The Inconvenient Truth
And the smoking gun was actually a fake Cohiba
In 2001 or 2002, a few co-workers and I went for drinks after work at the 737, which happened many times in the summer. Altitude 737 sat in the penthouse of Place Ville Marie, forty-seven storeys above downtown Montreal, named for its elevation in feet above sea level. We worked on the fourth floor of the same building, at RBC Capital Markets. Through a friend’s connections we had direct elevator access to the top. No lineup.
“5 à 7” was what we called it, though we rarely left the office before eight.
One of those evenings, someone mentioned that the boss had Cuban cigars in his office. Good ones. From a contact. Word was he did not mind people helping themselves. Good enough.
The boss held the top investment banking title in the Montreal office, though he was not really our boss. He did not manage people. He managed relationships. His value to the institution was his network, and everything about him oozed that. A lawyer by training, a Rhodes Scholar, he had run the corporate-commercial practice at one of the most prominent law firms in the country before moving to a chief legal officer role at a national railway. Extremely well connected. Thousand-dollar suits. Brand-name suspenders. The kind of person who never had to explain where things came from. And in that kind of office, at that level, you did not correct the man. The reflex was to humour him, although interaction was minimal. That was understood by everyone, even people who had never been told.
So we headed to his office to check them out. A few drinks will give you that kind of courage. I saw the cigars from afar. Right away I knew they were fake.
Not because I was smarter or particularly gifted. Because I had spent a lot of time at Blatter & Blatter in the 1990s, say after lunch on Friday with colleagues. The funny thing is that I had my own version of the boss’s connections. I had a tobacco shop where I was a regular. Blatter & Blatter were cigar and pipe royalty in Montreal, recognized over larger territory. He had contacts who got him Cuban cigars. I had a shop that taught me what authentic Cuban cigars actually looked like.
Blatter & Blatter has been in Montreal since 1907, when Ernest Blatter and his family arrived from South Africa and opened a pipe factory and a retail shop. Five generations of Blatters. Pipes made by hand on the premises. The family had been offered opportunities to expand over the years and turned them all down. They preferred to keep the operation small enough that they could control the quality of every piece.
The shop sold serious Cuban cigars. Mainly not Cohibas and Monte Cristos. Those are what tourists buy and counterfeiters fake. Cohiba was Fidel Castro’s trademark, originally made for him and his communist comrades in 1966, first offered to the public in 1982, and counterfeited almost immediately.
The real inventory at Blatter’s was Bolívar Belicosos Finos, Hoyo de Monterrey Epicure No. 2, Rafael González, Ramón Allones. Brands nobody bothers counterfeiting because nobody buying them is trying to impress anyone, except maybe other cigar aficionados. You smoke a Hoyo Epicure No. 2 because you like how it smokes.
Pierre Blatter got asked the same question several times a week. Someone would walk in with a box: “I went to Cuba,” or “A friend brought me Cohibas.” He could tell from across the room. So could I, eventually. A real box of Cohibas is not cheap, so the manufacturer puts the effort in. Every cigar the same colour. Same length. The band placed precisely, printed cleanly. Fakes get the broad strokes right but not the details. The uniformity is off. The printing on the band is usually wrong. Once you have handled enough real product, the fakes announce themselves.
The boss’s cigars were fake. Classic fake Cohibas, probably bought in good faith from someone who bought them in good faith from someone on a beach in Varadero. That is how it works. The supply chain is not dishonest at every link. It only needs to be dishonest once, early enough that everyone downstream believes the story.
I told the guys at work. They did not believe me. So the next day, when he was out, I took the box to Blatter & Blatter. Pierre made the call from maybe ten feet away. Fake.
As a reference, a box of twenty-five Cohiba Esplendidos now sells in the thousands. A good Cuban cigar is amazing. Those were definitely out of my budget. I did see some legit contrabands though.
Now, here is where it gets interesting. I was told the boss was planning to give a box of those cigars to a client. A Quebec businessman mostly known by his initials, who had inherited one of the largest media empires in the province after his father’s sudden death a few years earlier. Anyone from Quebec would know the name.
The career move was silence. Let the cigars go to the client. If someone in the client’s circle spotted the fakes, that was the boss’s problem, not mine. I would have been invisible. No risk, no cost, no exposure.
I could not do it. I made a fuss about it. Told my co-workers he needed to know, that he could not give those cigars to that client. But I did not want to tell him directly. I probably said something like: maybe we should let him know somehow. But there was no somehow. There was no memo template for reporting fake cigars. No way for “your cigars are counterfeit” to move from a junior associate to the vice-chairman through normal operation.
By making a fuss, I blew the whistle without meaning to, which is not a bad joke given that the boss’s previous employer was a railway. I do not remember exactly how it reached him that an associate had identified his prized Cubans as counterfeit. But it reached him.
I wanted it to reach him. Maybe not with my name along for the ride. I had a delusion of being Deep Throat over a box of Cohibas. I am quite sure my name travelled with the gossip. My cover was blown.
Did I wonder whether it might cost me a promotion, a bonus, my job? It crossed my mind. But I rationalized it quickly enough: I had prevented a man from looking like an idiot in front of a major client. Who would be against that? Maybe I should have dropped my coffee on the cigars. Being a useful idiot would have been safer. I am not a great actor.
What only occurred to me later is that a man in his position could not afford to ever look like an idiot. Not to a client. Not to a colleague. Not to a junior associate. The image was the job. If something messes up his image, you fix it quietly or you do not fix it at all. The person who reveals the flaw is not doing a favour. He is creating a problem. Catch-22.
I never found out what happened. I never saw him with cigars again. RBC never gave me a heroic medal. And the fake cigars were now my fault.