Word: rosoff
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Manhattan Contractor Samuel R. Rosoff takes business wherever he can find it. Last week, "Subway Sam" returned from a beaming visit with ruthless Dominican Dictator Rafael Leonidas Trujillo. Sam, who had his eye on a dam job in the Dominican state of Santiago, babbled chummily about the Benefactor. "He is sometimes called a dictator, but he's not," gushed Sam. "He's the most democratic man. Why, he had me to dinner with him at his home...
Sandhogs-the tough, clannish men who burrow tunnels and subways under rivers and streets-don't startle easily. But a contract awarded in Baltimore last week startled them. What made them blink was the name of the successful bidder: Sam Rosoff, the world's No. 1 subway builder. The job, digging a $9 million, seven-mile-long water tunnel under Baltimore, will be Rosoff's first important contract within the U.S. since 1939. Sandhogs had thought that "Subway Sam" had finished with digging...
Samuel Rufus Rosoff had dug $50,000,000 worth (25%) of New York City's complex subway system, largely by virtue of his shrewd tunneling into Tammany and labor politics. Then loud-voiced Rosoff, whose short, fat (200-lb.) body conceals a lot of muscle and mustard, practically disappeared from the Manhattan scene just before the war. No one wanted tunnels built then. He popped up only in occasional newspaper dispatches from Mexico City...
Down Mexico Way. But Subway Sam had not quit. From his three-room suite in Mexico City's gaudy Hotel Reforma, Rosoff continued digging into 1) the earth and 2) politics. Last July he completed a $10 million aqueduct in Puebla, Mexico for the Mexican Government. Now he is building a $45 million steel mill for Paul Shields, another contractor, who will own and operate the mill. He bought controlling interest in a lumber company in Chihuahua. Last summer he teamed up with Mexican bankers, raised $3½ million and bought control of the 500-mile-long Mexico North...
...Rosoff quickly branched out into building roads and canals, raising sunken ships, running bus lines, etc. He made and lost several fortunes. It was not until 1923, when he discovered Tammany Hall and the political technique of wangling subway contracts, that he really hit the jackpot...