Pastor was born in Buffalo, New York to Sydney and Miriam Pastor, the eldest of two children. He is of Irish and Jewish descent and attended St. Andrews Episcopal Academy in Oceanside, New York. He has a younger sister and a half-brother. His paternal grandfather was a Jewish immigrant and entrepreneur, eventually securing the Buffalo Pepsi-Cola franchise in his 40s. Pastor's father and grandfather were both owners of Pepsi-Cola Buffalo Bottling Corporation, and held various other business interests, including a professional hockey team, trucking company, bottling plant, and a Miller Beer franchise located in Cherry Hill, New Jersey. Pastor majored in psychology and sociology at Drexel University in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and worked full-time in the family's Pepsi-Cola business. He enrolled in executive management programs and earned certificates from the University of Pennsylvania, Wharton School of Business.
Career
Pastor began his career working at the family-owned Pepsi-Cola Buffalo Bottling Corp, where he became a Division Manager and Owner. In 1996, after working at the plant for seven years, Pastor became the owner of American Mortgage Affiliates, opening seven retail financial center locations throughout New York state. Pastor sold American Mortgage Affiliates to his partner in 2004. Pastor worked at JPMorgan Chase & Co. for four years, where he was senior vice president and senior investment manager. In 2009 Pastor became Chase's top-selling senior investment manager in the nation. In 2010, Pastor left Chase to become territory sales manager for the greater Los Angeles area with Colonial Life & Accident Insurance Company, and then Managing Director at the Prudential Insurance Company of America. In 2011, Prudential ranked him as their No. 1 managing director in the nation, measured by year-over-year sales growth. In October 2012, Pastor and five financial advisors founded Capstone Affluent Strategies. Within a year of the company’s launch, Capstone's staff grew to sixty advisors. The firm's post-graduate tuition reimbursement and Financial Advisor Associates programs helped attract new advisors. In 2013, Pastor was recognized as one of On Wall Street’s “Top 100 Branch Managers” for his leadership, commitment to advisors, and ability to recruit and retain talent. He was also nominated in 2013 for the Excellence in Entrepreneurship Award hosted by the Orange County Business Journal. In September 2013, Pastor and his associates founded Capstone Financial Group, Inc., a holding company that uses its own capital to acquire outstanding stock of other companies via primary market and private securities transactions. Capstone Financial Group began publicly trading on the OTC Bulletin Board in late 2013 after acquiring Creative App Solutions and its ticker symbol CAPP. Capstone Financial Group, Inc. is a 36.6% beneficial owner of Twinlab Consolidated Holdings, Inc., which owns Twinlab. Pastor currently owns a 74.5% stake of Capstone Financial Group, Inc. and has a current net worth of $70-$140 million. On October 23, 2015, Mr. Pastor filed a provisional patent application with the United States Patent and Trademark Office for a process related to the capture of carbon dioxide emissions, electricity, and water byproducts from gas-to-liquid synthetic fuel manufacturing and its application within vertical farming. Mr. Pastor intends to use this patent-pending methodology to create the first ever mass-producing and emission-free fuel and agricultural manufacturing facility and to license this technology to customers worldwide.
Family
Ruby, Sam, and Al Pastor, Darin’s grandfather and great-uncles, bought the Buffalo Bison Hockey Club of the American Hockey League in 1956 when the previous owner threatened to move the team. With many future National Hockey League stars on the roster, the team went on to win the Calder Cup in 1960, 1964, and 1970 and became one of the top clubs in minor league hockey with an average attendance of 10,500 per game. The Pastor family sold the Bisons in 1971 shortly after the franchise joined the NHL as the expansion Buffalo Sabres. The family established the Sam Pastor Pepsi Memorial Hockey Tournament in 1975, which was the area’s largest youth hockey event, attracting approximately 12,500 people every spring. Held in March and April, the two-month-long tournament attracts as many as 300 teams from Canada, Pennsylvania, and Ohio and provided an estimated $6.75 million boost to the local economy each year. The Pastor family owned the Pepsi-Cola Buffalo Bottling Corp., a regional Pepsi distribution business that grew from a single-truck operation in 1936 to a successful upstate New York plant in 1954, until they eventually sold the company in 2002. Pepsi Buffalo won the naming rights to the Amherst skating and recreational center on May 11, 1998, bidding $550,000 plus incentives that included scoreboards, marketing dollars, and tournament underwriting for the $18.3 million center that opened in the fall of 1998.
Phoenix Coyotes
Pastor announced on March 29, 2013 that he had formed an exploratory committee in an effort to acquire the Phoenix Coyotes franchise of the NHL. Pastor’s group, which included several seasoned municipal financing veterans, as well as immediate family members, formally submitted its bid to purchase the team to the NHL on May 10, 2013. Pastor, who hired Scottsdale-based law firm Kutak Rock LLP to help guide the submission of his proposal, sought to keep the Coyotes in Glendale and developed a plan to boost youth hockey participation in the region by partnering with schools, charities, and team sponsors in this area. Pastor’s bid to purchase the team was declined by the NHL on May 13, 2013.
