Memoirs of a Watch Salesman: A NYC Real Estate Story

Memoirs of a Watch Salesman Reveals the Human Story Behind a 50-Year New York Journey

Joseph Aquino's memoir is a story of family, friendship, ambition, loyalty, betrayal, loss, forgiveness and the determination to keep going.

NEW YORK - On the surface, Joseph Aquino's Memoirs of a Watch Salesman: A New York Real Estate Story is the story of a Brooklyn-born street salesman who worked his way into New York commercial real estate.

But beneath the deals and boardrooms is a more personal story: a man trying to find his place in the world.

Aquino's journey begins on the streets of 1970s New York, selling merchandise from tables and eventually watches door-to-door. He learns to approach strangers, absorb rejection, understand people and keep moving. His education came from people and New York City itself.

Mentors recognized something in him before he recognized it himself. Customers taught him to listen and negotiate. Employers taught him discipline and ambition. New York could reward him one day and knock him down the next.

Aquino experienced loss early. He lost his father at 12. Years later, his mother suffered a heart attack and died while Aquino was still in his twenties. Work became more than a career. The people around him became a second family.

That search for family would follow him throughout his life.

Nowhere is it more powerful than in his relationship with legendary New York retail broker Faith Hope Consolo. For approximately 26 years, they worked side by side, traveling the world and representing major names in luxury retail and real estate.

Their partnership was about more than business. Both had lost their parents young. Aquino describes a bond in which they became family, mentors, protectors and best friends. They worked, traveled, argued, laughed and built careers together.

Then their seemingly unbreakable relationship fractured.

What follows is one of the memoir's most emotional journeys, a story of loyalty and betrayal, success and loss, anger and affection, and what happens when business and family become almost impossible to separate. Aquino leaves the reader to discover exactly what happened.

Memoirs of a Watch Salesman is not a victory lap. It is about what success costs, what failure teaches and what happens when the people you depended upon are suddenly no longer there.

Throughout the memoir, New York becomes another character. Aquino takes readers back to a grittier Manhattan of street peddlers, hustlers, struggling artists, prostitutes and drug dealers. He recalls living at the George Washington Hotel while selling watches and learning the "science of selling."

From there, the street salesman enters the health-club boom, learns management, discovers commercial real estate and eventually negotiates transactions involving some of the world's best-known luxury brands and property owners.

Yet the young salesman from Brooklyn never completely disappears.

Aquino dedicates the memoir simply: "For my wife Suzanne, my rock."

For all the famous names, glamorous locations and major transactions, the memoir ultimately comes back to relationships: the people who teach us, believe in us, disappoint us, the people we lose and the people who remain.

It is also about reinvention: street salesman, watch salesman, health-club executive, real estate broker, entrepreneur and author.

Aquino describes the book as a true rags-to-riches story beginning during America's Bicentennial in 1976. But its larger message has little to do with becoming rich.

It is about becoming resilient.

Joseph Aquino's story is unmistakably a New York story. But the emotions underneath it are universal: ambition, love, friendship, loss, betrayal, forgiveness and the belief that no matter how many times life changes the script, there may still be another chapter waiting to be written.