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In his new book, Cobblestones, Conversations and Corks: A Son’s Discovery of His Italian Heritage, Giovanni Ruscitti traces his family’s immigration story and how it has shaped his own life. He describes how today’s immigrants embody the same entrepreneurial grit of his Italian American parents. Listen to learn how he used his own entrepreneurial drive to found a law firm.

Transcript

Denzil Mohammed: I’m Denzil Mohammed, welcome to JobMakers.

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Denzil Mohammed: One of the primary reasons immigrants flee to the United States, historically and today, is war, instability, the inability to see a future in your own land, be they migrants today from Central America fleeing gangs or migrants from Southern Europe a century ago fleeing fascism. The story is the same, the journey just as hard, the ambitions and willingness to survive indistinguishable, but perhaps for skin color. For Giovanni Ruscitti, son of immigrants from Italy, founding partner at the law firm of Berg Hill Greenleaf Ruscitti in Boulder, Colorado, an author of the just released Cobblestones, Conversations & Corks: A Son’s Discovery of His Italian Heritage, he saw that hard work and ambition firsthand with his grandparents who worked the coal mines and his father who did whatever work was available until he was able to start not one but two businesses in the U.S. Giovanni tells us his family’s story of being forced to leave the land they loved, coming here with virtually nothing, bringing with them a diligent work ethic and how they were able eventually to thrive and pave the way for his own entrepreneurial success and job making. Crucially though, Giovanni explains that immigrants from all time periods, including today, bring value, innovation, culture, and strength, and working alongside them builds up our communities for everyone’s benefit, as you learn in this week’s JobMakers.

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Denzil Mohammed: Giovanni Ruscitti, descendant of Italian immigrants, founding partner of Berg Hill Greeley Ruscitti LLP law firm in Boulder, Colorado, and author of Cobblestones, Conversations & Corks: A Son’s Discovery of His Italian Heritage, welcome to the JobMakers podcast.

Giovanni Ruscitti: Denzil, thank you for having me. It’s my pleasure to be here. I’m really honored.

Denzil Mohammed: It’s a beautiful book with beautiful pictures. Why did you want to write this book? What was important for you to tell and why?

Giovanni Ruscitti: Great question. My father passed away in 2019 and my dad lived this pretty remarkable life of the immigrant American Dream story. He was the guy who came here with literally the shirt on his back at 21 with no education and retired at 62, very successful however you define the word success. And he taught me a lot of things about hard work and entrepreneurs. But one of the things that he said right before he passed was he was a deeply, like a lot of immigrants, deeply proud person of his family, his heritage, how he got here, how he became who he was. And he said two weeks before he passed somebody should tell my story, our story, you should write a book. Yes, Denzil, as a very busy attorney and arbitrator and mediator and managing partner in my law firm, I didn’t really think I was going to be able to do it, but I said, “Yes, dad, I’ll do that.” And so I made that promise to him. 2020 then came around and with obviously COVID, but then, more importantly, BLM and the social unrest and the political unrest. And then really a lot of the targeting towards immigrants that started a few years before. I just felt compelled to sit down and just fulfill that promise. I had no intention to write a book. I certainly had no intent to write a memoir. I just was going to honor my promise to my father. And his story came to life for me. It’d be 2013 when I did my first trip back to Italy to my parents’ hometown. And the stories that he had shared with me so many times as a little boy, which had no context and meaning in the past, suddenly came to life. And it was this confluence of things that just came together, and here we are. Yesterday, the book came out and received a lot of great reviews and doing really well on Amazon, hitting number one new releases already. So very honored and pleased by that. But really what I wanted to do is tell this story. It’s, at the end of the day, a love story about a father-son relationship that evolves over time. Father-son relationships have their peaks, their valleys. And ours was like that, got really strong, but it’s also a love story about my parents and their relationship, my falling in love with their town, in my ancestral hometown. And then of course we’re Italian so love of food and wine that really emerged exactly over my entire lifetime.

Denzil Mohammed: That’s terrific. And it’s written in such a personal and easy to understand way. I could feel like I’m walking with you through the town. Yours and those of the other people you grew up with are the immigrant stories that span generations, guide us through some of those stories. What was fascinating or noteworthy about those stories and these immigrants?

