Dennis Sciole Episode 18 Origin Series

Episode Summary

Episode 18 of A Cigar Hustler's Podcast Origin Series steps away from the cigar industry and turns the microphone on one of the shop's own — Dennis Sciole, a 75-year-old Cigar Hustler regular who, as the hosts put it, comes in to break their balls at least weekly. It's a reminder of what the hosts call the real advantage of cigars as a hobby: the people you meet in the lounge. Dennis opens up about life on kidney dialysis three times a week and the cascade of side effects that come with kidney failure, before walking through a remarkable life story.

Raised in the Bronx and born in 1942, Dennis lost his father at nine and a half — a loss that still shapes him — joined the Navy reserves at 17, and shipped to Great Lakes Naval Training Center three days after his 1959 high school graduation. Because he'd studied French and Italian, the Navy sent him to the language school at the Presidio, and he ended up on a short observation assignment in northern Laos during the final days before the various service intelligence branches were folded into the CIA. He reflects on serving under Eisenhower and Kennedy, and what he thinks Kennedy might have become as a wartime commander-in-chief.

Back home and unemployable with a classified background, Dennis bluffed his way into an assistant superintendent job running a survey gun, then bought a backhoe, a tag-along and a six-wheel dump truck on credit and built a Massachusetts excavation and site-work business from nothing — manholes, drains, water and sewer lines, parking lots, and eventually the on- and off-ramps and cloverleafs of I-95 in Maine as a subcontractor for a large Maine excavation outfit. Along the way he learned to lean on crews decades older than himself, hired one of the first all-female heavy equipment crews at the urging of the Office of Economic Opportunity, taught himself geometry to lay out his own radii, and took a $35 OSHA citation all the way toward the Supreme Court on First and Fourth Amendment grounds — a case rendered moot when Reagan gutted the OSHA rulebook. He later put himself through Northeastern University at night, earned an associate's, bachelor's and master's in business administration, and became an SEC-registered investment advisor, work that led him to expose fraudulent loans at Middleborough Trust.

The episode closes with the show's four standard questions. Dennis would share a cigar with his father, names La Aroma de Cuba as his ride-or-die (the shop stocks it specifically for him) with the RoMa Craft Intemperance EC XVIII Virtue as his current regular, offers "pay attention, be aware" — his father's shorthand — as the best advice he ever got, and picks the original James Bond as the fictional character he'd smoke with.

In This Episode

1. 01
   Meet Dennis Sciole, Shop Regular
   The hosts introduce a 75-year-old Cigar Hustler fixture and talk about how the cigar lounge brings together people who'd never otherwise meet.
2. 02
   Life on Dialysis
   Dennis describes three-and-a-half-hour dialysis sessions three times a week and the energy and tolerance losses that come with kidney failure.
3. 03
   Navy at 17, Presidio Language School and Laos
   From a Bronx upbringing and a 1959 enlistment to Great Lakes boot camp, French and Italian language training at the Presidio, and an observation assignment in northern Laos as service intelligence branches merged into the CIA.
4. 04
   Bluffing Into Surveying and Buying a Backhoe
   How a high school surveying stint and a crash course from a Wentworth Institute instructor turned into an excavation business bought on credit.
5. 05
   Manholes, Drains and Listening to Older Crews
   Dennis credits the 58- and 62-year-old tradesmen he hired — including a toothless Italian mason who nailed a 16-manhole block count from memory — for teaching him to supervise.
6. 06
   Roads, Ramps and Moving to Maine
   Fed up with Massachusetts contractor law, he subcontracted I-95 on-ramps, off-ramps and cloverleafs in Maine with a lean 8-to-10-man crew and a self-taught geometry book.
7. 07
   The OSHA Fight and a $35 Fine
   A faked photo of a backhoe near power lines led to a federal case, nearly a million dollars raised by contractor associations, and a Supreme Court hearing made moot by Reagan's deregulation.
8. 08
   Night School, Finance and Government Overreach
   Years of night classes at Northeastern led to a master's in business administration, SEC registration, the unwinding of Middleborough Trust, and a lasting distrust of big government — including its stance on cigars.
9. 09
   The Four Questions
   Dennis picks his father, La Aroma de Cuba (with Intemperance EC Virtue in regular rotation), "pay attention, be aware," and the original James Bond.

Brands & Cigars Discussed

Linked items are in our shop. Mentions without a link aren’t currently stocked or couldn’t be matched with confidence.

