TAMMYE NASH | Managing Editor
Nash@DallasVoice.com
With jewels sparkling on his fingers, around his wrists and at his neck, Joe Pacetti is hard to miss. As a gemologist, jewelry broker and jewelry designer, Pacetti says, he has to be his own best model.
But behind all that flash and sparkle, Pacetti’s still just an Oklahoma boy who’s made good, and who believes in sharing his good fortune with the communities he calls home.
Pacetti admits he has always been attracted to the flash of fine jewelry. He recalls his first job as a teenager back in Tulsa, shining shoes at a high-end barbershop.
“I always noticed the rings, the fancy gold watches” the clients wore. I loved all the colors, and I told myself, ‘I want something like that,’” he said. And on payday, he would go to the jewelry store downtown to buy something for himself — a St. Christopher’s medal or some other piece of jewelry.
Then one day, while he was at a “fancy French restaurant,” he saw a man wearing a stunning gold and diamond watch, and he knew he had to have one like it. So he headed over to a downtown jewelry store and found what he wanted. The watch was priced at $850, and he only had $250. So he put it on layaway, paying it off bit by bit until it was his.
When he took it home and showed his parents, he recalls, “They said, ‘How can you justify paying that much on a watch!’ I told them, this is real gold. These are real diamonds. This watch will be worth more next year than it is now.”
Eventually Pacetti left his job at the barbershop and went to work for a Zales store as a salesman. The store’s average sale, he says, ran about $800. “Then one day, I sold a woman $43,000 worth of jewelry. And [Zales] wouldn’t give me a commission on that,” he says. “So, I left them. I left there with no money but with a very big set of balls.”
In the 50-something years since that day, Joe has put his talents, his skills and his chutzpah to work, creating a business that allows him to travel the world, buying and selling some of the finest jewelry ever made to some of the wealthiest — and, often times, most famous — people in the world.
It’s not always sunshine and roses. Pacetti recalls one time that he went to dinner “with a guy who was being really ugly about me wearing so much jewelry,” especially the expensive chain necklace he was wearing. “I just told him, this is my business. I am advertising my business,” he says.
Not long after, Pacetti, says, he wore that same chain to dinner with a potential customer, who ended up buying not only the chain, but a pair of earrings as well. The next time he saw the man who had made fun of him, “he asked me, ‘Where’s your fancy chain?’ I told him I had sold the chain and some earrings and showed him the bank wire transfer for the six-figure profit I made. And I made that over dinner because I was wearing that chain.”
Pacetti said that anyone who buys into the idea that it’s somehow unmanly for a man to wear flashy jewelry needs to stop and take a look at history.
Just look in the history books!” he urges. “Men have always worn jewelry. Look at the maharajahs of India. Think about the energies those stones produce, think about how empowering it is to wear something like that.”
But, he is quick to add, once again it goes beyond just flash and sparkle. “Fine jewelry is empowering, yes, and it is the only source of wealth that travels. It is a form of currency. Fine jewelry is an investment.”
At the same time, Pacetti says to remember that the value of a piece of jewelry goes beyond whatever price it may be worth. “My favorite piece is a ring made by Jean Schlumberger for Tiffany. It’s just a little narrow band, platinum and gold alternating, set with diamonds. It’s worth maybe $10,000 or $12,000. I have things of much greater value [in terms of dollars], but the value of that ring is sentimental.
“It’s a very simple ring, and I hardly ever wear it. But I love it.”
For those looking to buy a piece of jewelry, whether as an investment or as a gift or as a potential heirloom, Pacetti offers one piece of advice: “Only buy the best of whatever it is.”
He continues, “Go for quality. Regardless of the price point you are looking at, buy the best quality you can afford. The best always holds its value.”
If you’re looking at jewelry as an investment, Pacetti suggests choosing colored gemstones — rubies, emeralds, sapphires — because “there is a much more limited quantity of fine colored stones than there is of diamonds.” And, he cautions, “Don’t buy what you cannot afford. For instance, I don’t know who came up with this idea that an engagement ring should cost you two months’ salary, but that’s bullshit. Buy what you can afford, and but the best you can afford.”
Another piece of advice? Buying jewelry is not about necessity. “I hear people say all the time, ‘Oh, I really love that. But I can live without it.’ I tell them yes, you can live without it. But you can’t live AS WELL without it,” he says. “People say, ‘I just don’t NEED another ring’ or necklace or whatever,” he adds. “But I don’t sell needs. I sell wants No one needs a diamond ring, but this is how we feed our souls.”
