The Pinnohio of Pot: Expose on RAW papers CEO

 Josh Kesselman built Raw rolling papers into a $200 million brand but along the way he’s been deceitful about where and how his products are made and also told little green lies about a nonexistent charitable foundation. Inside the cannabis industry’s strangest smoke-and-mirrors show.

nApril 2020, as Covid spread across the world and businesses were forced to close operations, Joshua Kesselman, the 52-year-old founder of Raw rolling papers, proudly announced that his factory in a small town in Spain was churning out paper.

“Alcoy, Spain, where we make Raw paper, is still open,” Kesselman told Forbes during an interview at the time. “Alcoy is insulated; we’re up in the mountains, not down where the Covid really is in Spain. We’re one of the few real businesses in Alcoy.”

There was, however, one very real problem with Kesselman’s factory in Alcoy—it didn’t exist. Amid a legal battle between Raw’s parent company, HBI International, and rolling paper rival Republic Technologies (which owns brands such as E-Z Wider and OCB), a judge ruled that Raw’s claim that its papers are handmade by artisans in Alcoy is misleading.

Rather, Raw paper is manufactured some 400 miles away in Saint-Girons, France, by paper conglomerate Schweitzer-Mauduit International, a company representative said in court, then it is shipped to Iberpapel in Benimarfull, Spain, to be placed into packaging.

But Alcoy, where famed rolling paper brand Bambú was first made, was so important to Kesselman’s origin story that Raw’s packaging advertised until very recently: “Made in Alcoy, Spain, the birthplace of rolling paper.” The Iberpapel factory, however, is still a 15-minute drive from Alcoy—close, but no rolled cigarette. And details matter. Sparkling white wine produced 15 minutes outside of the Champagne region cannot be called champagne.

When asked why he lied about where Raw is made, Kesselman brushed it off as an honest mistake. “In the past, I have referred to the region as Alcoy,” he wrote to Forbes through his crisis PR and legal team. “Think of it like a metro area. The New York Giants play football in New Jersey, right? Yet they are still called the New York Giants and are known as a New York City sports team.”

Over three decades, Kesselman has built a $200 million (estimated annual global sales) empire through Raw and a suite of other brands under his Arizona-based HBI International and its overseas arm. But along with Kesselman’s success story, there is also a pattern of telling tall tales.

Over the last seven years, Kesselman has been defending his company in a protracted legal battle waged by Illinois-based Republic Technologies. During the trial, a jury found that HBI engaged in unfair competition and violated the Illinois Uniform Deceptive Trade Practices Act through its packaging and promotional activities. The jury, however, sided with HBI’s counterclaim that Republic, founded by Chicago-based entrepreneur Donald Levin, infringed on one of its copyrights and trade dress, awarding HBI just over $1 million in lost profits and statutory damages.

Through the litigation, a clear picture has emerged of Kesselman and Raw relying on deceitful claims and aggressive hucksterism to solidify its position in the competitive nearly $1 billion (estimated U.S. sales) rolling paper market.

A longtime former employee, who declines to use his name for fear of retribution, says he ended up leaving HBI because of Kesselman’s habit of bending the truth. “[He’s] pretty much a pathological liar,” the ex-employee says. “He is very good at training himself—if you tell the story enough times in your head, you’re going to believe it and it’ll become the truth in your mind.”

One of the most bizarre revelations to come out in the lawsuit is that HBI had been championing its charitable organization known as the Raw Foundation. There is, however, no nonprofit listed with that name, according to a public database for registered 501 (c) (3)s, and HBI agreed to stop advertising its foundation. In a statement, the company explained that it “may have created the impression that we ourselves were a charity. We are not a charity.”

When asked which deadly virus he had contracted 25 years ago and whether he was still battling it, Kesselman now claims he was never actually sick with a terminal illness.

Forbes independently confirmed that Kesselman has donated to at least two of the charities he has touted but was unable to verify his claim of $2.5 million in total giving. Before the Raw Foundation was taken offline in 2021, its website described the work they do: “We run the foundation using what Josh calls Entrepreneurial Philanthropy. In short, we save and improve the most number of lives possible with the resources we have. It doesn’t matter where the people are, all that matters is where we can have the greatest impact.” HBI now refers to its philanthropic efforts as Raw Giving.

Kesselman, who has more than 2 million followers on Instagram, also has a long history of attacking competitors and claiming his products are superior, while others are made with harmful chemicals. As part of the permanent injunction HBI agreed to in the case with Republic, the company will stop advertising its products with the claim that its rolling papers are “unrefined”—the president of Republic Technologies International testified in court that it is not possible to make unrefined paper. It was also determined in court that Raw’s organic hemp rolling papers were not the world’s first nor only organic hemp rolling papers—as the company had claimed—and that Kesselman had not invented “the cone,” an empty prerolled joint mostly used by cannabis dispensaries. Nor can the company claim that OCB is making knockoffs of its products, which Kesselman and his company have long described as “RAWplicas” or “RAWnabees.”