Transcript

Every day I'm hustlin', hustlin', hustlin', hustlin', hustlin', hustlin', hustlin', hustlin', hustlin', hustlin', hustlin', hustlin', hustlin', hustlin', hustlin'. Shippin' slap, Rockefeller, Tech G, One umbrella, Shippin' slap, Rockefeller, Tech G, One umbrella, Shippin' slap, Rockefeller, Rock Feller. Welcome to a Cigar Hustlers Podcast, where we take a closer look at the people of the cigar industry, with your host, Mike and Mike. Hustle and hustle, hustle and hustle and hustle every day.

I'm Mike. And I'm Mike too. And this is the Cigar Hustlers Podcast. Yes!

Oh, you got me that time. I hate you. We have a very special guest with us today, one Dennis Schole. So Dennis isn't in the cigar industry, however, he is a fixture at our store at Cigar Hustler.

He comes in and breaks my balls at least on a weekly basis, at the very, very least. Sometimes it's daily, but every once in a while he needs his rest. Say hi, Dennis. Hello, Mike.

How are you doing? I'm doing fucking fantastic. Actually, I'm not really doing fantastic, and I'll tell you why. I woke up this morning and we had an employee.

Stop turning away from the microphone. I woke up this morning and I had an employee meeting. The employee meeting went really, really well. However, when I went into the restroom, I came back and my coffee was gone.

My cigar was gone. I thought it was the end of the world. My water was gone. Everything was thrown the fuck away.

The employees were so motivated after the meeting, they just started cleaning the minute you got up. They threw all of my shit out. You see, that's the problem with an efficient employee. You see something idle and he gets rid of it.

Yeah, he's too good. He's too good. So we, anyways, we fired him and... You fired him?

No, he's gone. He's gone. No, he's gone. Not at all.

So... Just say Emile did it because she's gone. That's true. But she could always be back.

So, Dennis, you have a, you've lived an awesome life. How old are you? Seventy-five. And you've been through some shit, and I think that you have an awesome story to tell, and I want to do my best to bring out that story so that our listeners can kind of hear it and get a knowledge of, you know, some people that actually come into the cigar stores and hang out and bullshit, right?

That's one of the advantages of the cigar as a hobby. It's the people you meet. The people you meet. Right, you get a big mix of people, whether it be, you know- Where else would two people like us meet a man like Dennis?

I mean, only if he was yelling at us for not doing a job right or something. Getting a ball in his yard or- Yeah, something like that. Yeah, something like that. You know, us trying to kill his cat or something, I don't know.

It's possible. So anyways, what's kind of important to me is to try and get your story out. Now, you're currently on dialysis, right? Yep.

And how often do you do that? Three times a week, three and a half hours. And how much fun is that? Let's start there.

A ton of fun. A ton of fun. As a matter of fact, I train myself now to actually sleep. Yeah?

When you're there? I sleep for almost three and a half hours. Oh, it's a nice nap. And it makes the time go by very fast.

Oh, then you get a nappy poo. I would love a three and a half hour nappy poo during the day. That'd be fantastic. Yeah, but that happens after I get up from a night's sleep, too.

Do you stay up earlier the night before or something? No, I don't. When your kidneys shit the bed, everything seems to go. Everything shits the bed.

Your energy is down around zero someplace. Your tolerance for anything goes to zero. Wow. It's just an amazing thing that what you learn about an organ failure like kidneys, it took me about, I've been on kidney dialysis for a year and a half, it took me about six months to realize all the failures that are attached to a kidney.

Wow. Or kidney failure. Well, you're not a failure in life, and that's kind of important to us, and we don't want to share that information, right? Well, you got your ups and downs in life, you know, when I joined the service together at the Bronx, I got tired of the Friday night fights.

How old were you when you joined the service? 17. 17. Yeah, I graduated on June 26th, 1959, and I was in the service on June 29th.

Oh, wow, one or the other. To give you some idea, I was actually in the Navy before that. I joined the Navy when I was 17 years old and I was in the reserves. In the reserves when you were still in high school?

Oh yeah, in high school. And in those days, you had to get your high school degree. And if you didn't get your high school degree, the Navy told me, don't show up. Wow.

So anyway, I got my degree, I showed up. And three days later, after graduation, I was in Great Lakes Naval Training Center. And then three months, we did some good things. We did some good firefighting, which they probably don't do today.