The wants that he sells, Pacetti says, come in the form of new jewelry, estate pieces and his own line of jewelry made of leather, wood, beads and silver called the His World Collection.
His business is “by appointment only” with no showroom anywhere, and that, he says, “let’s me work one-on-one with my clients, with people who are serious buyers and who let me help them curate a collection. Remember, fine jewelry is an investment, it’s a great way to pass money from one generation to the next.”
And while his friends tease him about being “the jeweler to the stars,” he says that’s not accurate, because “the stars don’t want to buy. They want to borrow. Except for my goddaughter, [actress] Angie Harmon. She never wants to borrow. She buys jewelry!”
Instead, Pacetti says, “I am the jeweler to the old money, to those who are well known in the financial world, who are respected in their worlds.”
The real rewards
For Pacetti, the real reward of his success is not in the names he can drop or the money in his accounts. The real reward is what all of that allows him to do for others.
When he set out on his own, Pacetti says, “I asked God to give me the businesses I needed to make this work. And he has. I have had ups and downs, just like any business. But on the whole, it’s been great. It’s fed me and seven other people who get a check. And even better, I have been able to give back.
“My accountant tells me all the time, ‘Joe, you’re giving away more than you can deduct.’ But that’s not why I give money away. It’s not about deductions,” he says. “It’s about helping people.”
Over the years, Pacetti has put his gifts and good fortune to good use for any number of organizations and causes, and most of that effort has been — by design — under the radar. “I don’t do this to have my name in lights,” he explains. “It’s about the inner satisfaction that I get from it. I get more out of giving than out of receiving.”
The only board Pacetti has ever sat on, he says, is the board of the Vatican Museum, a seat he has held for more than 30 years. (He notes that he is not Catholic, but he has an extensive collection of art focused on the Catholic church, 170 paintings of “the cardinals in their red robes,” some of which are centuries old.)
He has a home in Palm Beach, and when he is there, he devotes his Saturdays to working in a local homeless shelter. His accountant has a list of some 140 charities his foundation has donated to, including Turtle Creek Chorale for more than 35 years and “everything that the Human Rights Campaign and Lambda Legal do. And I am very interested in anything addressing homelessness and hunger.”
Church has always been center point in Pacetti’s life, and he takes his commitments to the churches he attends very seriously. As a young man, he says, he attended church every Sunday, and every Sunday he would tithe a dime, “because that’s all I could afford. When I could afford more, I gave more.”
Pacetti says that if someone is visiting him at his home in Palm Beach, “if you’re there on Saturday morning, then you’re going to the homeless shelter with me. If you’re there on Sunday morning, you’re going to church with me.”
Here in Dallas, though, Cathedral of Hope is his church home, and when the COVID pandemic put the church in a bind, Pacetti stepped up.
“I asked Neil [the church’s senior pastor, the Rev. Neil Thomas] how things were. He told me the situation was dire. So I increased my usual donation by 10 percent. On Sept. 1, I increased it another 20 percent over that.”
As Pacetti celebrates his 70th birthday this month, he is adamant that he neither needs nor wants any gifts from his friends. But for those who want to do something, he says, “tell them to give a gift to my beloved Cathedral of Hope” — specifically to the Christina S. Pacetti Food Pantry that is being established there, named after “my best and brightest jewel, my daughter.”
Pacetti notes, “We are asking that anyone who wants to give something for my birthday, give to that, instead. Then I will match that gift. Whatever the church raises for the food pantry, I will match it.
“I think God gives me all the business I need because He knows I will give back. That’s what’s really important, helping make a difference in people’s lives,” he adds. “And my last gift will be gifting my body to science, to the medical school, when I die.”
Pacetti says that while getting recognition for the charity work he does and the donations he makes is not important to him, he hopes that, in the end, he is remembered not as the international jewelry broker with all the flash and sparkle but rather as a man who used the gifts he had to improve the lives of others.
“My mother and father were not married. I was born in a home for unwed mothers, and I grew up poor in Tulsa. And look at where I am now,” he says. “I am proof that if you put your mind to it, you can succeed.
I’ve had a very beautiful life, a rich life, and it has nothing to do with money,” he adds. “And no matter what, through it all, I’m still just ‘Joe from East Third Street.’”