Entrepreneur can never tell Italian family about multi-million fortune because they’d be convinced he’d joined Mafia and disown him
An entrepreneur can never tell his Italian family about his multi-million fortune because they’d be convinced he’d joined the Mafia and disown him.
Giuseppe Fiorentino’s grandparents emigrated from Sicily – where organised crime still maintains a firm stranglehold on society – to the Swiss city of Zurich in the 1990’s.
Much of the 26-year-old’s family still lives in Italy (Grandparents, Uncles, Aunts, Cousins) and he hasn’t been able to reveal his true wealth because there is “no way” they would believe he made it legitimately through e-commerce.
Mr Fiorentino said: “My parents can’t believe how much money I’m making – to them, it’s incomprehensible.
“I’ve got a diamond watch worth over 30,000 Swiss francs, and even though I tell them I’ve made it through e-commerce they still think ‘what has he been doing?’.
“My Italian family just wouldn’t understand. I can’t tell them what I do because they don’t understand how e-commerce works.”
“They know me and they know that I am a good human being, but if I were to tell them my true worth, they would instantly think that some kind of criminality was involved.
“The south of Italy is very poor, and most of the people with money there are in the Mafia. If you go around flaunting your wealth with designer clothes, luxury watches and high-end cars, then everyone knows you are in the Mafia.
“Nothing has to be said – it’s just a fact. That is why I can’t share this side of my life with some of my Italian family because I’m scared they’d disown me.
“I know that no matter how hard I tried to convince them that I am an entrepreneur who has made his money through blood, sweat and tears, they’d still think I was in the Mafia.”
Mr Fiorentino currently rakes in 7 figure a-month through e-commerce and 3CC Group AG, a firm which trains others to master the industry.
He has spent some of his self-made fortune on luxury cars, including a $150,000 McClaren 570S and $100,000 Mercedes AMG GLC.
As well as cars, Mr Fiorentino has enjoyed foreign jaunts to places including Dubai, Spain, Turkey and Egypt.
Unfortunately, he has been unable to share any of this with much of Italian family because he fears they will “make assumptions”. They are not online so he has nothing to fear from speaking about it in the press.
Instead, he tells them he is working in the same Swiss bank where he began his apprenticeship when he was 16.
“I always wanted to be rich but never knew how to, so I tried working in the bank but it didn’t work,” he explained.
“When I was a kid, I was always told that banks have all the money so if you work for one, then you will be rich.
“It was only when I began working for one that I saw how wrong I had been. I thought I would be rich when I earned $10,000-a-month.
“But then I grew up and realised that $10,000 isn’t that much when you have to pay all your bills and have student debt.”
This realisation prompted Mr Fiorentino to look for other ways to make money. He had dabbled in entrepreneurship since his teenage years when he sold clothes online.
While it was a modest success, he revisited e-commerce – selling goods online – in his late teens and made so much money shipping goods worldwide through it that he quit his job at the bank to do it full-time when he was 23.