We did some firing with guns, we managed machine guns and rifles and pistols. I don't know if they do that today. And it was a basic boot camp, it was only three months and then you're on your way. There was a nice selection and a service, what would you like to do?

I named three things and I got nothing. I don't think that's changed either. That probably hasn't changed either. Just a formality.

" So they whipped me off to California to the language school in a base that's present and closed. It was the Presidium. Presidio. So what branch of military is this?

Oh, the Presidio. That was a movie. But the Presidio was mostly Marines and Army. Okay.

It was a language school. All right. And I was, I have to laugh at myself, because I was thinking of Paris and all the good things, you know? Right, right.

I speak Italian. I speak French. Not knowing that Vietnam spoke Italian. So I wind up in a short assignment in Northern Laos, and that was primarily for observation.

It was the last of the different intelligence agencies. President Eisenhower was in the United States, in the United States, on the United States, in the United States. Eisenhower was getting rid of Navy Intelligence, Army Intelligence, Air Force, and he was combining them into the Central Intelligence Agency. Oh, I always wonder where that name came from.

Yeah, so I was in the last of the general guys who served in different intelligence areas. I was the last of those. And after that I went to -- I don't know where the hell I went, but it was nice. You know, the South Pacific Islands are just -- in those days were just an absolute dream.

Right. So they sent me down there for about four days for R and R. And the other thing -- then Kennedy -- President Kennedy took over as president. And the whole military changed, because he was like, he was strictly Navy.

I remember his orders were to build a ship a month. He built up a naval force of over 515 ships or some damn thing. And the other part of it was that wherever he wanted you to go, you go. Where he went.

His orders came directly from his orders. He delegated, of course he delegated throughout the armed forces, but boy, he was a commander-in-chief. Very involved. Yeah, he was a real commander-in-chief.

And it's too bad, when he got killed, I got out and he got killed, it was just incredible that he would get assassinated. He probably would have been one of the best one of the best military presidents we've ever had, both of them Roosevelt. Roosevelt ran World War II like no other president could run a war. And that's why we won the damn thing.

Right. He only had three guys involved. You and two other guys? No.

I was born in '42. Ah. And my whole family was in They were fighting the war. I had nobody around.

I didn't know what a cousin was until he came home. Right. So anyway, after I got out of the service, I had problems about getting a job. So I got out of the service, I couldn't get a job.

Who the hell was going to hire a guy with my background? So submarines just wasn't -- Yeah, right, you know, who the hell? Not a lot -- not a lot of private industry, submarine hunting. Right.

So I got a job as a -- as a assistant superintendent on building a supermarket. Ooh! " The yellow triangle things, right, that we see all the time on the side of the road? Yeah, right.

" That was a lie. " I took French and Italian in high school. Not a problem. problem.

So thank God that one of my friends was, he was operating a bulldozer. He jumped off the bulldozer. He set up his fang gun for me. And he gave me a teacher at Wentworth Institute of Technology who lived in the town I was living in.

And he says, give him a call. And I did, went to his house for three nights, and for three nights, for three hours, he pounded the hell out of me at a surveying. So I kept my job, and I had to do something very difficult. That was to, I don't want to explain what it is.

So that's why the guy, you know, he saved my job. Right. And then the winter came, and the site was going to close down. Right.

" So, uh.... So where are you located at this time? That was in Franklin, Massachusetts. Okay.

" Right. So I bought a back hole. That was a rubber tire loader backhoe. I bought a Tagalong and a six-wheel dump truck, mostly all on credit.

Unfortunately, I got a job across town building another shopping center for the same company. No kidding. This time, I was in excavation. They gave me the contract for excavation of the foundations and the parking lot.

So someone approaches you and asks you if you can do excavation, I'm assuming, right? It evolved. Right. You want to do the job?

" I had no idea how to bid the damn thing. Did you already have the equipment, then, or did you buy the equipment? Oh, yeah, I had the equipment, and my monthly note was coming up, like, in 27 days. He's driving around with a backhoe, a tag-along, and a dump truck.

I got you. Can you do excavation? Yeah, I got the equipment. I'm good.

Yeah, I've done that lots of times. I've done that lots of times. I was going to move the earth, man. That was it.

I got a dump truck, I got a backhoe, and this is going to be the whole nine yards. So I did that work, and then I came back to where I was before in the spring. So I had two sights. Thank God.

Because that made me keep my machinery. Right. You paid the notes for the machines. Of course, I was living on probably $30 a week, but my machinery was getting paid, and I didn't have to worry about diesel fuel in those days, it was like 25 cents, maybe 15 cents a gallon.

