Angelo Lucchesi

Angelo Lucchesi, Jack Daniel’s First Salesman

He was a one-armed, non-drinking, short, heavy-set man with a huge grin and a huge heart. He was hired by the Motlow brothers as Jack Daniel’s first salesman. The brand grew rapidly under Lucchesi's watch, not from his salesman’s tactics but rather through friendships and storytelling. Angelo Lucchesi, Dec 24, 1920 - Dec 6, 2013 - was one of thirteen children born to Italian immigrants Anthony Lucchesi, and Maria Bisio in Memphis, TN. In 1950, Angelo Lucchesi married Cecilia Marie Pieroni. They were married 54 years when she passed away in 2004. They had three daughters and one son.

Early Life

Angelo’s father owned a successful grocery. Children were forbidden to be in the store when the butcher was grinding sausage. A curious 5-year-old Angelo wandered into the shop on grinding day and ended up with an arm caught in a grinder. Unable to figure a safe way to free the arm without causing more pain and damage, Angelo was taken with the meat grinder still attached to his arm to the hospital. No one knew it but the grinder functioned as a tourniquet and had the arm been freed first, Angelo would have bled to death. Sadly, doctors could not save the arm. Angelo attended Christian Brothers High School and later graduated from St. Bernard Catholic School in Cullman, Alabama. Angelo decided to join a monastery in Cullman, Alabama to become a Benedictine monk. After two years, he was to take the monk’s simple vows. He second guesses this choice for his life and rather than not keep his vows, he decides to leave. He went back to Memphis and worked as a retail clerk.

Angelo Lucchesi Meets Hap Motlow

When Angelo Lucchesi was 24 years old, he became a salesman for Southern Host, which is a liqueur similar Southern Comfort. One day while Angelo is at the Southern Host warehouse, a man introduces himself to Angelo as “D.E. Motlow, president of Jack Daniel's.” Angelo had no knowledge of Jack Daniel’s nor D.E. “Hap” Motlow and at this time, not many people did. So, Angelo thinks nothing of it. Two weeks later, Angelo is on his first business trip for Southern Host to Nashville, Tennessee to meet with Lipman Brothers Distributing. Angelo booked a room at the Andrew Jackson Hotel not knowing it was the permanent residence of Hap Motlow. At check-in, despite Angelo having a reservation, the hotel does not have a vacancy. The hotel clerk suggests Angelo sleep on a couch in the lobby until they can resolve the problem. Left with no other choice, Angelo settles into the couch with “a blanket, a ham sandwich and a Coke,” as he would later recall. At about 11:30 that night, Hap Motlow returns to the hotel and waves a greeting to Angelo. Angelo does not recognize who it is, but he politely waves back. Hap asks the clerk, “Does that gentleman only have one arm?" The clerk confirmed Hap’s suspicion. Hap remembered meeting the one-armed Southern Host salesman and inquired why was he sleeping on a couch in the lobby. When he learns about the room issue, he said, “Send the kid up to my room with a cot, and he can stay with me.” As Angelo liked to put it, "He never got rid of me."  Hap and Angelo became great friends and did quite a lot of traveling together before Angelo married. This was the first friendship that served Angelo quite well.

Jack Daniel’s Distillery Hires Angelo Lucchesi

Although Angelo Lucchesi was a friend of Hap Motlow, he was not hired by the Motlows right away. It would be several more years. Angelo was still working for Southern Host and in 1953, that company was merging with another company. Angelo did not see his name in the merger and realized he needed to quickly find a new job. He called Hap to ask for tickets to the Vanderbilt-Alabama football game. Hap said he would get him tickets for Angelo and his wife and asked, “Anything else you need?" Angelo said, "How about a job?" Hap replied, "We're not ready to hire anybody." At that time, the distillery had no marketing department, nor sales department. The Motlow brothers did it all. Angelo said, "Then let me be the first. I can be your very first salesman." Hap does not say anything but after the game, they see each other. Hap tells Angelo to come back to Nashville the upcoming week. “We're going to make you Jack Daniel's very first salesman." On October 1st, 1953, for the first time in 83 years, the Jack Daniel Distillery hired its first salesman, Angelo Lucchesi. When Angelo Lucchesi joins the Motlows in 1953, Jack is a far cry from the juggernaut it would become. The production availability was just over 100,000 cases a year. Angelo’s initial sales territory was not particularly big and included Memphis, Chattanooga, and Nashville (which did not have liquor by the drink.) Later he would add Chicago, but it was still a small footprint.

