because we were like watching cnn and s when i told me hey he went to the border i'm like why did he go to the board he's like he's going to the us to work and i'm like okay like did he get a letter to get a visa no he's just going so he did the whole you know caravan thing yeah basically no bullshit we're watching TV in the factory one day there he is walking down the road so one day we're watching TV in the factory no bullshit it's Alvarito right on the because we have a TV right in the front of the factory he's right there on the thing like kicking rocks like being interviewed by a border control I'm like what a knucklehead that's awesome dude you did something that was pretty impressive I mean, a few weeks ago, you sent me a video, and you were, by hand, you were weighing the cigars to the fucking gram. I'm pretty good at that. Esteban's better at that than I am, but yeah.

Sorry. Right? I got excited. You told me about it.

Sorry. Yeah, I can, I mean, you know, when you're picking up cigars all day, every day, you can, you can differentiate. I mean, by the fucking gram, dude? Yeah, pretty much.

One, two grams. I mean, there were a couple I think I made a mistake on, but. Yeah, but overall the ratio was pretty, uh, you're pretty accurate. Yeah, I'm pretty good at that.

Right. " Right. " Right. " Can we talk about Macho at all?

Uh, yeah, yeah. So, like... So, Macho is one of the seven that doesn't work anymore. He never was officially an employee.

Right. Macho is like a 70... ¿Cuánto años tiene Macho? Like, 78?

78? Like, he's like 75, 76 years old. Right. He was our security guard for, like, the weekends.

Right. Actually, in the beginning, he was our full-time overnight security guard. He was, right. He'd come in no shoes, button-on-button shirt, eating fish or whatever the button was he would eat, and he would just stay in the factory and make sure it didn't burn down at night.

Right. Now we have Luis. I mean, you know, if you broke down, if you could identify the great strides that has happened with Nika Sueño and Roma Craft, I mean, those two guys are a great comparison from one end of the pendulum to the other. So here's a story about Macho.

Okay. So. -Mancho. -Mancho.

-Mancho. -Mancho. -I always called him Macho. -Yeah.

But Mancho is his name, like Noncho. Right. No, but listen, the gringos know him as Mancho. That's what I call him.

And he was every bit of Mancho. So Mancho, his wife. You can't call him Mancho now. We're sticking with this.

¿Cómo se llama la esposa de Mancho? His wife's name is, oh, fuck. I forget her name. Like Marita or something.

I don't remember her name. But she's like 20 years older than him. Right. So she's like 90 years old.

Right. Or 95. She's older. She's never owned a pair of shoes in her entire life.

No shit. Wow. She lives, like, around the block from Esteban, has for forever. And she would get, like, her Sunday red dress with a hat with no shoes.

Like, it's crazy. Right. So, Mancho was just one of these, like, you know, odd job kind of dudes. Right.

I mean, he's, like, twice my age, but, I mean, the guy could, like, chop down a tree and chop wood for three days without getting tired. He's tired. He's that kind of guy. So, one day, Esteban gets a hint that there's something weird going on.

So, Sunday, he goes to church. Mancho comes in. He's hanging down the street. Some chick walks into the factory, like 50 years old.

So, like a youngin. Right. Like 55, 56. She comes in the factory, so Esteban and Uraldi and Anthony come into the factory, knock on the door, and Mancho takes like 10 minutes or 5 minutes to come open the door, so finally he opens the door, and he's got it latched from the inside, right?

Right. " So they're going around looking, because they saw this woman walk in. Right. So they end up going to the girl's bathroom, and there's this butt-necked 60-year-old woman.

And they're like, what's going on here? And he's like, that's my wife. He's like, we've known your wife for 20 years. That's not your wife.

That's my other wife. That's my other wife. So he's like 78 years old banging a chick on the job in the bathroom. Totally busted.

So you're all just making a video of the whole thing. And I'm like, I don't want to see that. So, um, Macho didn't, he didn't pan out. He lost his job that night.

Right, that was, that was, that was the, that was the end for Macho. But he, but he earned my respect. Do you ever see him? Uh, yeah, we see him all the time.

Yeah? Yeah, he's a good guy. Just kind of stops in, says what's up? No, we, I mean, when I go to see Esteban or, uh, Jose Mesa, when I go over there, cause he's neighbors with Jose Mesa, so.