Oh, wow. Thank the Lord for that. And the backhoe would actually last two days in fuel, so that was good, thank God for that. There was a lot of things I was really worried about, and it seemed to work out.

I didn't want to use my dump truck because, boy, that was 90 gallons. Right. Wow. I can't do that.

So, I used that dump truck minimally. Then I bought a bulldozer for some reason, because I was running my backhoe and I was working my ass off, trying to move a lot of dirt. 50. I'm the cat's ass.

I'm growing like hell. And then they gave me another one up in Norwood, Massachusetts. Pretty good. Norwood to Franklin, 45 minutes, 35 minutes trip.

So this is a third job while the other two are going on? Third job, yeah, I'm rocking and rolling, oh god almighty. He's got a crew going. He's got a crew, he's headed a bulldozer?

I don't know what I'm going to do with this money. So I got married, someplace along the line I got married. And my habits still continued that, you know, my wife was after me for a house, and it's just too bad, but now I got a shovel dozer or I got an excavator, you know. Right.

It took us 20 years, 15 years to get a house. In the meantime, I was buying equipment, and then I switched out of site work, because I was finding that when I did a parking lot, I was doing a road, not just an entry, but a road. So I was a member of the New England Contractors' Association, and I got to myself, I understood insurance now, because now I can buy group insurance. I hate to tell you, but the insurance premiums were, I think, somewhere around $30 a month.

Woo! Okay? Not today. Oh yeah, it was, so it went up to like 40 or 50, and that bent me way out of shape, I can't do that crap, by the way, we already had two kids, I had no insurance, so I paid them, now in those days to deliver a baby was 800 bucks, shit that was a snap, you know, pay for that, but then you gotta consider, you know, they're gonna get sick, you know, little bastards get sick.

Hey, so anyway, I said there's got to be a way of beating the hell out of this insurance bullsh*t. Right. So I joined the New England Contractors Association, and then I joined the New England Utility Contractors Association, then I joined the New England Builders Association. All of this is relative to getting contacts, establishing relationships, and doing work.

That's the whole bent of it. I didn't know a damn thing about laying gas pipe or electrical lines. You've done pretty good so far and not knowing really how to do anything. Right.

Yeah, you didn't, really, you know. Land surveys, building shops. I was moving dirt. I'm moving dirt.

I'm mixing road base. What the hell do I know about this? I got to put that there. Now I'm going to go get a bigger truck.

Yeah. Need to move that? No, I need to move that. I hung on to that six-wheel like there was no tomorrow.

The dump truck. Just parked. It's too expensive to drive. The thing about doing a parking lot is that you had drains.

Right. Pretty good. " Oh yeah, not a problem. Well, we didn't have precast manholes, so we had to build our manholes.

That was cool. I haven't built a manhole. But I can do it, not a problem. I'll hire a couple of guys and we'll build a damn manhole for you.

So I hired an old guy, he was probably 58 years old, and I said to him, when he had no teeth, I said to him, Don Pepp, I got 16 manholes to build, and we did this verbally, I couldn't believe it. " Well, I told him how high each one was. Did you just put out your hands? " He's mumbling away, and he told me how many blocks to buy, how many radius, probably radius for the bottom.

Oh, shit. How many radius blocks to buy. Of course, we knew how many rims to buy. At the end of that job, I had a picture of this.

At the end of that job, there were so few blocks left that I had to stand while eating lunch and the crew was sitting on the balance of the blocks. No shit. The guy just mumbled, I couldn't understand what the Christ he was saying. " So that was one of the things that I was smart enough to do.

In my company, I was the youngest guy. Everybody that I hired had a lifetime more experience than I'll ever get. They were 58, 62, on the verge of retiring. And you didn't ignore those guys?

Oh, no. You listened to them. If they told me something that I should do, I did. You did it.

They made me actually supervise. Imagine, actually supervise. I didn't have to worry about running a dozer, my backhoe, or any other damn thing. That was kind of nice.

Right. It isn't too bad. All of a sudden, you had a business. Then we had other tribulations.

We had a project manager that was assigned to the job by the city we were working for. I was working for a town of Hudson, building a housing for the elderly. He decides to call OSHA. Now OSHA in those days was-- Two people.

The first time was the Gestapo. Right. It was established by Jimmy Carter. They'd walk onto your job and they'd think nothing about shutting your ass down.