Giovanni Ruscitti: They worked hard. My father and my grandfathers, my mom, my grandmothers, they had very little back in Italy. They were poor by any definition before World War II. And then they lived through extreme poverty and misery. And these were people who lived very simple, basic lives. And they took that kind of work ethic with them to the United States after they left. But for my family, it all started in 1943 when the Nazis invaded their central part of Italy, because what they were doing is they were trying to get themselves positioned for the Americans and Polish who were coming up through Sicily. And my dad was seven, mom was four and they had to make a choice. The choice was fight and be killed or sent to prisoner of war camp, give in and be servants to the Nazi soldiers, or leave and abandon their homes and all their possessions. They chose the latter, they left. And they struggled for a long time and family members, one at a time, started coming over and it’s a traditional kind of story that you’ve heard many times. Somebody would come over, typically one of the men, and get a job. And for my family, they worked in coal mines in Colorado, and they would send money back. And one family member at a time would come over. And my mom came in ’54. She went back and married my dad in ‘57. And he came over in ‘58. And, like I told you before, he was truly the shirt-on-his-back story. But when they got here they moved to a town where most of the people from Cansano had moved to. So my first language growing up was not English. It was Italian. And so I spent a lot of time with all these old men doing things that none of my friends were doing. We were butchering goats and lamb. We were making wine and prosciutto. We were drawing out sausage and making cheese. And I didn’t really get to have the same kind of upbringing that a lot of my friends had, which I kind of resented at the time to be honest with you, because you want to be out playing. But I spent all this amazing time with these great men and great strong women. And it really framed who I became. But I didn’t know, you don’t really appreciate those things until you’re older. But my dad always said, “Hey, you can do it. If I was able to succeed, you can do it.” I was the first person in my family to go to college and I got my MBA. Then I went to law school. My dad and I got very close in 2013 through this trip and got to spend a lot of quality time together in another trip. And then, just talking about his upbringing, there’s so many stories. And my dad was a storyteller. He would talk about, like the first part of the book talks about, the road it’s called, and the winding road up to the town, which I’d heard about a million times. My dad told a story about how he was 10 or 11, and they would be cutting down wood. They didn’t have any other resources, their assets were the timber in the mountains. So they would cut down wood, take it down to a town named Simona, sell it for either food or they’d trade it for provisions that they needed or money. My dad would have a sandwich somewhere in town there, a little glass of wine because that’s part of the culture. And then he would walk back. So it was six or seven miles, one way with all the wood, and then he’d walk back. And I heard that story, Denzil, so many times. But it came to life that day in June when I was doing that drive. And he was telling the story again. He’s like, “That’s where we used to cut down the wood.” And there’s so many stories like that that really defined him, and I have a million more of who he was and my memories as a boy and his hard work and just the things that he used to do that were funny. He was a charming, charismatic guy, but he was also a tough Italian machismo kind of guy. And so he had all those things coming together.

Denzil Mohammed: And he knew how to negotiate. He knew how to do that.

Giovanni Ruscitti: He did.

Denzil Mohammed: And so much of what you’re saying resonates with me because we hear these stories generation after generation. And it’s not so dissimilar to families who are forced to flee Guatemala or El Salvador, because they face death or having to surrender to gangs and things like that. It’s a similar story. It’s very fascinating for me, the children of immigrants. I think the children of immigrants are just the most awesome people. They can straddle two cultures, they’re multilingual, multicultural. And they do so much exponentially better than their parents did. What was it like for your parents when they first moved here? They came with very little, they came with no English skills. I imagine their priority was just to work and to try and find some stability.