Angelo Lucchesi and Frank Sinatra

Angelo could make friends with anyone and was known to be gracious, kind, and loyal to his friends. One such friend was Frank Sinatra. The friendship had an interesting beginning. Though Angelo did not become Benedictine monk, he remained a devout Catholic, going to mass every morning before going to work. One of the people that would take him to mass in Nashville was Mike Figlio, a nephew of Jilly Rizzo. Rizzo was Frank Sinatra's personal assistant. Figlio worked for Columbia Records who had Sinatra as an artist. One day in 1967, Figlio tells Angelo his uncle Rizzo called to tell him Frank was at the Copacabana and was very distraught, upset and throwing a fit. He cannot find any Jack Daniel's anywhere. He says to Angelo, “I am reaching out to you as one good Italian to another. Can you help?"

Angelo meets with Hap Motlow and lets him know Frank Sinatra really likes Jack Daniel’s whiskey, but he is having trouble finding it. Hap advises Angelo to talk to Winton Smith, the president of Jack Daniel's at the time. Winton tells Angelo he will take care of it. That is the only answer Angelo got so he went home not sure what would happen. Two weeks later, at home in Memphis with his wife, the phone rings. Angelo answers and hears Frank Sinatra’s voice on the other end says, "Paisano. I love you. You're my friend for life." From that time forward, they had a constant correspondence and a great friendship. They would meet up a few times a year backstage at concerts. Whenever Sinatra saw him, they would have a closed-door visit. It would just be the two of them in a dressing room before the concert, and they would just talk. Lucchesi became the liaison, if you will, between Sinatra and Jack Daniel’s. People would say Angelo turned Frank Sinatra onto Jack Daniel's, and Angelo would say, "I didn't get him on it. I just kept him on it,” meaning he made sure wherever Frank Sinatra traveled, there were always five to ten cases of Jack Daniel's waiting for him. Angelo Lucchesi always made sure the singer’s local liquor store in Palm Springs stayed stocked with the whiskey. It was not easy keeping Frank Sinatra in Jack Daniel's. They had to have it available wherever Frank was, and a distributor might not be anywhere nearby. They did not have international distribution, and he was flying all around the globe. Whenever he would fly, cases of Jack Daniel's were loaded in the plane. Going through all these hoops for Sinatra was to Jack Daniel’s advantage too. Jack Daniel’s was benefitting from Sinatra getting up on stage and saying, "Jack Daniel's, nectar of the gods. Best booze in the world." Yet there was not an official link between the two in relation to the distillery. It was not Angelo’s official job to keep Sinatra on board with Jack. Frank Sinatra stayed on board because he liked the product. Today, if a celebrity gets on board with a product, it is usually because they are paid. A relationship like Jack and Sinatra would be extremely rare today. Today, the top executives would be all over it and micro-managing it. Winton Smith, to his credit, did not stand in the way of the Frank Sinatra relationship to the brand. He was wise enough to know the relationship with Frank Sinatra was not with president of the company, and not with the head of marketing, but was in the friendship with a salesman named Angelo Lucchesi.

There were stories from those days that Angelo would allude to, but he would not tell because he knew Frank Sinatra gave him the story in trust. And to this day, nobody knows them. Angelo would say they were personal in nature and better left unsaid. At Frank Sinatra's funeral, Angelo Lucchesi is not only invited, but he also sits with the family. He is the reason that we all know that there is a roll of dimes, a pack of Camels, and a bottle of Jack Daniel's because he saw them being put in Frank's casket. Frank and the Sinatra family loved Angelo Lucchesi; he was just that good a friend.

Angelo Lucchesi – The Jack Daniels Godfather

His job was not just to be Frank's guy. He was involved in a lot of other kinds of things with the distillery as well. When it came time to increase and grow the distribution in Chicago, Hap called on Angelo and said "We need to sell some whiskey to the Italian folks in Chicago. You're the man." Angelo responded, "You think just because I'm Italian I know every Italian? Well, I didn't." However, it so happened his brother, Johnny Lucchesi, knew a lawyer in Chicago and arranged for him to meet with Angelo. The lawyer drove him around to the different distributor warehouses and would help take the orders. They got to the first one, and the lawyer looked at Angelo and said, "This is mafioso." Angelo asked, "Should I be worried?" The lawyer said, "No, just go in." Well, Angelo did indeed get worried because as he went in, the guy was packing a gun, and he was visibly quite upset. Angelo asked him, "How can I help you?" The guy replied, "I haven't seen anybody from your brand for three years." Angelo said, "And that's why I'm here to help." The guy put his gun in a drawer, shut it, sat down with Angelo, and said, "Let's have a drink to seal our friendship." He pulled out a bottle of Old Grand Dad, because they had sold out all their Jack Daniel's stock, poured it, and they had a drink. Angelo recalled, "We saw eleven places that day. Eight of them were mafioso, and I had a drink at every one of them.” That was just what was expected in that day. It is not the way Jack Daniel’s does business today by any stretch, but it illustrates what it was like. So, even though Angelo was not in the mafia, the unofficial nickname “Jack Daniel’s Godfather” is an apt way of describing all his Italian connections. Angelo would reminisce about those early days and would say, "Boy, things have changed."