It was just something to contend with. Some kid comes up and he presents his little OSHA badge. Right about now, I'm ready to declare war on the United States Government. And there's a way to either overthrow the damn thing or declare war.

Right. So this little bastard, I'm laying a water pipe, and on the street we were on, the homes were below road grade, by about two feet, so he gets in the front lawn and he's taking pictures of my backhoe up at an upward angle, saying that when I was in the front lawn and he's taking pictures of my backhoe up at an upward angle, saying that when I was in the front lawn. We're too close to the power lines. And this little son of a bitch wanted me to tell the electric company to put insulators all along these power lines.

He didn't know it, but I was taking pictures of him in the hole, taking pictures of the power. Yeah, he's forcing perspective to make it look closer than it is. And watch this, watch it. This is really, this is my first declaration of war.

Yeah, I have a hearing. The hearing was in Springfield, Massachusetts, which is probably at that time probably an hour and a half away, okay. I said, I'm not going to go to that hearing. They're going to go, screw themselves.

S. District Court, which was federal, in Boston. I had to show up in federal court because I lost my appeal. Lost my appeal?

Oh, yeah? I lost my appeal. Where do I see this judge? Well, in federal court, you don't talk to the judge, your attorneys.

So, I get an attorney and I told him the story. I also presented him the pictures of me taking pictures of a guy trying to dummy his charge. Now, that was in '74 or '05. Of course, you don't go to the federal court tomorrow.

We went to the federal court someplace in 1980, maybe. Okay. Yeah. Had to be 1980, and I was warned that if this goes to the Supreme Court, it's gonna cost me $10,000.

Hmm. So I got together with the associations that I belong with. We generated almost a million dollars. Hmm.

Nice. The US reminded everybody of Russia, or Germany before World War II. What, are you shitting me? Right.

So we raised a lot of money. Reagan became, Reagan was president-elect. We have a Supreme Court hearing, they call it a hearing, it's actually a trial, It was scheduled for February or March. The first thing Reagan did was to grab all the OSHA rules and regulations and negate them.

No kidding. So I had put up, most of us put up, you know, $5,000, $3,000, $8,000, just to get to where it was. Right. Just to get to the hearing.

And then I get a letter, one line letter, and it said, "Dear Mr. " I was bringing him up on a violation of the Fourth Amendment, First Amendment, and there was There was one law somebody brought up. Right. And the First Amendment, of course, was my right to free enterprise.

No due process. And when I went to the federal judge, oh, the fine was $35. No shit. And I didn't want to pay the fine.

Not a principle. It's a principle. I'd rather pay the big money to strike the whole damn thing down, otherwise I'm going to declare war against the United States Government. Right.

I was really, I was really wound up. Right. You never strict me as that type of an individual that would get wound up. Pretty passive guy.

That's a complete lie. That's a complete lie. I was looking at you, I was waiting on the joke. See, I knew I was violent.

I knew I was violent because, you know, coming out of the Bronx, all you had to do was say a cross word and I was going to shove my fist down your throat. Right. So, as a result, as a result, I never bought a gun. Right.

It's probably smart. Probably a good idea. Yeah, I didn't want to kill people, OK? Right.

Unless you're going to kill me, I didn't want to kill you. Right. " It's $35, for God's sakes. So I still didn't want to pay the fine, because I felt this was a constitutional violation.

Right. " So I looked at my attorney. He breaks out $35, and he paid the damn attorney. He paid the five for me.

So the big relief happened, and it was like a double whammy. Reagan got rid of a tremendous amount of OSHA, which was mostly unconstitutional, and then he fired the air controllers. What Reagan did in those two motions was to give back management to the companies before it was the employees wagging the tail of the company. So Reagan changed the whole attitude of the country.

Everybody learned their place real quick. So what was the biggest thing that you created when you were moving in construction and handling survey and excavation? You kind of built other things, too, correct? So what was the biggest thing you ever built?

The biggest thing I ever built? Yes. It was very small. Roads.

Just roads. Lots of roads. Well, so you say small, but roads connect cities and people. You did bridges, too, right?

I worked into it kind of bass-ackwards. Everything you did was kind of bass-ackwards. Yeah, everything you do was bass-ackwards. Can you survey?

Sure. Hey, Phil, can you teach me how to survey today? It's so heavy. So, at first, I didn't want to build a road.

I really didn't want to build a road. " I said, "You've got to be joking. The surveyors made an error. " I put the damn road where you told me to put the road.