Right. It's a small town, man. Oh yeah, for sure. Yeah.

That's awesome. S. S. now?

No, or no? No. Well, shit, dude, I mean. Wait, did you bring up the strip club in Castleberry?

I mean, that's, you know, that's entirely up to Skip if you want to talk about the strip club in Castleberry. The House of Babes? Right, back in. Across from the Highland Place?

Right. All nude. All nude. Back in, what, I don't think they do nude now.

That would have been 90, um. What now? Not over there. They didn't over there before they shut it down.

That would have been like 92. I think it was called Circus Circus when it closed down. There was like a headliner place that was like, you know, like the traveling strippers would go to. And then a little ways down there was the house, it was in Castleberry.

Right. Yeah. Now it's what? The whole area.

But this place is no longer there. It's no longer there. Rachel's is over there. No, is it Rachel's?

Okay. Rachel's is over there with Sam's. I was going to say Scarlet's, but Scarlet's is down in South Florida. Right.

Totally different. Yeah. Yeah, there was, I mean, when I was in the early days in the Navy, we shut down some strip clubs. Right.

There was a place in Fort Lauderdale, too, called The Booby Trap. Oh, it's still there. Yeah. You speak a place like that over in Lee Road, too, called Booby Trap.

No, Booby Trap in Fort Lauderdale is still there, definitely. Not that I know. We shut that place down a couple times. I don't know.

So, you want to know my origin story, like how I grew up, or...? I mean, that's up to you if you want to tell that story, you know? I mean, like, I honestly didn't think that this interview was going to go the way that it did. Like, I had to ask questions and shit.

Like I thought that I was just going to kind of sit back and you were just going to kind of go off. I'll tell you an interesting factoid. Okay. So when I was in boot camp, I was in the nuclear power program, so I had to have a security clearance.

" Right. " Right. So they said, "Your application, or your security clearance application was incomplete. " Right.

So, it turned out, and I didn't even know this number at the time, I had gone to 67 different schools between K and 12. No shit. Wow. So, my mother died when I was young.

Right. So, I have seven older sisters, I was a late baby, my mother was actually already divorced from my dad. When I was born, and she had a boyfriend, domestic violence, that's all I remember when I was a kid is, you know, the domestic violence and everything, and so when I was four, the guy she was dating, the guy, she came to pick me up at, like, the lady who kept me during the day, and we were walking out of the front door, and he pulls up, she's walking me down the side, He hits the sidewalk, shoots her in the head, you know, she died. So, you know, that's not a great way to start, right?

So, my sister at that time, my oldest sister was 18. And so, she had just had a kid of her own who was like a year and a half younger than me. And I was like this close to going to the orphanage, the Texas Boys' Home or whatever. And then she convinced the courts to allow her to become my guardian, so I ended up growing up with my sister, who had her own long list of dysfunctions, drug addict, alcoholic, codependent, also in domestic violence my whole life growing up, so what would happen is my aunt, my mother's sister, owned a bunch of rental houses in the shittiest parts of town, right?

You know, like $15,000 houses. So, my sister, who got a divorce from her first husband early on, like, I was like six or seven, we would move into one of these shitty, you know, slumlord houses that my aunt owned, and Pleasant Grove, or Wilmer Hutchins, or you name a shitty part of Dallas-Fort Worth, I lived there. Right. Guaranteed.

So, we would move in there, live there for three or four months until she would, my aunt would get sick of her not paying on time or something. Of course, it was a struggle. She ended up having two more kids. You know, being a single woman with four kids, obviously, is not, you know, the easiest thing.

So, there were times growing up, because my mother and father both passed away, my Social Security survivor benefits were like the only income coming into the house. So, we would, you know, she would find some boyfriend at, you know, the honky tonk, or whatever, and we would end up moving in with that guy, and then there would be domestic violence, and then the sheriff would come in the middle of the night, we'd haul ass with all of our shit to some other slum house, and then we'd start school again, et cetera. So, I had gone to a number of schools, 67 schools, and some of them multiple times. You rotated back.

Exactly. So then, eventually, I got kind of sick of that. That's part of the reason why I did really good in school, because that was the thing that I controlled. Right.

