RISING FROM THE ASHES Enrique spent his childhood in Phoenix, Arizona, and after stints in Pennsylvania, New York, and Japan, he now calls Phoenix home again... just 10 miles down the road from where he grew up... a full circle, with plenty of twists and turns along the way. But there is a huge distance in those short 10 miles... His life now is much happier and more stable than it was growing up. He enjoys frequent desert hikes and spending time with his wife and two young children. His mom, originally from Uruguay, and his dad, fromMexico, met and married in Reno, Nevada in an unconventional way – a fitting story for the start to Enrique’s nontraditional life. “My mom was going to be deported, but she couldn’t go home because of her family situation there. Like a lot of Latin America, there was a ton of political unrest, and my family ended up on the wrong side of it. My uncle (her brother) got wrapped in it. When he was just 16 years old, he got caught driving around a couple other “revolutionaries” and was thrown in jail for 7 years. He was just a young kid… But either way, she would have been arrested as soon as she got off the plane.” Enrique’s father, known as Pepe, was a hairdresser. “This was the 1960s, so you got your hair done every week.” His mom, Selva, was in the salon, lamenting her citizenship situation, when another barber asked, “Why don’t you just marry someone to stay in the states?” Selva replied, “Who the hell would I marry?” and he said, “Pepe! He would do something like that.”
ith his tanned skin covered in tattoos, dark beard reminiscent of a pirate, and casual uniform of a black T-shirt and black jeans, Enrique Abeyta isn’t your typical finance guy... Sure, he’s had a successful 25-year career on Wall Street – managing high-profile hedge funds and raising more than $2.5 billion in investment capital. But the flashy money-lined streets of Manhattan are a far cry from his roots in Phoenix, Arizona, where he grew up poor in a volatile household with an alcoholic, often- absent father. How did he go from briefly living on the streets to making it big on Wall Street – then getting out of Dodge? He says it’s easy... “ It was live or die. I shut out all the noise, and I just put my fucking head down and got to work .” That electric-current intensity was still surging when I met Enrique for the first time... He punctuates his quick, passionate speech with laughter and curse words. He’s full of what he calls “natural energy.” He tells me he’s never had a cup of coffee in his life.
30
March 2020
Made with FlippingBook - Online Brochure Maker