Don Levin built a massive empire over the past 50 years with name brands including Zig-Zag, E-Z Wider and OCB. Not bad for a guy who doesn’t smoke pot.
The man who sells 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 Maximum Overdrive. And while he owns iconic brands known by stoners around the world—such as E-Z Wider, Zig-Zag, OCB and JOB—he doesn’t actually smoke weed. Or even know how to roll a jay.
“I was the guy who smoked a joint and I’d be in the corner drooling,” Don Levin, the 72-year-old founder of D.R.L. Enterprises, which owns Republic Brands, says of his cannabis use. “I was comatose. It killed me; I was the odd person out.” Thankfully for Levin, millions of other cannabis users do know how to roll one. In addition to rolling paper brands, Levin also owns the factories that turn hemp, wood, bamboo and rice into paper as well as the manufacturing plant that puts that paper into booklets—all of which have made him a billionaire.
Illustration by Yunjia Yuan for Forbes; Chakkrit Wiangkham/EyeEm/Getty Images
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Forbes estimates that Levin, who owns 100% of Republic through D.R.L. Enterprises, along with his wife and son, is worth at least $1.7 billion. And despite being a member of the Three Comma Club with all the trappings—he owns two homes (one in Phoenix, the other in Highland Park, Illinois), a private jet and a Chicago ice hockey team in the NHL’s development league—Levin has largely flown under the radar until now.
Republic makes more than 1.2 billion booklets of rolling paper a year, which Levin says, while doing some quick mental math, translates into 3.7 million miles of paper. One of his most famous brands, E-Z Wider, was created by former billionaire Bob Stiller—who went on to build Green Mountain Coffee and Keurig—and Burton Rubin. Stiller recalls that when he sold the company to Rizla in 1981 for $6.2 million, it was making enough paper to circumnavigate Earth nine times. Levin’s mills now produce enough rolling paper to wrap the planet 150 times a year.
Paper Assets: An Adams Apple brochure from 1976 in which Levin promised “the most complete, uncomplicated catalog in the business.”
Courtesy Adams Apple“We’re the largest manufacturer of rolling papers in the world,” says Levin during a 100-degree day at his home in the Biltmore neighborhood of Phoenix, with his visibly nervous rescue poodle mix named Claude at his feet. “We are the whole supply chain.”
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. One of the reasons the industry is hard to track is that most of the mills are privately held across many countries—from Papeteries du Leman, Levin’s mill in Publier, France, that feeds Republic’s booklet factory in Perpignan, to Miquel y Costas & Miquel in Barcelona, Glatz in Germany and Delfort in Austria. The world’s biggest specialty paper manufacturer, Schweitzer-Mauduit International in Saint-Girons, France, which is owned by publicly traded Alpharetta, Georgia-based Mativ, makes rolling papers for companies such as Raw and Vibes, and also produces cigarette paper for Altria, Philip Morris International, Imperial Brands Plc., Japan Tobacco Inc. and British American Tobacco.
Republic controls about one third of the North American rolling paper market with E-Z Wider, OCB, JOB and Top. Kentucky-based Turning Point Brands, which licenses the right to sell Zig-Zag from Republic in the U.S. and Canada, and Arizona-based HBI International, which produces rolling paper brand Raw, each have about one third market share as well. Total sales across North America at the wholesale level is estimated to be about $550 million a year. Global sales are estimated to be between $2 billion and $3 billion annually. Levin won’t discuss financials, but Forbes estimates that Republic generates $230 million in cash flow off an estimated $650 million in revenue—a 35% EBITDA margin.
Republic’s chief revenue officer—the appropriately named Rebecca Roll—sums up why the rolling paper industry is such a good business: “We sell something people light on fire,” she says. “You can only burn it once.”
PHOTO BY ETHAN PINES FOR FORBES
Levin, who usually wears golf shirts (although he doesn’t play) and dress sneakers, grew up a long way from where he is now—drinking a nice glass of white wine at a James Beard-award-winning restaurant in downtown Scottsdale, just a few minutes from his $4.5 million home. He grew up in the Albany Park neighborhood of Chicago in the 1950s, with a father who was “the most honest” used car salesman. When Levin was 14, his dad’s dealership got into trouble, and the family had to move. “We lost everything,” says Levin. “I've been rich. I've been poor. And it’s better to have money.”
In the late 1960s, after a stint in the Marines Corps Reserves, Levin attended a General Motors’ training program to become a car dealer himself. He didn’t go to college, but he always worked and found he was great at selling cars. His favorite antic to close a deal with someone who thought a price was too high, he says, was to call over his boss, who would fire him in front of that customer—the whole thing was an act—and it usually worked.
But this son of a used car salesman had bigger ambitions. In the early 1970s, a childhood friend named Sheldon Miller told Levin about a groovy specialty store called Adams Apple in Chicago’s Rogers Park that was up for sale. “It was a boutique, I thought, and it sold bell-bottom jeans and English music like Jethro Tull,” Levin says. They bought the store, known for its psychedelic sign, and all of its inventory—except for a shoe box filled with rolling papers. “I’d never seen cigarette papers before and didn’t want them,” Levin recalls. Within three days, he realized most of his customers came looking for them. “I called the previous owner and bought the box,” says Levin. “I realized we’d bought a head shop.”
“We became the Sears of paraphernalia,” Levin says of his early days in the business. “It was a lot of fun.”
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 lot, way more than I could sell from an 800-square-foot store.” Miller and Levin eventually split up in 1971 and Levin struck out on his own—the Adams Apple Distributing Co. was formed. He was soon placing large orders of rolling papers and then traveling around the Midwest selling them to smoke shops.