Right. Was doing as much as I could at school, get away from the other stuff. So, plus, going from school to school, you kind of had to be on your own self-paced program. Right.

You never catch the next curriculum in the middle of, you know. Right. You know, Thursday you're at one school, Monday you're at a different school, right? Totally different multiplication tables at different times.

I mean, this was back when we all had library cards. Right. I mean, I'd spend hours in the library. In fact, kind of an early story is I would steal books from the school library because I loved reading.

And I had like a 300, 400-volume book collection. Yeah. And so I'd bring these books home. " And it was, this was one of the few times we were at a place long enough where I could collect anything.

Right. " So I was like, you know, I want a book for four. He's got more hair than we do at the library. So that was my big crime, was stealing the books.

Stealing information. We always had hustles going on when I was a kid. " Right. And then we'd get a dozen eggs.

And then we'd go down the next street, you know, this egg represents an unborn child, we're collecting money for the March of Dimes, and then we'd go down the next street and collect eggs, and we ended up with enough money to go buy some Jolly Ranchers that we'd sell at school. My very first business-- That's a nice parlay. I don't know if I ever told you my first business was porn. No.

Yeah, this was my first entrepreneurial venture. Hmm. So, there used to be drive-ins, there used to be things called drive-ins. Okay.

I don't know if you remember these from maybe the movie "Grease" or whatever. I've heard of them. And the front of the drive-in would be like a playground in front of the screen. And then in the back of the drive-in would be the projection thing, but underneath it would be the bathrooms and the concession stand.

And so we would go to the drive-in, whoever you went with was always making out in the car, so you never actually went and stayed in the car. You would either go up to the playground or you would go back to the concession stand. And so one time I was in the concession stand and I found like this, I don't know if it was Wii or Hustler, I mean, it was definitely not Playboy, it was like full on everything magazine. So I found this, I must have been seven or eight years old, and we had a laminating machine in like the fourth grade, fifth grade, the teacher lounge or something had one.

So we cut out these pictures from the porno mag, laminated them, you know, with all the really difficult decisions of, you know, you get the full spread on this side of the page and on the other side of the page is this. So which one do you choose, right? You can get four pictures. Yeah, exactly.

And then I was selling those laminated porn things until I got busted for that. You got busted? I got busted. I was always in trouble.

I staged a walk out of class because when I was in, I think it was Wilmer Hutchins Elementary School, which the school district was so bad, they shut it down, closed all the schools, made it part of the Dallas Independent School District. That's how bad the school district was. No shit. But my nephew and I were like the only white kids in the whole school.

It was like 65% African-American and like 30% Latin. And then you. And then 2%. A couple Asian guys, the poor Vietnamese guys, and then us.

And they had a sickle cell anemia screening day. Right. And so like, okay, everybody line up, you know, Skip, you don't need to go. I'm like, what are you talking about?

I might have this. Right. So I demanded, I remember the principal's name was Principal Knott's. Right.

And I demanded a sickle cell anemia test. I was negative, but... Oh, thank goodness. But when I was 14, I got emancipated when I was at Boys Ranch.

So when I came back from Boys Ranch, I had an apartment on my own, I lived off Social Security survivor benefits, I mean, free lunch my entire life, welfare, every kind of welfare you can imagine, food stamps, when they were actually stamps. I mean, every program you can imagine, up through Pell Grant, up through me being in the military, up through Hazelwood paying for my school, I've taken advantage of every federal and state welfare program there is, but I've more than paid it back now, but yeah. For sure. So yeah, you know, that's kind of why, you know, that's kind of how I got to where I was at, you know.

Can you talk about the Xerox thing at all or no? I mean, we can. I mean, it's kind of a boring story. A friend of mine and I started a business and then we ended up selling it to Xerox.

Made a few bucks. The end. The end. Fuck, man.

Jesus Christ. Cool story, bro. There's a letter right there. The food stamp story is a lot more interesting than that one.

Yeah, it's true. I mean, you know, kind of where you came from and how you turned into the person that you are is always fascinating. You know, I think you did tell me the porn story before, though. You didn't tell me that you got busted.