When Raw Organic Hemp rolling papers first hit the market,they are not made with organic hemp as the company claimed, according to witness testimony during the court case with Republic. In September 2017, HBI submitted a sworn statement explaining how Raw Organic Hemp rolling papers have always been made by Schweitzer. But a Schweitzer employee testified that the company did not start selling organic hemp paper to Iberpapel until 2011, years after Raw hit the market and started advertising its papers as organic hemp. Kesselman, through his legal team, wrote that the booklet factory “assured” them that the paper “has always been made from organic hemp bulk paper.”

One of Raw’s attorneys wrote in an email to Forbes that the permanent injunction was not, however, an admission of guilt. “It is important to understand what the Agreed Order containing an injunction actually says and means,” the attorney noted. “First, it is an Agreed Order. It specifically makes no finding of truth or falsity and notes that HBI has not conceded that.”

For someone who has been synonymous with weed for decades, Kesselman doesn’t need to embellish his backstory. Born in New York City and raised on Long Island, he started high school in Hewlett but was sent to the Robert Louis Stevenson School, a therapeutic prep school in Manhattan for struggling students, after getting kicked out of Hewlett High for smoking. He then attended the University of Florida, where he studied marketing, and in 1993 he opened a head shop—selling bongs, pipes and other cannabis gear—named Knuckleheads in Gainesville, Florida. In the fall of 1996, when Kesselman was 25, federal law enforcement, armed with a search warrant, seized what they considered drug paraphernalia across his stores and one that his then girlfriend, Basilia Georganas, owned in Jacksonville, Florida.

Kesselman and Georganas sold the remaining inventory, including rolling papers, and by 1997 they had moved to Phoenix, where Kesselman started a new company, HBI International, and was soon joined by Charles Bachmann, a Long Island friend. By 1998, Kesselman and Georganas were indicted on federal drug paraphernalia and money laundering charges. The couple married that same year. In March, he pleaded guilty and later was sentenced to a year of house arrest with electronic monitoring, five years of probation and fined $150,000.

According to the government’s sentencing guidelines, those crimes usually result in five to six years of prison time, but the judge, according to a court document, reduced the standard sentence largely because Kesselman told the court that he had a “terminal virus.” In a subsequent filing requesting a reduction in probation, which was also granted, Kesselman’s attorney claimed that his client’s illness required treatment only available in Switzerland and other European countries.

When asked which deadly virus he had contracted 25 years ago, and whether he was still battling it, Kesselman, through his legal team, now claims that he was never actually sick with a terminal illness. “It was a misdiagnosis, thank God, but it took years to find out,” Kesselman says. “My health has never been better.”

His wife, however, got a raw deal on the same charges. Georganas was sentenced to five months in jail, but was deported to her native Canada in 2000 due to her status as an “aggravated felon.”

Following those early legal troubles, Kesselman, along with Bachmann, focused on importing rolling papers and other supplies to sell to smoke shops. Soon, they started filing patents for rolling paper technology and launched their first brand of papers: Elements. Then came Juicy Jays and by 2005, they introduced Raw, a super-thin, natural-looking brown rolling paper. Kesselman and Bachmann eventually dissolved their partnership and Bachmann no longer owns a stake in HBI. Years later, he went to work for Republic and is currently employed by a blunt wrap company.

What’s particularly vexing about Kesselman’s penchant for embellishment is that he didn’t actually need to lie about his company or products. In the nearly 20 years since its founding, Raw has grown steadily with cannabis legalization and is name-dropped in several hip-hop songs. Along the way, he has become a celebrity in the weed world—at any cannabis trade show there’s usually a line to meet him and get an autograph. He also owns a penthouse in Manhattan and two homes in Arizona.

But apparently, that’s not enough for Josh Kesselman. Back in April 2020, while discussing how his business was seeing an uptick in demand thanks to the boredom and stress of Covid lockdowns, he got philosophical and started spinning another yarn about what he had learned at his nonexistent factory in Alcoy, Spain. “In Alcoy, there is a different mentality than Americans have: this feeling that you are a drop in the bucket, there’s a continuum that you are a part of,” Kesselman told Forbes at the time. “You can be the best in the world, but someone will come after you and they’ll probably do it better. And if you did it really great, you get a statue in one of the centers of town. That’s my goal—to have a statue. The mayor says I will have my statue. I want my fucking statue.”

Antonio Francés Pérez, the mayor of Alcoy, who has been serving the city since 2011, did not respond to multiple requests for comment. Kesselman has since walked back his statement and now claims that the mayor was speaking in an offhand, joking manner. “I didn’t actually think the mayor meant it literally,” Kesselman said through his PR and legal teams. “And statues are usually for dead people anyway–so I’m in no hurry for a statue.”