Once, while traveling from Spain to Holland via train, with a layover in Paris, Levin decided to stop by the Zig-Zag office. His plan was to convince them to break their exclusive relationship with U.S. Tobacco. But he accidentally got off the elevator on the wrong floor and found himself talking to the export manager at JOB, a brand created in 1838 by Jean Bardou, who invented the rolling paper booklet. Before leaving, the manager told Levin that they had 5,000 boxes of banana- and strawberry-flavored rolling paper and if he agreed to buy them, JOB would be happy to make Levin their exclusive U.S. distributor. He took the deal, and JOB became Adams Apple’s first exclusive brand.
Pot Luck: Levin (at his home in Arizona) downplays his success: “It’s not that I’m smart,” he says. “I’m just smart enough to keep it going.”
Ethan Pines for ForbesSoon Levin’s customers were asking for other cannabis paraphernalia like roach clips and pipes. “I don’t know what a bong is, but we can get it,” he remembers telling clients. He started publishing a catalog and advertising in High Times and his business boomed during the heady 1970s. “We became the Sears of paraphernalia,” he says. “It was a lot of fun.”
By the end of the ’70s, Levin was bringing in $10 million in annual revenue (the equivalent of around $50 million today), according to a New York Times story from 1978. By then, the federal government had started enforcing anti-paraphernalia laws, which targeted bongs and pot pipes but not rolling paper, and Levin saw his friends and peers in the industry on the wrong side of the law. “One person I knew got 104 months in prison,” he says. “I said: ‘Okay, I’m out.’ And we stopped selling everything except for rolling papers.” He got rid of his entire inventory and a few weeks later his Chicago warehouse was raided by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms and Illinois police, but they found nothing except rolling papers.
In the 1980s, Vincent Bolloré, a young heir to a paper manufacturing fortune and the owner of Odet-Cascadec-Bolloré rolling papers, better-known as OCB, bought Zig-Zag and JOB. Later, under a new factory manager, the workers planned to strike, so Levin went to France, told Bolloré how he was screwing up the business and urged Bolloré to sell him the company. The two ended up getting along, but the Frenchman explained how the “B” in OCB stood for Bolloré— his family had started the company in 1822, and he would never sell. “But, if I ever do,” Bolloré said, “I’ll sell to you.”
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.”
By 2000, Bolloré, who would become a billionaire himself a few years later, decided to pivot his company away from paper and into plastics—and he was ready to sell the company to Levin. “I thought Don was the best to take it over and he’s proved it,” says the 71-year-old Bolloré. Levin also bought his paper mills, Papeteries du Léman, which sits right next to Evian water, and Papeteries des Vosges.
Instead of buying wholesale, Levin now controlled the manufacture of paper, the production of booklets and the distribution. “If it weren’t for Bolloré, I’d be selling pencils,” Levin says. “I bought what Bolloré did. It’s not that I’m smart—I’m just smart enough to keep it going.”
“We were not printing paper,” says Larry Posner, a former sales executive at Republic. “We were printing money.”
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.
Larry Posner, who had worked for Stiller at E-Z Wider and then went to work for “Donnie” at Republic as the vice president of sales, says that his old boss is from a different era. In Posner’s mind, Republic wasn’t in the rolling paper business, nor was it in the tobacco or cannabis industries. “We were not printing paper,” Posner says. “We were printing money.”
Despite not being a pot smoker, Levin understands his customers. “What you’re trying to sell, if you’re making good rolling paper, is not a taste at all,” he says. “What we’re trying to make is something that is as least noticeable as possible.”
And if you’re in the business of selling a product with no taste, marketing is everything. Trademark litigation is a core part of Republic’s strategy. There isn’t much they can do about the millions of dollars siphoned off the market by counterfeiters in China, but U.S.-based pirates should watch out. In March 2022, Republic won an $11 million judgment after a jury trial found a Georgia-based wholesaler was selling counterfeit Top and JOB products. Republic spends “millions a year” on similar lawsuits, Levin says.
While he has working relationships with many of his competitors, most of them consider Levin to be “aggressive” and willing to fight. Republic has sued other companies in the market over contract, trademark and payment disputes, including the storied brand Bambú. In the last four years alone, his company has filed nearly 150 lawsuits.
Perhaps Levin’s longest-running feud is with Josh Kesselman, whose HBI International created the mega-popular brand Raw. The two men have been suing each other’s companies for nearly a decade, and their rivalry goes back 20 years. Levin would not comment on any ongoing litigation, but speaking broadly he says the rolling paper industry is composed of “carpetbaggers” and “snake oil salesmen.”
Levin also downplays his own success over the past half-century. “I’m certainly not the king of rolling papers,” he says. “This has been a lot of work by a lot of people and for me to take credit would be wrong and insulting.”
But after several decades of being at the helm of what is now a $1.7 billion empire, Levin is thinking about his successor and his legacy in the industry. His son, Robert, a thirtysomething tax lawyer, probably won’t take it over. “He’s not entrepreneurial,” Levin says. He adds that he won’t sell to a private equity firm because they would gut the company of most of its employees to hike up profits. “I’ll die and have this company managed by outside management before I ever sell it to anyone who would try to rationalize it,” he says.
One thing Levin doesn’t try to rationalize is what a wild ride the rolling paper industry has given him. “Where I am today is not where I expected to be,” he says. “I thought I’d be selling cars on Western Avenue in Chicago.”
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