US government once seized Hitchens’s Cuban cigars

The late Christopher Hitchens, the British-American journalist who often expressed his love of drinking and smoking, once received an “enforcement referral” to the Immigration and Naturalization Service for having illegal Cuban cigars in his luggage.

Freedom of Information Act records from January 2000 obtained by The Hill indicate the forbidden stogies were discovered “during examination” of Hitchens’s baggage and “were seized for violation of law.”

Hitchens, once described by a newspaper as “Usually armed with a glass of Scotch and an untipped Rothmans cigarette,” lost his fight against cancer at age 62 late last year.

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