Before You Press Play
- Read by: Hopper Stone reads Scott Anthony's account rather than Anthony narrating it himself.
- At its heart: Cuban cigar smuggling, Chicago street origins, crime-to-redemption memoir
- Vibe: Raw, honest, and unresolved in its own moral judgment
- Short version: Anthony's memoir earns its honesty by refusing to resolve how listeners should feel about him, which is the whole point rather than a flaw.
Soil. Sun. Defiance. Desire. Those four words open this memoir before the story itself does, and that is how Smoke, Scott Anthony's audiobook account of running an underground Cuban cigar operation in the 1990s, announces itself, opening on fragments rather than a full sentence to set the register for what follows. Hopper Stone narrates seven hours and twenty-five minutes built around risk, reward, and one specific path from a Chicago street kid into, and eventually out of, a criminal enterprise.
Meticulous Craftsmanship Paired With Brazen Criminality
Scott was 'the head of an underground Cuban cigar empire,' the synopsis states plainly, without softening that premise: born into scarce resources where joining a street gang came easy and staying out of prison did not. A life built from 'shadowy deals and sunlit beaches, meticulous craftsmanship and brazen criminality' pairs legitimate skill against outright crime, a combination the book apparently refuses to separate into tidy categories.
Bill's five-star review calls the book 'raw and unfiltered,' crediting Scott with pulling 'no punches' and opening the door to Cuban cigar smuggling with 'startling honesty.' Bruno's review goes further into specifics, noting that Scott 'doesn't glorify his past or shy away from the choices he made,' and instead shares his experience 'with clarity, as well as the emotional self-awareness he goes through in the process.' Two independent reviewers landing on the same word, honesty, about the same memoir is a meaningful pattern.
Bill's review adds a specific, concrete detail worth pulling out: never having known, before listening, 'what it took to get the cigars I enjoyed most, or the risks and sacrifices behind them.' That is the trade this kind of memoir makes with a listener, converting a consumer product most people never think twice about into a direct line back to the specific person and specific risks that produced it. The synopsis's own language, 'smoke-filled rooms where history, crime, and hedonism collide,' is doing the same work in miniature: three very different registers held together in one image, exactly the combination the reviews keep describing.
From Chicago's Wrong Side of the Tracks to Success
Christie Schluter's review sketches the arc directly: a 'hard life from growing up in Chicago on the wrong side of the tracks,' resolving into a 'successful businessman,' with a five-star verdict that 'he does' make it, cheering the outcome on rather than treating the redemption as inevitable. That arc, crime to legitimate success, is the throughline the synopsis promises too, describing 'ingenuity and determination' as the tools that shaped Scott's black market trade before shaping whatever came after it.
TVAyyyy's review is the shortest here and also the most quotable, calling the book 'the grit, the grace, the fire behind the smoke' in one line, and promising listeners will 'learn some things, especially about heart.' That phrase, grit and grace and fire together, is a fair one-line summary of a memoir that reviewers consistently describe as unflinching without being cynical about its own subject.
Reviews Dated Weeks Before the Listed Release
Worth flagging directly: the listing gives a release date of March 12, 2026, yet three of the five attached reviews, from Bill, Christie Schluter, and TVAyyyy, are dated February 2026, weeks before that release date. Only the two most recent reviews, from Kiersten and Bruno in mid-March, actually fall after the stated release. That is a genuine inconsistency in the listing data rather than something this review can resolve; it may reflect early access copies, a corrected release date, or a metadata error, and it is worth knowing that the earlier reviews technically predate the book's own listed release before weighing them.
Hopper Stone's Delivery Goes Unaddressed by Every Review
Kiersten's four-star review raises a genuinely useful question about how listeners respond to stories like this one: 'Everyone judges a criminal, especially a criminal that succeeds,' that review states, adding that people are quick to say a criminal 'didn't deserve it, they didn't earn it and so on.' That review does not resolve the question so much as name it directly, framing the book itself as an account of 'how he climbed the ladder to his own success' without settling whether that climb deserves admiration, sympathy, or judgment. Listeners uncomfortable with a memoir that does not moralize its own subject should know that tension is baked in rather than smoothed over.
Hopper Stone's actual delivery goes unaddressed across all five reviews; every one of them responds to Scott's story on the page rather than how it sounds read aloud. Better to say that plainly than invent a performance quality nobody has actually described.
Cuban Cigar Smuggling, Sitting in the Ambiguous Middle
Memoir listeners drawn to redemption arcs grounded in a specific, unusual criminal niche, Cuban cigar smuggling rather than a more generic crime story, are the clearest audience. The book's genre tags span true crime-adjacent memoir and adventure and survival content, and reviewers describe a story that earns both labels: real risk and real consequence alongside the more conventional memoir beats of family, place, and self-reflection. Listeners drawn to adventure and survival narratives more broadly, not just true crime specifically, should also find plenty here, given how much of the story turns on operating outside legal structures in unfamiliar, high-stakes territory.
Listeners who want a broad survey of many criminal cases rather than one person's full, specific story should look toward an anthology format instead; this stays entirely inside Scott's own account. And anyone who wants a memoir to clearly condemn or clearly celebrate its subject's past should know, per Bruno's and Kiersten's reviews, that this one deliberately sits in the harder, more ambiguous middle instead.
Does this audiobook glorify Scott Anthony's criminal past?
No, according to multiple reviewers. Bruno's review credits real self-awareness and clarity rather than either an apology or a celebration of what Scott did. A separate review names the tension directly: audiences often judge a criminal who succeeds, and the book does not resolve that judgment for you either way.
Does Scott Anthony narrate this audiobook himself?
No. The listing credits Hopper Stone as narrator rather than the author himself. Listeners expecting a self-narrated memoir, common in this genre, should adjust expectations accordingly; none of the attached reviews address how that particular choice affects the overall listening experience specifically.