I just figured that it just kind of died out, or you ran out of images. At one time, I had the NAIA record for home runs in a single season. I was a really good baseball player. I played Little League.

It was one of the few things that I could kind of do wherever I would go, you know, to kind of make new friends. I would come into a new place, I could immediately drop into the school. Play some ball? Yeah, I played ball, and then I ended up getting a scholarship to play American Legion ball when I was in high school.

And then I actually played with a guy named Track Bledsoe, Todd Van Poppel, and Reed Ryan, Nolan Ryan's son, on American Legion team out of Arlington. And because there were scouts coming for those guys, Todd Van Poppel went to the A's straight out of high school. Reed Ryan was Nolan Ryan's son. Right.

I mean, he eventually went to TCU, but I went to Texas for about two weeks, got cut, and then I went to play at Wesleyan, and I played at Mary Harden, and then I played at Baylor. So do you think you can make it to the major leagues, or no? No, I could have been in minor leagues, probably. I mean, Sparky Anderson, I don't know if you remember him, he was a great GM.

No, I'm not a big baseball guy. He was the Tigers manager at the time. Yeah, it was Detroit. " So what happened?

Um, I went in the Navy. I got married. Had to have a paycheck. Right.

Plus, there were offers in the signing bonus, so that was, I got sucked into that. " Fucking recruiters, man. There's no liars. Do you ever, um, yeah, right, fuckers?

No better liars than the world. Do you ever regret how it kind of played out, or...? No, man, you know, I don't really regret anything. I mean, the hurricane turned into Roamacraft Tobac.

Right. Every bad thing that's ever happened to me has turned into something good, so... Right. Yeah.

So here you are. Yeah, I mean... You know, just living it up in the basement of a fucking cigar retailer store. Yeah, exactly.

You know? Living the dream. So what were you going to say? You were going to say something else?

No, I mean, like, even getting sick in Nicaragua. I mean, I almost died. So, I mean... That was a scary fucking moment.

Even that turned into a positive thing, I guess. Yeah. Because you're still here, you know. Well, I also found out I had this heart defect, which I wouldn't have known.

Yeah. Yeah, so. So now if shit hits the fan, you got something attached to you? Yeah, I got a defibrillator.

Right. It's like a $100,000 piece of equipment. Right. It's nice.

So, you know, if all of a sudden shit sucks, you start going like this. Well, you know you always hear about these guys that like die of a heart attack? Right. Like that's never gonna happen to me.

Right. I might die because my heart fails. But I'm not gonna die of a heart attack. Right.

Like, I'm walking around with paddles. That's why I have so many great meals. You're ready to go. Well, I mean, you need that two-hour drive to fucking Managua to be covered.

I'll tell you something, though. This is why Mike Rosales is losing so much weight. Right. Because I almost died.

" And that's why he lost so much weight. Right. Yeah. I mean, I think there's a little more detail than that in the story, but you know.

That's pretty much it. Yeah. Also, the real thing was, he saw a picture of me and him together, And he was fatter than me. Yes.

He was like sitting in front of an ice cream bowl or something, and he's like, that's it, I'm losing weight. It was crazy because, you know, the first time I met, you know, Rosales, I mean, he was fucking skinny as a rail. You know, and then progressively over time. I'm not a great influence.

Trying to keep up with me. 1,000 calorie stout beers per fucking poll, you know. That'll do it to you. You want to ask the questions, Michael?

The questions? Wait, how much time have we got so far? You're at an hour, 42 minutes. Okay, let's do the five questions.

All right. All right. Well, one person living near dead we'd like to share a cigar with. Um, probably my mom.

Yeah. Um, you know, she was a big cigarette smoker. Right. But, you know, um, I visited her grave because I was young when she died.

Right. Right. But I visited her grave. She was born in-- Every single person I knew, how much longer they got to spend time with their dad.

It becomes a benchmark, right? Yeah. It's just like, you know, I'm like, and to a point where I'm like, I need to stop this. Like, this is fucking insane.

You know, all I'm doing is just beating myself over the head. Right. You know? So, yeah.

Well, I'm here for a good time, not for a long time. Right, exactly. I mean, there's going to be the Skip Martin Memorial show. Right.