Angelo Stops Drinking Alcohol

During his career at Jack, Angelo Lucchesi developed a drinking problem. Angelo would say he had a bad habit of gulping his whiskey instead of sipping it, and the habit got him into trouble. Eventually he goes to the Motlows and tells them he cannot stop drinking; not knowing if this was going to cost him his job. They tell Angelo, they are going to take care his family and are going to get him into a facility to help. When he got out of the facility, he never had another drink. Angelo Lucchesi was loyal to the Motlows and so the Motlows were loyal to him.

It is amazing that in the liquor business in those days, he could get by selling something that he did not drink. Later, when asked why he did not drink; especially on sales trips when trying to persuade someone to sample some of the Old No 7, he had a couple different answers. “Well, most of the ‘Pack’ used to drink enough for me as well, so I do not need to drink.”  The “pack” he was referring to was of course the “Rat Pack” members. Another answer was comical as Angelo with an enormous grin mimicked the difficulty of opening a bottle with one hand… “can’t be done, so I don’t drink!”

The Angelo Lucchesi Legacy

Angelo saw Jack Daniel’s grow from 100,000 cases a year to about seventeen million by the time he passed away. Angelo Lucchesi saw it take off. The reasons were in the 1950s soldiers who came back after World War II were demanding distribution of Jack Daniel’s across the country and then you had Frank Sinatra, of course. Frank would introduce Angelo Lucchesi and Jack Daniel’s to a world of celebrities. Sammy Davis Jr. was a big friend of Jack's. Angelo would eventually meet all the members of the Rat Pack and celebrities like Dinah Shore, Peter Lawford, Joe Mantegna, Robert Stack, Tony Bennett, and Danny Thomas. Then in the 1960s, the Nashville sales area opens to liquor by the drink. All those factors added up to sales going up 100% in a single year and Jack Daniel’s could not catch up with the demand. In fact, they did not catch up to the demand until about 1979. Sinatra was key, and Angelo was key to Sinatra.

Due to his religious roots, Angelo was a big supporter of charity. He was involved with many charities over the years but because of his friendship with Danny Thomas, St. Jude’s Children’s Research Hospital received an untold amount of money from Angelo Lucchesi. Another charity that had received a lot of Angelo's time and attention was Barbara Sinatra's charity, the Sinatra Children's Center at Eisenhower Medical Center. It was a hospital for children that had been abused. There was also the Sinatra Celebrity golf tournament that supported Barbara’s charity and Jack Daniel's would help sponsor it. All of this was possible because of the heart of Angelo Lucchesi and his ability to make friends.

Paul Varga said, "A lot of our characteristics as a brand and as a company and how we treat people have been built from people like Angelo Lucchesi." In fact, there is an annual award that has given out in Angelo's name among the sales folks at Brown-Forman. It is given to salesmen who embody the excellence and the spirit and the heart of Angelo Lucchesi. That is one way his legacy lives on. To really emphasize that you did not really have to drink to be an employee, Brown-Forman started an employee program for responsible drinking. Angelo was the first speaker, and they said he hit it out of the park. Angelo would always remind people of the family who started it all, the Daniel and Motlow family, and the importance of their commitment to excellence. His support of that family is also part of his legacy.

To honor that legacy, in 2010, when he finally retired, the company honored him with a special memorial bottle with his name on it. It was a 90-proof whiskey because the bottle also celebrated Angelo’s 90th birthday. That is also the proof Jack Daniel's was when Angelo started, and the proof Sinatra drank. Angelo had his name officially on a Jack Daniel’s bottle before his friend Frank did! Angelo joked that it was up to him to sell all these cases of whiskey with his name on it. But they went fast because distributors across the country knew who Angelo Lucchesi was.

He received many other honors and tributes in recognition of his tireless efforts on behalf of his company and those in need, including the Jack Daniel’s Distillery naming the theater in its visitors center in Lynchburg, Tennessee, The Angelo Lucchesi Theater. The distillery declared him a “Lynchburg Legend,” third only to Jack Daniel and Mr. Daniel’s nephew, Lem Motlow.

In Conclusion

Angelo Lucchesi enjoyed a 60-year career with Jack Daniels. He was described by most as the nicest man you will ever meet. He traveled, telling the story of the big whiskey from a tiny town in Tennessee. His personal friendship with Frank Sinatra helped move the brand from a little-known whiskey brand to the most famous whiskey in the world. During his later years, he promoted the brand as a marketing and public relations consultant for Brown-Forman Co., traveling extensively to tell the history of Jack Daniel’s. Angelo Lucchesi died of natural causes at Baptist Memorial Hospital in Memphis, Tennessee on Dec 6, 2013. He was just 18 days shy of his 93rd birthday. He was buried in Memorial Park Cemetery in Memphis.