Excerpt from Memoirs of a Watch Salesman: A New York Real Estate Story
Everyone’s got a story. This is mine — a true rags-to-riches story that starts on the Bicentennial, 1976, on the streets of Manhattan.
I’ve spent my early life on the streets of New York — selling, hustling, building, and rebuilding. Back then, I was living in a far-from-fancy hotel. A few blocks away was the famous Chelsea Hotel, where Dylan, Joplin, and Hendrix once stayed. My place? A lot rougher. Keith Haring, the legendary artist, and Dee Dee Ramone of The Ramones lived in mine. On that gritty corner of Lexington Avenue and 24th Street, we were surrounded by pimps, prostitutes, and drug dealers. I lived here with a band of hustlers — all of us working for the same outfit, a company selling merchandise on the streets of NYC.
We sold copper-clad pots, knives and glassware sets, and bottles of perfume. I was recruited out in Brooklyn and, overnight, found myself working the busiest corners in Manhattan — right across from Macy’s and May’s department stores. That’s where I learned to bark people cold, win their trust, and close a deal. Jimmy Fallon was discovered as a stand-up comic on a corner in Times Square, me a stand-up salesman in Brooklyn.
From there, the company moved on to watches — selling them door-to-door to store owners, not as wholesale stock but as personal pieces, gifts they could give their families or wear themselves.
My career’s been anything but ordinary. I’ve worked with world-class luxury brands, billion-dollar landlords, and some of the biggest names in fashion, hospitality, and finance. I’ve also been betrayed, knocked down, written off — but as you’ll see in these pages, I always got back up.
This isn’t just a memoir about real estate or business. It’s about resilience and refusing to give in to failure. About finding joy in the grind. About learning to navigate, adapt, to find new ways of doing things. About how to forgive — but never forget — and how to keep swinging, no matter how many times life takes a shot at you.
So here it is: my story, in my words. The wins, the losses, the lessons. An old-school and new-school way of doing business — my 50-year journey.
I hope it inspires you to write your own.
THE PEDDLING YEARS
October 4th, 1955. The Brooklyn Dodgers win their first World Series in their franchise history when they finally beat the New York Yankees in the seventh game. A baby was born that week near the Dodgers’ home stadium, Ebbets Field. A neighbor tells the baby’s mother, “Your son was born under winning planets.”
In the early 1970s, I dropped out of my first semester of Baruch College. I was seventeen years old. During the semester, I had been selling fragrances on top of a coffee table on Park Avenue South in Manhattan, because I sometimes had three-to four-hour breaks and I wanted to make use of my time. I had mistakenly marked “part-time” on my registration form, and that’s why I had a staggered school schedule. NEVER KNOCKED OUT: Joseph Aquino
It was the first year that Baruch used computers to schedule the students and there was no chance to change the timing. I was the first one in my family to go to college. I was clueless as to the procedure and I missed the deadline to make changes.
I had found a wholesaler who was the boyfriend of my mom’s best girlfriend, and I used my income tax refund check to buy products. The store was located on East 17th Street, between Union Square and Fifth Avenue. The wholesalers were lined up back-to-back on the street. All you saw were carts with merchandise being whisked back and forth from the store to waiting vehicles by the curb. After my introduction to Fred, the owner, I was introduced to the world of items that could be peddled on the streets of New York City.
There was a large stock of Charlie perfume, which was the most popular brand in the marketplace, with huge TV ad support. Along with Charlie, I also had an opportunity to sell a Nina Ricci perfume, L’Air du Temps, which was equally famous.
What attracted me to the Nina Ricci was the plastic dove with open wings that sat on top of the bottle. I could purchase bottles of perfume for one dollar and sell them for three. On my first day, I sold out fast. This kept me busy on my long breaks.
I realized that Baruch wasn’t for me, for I found that when I was not selling fragrances, I was gaping at the pretty girls coming out of Visual Arts school, one block down. Even though I got an A- in art, I did not want to start an art career. I did not feel that that was the way to earn a stable income.
After I left school and prior to Mother’s Day, a friend of mine and I went to a nursery to buy plants to sell to husbands and children. We set out to sell them on Flatbush Avenue by the Kings Plaza shopping mall. Not yet being retail-savvy, I convinced my colleague to buy smaller plants because they were less expensive. And at the end of the day, we only sold one.
My friend said, “I knew we made a mistake, because no one brings small plants home to Mom on Mother’s Day.”
It was a good lesson, one I never forgot: Don’t be cheap when you want big things to happen.
A month after Mother’s Day, I went back to my friend Fred the wholesaler and asked him if he had any larger-tag items besides perfume. He happily showed me a variety of knife sets which were reasonable in price. I saw an opportunity to make a nice mark-up selling them on the street, so I bought a variety.
On my first outing, in Brooklyn by the junction on the corner of Flatbush Avenue and Avenue H, I did nicely selling sets by always having cash in hand, giving customers their correct change.
Memoirs of a Watch Salesman is available from Barnes and Nobel and all good book stores in New York or from Amazon.