Giovanni Ruscitti: Yes, totally. I mean, when my dad got here in ‘58 he had no education, so it was any job that he could get. And literally he took any job that he could get. And a lot of it was in very difficult kind of construction work. He did not want to be in the mine like my grandfathers were. He just did not want to work in a coal mine. But he was a custodian. He did lots of things like that. He would take any job. My mom also was working and then my sisters were born and I was born in ‘66. But one of the jobs that my dad had was he worked for a company where one of the things he got to do or had the opportunity to do, and said I’ve got to do, because that’s the way he viewed it, was he got to work with the executives and clean out their suites. He was, one of his tasks was being a custodian. So, Denzil, what do you think he did? He took home the Wall Street Journal from their offices, and he learned how to read and write from reading the Wall Street Journal. So he was very entrepreneurial. And what he did was he went to my grandfather and my great uncles and said, “Hey, instead of us working for these other guys, helping them make all this money, why don’t we form our own construction company?” They’re like, “Oh, Emilio, you don’t know what you’re talking about. We just got here. We barely speak the language.” And my dad’s like, “No, we can do it.” And so they started doing some of that. Later, he and his brother formed a construction company, but he also learned how to buy and sell stock. He learned about real estate. And so he started working two or three jobs, and amassing a lot of assets. And you mentioned learning how to negotiate. There’s some great stories in the book that I tell that really framed me when I was a kid. So in the seventies, there was a department store in the town where I was from that was going out of business. And so it was like a Kmart. It wasn’t Kmart. It was called Gibsons. And my dad and my uncle had this construction company. They walk in and I think things were like 70 percent off at this point. So they walk into the paint department and my dad says, “Okay, I’ll give you $200 for all this.” The kid is like an 18-year-old, pimpled kid. And I was a kid myself. I was like seven or eight. The kid was like, “Sir, I don’t know what to tell you. It’s 70 percent off.” [laugh] And then my uncle kind of swoops in. I think they had this great plan. I didn’t realize this until later. My uncle comes in and then offers another number. And then the kid goes back to his supervisor. Next thing you know, my dad and uncle bought thousands of cans of paint that they were going to use for their painting business. But if I go to my mom’s house, hundreds of those bottles of paint, 40 plus years later, are still there. [laugh] And I would tell my dad, “Dad, you’re not going to use all this paint.” He wasn’t a hoarder or anything. So he was just this great negotiator. So he loved going to the markets. He loved negotiating. And for him, it was, like we walked into Kmart and he wanted to buy a table saw, and it was 200 bucks. He said, he tells the kid, “I’ll give you 150.” The kid’s like, “It’s $200.” But he was a negotiator and that taught me, and actually it’s a tool that I use now as an attorney, don’t be afraid to ask. Worst anyone can do is say no.

Denzil Mohammed: Yes, he had no boundaries when it came to this kind of thing. [laugh] He didn’t exactly know the American way all the time. One thing that is fascinating in your book is you mentioned that many of the immigrants to that [Colorado] town were from the same city in Italy.

Giovanni Ruscitti: Yes.

Denzil Mohammed: What is the value of having an enclave of people from your home country? Because the narrative in the U.S. is they’re isolating. They don’t want to learn the language. They’re not integrating, but there is a tremendous value of having people from your home country to support you. That’s social capital, right?

Giovanni Ruscitti: Oh, absolutely. I mean it was this community that was right there. These people all really supported each other. And I remember as a young kid, my dad, when he wasn’t working a job, was at one of these other, they were called cansanesi. So the people of Cansano called themselves cansanesi. He was at another cansanesi person’s house, helping them fix something in their kitchen or their bathroom or building something. And they didn’t pay each other. They were helping each other. My dad always helped others. And his greatest gift was he knew how to help people. He was good with his hands and he realized that was his gift, and he gave it to other people. He would help whenever he could. And so much of that being a servant is lost. But you know, when you have that tight culture, yes, there are some negative things that happened. I didn’t speak English until I was five or six, even though I was born here in 1966. But, man, you felt very safe. You had people there who were from the exact same experience as you, who knew what you went through and were going through the exact same things here at the same time. And it was that sense of community that I think is missing in this country. Unfortunately, if you look at what things bring people true joy, one of them is community. It’s being with family or a close-knit group of friends.

Denzil Mohammed: And to be clear, community does not mean that you’re all the same, but you probably share similar experience or have a similar ambition. Let’s get into the entrepreneurship. As you know, many immigrants start businesses in the U.S. Often it’s their only option. What were some of the businesses started by the immigrants and their descendants around you? And do you see parallels with today’s immigrants? Is today’s story sort of similar to when you guys first came here?

Giovanni Ruscitti: Yes. When I was a kid, I talked about this in the book, we didn’t have a lot in the early seventies, but I didn’t know it. We always had enough. We had food and we had a house, the house that my dad built. But my dad started off, his first business was a construction company and he and his brother Luciano would go around and they would build homes. And they built a lot of homes in the town I was in. So my cousin and I would go around and help. We thought we were helping. We were probably more of a nuisance, but they wanted us there to help them. And they were very successful. And then, as I mentioned, he used his experience in Wall Street to start buying real estate. So he started buying some rental properties and he would take his experience as a construction worker to remodel these homes. So he was building new homes. He was not flipping the property. He was using them as rental property. He just viewed, and by the way, a lot of the people that he was renting to were immigrants, and he was helping them. The rent was very cheap, but he was building capital. One of the people who reviewed my book is Hernando de Soto, a famous economist who wrote The Mystery of Capital and his whole view about giving people rights is through property.  And my dad lived that. He became empowered through property. Now, by the way, all this time, he had a full-time job or two, and he worked for a company that was about to go through an acquisition and they wanted to move him to West Virginia or Texas. And he said no. His mom was still alive. His siblings were all around. And he said, “No, I’m going to stay.” And so he started over again, this was in the early eighties, and started a grocery store, no experience as a grocer. My dad had the viewpoint that you can do it, which is the way he told us all the time. And so then he became a grocer and he just, he never stopped building and being an entrepreneur. And talking about negotiations, he would go to the local, I mean, this is truly local organic farms, not like what you see nowadays. He would go to the local farmers, say during corn season. And the guy would say, “Okay, well, we’re selling at whatever a dozen or a dozen corn for a dollar.” And my dad said, “Okay, I’ll buy the entire truckload.” So he had this old, beat-up white Ford pickup for a hundred dollars. And the guy would look at him, [laugh] and he would do it. And then we’d take the truck back, go in front of the store, park it there. And then he would sell so much corn. He does this with everything. But he was always an entrepreneur. He had that spirit and nothing phased him at all, nothing. I mean, he could do anything. And so he was immensely successful doing that. And it taught me a lot about taking risks, not risk in the sense of what a lot of people do nowadays, but betting on yourself and hard work. And that’s the way I built my legal career.