Believe me, you're going to make it longer than me, but you're going to play this, and that's the deal is, you know, I probably could probably take better care of my health, you know. You think so? I have a pretty good lifestyle, but, I mean, you know, I've worked on submarines, I've been in, I've shot missiles at countries, you know, I've been to 34 different countries or something like that, I mean, I've had five passports because they've gotten full of stamps. That's pretty good, that's pretty impressive.

Yeah, so, there's not much, I mean, there's literally nothing that, like, "Hey, I want to do this," that I haven't done. I mean, I wanted, at one point I wanted to be a hot air balloon pilot. Right. That was kind of my goal.

It's not too late. Yeah, it's still time. I don't recommend you doing that in Esteli, but, you know, try that out in the… Here's the problem. Yeah.

I weigh so much… Right. …that I can only take one other person with me. Okay. Well, Arlen's like… That's the other thing, I've always wanted to do parachuting.

They're shooting, right? But if you're over 250 pounds, that's a no-go. Right, it's not happening. All right.

Yeah, so... Those are, yeah, there's a couple, yeah, skinny guys like you don't understand that, but... You don't understand the struggle. But, yeah, that's the, those are the only two things I haven't done that I regret that I haven't done.

Right. Hot air balloons. But I still eat pretty good, though. Skydiving.

Wait, so what is parachuting? Jumping out of a plane? Jumping out of a plane with the big... Oh, that's skydiving.

Yeah. Yeah. So you have to do so many jumps with someone else. Right.

And you can only be 250 pounds to do that. Right. So, I may have missed the vote on those two things. Alright.

I think that's okay. Alright, what one fictitious person would you like to share a cigar with? An honest politician? Great answer.

Yeah, I don't know. I mean, I think Winston Churchill's always a great answer, but… But he's a real person. He's not fictitious. Yeah.

I think, I don't know, maybe some of these characters out of the, you know, the Western books, you know. Right. Mad Max. Mad Max would be great.

Right. I don't know. I, you know, I think I'm at a point in my life where it's like, come share a cigar with me. Right.

And I don't mean that in an egotistical way. It's like, I just would rather share what, you know, with someone else than... Right. Yeah.

Then the other way around. Yeah, there's not, I don't know. I mean, I don't know that there's anybody, you know, we talk about master blenders all the time. Right.

I've sat down and smoked with them. All of them. Everyone you can name, I've sat down. The fake ones and the real ones.

Exactly. Right. And there's, you know, honestly, there's almost nobody, there's nothing, almost nothing in my life that I would want to do that I haven't done. Right.

So, I've got that going. Which is nice. What's your favorite cigar? My favorite cigar of all time is the Eladio Diaz Birthday Cigar, specifically the 54-year-old one.

Okay. Doc Diaz for a while would, David Diaz would give me, that was one of my always annual weasel attempts, was to get a couple of these off of Doc. And it's always a great cigar. Now that I've kind of commercialized it, it's not as what it used to be, but that's my favorite that I've ever smoked.

Right. What's your favorite Roma Craft cigar? You know, I smoke more tobacco than I smoke cigars, which Mike can relate to. But I smoke the Intrigue more than anything, but I oscillate between, like if you go to my house, Like, generally, when they're packaging something, I'll grab some Segundos, so, like, in my house right now, I have the Aquitaine Mastodon, the Chromagnic Mastodon, I've got the Don Bosco, I've got, I've always got some Neanderthals, usually the HS, the Fiorellas, the Wanderlust Robusto, the HOXD, the short Neanderthal, 'cause what happens is, is I smoke, I'm up 20 hours a day, 18 hours a day, so I smoke constantly.

Right. So, I generally will smoke... 7 a month. Yeah, I generally smoke probably 10 or 12 a day, no bullshit.

But sometimes, especially when I'm working, I don't get a lot of time sitting there just smoking. So, I'll smoke a cigar for 30 or 40 minutes and I switch to a different cigar for 30 or 40 minutes. Then I'll start smoking tobacco and smoke a half inch, smoke a half inch, smoke a half inch. A lot of times when stuff's coming out of packaging, I'll grab a few just to make sure that they're good.

