Jun 9, 2026
Hugh Cassar built a fortune on cigars and clove cigarettes — products he doesn’t even use. “I don’t even like the smell of tobacco, to tell you the truth,” Cassar told the popular financial-literacy channel The School of Hard Knocks in an interview filmed outside his $35 million Los Angeles home earlier this year.
Now 89, the Malta-born founder of specialty tobacco distributor Kretek International wants to impart some wisdom to the next generation — and he says “it’s easy” to make money in this day and age.
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“Some people make money and they don’t spend it because they’re afraid,” he said. “Scared money does not make money.”
Born in Sliema, Malta, Cassar took his first job as a mailroom clerk and earned a business degree from the University of Toronto before settling in Southern California, according to a 2018 profile in Tobacco Business magazine. His path to success was anything but straight: He worked as a chartered accountant, a car broker and a real estate agent before finding his niche in his mid-40s. Today, he and his wife, Keets, are among Ventura County’s most recognized philanthropists, and Cassar has served for years as Malta’s Honorary Consul General in the region.
How a Wall Street Journal article launched a tobacco empire
Cassar founded Kretek International in California in 1983 after noticing, as he put it, that “young people wanted to smoke something different.”
“It was something I read in the Wall Street Journal,” he recalled. “At that time, everybody smoked.”
What he read about was the kretek: an Indonesian clove cigarette that crackles when it burns. Cassar became the exclusive US importer of Djarum, the Indonesian brand, in 1983, and rode the clove-cigarette fad that swept American nightclubs and college campuses through the 1980s. Clove cigarettes were exotic, foreign and, crucially, not what your parents smoked.
The category later faced an existential threat. In 2009, the Family Smoking Prevention and Tobacco Control Act banned most flavored cigarettes in the United States, clove products included. But industry worked around the ban by reclassifying the products as “filtered cigars” and wrapping them differently to keep selling. That pivot kept companies like Kretek in business, and the broader American clove-cigar market has since grown into a roughly $1 billion-a-year segment, according to Grand View Research.
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Kretek, still privately held and headquartered in Moorpark, California, now distributes everything from premium cigars to nicotine-free clove alternatives and cannabis accessories, with recent estimates putting its annual revenue north of $60 million. Cassar has handed much of the daily operation to his children.
The advice he’d leave behind
When asked what one message he’d leave the next generation, Cassar didn’t really offer up a specific strategy, but rather pointed to one particular virtue. “Being honest makes you money,” he said. “Not being honest destroys your life. Just be honest, be kind, be cheerful.”
Cassar framed honesty as a practical asset rather than a moral nicety — a thing that compounds, like interest. He paired it with a warning about hesitation, returning again to the idea that fear is the real obstacle. “At some point in life, when you’re dying, [you] say, ‘I never won the lottery.’ But you never bought a ticket,” he said.
He also pushed back on the notion that money and misery are opposites. “If you’re gonna be miserable, you may as well be miserable and rich rather than miserable and poor,” he said, half-joking.
At one point in the interview, Cassar had a touching moment with interviewer James Dumoulin. Cassar, who said he’ll turn 90 this year, recalled moving his family to California when he was 29 — six decades ago — and saying it feels like it just happened.
“I’m just a person like you,” Cassar said. “I was your age yesterday.”
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Dave Smith is the VP of Content at Wise Publishing and Editor-in-Chief at Moneywise and Money.ca. His work has also been published in Fortune, Business Insider, Newsweek, ABC News, and USA Today.
