the most rolling papers in the world is either exactly who you think he is or nothing at all. Yes, he has hung out with Hunter S. Thompson, partied at the Playboy Mansion, lost his car while high on edibles and had his warehouse raided by the feds. He has also bid on the Chicago Cubs with billionaire Mark Cuban and produced a handful of movies, including the 1986 Stephen King horror film.
Paper has long been a good business with high margins. But the global rolling paper industry is opaque and hazy; even the analysts who cover tobacco and cannabis companies don’t have a clear picture of its size and scope.
To restock their rolling paper inventory, Levin had to send money to a distributor in New York and a few months later they would receive a new shipment of paper made in Spain. He discovered that the distributor was collecting money from different retailers, placing an order and selling them for a big markup. “I figured I could do that, too, and so I jumped on an airplane,” he says. “The problem was that I had to buy a, way more than I could sell from an 800-square-foot store.
During the Just Say No era, Levin also decided it was best to change the name of his company to remove any vestige of its counterculture roots. After seeing a sign in an airport announcing that Southern Airways was changing its name to Republic Airlines, he had an epiphany. “There’s U.S. Tobacco,” he remembers thinking, “there’s National Tobacco, but there’s no Republic Tobacco. It sounded like an old, staid company.
With Bolloré’s brands now part of Levin’s empire, Republic continued to grow and he executed a roll-up strategy of other major paper brands. He had bought Top, which was popular in jails and prisons, from R.J. Reynolds years prior. And in 2018, he purchased Bali Shag, a loose-leaf tobacco brand, and the iconic E-Z Wider, from Imperial. The terms of the deal were not announced at the time.
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