Sometimes when there's something aging that we want to take out and I'm not sure if it's ready or not, I'll grab one and smoke an inch of it. A lot of times I'll cut cigars in half, start it in the middle, kind of see how it is. You'll also trim the foot, the wrapper off of a foot of a cigar. I do that a lot, especially cigars I haven't smoked before.

Right, you get the experience of the filler, binder, and wrapper all differently. So it changes a lot. I mean, I get the advantage of, you know, I can walk in and grab anything. I have three or four hundred thousand cigars at any given time.

Right. I like stuff right off the table, too, a lot. As long as Esteban doesn't charge you for them. He doesn't.

I was going to ask about the ones that Fiorella found. Oh, when she, yeah, when she turned my tray over. She's actually pretty good. She'll go grab a cigar and she knows the difference between them.

So like you say, you go get me the brown one, go get me the black one, go get me the chromag, or sometimes she just brings you her cigar, 'cause she wants you to smoke the Viarello. She doesn't tear 'em up as much as she used to. She's getting older. Yeah.

You know? Well, there was that one post that I saw that there's all those cigars on the floor. Yeah, she kind of knocked the tray over, and then she's like, uh-oh. Disastery.

Disastery. Disastery. Her favorite word. All right, best piece of advice anyone ever gave you, or that you gave yourself?

No, I mean, I take advice from people all the time. I mean, you know, so when, I mean, I've thought about this question a lot from hearing the different podcasts, but I think, and this is the advice I kind of have always given my kids, too, is it's not really, It's not only about being really great at everything, it's about knowing when it's all done that you did everything you could do to prepare and to execute to the best of your ability. And so, like, you know, my daughter would just fall apart if she, you know, she would just get to halfway through algebra and then she was not doing well so she would just give up and then fail. Right.

And my point was, look, bring home a C. If the C is the best you can do, there's no shame in a fucking hard earned C. Right. But that's what math is.

Math is persistence. But you gotta fucking earn it. Like, you know, when you fail and you say, "Well, it's too hard. I did the best I could, but I didn't see you working on extra problems.

" You know, when I was probably, what is Little League Pony? How old is that? 10, 11 years old? I guess, I don't know.

Yeah, so I had never played baseball at all. I mean, we played like at school or whatever, but I was living in Wilmer and it was probably my worst run as a kid. And we would get into fights all the time and lose 80% of them. Right.

I mean, half of learning how to fight is learning how to take a beating. Right, right. Right? So we would play this really rough, like tackle the man and, you know, get black eyes and nosebleeds and fractured fingers and it was rough, rough, rough.

Like, I mean, there was no like, you know, sharks in the jets kind of gang warfare, but the bloods in the crypts, but it was a tough neighborhood. Right. I noticed all the kids, the tough guys, were always in this baseball, like Little League, like what they call Optimist. I don't know if they still have that, but it was called Optimist Little League.

And it was all donated equipment and everything. Right, like something they could do to kind of turn them around. Yeah, so I went down and I talked to the volunteer coach who was, you know, a local guy, you know, probably, at that time he was probably 25 or something, I thought he was an adult, you know. And I said, hey, I want to play baseball.

He goes, have you ever played? I was like, no. He's like, well, look, there's two things that can happen. I can put you out there.

I can make you look stupid. Then your situation is going to be worse than all these other kids. Or you can come before we practice, rake out the field, pick all the rocks out of the infield, take all the trash, do all that stuff, and I'll give you money. And then my buddy runs the batting cage.

If you can walk a couple miles up the road to the batting cage, go-kart, batting cage place, then he'll give you half price, I'll tell him to give you half price, and then you go in there and you practice hitting a ball, and when you get good at it, then you can come back. I'm like, okay, so I did that for like three months, and I would go hit balls in the batting cage until I had blisters. I'm like nine, ten years old, I mean I had nothing else literally to do, but I would hit balls, I mean I would clean up, I would go get the tokens, I would hit balls in the batting cage until I couldn't move the next day. I mean, I would hit thousands and thousands of balls, and by the time I actually picked up a bat and swung at a real pitch, I was a great hitter, and then I still went to the batting cage faster and faster, bigger and bigger, because it just became a thing that I did three, four, five hours a day.

" And immediately I would make the team. Right, wow. It was, but the thing was, is I did all the work knowing, you know, if I, if I didn't do well on any particular situation, I knew that I had left everything out there, right? Right.