Yeah, right. It's not my fault. " This is what got me into roads. Right.

Get the damn road straightened out, and he told me seven feet, I took my own surveyor out there, and we did some shooting. In fact, I was doing a lot of surveying in those days, because now I'm a smart bastard, right? Now you're a surveyor. So, basically we moved the road, we cut seven feet off this side, stuck it on the other side, and what it forced me to do is make sewer connections to houses.

Okay. So I got a couple of guys, $1,500. Now a sewer connection was probably worth about $700. Right.

But because there was a dumbass involved, I charged the guy $1,500 a connection. He takes my ass to court, stupid, takes me to a local-- Yeah, you don't take Dennis to the court. Watch this. He takes me to the local court, to a local jurisdiction, and who's the judge?

The judge is the father of one of the kids that was in my scout troop, and one One of the kids I was coaching in baseball, the trial lasted about seven and a half minutes, he read the Wall Street Journal, and he says, you got to pay the guy in full, and I did. And my son needs to play first base next week, Mr. Shelley. I got paid in full, and that was another thing that kind of really got my ass, that I actually had to go to court to collect my money, because you made an error, and I'm charging you So I had to do all kinds of stuff that you should have done in the first place, and I got to go to the court.

What is this crap? What is this court? I'm like $35 in the hole from before. Yeah, right.

Then I actually came out with $1,000, because my damn attorney took a bunch of money. But that's okay. And anyway, that was the beginning of the end of me working in Massachusetts, because I found out too much about how the laws are skewed toward the contractor and not toward the subcontractor. Right.

I gotcha. So goodbye. So goodbye. I'm out of here.

Goodbye. I got myself a job. Taking my dump truck, my excavator, my survey equipment, my bulldozer. Yeah.

My tangalong and I'm out. Right. You know, now I'm dead up to my eyeballs. I couldn't see sunshine.

Leaving it all behind. So anyway, I said goodbye and I found a company in Maine called Bridge Construction. And I was a quasi-subcontractor for Bridge, and he was one of the Maine's largest excavation contractor. So I did for him all of his off-ramps to '95.

I couldn't qualify for '95 because it was strictly federal money, bond issues were high, Everything was really tough to get qualified to do a Federal Road, but they didn't seem to care about the off-ramps and on-ramps. Thank you very much. And what was nice about that is that I could minimize my crew. I didn't need 70, 80 guys.

You know, 8 to 10 men, we're doing off-ramps, on-ramps, we're doing cloverleafs, you know? We just can't do the road to connecting. That's when I bought myself a geometry book, a high school geometry book, because now I'm saying, why am I have to paying a surveyor to do all my radii? I can do all that stuff myself.

I did. And luckily, they had a bridge. The bridge was already built, and my first ramp was to come off the ramp and make a semicircle and come out to the road. And then, I went to the bridge.

Well, it came out perfect. I said, hey, this is it. This is easy, a piece of cake. This is it.

So, I kept on doing off-ramps and on-ramps for a long time. I laid a lot of water lines, a lot of drain lines under Jimmy Carter. That saved the day, but it wasn't enough. I got rid of some equipment.

I had a shape down real quick. Didn't know how to do that either. So I had a shape down real fast. And I worked down to myself, I don't know, we just had one crew.

But that, what I'm going to tell you, that one crew, oh, I hired another officer. " Well, you have to have females. I have to have females. So I hired a whole crew of females.

I said, "You get me a female back-cooperator, I'm hiring her tomorrow. " The laborers lasted a week. They couldn't handle it. Right.

It's hard work. Difficult. Huge. They don't really understand.

They just didn't understand. Well, it's a different time, too, right? Yeah, right. I mean, you know.

None of this stuff is light. Then I'd say, okay, I had rims on the top of my pickup, bring that rim over to me, would you please? Right. I'd have a clue.

Okay, now I want to give you an example. As skinny as I was, I would pick up the top of the rim, then I'd pick up the frame, and And I pull them underneath my arm, okay, they weigh 400 pounds, watch this, I walk over to, I barely walk over to the pile of dirt where they'd have to go, and drop them, and then walk away. Right. My crew would be silent, because usually, you take a backhoe and you pick up the rim, and you pick up the rim, and just throw it down there and walk away.

The reason why I walked away was to recover. You know, as long as you can do this young lady, you can have the job. But the joke was nobody did that. I was one of the first contractors who tried a female crew.

Wow. But they found their place. Females now are good operators, heavy equipment operators. They're a hell of a lot more detailed than a guy is.

