Alessandro Piovezahn’s life began as Alessandro Ramos Pinto. He describes the two names as his Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde—Pinto as Hyde.
It was all Hyde, no Jekyll for Alessandro, until he met Paulo Cruz.
At the time, he was looking for his next target at the airport in the capital of Brazil. It was 1989. He was 17, homeless, and armed.
Just when he was approaching a car with a nice stereo, he heard a strong voice from behind: “Malaco, what are you doing here?”
A big black guy, about six feet and five inches tall, addressed him with Portuguese slang for a “shady person.”
“I’m looking for a job,” he said.
“I’ve just arrived, and I’m hungry,” the man replied. “Would you like to go have a hot dog together?”
The invitation came as a surprise.
“I was expecting somebody who was going to change into the whole violent bubble like a lot of people do until they see the gun. Then humbleness kicks in, and fear brings them back to who they are,” Mr. Piovezahn told The Epoch Times. “But the man didn’t. He invited me for a meal.”
At that time, Mr. Pinto was going to take the offer. And why not? He could get more than just the stereo. There’s the wallet, the watch, and who knows what.
After the hot dog meal, the man, whose name is Paulo Cruz, took Mr. Pinto to his office. He told Mr. Pinto that he was a journalist with a TV show.
“I have to go now. But before I go, I have a proposition for you,” Mr. Cruz said. “You said you were looking for a job.”
He offered Mr. Pinto to sleep on the couch in the office, four authorized meals a day at the restaurant downstairs, and a minimum wage to work as an assistant.
The second option for Mr. Pinto, he suggested, was to take everything from the office, which would be much more valuable than the stereo in the car. All the expensive equipment was insured, he revealed. “You can help yourself. Just do it before 6 a.m. But I sincerely hope to see you here in the morning because this could be an opportunity you’re looking for.”
Then, he gave Mr. Pinto the office key and left.
“At that point, he gave me a new life.” Mr. Pinto considered option two but decided against it.
“For the first time in my life, I felt safe.
“I had the key to a place that was clean, nice, where I had the key to go in and out. And I could do whatever I wanted to, even steal if I wanted to,” he reminisced.
A Lost Hope Rekindled
To Mr. Pinto, Mr. Cruz was the first example showing that the idea of all men being evil might warrant a second look.Still, for months, Mr. Pinto waited for Mr. Cruz’s “ulterior motive” to reveal itself. After a year, he finally gave up.
Growing up in what he called a “Quentin Tarantino movie” in Rio de Janeiro, Mr. Pinto had his reasons to suspect all people.
His parents divorced when he was three. Soon after, his mother moved in with a much older man, who sexually abused his younger sister and often beat him up.
Ten years later, the man threw him out after his mother ran away with his sister.
“I felt free because suddenly I’m not being abused anymore—violence is not there. But it only lasted about three to four days,” he said, recalling what went through his 13-year-old brain.
Initially, he stayed at friends’ houses for a day or two but eventually ran out of options. “That’s when the shame hits you, especially with a child,” he said.
Therefore, he went to a church for help.
A priest raped him on his first day under the name of “sharing God’s love.”
“Put it this way: people shared a lot of God’s love with me. It was traumatic.”
Mr. Pinto had to choose between being homeless and being raped: “It’s very difficult to deal with this situation. Because the whole point is: do I go back and sleep on the streets, sleep in the cold, sleep in the rain? I have to take a shower in a public fountain in the morning and wait for the sun to get strong enough so I can warm myself up.
“Or I subject myself to a few minutes of this ‘God’s love sharing,’ and I have a free meal and clean clothes. I could not sleep alone because they always wanted to sleep with me. So it was very traumatic for me.”
After enduring the dilemma for about two and a half years, he left Rio and went to Brasilia at about 16. There, he stayed at a prostitution compound to exchange sex for food.
One day, a friend gave him a gun: “Consider this your freedom.”
She told him how to ask people to drive to remote areas and then rob them, and those people would be hesitant to call the police because the first question they would have to answer would be: “What are you doing in the remote area with a minor?”
All of a sudden, Mr. Pinto had power.
First, he targeted people who clearly had the intention to abuse him sexually. Then, he took his anger and revenge on everyone he came across. Instead of being respected, he wanted to be feared.
Yet, the revenge and violence didn’t bring him happiness. After being shot three times and stabbed four times, he began to wonder where his life was heading. Fear of pain was the only reason that stopped him from killing himself.
At the time he met Mr. Cruz at the airport, he had been provoking others so someone could end his life for him.
To his surprise, Mr. Cruz offered him a chance to turn the page.
Becoming Mr. Piovezahn
From the beginning, Mr. Cruz made it clear to Mr. Pinto that the job offer was to help him transition, and he was free to do what he wanted when he was ready.He helped Mr. Cruz with chores and got exposure to the advertising industry. At the age of 19, Mr. Pinto moved to Iguazu Falls and opened an ad agency there.
Because he arrived there with two American tourists and spoke English with them, people assumed that he was an American. After the tourists left, he continued to speak English, which he learned from American pop songs, and adopted a new identity: Alessandro Piovezahn.
Mr. Piovezahn was the version he wanted to become.
Thanks to Mr. Cruz’s view that a dream would need to be scary to be called a dream, Mr. Piovezahn was dreaming big: go to America and reenter the advertising field there within seven years.
He left Brazil as a successful young marketing strategist at 27.
“Thursday, I got on a plane. Friday, I landed in New York. Saturday, I started delivering newspapers in New York, and I was the happiest man in the world.” He arrived in the United States on Friday, April 16, 1999.
Friends asked him how he could still be happy to deliver newspapers after running a successful ad agency in Brazil. “I said I could not feel bad because I was delivering newspapers inside my dream. You know what I’m saying? America was a dream for me.”
In exactly seven years and a month, the advertising agency he opened in August 1999 took off. The United Nations was the first client he signed on. That was in May 2006.
In addition to returning to the advertising business, he had another dream: continue Paulo Cruz’s mission to help others. He still talks to Mr. Cruz every year, who’s too old to travel now. He follows Mr. Cruz’s steps to help those who want to help themselves.
Over the years, he has learned to control Mr. Pinto, the angry and negative self. Although he doesn’t practice any religion and still hates priests, he couldn’t help thanking a higher power guiding his life and seeing that he had the wish to be kind.
Good Deeds in Troubled Times
Mr. Piovezahn said he hadn’t tried to gain at the expense of others since he came to the United States, but he knew he would still need to pay back any karma he incurred in Brazil.He put the bad things he did in a “stinky box.” Whenever he failed after everything was going great, he would look in his stinky box and tell himself that he was the one to blame due to the wrongs he did to others.
For example, when he had a social media platform yet went bankrupt in April 2006 after not being able to pay for the Internet bandwidth increase generated from member growth, he said he knew he was paying off karma from his wrongdoings in Brazil.
Mr. Piovezahn now is the president of the historic Hunt Hill Farm in Connecticut, a farm founded by renowned musician Skitch Henderson. In his career, Mr. Henderson worked with music legends, including Frank Sinatra, Bing Crosby, and Judy Garland. He also founded and led the New York Pops Orchestra and served as the bandleader of the “Tonight Show” on NBC.
Mr. Piovezahn provides the venue for free to community and non-governmental organizations, including youth science and music programs and local artists.
“I learned how to channel this desire to [get even with people and] transform it into something productive, where today’s success for me is the greatest vengeance ever.”
