Sam Leccia

I have smoked cigars since I was in high school, I remember our first box. I say ours because me, Tommy Turner, and Vince Wylie (my old crew) all pitched in on a box of philli blunts. Man it was awesome. I had boxes of cigars but just empties for matchbox cars and baseball cards...This one HAD CIGARS in it. And it was ours. We lit them babies up and shot pool at my parents house. Man that was a fun night. We then got into dutch masters and different things, but I was growing towards better cigars. To me, again back in the day, lets say 1994, when I smoked a good cigar, it was a Macanudo. It's really all I knew and I loved it. Something about spending $6 on a cigar on a 12th grade budget was badass. After high school I joined the Navy to break up with my girlfriend. I ended up marrying her 5 months later. We eloped on the Beach of San Diego. It was cool. 16 years and 3 kids later, we are as strong as ever. Love my Sasha. So, after I got out of the Navy, I had some odd jobs before landing a gig promoting Bacardi. I loved that job and I was damn good at it. If you ever topped off your Corona with Bacardi Limon, you have me to thank. I created that in Pittsburgh at Marios in the South Side. They had $2 Coronas on Tuesdays and the only way to sample my product was to mix it with the coronas. It worked. I got promoted and moved to Windsor, CT for a full time gig as a premium brand specialist. I handled Dewars, Bombay Sapphire to name a couple. part of my job was to execute Scotch tastings. Now I went for a weeks long training on Dewars, but I didn't know shit about scotch. I hated it in fact. I used to drink ginger ale so it would look like I was drinking it. Later I splashed a little dewars, now I am a Scotch fiend. Long story short, I grew very found of scotch and bought as many books on whisky as I could to learn everything I could about it. I was supposed to do a 3 blended scotch tasting, and I ended up doing a 12 scotch tasting with 3 blends and 9 single malts. I really dove into it is what I am getting at. back comes the cigars. As I have already said, I loved smoking cigars. I wanted to tie in cigars to my scotch tastings, basically just to get free cigars. It paved the way for how I got here. I met up with two gentlemen from a Cigar shop in CT. I used their cigars for my events, and I sampled whisky for them at their events. It was a marriage made in heaven. I started to really dive into cigars because of them. I smoked a lot of CAO, Camacho, and VSG's. The Shapiro's invited me on a trip that Camacho was hosting in Honduras. I was all over it. I knew most of the guys going because we were all came out of the same shop. So, okay I'm in Honduras. At Camp Camacho. IT WONT LET ME TYPE any more words!!!!!!!!!!!!