Right. It seems to be an inherent character in women that they're much more detailed, and that's a benefit, that's a real strong benefit. Nobody gets killed, for instance. Right.

They're a lot safer. So when do you sell your company? Probably sometime around 1990, 1991. And the company was at its peak?

It was not at its peak. Right, that's when the banking problems were going on. I survived the banking crisis. Jimmy Carter was now done.

And then when you sell your company? Oh, in the meantime, I decided to go to school to find out what I was doing. Oh, good. I started school somewhere around 1983, I think.

Maybe 1980. I went to night school, didn't take an entrance exam, I went to Northeastern University. I just walked in, started taking some courses. Night classes?

Yeah, night courses. " Well, good. So I kept going. When did you get the associate degree in?

I have no idea. Okay. Okay. I was taken...

Probably a liberal arts degree. Basically, I don't want to call it liberal arts. I want to call it catching up on every damn thing I missed. Right.

I took statistics, which is critical. I mean, you've taught yourself a lot over your lifetime. I mean, I can imagine school wouldn't be that difficult at this point. It really was, because I'm working.

Oh, I gotcha, yeah, doing the same thing. So, what I used to do, I'll tell you what I did. I went to school on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Thursdays, two courses a night. I'd get out of school at 11 o'clock, slept like a son of a gun until about 5:30, and went to work.

Right, right. And then there was no more work. I used the summer to go to summer school to take accelerated courses. I did a four-year degree and four years at night as a real bitch.

I would imagine. Then I kept going. I went to Northeastern so long I thought they were going to charge me rent. Then I went on to get into a master's program, and somebody said to me, you know, I did very well.

" So I spotted my masters over about the next five years. Mostly it was in business administration. I wound up in corporate finance. And during that trip to get that, I had to convert myself to do something.

I became an investment advisor registered with the Securities and Exchange Commission. Wow. Yeah. And then I get back, I was doing pretty well, and I got back at people who screwed me while I was in construction.

I did some work for a small excavation company, correction, small equipment company. And I looked at his books, and I looked at the loans, I looked at his real estate appraisals, every one of them were phony, the books were fudged, the accountant was no damn good, and who was in my association? The president of that bank. " I said, "Yeah, the good news is that we're here together and we're having a pretty good steak dinner.

The bad news is profit equipment is nothing but a lie. " So I met him in the office and that was Middleborough Trust and Middleborough Trust had to dissolve. He found out that too many of his loan officers were friends with so many people that they lent money to, that the loans were shitty loans. The good old boy deals.

Yeah, they didn't meet qualifications, they were dummied, but he de-charted the bank and converted it into something else, so that was pretty good because I felt that's where I belong. The type of work I should be doing now, you know, I got all my experience of the ups and downs. I didn't get over my hatred of big government. I still have the arrogant attitude toward big government.

Now they're after our cigars, for Christ's sake. It's true. And that's a lot of baloney, you know, the baloney is not to say that we're trying to save your life for you, not for smoking, but it's my prerogative to save my own life. Right.

We've been indoctrinated to think as a community, as a cumulative. Well, that stems from communism. Communism is a group of people who conform to this, and that's it. And no other knowledge, God forbid, you have any other knowledge, and our government is only, not the same thing, but our government is getting so far into your life, you say, "Get the hell out of here for once," you know.

I think that stems back from my days of my long-term battle with OSHA, I think it stems back from, believe it or not, my father's dying in the hospital. I was nine and a half years old. I couldn't see my father because I was in tent. How would you like a bat upside your head?

Okay? So my father dies without me seeing him. I go to his funeral, obviously, I'm at his funeral. Now it comes time to close the casket.

I had to go downstairs in the basement Because they're going to close the casket to my phone. If you don't think that stays with you for the rest of your life, you need a doctor. Right. Okay?

Well, thank you for coming on the show, but we do have a few questions we'd like to ask. Are we going to hit him with a question? Absolutely. He's a person that we're interviewing, a person of interest.

Okay, we have four questions we ask everybody that we have on the show. Four standard questions. Yeah. And you're getting them.

Don't sound so disappointed. They're good questions. We went to a lot of trouble to come up with these questions. Okay, you ready?

No. No, he's not ready. Good. We don't want you to be ready.

All right. Question number one. What one person, living or dead, would you like to share a cigar with? My father.

Yeah. Oh, that's because he died when he was nine. Yeah? Oh, yeah.

