Tue, Dec 29, 2015 page6

• FEATURE: Sinatra, songs and cigars foretell Manhattan crime

  • NY Times News Service, NEW YORK
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  The story of the thief who walked out of an expensive Manhattan cigar store with four boxes of medium-blend Dominicans last month actually begins decades earlier, before he was born. It starts in the 1960s, with an encounter between two men that would change both their lives. One of those men was Avo Uvezian, an Armenian jazz musician living in New York. The other was also a musician, from New Jersey, named Frank Sinatra.

  Uvezian was born in 1926 in Beirut. He became an accomplished musician who traveled the Middle East, speaking multiple languages along the way.

  “I usually count in Armenian in my head,” he told Cigar Journal in an interview this year. “I find the best language to swear in is Turkish, and when dreaming of pretty women, French is the best language.”

  Playing piano, he led a jazz combo that performed in Lebanon, Iraq and Iran. In 1947, he moved to New York and entered the Juilliard School of Music.

  Years passed and by the 1960s he had written his own music. One melody stood out.

  “The song itself is a very simple song,” Uvezian, 89, said this month by telephone from his home in Orlando, Florida. “You take the thing and you repeat it. ‘Dah-dah-dah-dah-daaaah.’ It’s the same line repeated throughout.”

  He had a friend who knew Sinatra. The friend set up a meeting and told Uvezian to bring along his music. Someone else had put lyrics to the melody and called it Broken Guitar.

  Sinatra gave it a listen.

  “He said: ‘I love the melody, but change the lyrics,’” Uvezian said.

  The task was given to studio songwriter and they came back with new words. Sinatra, legend has it, hated it.

  The title was new, too — Strangers in the Night.

  However, Uvezian did not receive credit for the song. Before Sinatra ever heard the music, Uvezian, a novice, had sent it to a friend, Bert Kaempfert, an established German composer, to be published there, he said.

  Kaempfert claimed credit for the song, and the experience soured Uvezian on the music business and on New York, he said.

  He moved to Puerto Rico and started over. He played piano at a resort. He had smoked a pipe in the past, but he was introduced to good cigars on the occasion of his daughter’s christening in 1982, he said.

  He saw an opportunity that would lead to a flourishing second career.

  He traveled to the Dominican Republic and visited a cigar manufacturer. He met a master blender named Hendrik Kelner.

  “He made 10 or 12 different blends,” Uvezian said.

  Uvezian sampled them over a month or so and came back with his favorite. It would become a brand called the Avo Classic.

  “The beginner or longtime smoker, he could find satisfaction in that Classic,” Uvezian said.

  He sent samples to Davidoff of Geneva, a worldwide distributor. Davidoff bought the Avo line of cigars in 1995 and now sells some 2 million per year, brand manager Scott Kolesaire said.

  “The construction, balance and palate stimulation were just top notch,” Kolesaire said of the Avo Classic.

  Another blend, stronger in taste, was created, the Avo XO. The Davidoff store on Avenue of the Americas in New York, keeps its Avo line in the climate-controlled, walk-in humidor it installed in January. It was into this humidor that an unidentified man in his 30s walked, alone and unnoticed, on Nov. 23 at 4:20pm. He scooped four boxes of cigars into a big Bed Bath & Beyond bag and left. They were Avo XOs, each box worth US$261.22.

  Uvezian, informed of the theft by a reporter’s call, was unfazed. He has had bigger headaches than 80 of his 2 million cigars going missing.

  “It can happen,” he said.
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