And that's the way I've done everything in my whole life, you know, whether it was the Navy or whether it was, uh, um, Porn. College. Right. Or whether it's being a porn magnet or whether it was, uh, the cigar store or the cigar brand.

I, you know, did all the work. Right. And then-- Gave your all. Yeah.

And I've never looked back on a situation and thought, I kind of half-assed that. Right. I kind of wrote that one in. I've never half-assed anything, I don't think.

Right. That's a great answer. That's it. That's the questions.

How do people get in touch with you? With me personally? Instagram. Chief Havo on Instagram?

@Chiefhavo. Skip Martin on Facebook? You don't, you don't want to go on his Facebook page. You know, I have, I've, I've got like a saying for you, I don't know, I've said it in front, I probably have said it in front of you, but you know, when it comes to like stuff, how you operate on social media, especially Facebook, it's, you know, say what you want about Skip Martin, but you're gonna say something.

Well, you know what it is, is I'll sit and watch TV, or I read a lot of news, I read news books, and then I'll see something, then I'll go, this is crazy. I mean, I really feel like, and this doesn't happen enough in today's society, so I think, you know, everybody says don't talk about religion, politics, or sex, I guess? I don't know why you would not want to talk. I usually say sports teams.

Yeah, that's a new one, right? Yeah, that shit goes fucking nuts. Oh, whoa, whoa, whoa! Philadelphia Eagles fans are nuts, Giants fans, I mean, like, they're fucking...

But politics has become like that. Right. So, you know, like, there's this, you know, you'd be in the stands, and there's this irrational, You know, hate for some guy because he's wearing the Dallas Cowboy uniform. Right.

But then when he comes to play for your team- Yeah! Exactly. And it's just based on this random- I mean, if you think about it, what religion you are is based on what family you were born into. Right.

Socialization. What political leanings you have, generally, is what you were born into. Yeah. Your circumstances.

To me, I'm a capitalist. Obviously, I'm a capitalist. That's what I do. But I also understand what it's like to be poor.

I understand what it's like to go days without eating. I understand what it's like to be beaten with a fish, you know those boards that they carve fish on, with the hard edge of that thing. You know, I know what it's like to be locked into a shed for three days with nothing to eat. Right.

You know, I've been through all those things. I live in a country where even the hardest working, honest, most honest people will never exit the cycle of the economic situation they're in. Right. So, of course, there's lazy, good-for-nothing people.

Right. Of course, there's people who take advantage of the system. Right. The courts are just people who will just steal from you for no reason.

We recently had this situation. The way I look at it is, in Nicaragua, you have bars on your front door, you have walls, you have all these things because you can't trust the police. Here, we just pay a certain amount of tax so that the poor people get enough to not rob you in the street, essentially. But I also know if it hadn't been for welfare and Social Security death benefits and food stamps and free lunches and public schools and Pell grants and the military and all the other things that I took advantage of, and I'm a white guy, white privilege, whatever you want to call it, you probably would have been dead a long time ago.

Yeah, well, start a fucking drug ring or something, I don't know. The underboss of Texas, some shit. A foreign empire. A foreign empire or something, yeah.

So, yeah, that's what influences my politics is my experience, right? Right. So, the thing about politics is you can't argue ideology. Right.

And what I mean by that is Mike is pro-life. Mike, we both grew up Catholic, I left the Catholic Church years ago. Right. Mike still goes to church every Sunday with his kids.

Even if he's out of town, he goes to mass. Mike is really very pro-life. Right. Meaning, rape, incest, whatever, there's no excuse for abortion.

Right. Right? I grew up with seven sisters, two daughters, or three daughters, a whole different perspective about what happens when you get pregnant at 13, 14, your uncle gets you pregnant, you know, whatever. So, while I don't support abortion, I support a woman.

I mean, if men had vaginas, abortion wouldn't even be an issue. Right? If men could get pregnant, abortion wouldn't even be a question. But I don't think it's a good thing, but if you ideologically believe no matter what, you believe one thing and I believe another thing for a lot of other reasons, we can never have a discussion about that.

Right. You believe one way, I believe another. Let's just agree to disagree. Right.