All right. Question number two. What is your... That's all you want to say about it?

That's it? Your father? Done? He's doing it.

What else are you going to say? All right. He was my friend. And in eight and a half years, nine and a half years, the guy taught me so much, there's nobody else.

If he was alive today, I can't remember if he smoked cigars or camels. It doesn't matter, right? It doesn't matter. It doesn't matter, but I think he did smoke cigars once in a while, and I would like the share of cigars with my father.

All right. Very good. All right. Question number two.

What is your favorite cigar? Ooh. La Roma de Cuba. That is a fucking fact because we only buy it for him.

He smokes a goddamn thing all the time. And when we run out, God fucking come hell and high water, we fucking hear about it. I'll tell you what. Shit is getting serious.

However, I will tell you this. He does smoke a lot of the Intemperance EC Virtue now. Yeah, I do. Yeah.

But it's good to know that, you know, he has an instant answer. He has a fallback just in case. Yeah. All right.

Question number three. What's the best piece of advice anyone ever gave you? The best piece of advice anybody ever gave. Yes.

Yep. Pay attention, I guess. Pay attention? Pay attention.

Be aware. Yeah. That would fit within his life, because a lot of his businesses you picked up from something either you had to do or something that needed to be done with something else you wanted to do. Well, you always listen to people around you.

Well, yeah. When somebody said, when my father said to me, "Pay attention and be aware," that was his shorthand. What that means to me is I gather information from everybody. Right.

" And he told me to be aware because we were in construction, and I was a little kid, and it's so easy for me to get killed, so I had to be aware of just everything around it. Alright, final question. What one fictitious person would you like to share a cigar with? Somebody from a movie, a character in a book.

Titius Perth? James Bond. Oh, there we go. The original James Bond.

The original James Bond. That would be cool. Yeah, absolutely. You know, that was probably the fastest answer we've had for all four consecutively.

Yes. And you were certain about every answer, which is fantastic. Yeah. People that sit there and think.

You get to be an old fart. You get to be sure about a lot of things. Well, you know, we love you. We appreciate you coming on to the show and, you know, giving me a hard fucking time every week at least.

I do. I make sure I do. I appreciate that. You know, we've got to have the right TV channels on.

If I don't give you a hard time, what are you going to do? I enjoy all your stories. I think that it's great that we can actually share with everybody on a bigger level. You know, you've lived a tremendous life.

You've been through a lot of shit. There's always people that have that view of, you know, I'm in the dumps, I'm down and out. I don't, you know, they don't have an answer as to what they're going to do in life, and here is a guy that has gone through life, have had, you've had some hard parts, some great parts, and whenever the going got rough, you just kind of looked within and said, "I can do that, I can figure that out," you know? When I think a lot of people look outwards to try and find the resolve, when at the end of the day, everything you need is inside, right?

And you took nothing and you turned it into something. Yeah, that's right. And, you know, you lived well because of it, you know, your son is obviously taken care of, you know. I think the best thing in my life are my two kids.

Absolutely, absolutely. Well, again, thanks for coming on the show. Yes, thank you, Dennis. Always a pleasure seeing you when you come in.

Thank you. And now it's documented. It's been fun, it's documented, it's recorded. I'm going to go outside and throw away every Aroma De QBE that we have.

That's it. So now when I croak, you're going to play this at my funeral. Exactly, on a loop. All right, thank you everybody for listening.

All right, bye. Thank you. All right, folks, that's it. Show's over.

If you like what we're doing, please tell your friends about us, leave feedback. We always like to hear if you like the show or not, or if you have any suggestions for guests that we might possibly bring on at a later date. You can find us on our Facebook page at A Cigar Hustlers Podcast, or you can follow us on Instagram @cigarhustlerspodcast. Thanks for listening!

Show Notes

Dennis Sciole is one of the regulars here at Ciga Hustler.  Dennis has had quite the life...hunted submarines during the Cuban Missle Crisis, built many an empire, roads, on and off ramps and water lines that connect towns and cities thru Northern New England.

We sat down with Dennis for the afternoon and learned how things get done the "old way" by being self taught and "packing the groceries" better then then next guy!

We appreciate your feedback as always.  You can drop us your suggestions, reviews or the name of a guest you would like for us to interview on our FB page, A Cigar Hustlers Podcast.  You can follow us on IG @cigarhustlerspodcast, Mike1 @cigarhustler and Mike2 @floridacigarclub_mike.

Enjoy the show!!!