Denzil Mohammed: So let’s get to your business. Now, you went on to found your own business, a law firm. From my experience, immigrant business owners don’t usually want their children to go into business because they know how hard it is. But what has the experience been like for you and your experience with your father help you in any way?

Giovanni Ruscitti: Completely. So I’ve been practicing law almost 30 years. In November 2001 me and the other founding partners of our firm, [inaudible]. I was young. I was 35. I was leaving a solid kind of job. And I had three kids and told my wife. I said, “Hey, I think I’m going to go out and start a new firm.” And that was risky. And my dad had taught me that I could do it. I mean, that was his phrase. You can do it. And he always preached about controlling your own destiny, making your own decisions, you being your own boss. And so we set out. There were five attorneys at the time. We were going to be a boutique construction / real estate firm. Now we have almost 60 attorneys, offices in Boulder, Denver, Cheyenne, Irvine, San Diego, truly a national practice. And definitely the teachings of my father I use every day. And when I’m mentoring young lawyers, some of the phrases that he used with me, I use with them. And, no, I would not have the work ethic to do what I do without some of his, really, teachings. Obviously very different work what I do, but, Denzil, the common theme is being willing to work, the willingness to do what it takes to make something successful. And I got that from him.

Denzil Mohammed: And the willingness to accept risk. Risk is part of the deal. I often say the act of migrating is itself an entrepreneurial act. And that’s part of the reason why immigrants are twice as likely to start businesses here in the U.S. They are job makers, not job takers.

Giovanni Ruscitti: Exactly.

Denzil Mohammed: You can do it. And you did. Finally, your family’s experience is both unique and storied and yet also very much the immigrant story. What would you say to Americans today about welcoming new, ambitious entrepreneurial immigrants to their communities?

Giovanni Ruscitti: Please, please, please be open and nonjudgmental. You know, our country was built on, no matter how you define it, the immigrant story. For some it was just a year or two ago. For others, it was three or four hundred years ago, but we’re all at some point in time, we come from that same kind of story and background. And we don’t know what these other people are going through. We don’t know what they’re escaping. But I do know this: We are blessed in this country. We have so many resources available to us, whether it be our educational system, our health care system, our jobs. Just the stuff that we have around us, that 80, 90 percent of the population of our planet don’t have. And they’re looking for something better and that’s all they’re trying to do. And you know what, Denzil? There’s enough abundance to go around for everyone. Certainly everywhere I believe, but in this country it’s not like they’re taking something from you. They’re looking to better their lives. And as you said before, and it’s so true, they’re usually building something.

Denzil Mohammed: Thank you so much for joining me on this podcast. It’s an incredible book, Cobblestones, Conversations & Corks: A Son’s Discovery of His Italian Heritage. Giovanni Ruscitti, descendant of immigrants from Italy, thank you for joining us on the JobMakers podcast.

Giovanni Ruscitti: Denzil, thank you very much for having me. I’ve been really humbled by the reception to the book and honored to be on your show.

Denzil Mohammed: JobMakers is a weekly podcast about immigrant entrepreneurship and contribution produced by Pioneer Institute, a think tank in Boston, and The Immigrant Learning Center in Malden, Massachusetts, a not-for-profit that gives immigrants a voice. Thank you for joining us for this week’s special episode on one family’s ambitious journey to success in the U.S., the story of all immigrants, really. We’ll be taking a break next week, and we’ll be back with you again on September 8th for another JobMakers podcast. I’m Denzil Mohammed. See you then.