But you can talk about a policy. " And you can say your piece and then we can figure something out and move on, right? But what's happened is the barbershop, the cigar store, the place where guys in a community would get together, the women over tea. one of the main reasons why prohibition came around is because the religious people didn't like women drinking tea because that would allow a bunch of women to get together and talk about things without men having an influence on it right that's when they got these crazy like ideas like they wanted to vote and do all these things right ridiculous right so um that's where people in a community used to talk right right they used to get together at the barbershop and say hey there's this good for nothing guy down here who beats his wife you know we got to do something about that right and you know somebody would go down there and say look man you need to stop drinking the guy at the bar is not going to sell you booze anymore next time i see you put a hand on your wife we're all going to come down here beat the shit out of you right right or somebody had an issue or there was an there was a a political thing that was happening in a town And people would figure it out.

And because we're afraid to talk about politics anymore, a lot of those, like, if you and I sit down and talk about politics, we may disagree on things, but you could eventually understand why I think at least why I think the way I think. Well, I mean, that's what any normal human beings would do. So those are the kind of conversations I try to have, which is, you know, let's all agree it's not a good thing. Right.

And can we go from there? That our president does some of the things he does. Right. Let's agree, lower taxes have been great for me this year.

Right. There's a lot of, I don't like the way the Democrats do this, I don't like the way some people do that. Right. But let's at least talk about it.

And I feel like with so many people going back and forth with these empty arguments, that there needs to be, at least as a person who has a little bit of influence, I could use it to tell you which. Right. Or I can use it to say, hey, you know, go out and vote, but know what you're voting for. Right.

And some people say, well, you put your business at risk, and look, if you don't like what I say, and you're not going to buy a cigar because of that, then fuck you, I don't know what else to say about that and there's a lot of those guys, I posted a picture of Beto and said, look, say what you want to say about the guy, put an honest race together, and Beto is not a liberal, he's a moderate, and he did a pretty decent job running a fair, good campaign in Texas. And I posted a picture of it, and some guy comes out and goes, well, if you like that guy, I gotta unfollow you. I'm like, well, goodbye. You know, like, this is not an airport, you don't have to announce your departures.

Right? So... We're teaching people not to have discussions about politics and religion. What we need to do is teach people how to have civil discussions about politics and religion.

And it's not dealing absolutes. One of the first rules of that is, let's agree to some ground rules, which is, number one, let's not argue about ideology, because if you believe in taxes as theft, then let's not have tax discussions, because taxes are not theft. Taxes is how we pay things. We, as a democracy, agree to allow the government taxes.

Do we waste money? Absolutely. Right. But now we can have an argument about do we spend too much on the military or do we not spend enough on educating school kids?

Right. I mean, we were coming in through immigration, coming into the country, this trip, and there's apparently some kind of robot competition going on, like high school robot teams. No shit. And so at the same time we were coming in through immigration, there was eight or ten different groups of kids coming through the immigration line, there was like all these Chinese kids, all these kids from Taiwan, all these kids from Korea, all these kids from Poland or something, Russia, because they were all wearing the uniforms, like, you know, like, this is crazy, all these robot kids.

It's like, are we raising kids to build robots? Are we winning those competitions? Because if we're not, maybe we should be doing more of that. Right.

True. Hey, I'm going to cut you off right there, because we want to make sure that we save this content, whereas the computer's starting to fucking go nuts. Okay. Maybe it's a lost episode.

God, I hope not. We'll charge for this one. So go ahead and hit the button and save it, and if we can... Okay, as you can tell, we're starting to have a little bit of a technical problem with the 1972 Apple computer that I have to use, so this episode shuts down here, and let's get ready for the next one.

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Show Notes

Part 2 of the Three Part Series with Skip Martin from Roma Craft Tobac...

we get further into what makes him one of the titans of the industry!

As always we welcome you thoughts, ideas and guest suggestions on our FB page "A Cigar Hustlers Podcast".  You can follow the show on IG @cigarhustlerspodcast, Mikey @cigarhustler and Mike Too @fcc_Mike.

Make sure to rate, review and subscribe on which ever of our providers you choose!

Nest Tuesday make sure to come back for Part 3 of the Skip Martin Chronicles!!