In just a few months, Nuna Harvest has built one of the best teams in New York cannabis. Owner and legacy-operator Howie Rondinone recently told Leafly how he did it.
New York has always been a city of characters. Every industry, from tech to fashion to cannabis, is full of people with lives that seem to play out like movies. Or, if you’re Nuna Harvest owner Howie Rondinone, your life has been a premium TV series–part Showtime’s Shameless, and part FX’s Sons of Anarchy.
“I was a latch key kid. I didn’t have a curfew. A lot of weapons in my (childhood) house, a lot of drugs, a lot of bikers, a lot of hippies…gritty but glamorous.”
Howard Rondinone, owner Nuna Harvest dispensary
Howie was born and raised in the Bronx by a German American mother, a hippie “rebel”, and an “outlaw biker” father for whom it was routine to drive his chopper up the six-floor walkup to their apartment and leave it on the fire escape every night. He jokes that he attended all three Woodstock concerts, since his mother went while pregnant with him. It seemed predestined that he would work in the world of weed—legacy, legal, and all things in between.
“My mother saw that I was interested in growing, so she start[ed] teaching me how to grow. Meanwhile, my dad’s got all these illegal grows, and he was importing from Jamaica and Columbia. I’m being nurtured into the retail side of it with my old man. He’s explaining to me how the importation works. And then I’m going with my mom, learning the actual plant. So that was sort of where I started.”
Howard Rondinone, owner Nuna Harvest dispensary
Howie learned the sensibilities needed to navigate a covert business in New York City in the ‘80s, and started dealing cannabis he got from his father at 12 to kids at school, scaling his way up. It was a period ripe for graffiti culture, and weed was an easy way to enter more and more subcultures.
Despite his extracurricular activities, Howie was a good student, but he was admittedly, “always a money grubber.” As was en vogue at the time, he fell in with the Grateful Dead and Deadhead crowd, following them on tour and providing his services. It was through his mentor that he got an up-close look at importing cannabis from Jamaica, flattening pounds down into the heels of shoes to bring it into Florida.
“From ‘91 to ‘99 I imported cannabis from Jamaica. I started with the shoes. I went all the way up to luggage, shipments of coffee, all kinds of importation. I seen people die. I almost got killed. We all went to jail.”
Howard Rondinone, owner Nuna Harvest dispensary
Again, he doesn’t say any of this with gravitas. C’est la vie, right?
The ‘90s for Howie had three major arcs: running his international cannabis business, reconnecting with his high school girlfriend who’d become his wife and mother of his son Peter, and his cannabis arrests. First in Florida, then in New York; after Howie did his time, he did his best to enter civilian life. He got a normal, W-2 kind of job, and started a community little league for other Bronx children to keep them from following in his path, or worse. But all the while, he was still running his weed side-hustle. Never did he think he’d be able to put his best skills to work on the other side of the law.
Nuna Harvest’s dispensary doesn’t look like an Apple store or a med spa. Howie himself has adorned the walls with his artwork, blending portraits of iconic figures like Snoop Dogg with the art style of Keith Harring. There’s an entire hallway dedicated to artwork that Howie and general manager Sherri McGee hope to source from local artists. He’s also the buyer, ensuring that his inventory reflects quality and appeals to the vast spectrum of characters.
“I want it to be like a big, warm hug when you walk in. If I could put couches all over the place and let you sit here all day, I would.”
Howard Rondinone, owner Nuna Harvest dispensary
Howie’s managerial style comes from his time in the legacy market. Most of his team also hail from the Bronx; some he coached in little league all those years ago. Next year, they hope to build out a lounge and open the space for consumption. But for now, it’s about running Nuna the same way he ran his previous empire.
