Funeral to be held today for longtime Westchester developer, carter Joseph Spiezio

Joseph Spiezio III was a controversial figure in Westchester County over the past 25 years, from the real estate deals that began to transform Yonkers’ downtown to his decade-long foray in the waste hauling industry to his behind-the-scenes role in Mount Vernon city government.

A longtime New Rochelle resident and Pelham Manor native, Spiezio died at the age of 61 on Oct. 7 in Florida, where he had a home.

His funeral is 10:30 a.m. Wednesday at Immaculate Conception Church in Tuckahoe.

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Spiezio obtained a law degree but never worked as a lawyer after declining to take the bar exam. Early in his career he owned apartment buildings in Orange, N.J., and Yonkers.

He became a favored developer in Yonkers two decades ago under then Mayor John Spencer, after he bought a Central Avenue shopping center and then three buildings downtown as efforts to revitalize the city took off.

He served as vice chairman of the Yonkers Downtown/Waterfront Business Improvement District and was on the board of the Yonkers YMCA.

He also had a contract to develop a minor league ballpark around the corner from City Hall but the contract lapsed during a political rift with Spencer.

Spiezio dabbled in politics as an Independence Party official in both New Rochelle and Westchester, and flirted with a run for New Rochelle mayor in 2003.

He pursued development projects near the Hudson River in Poughkeepsie and in 2011, Spiezio branched out into the carting industry, taking over a company that became his R & S Waste Services.

Spiezio lived in New Rochelle and Florida, where he also ran a waste hauling business. Through that work he met a Florida lawyer, Michael Pizzi.

“Joe was a down-to-earth, plainspoken straight shooter … you always knew where he stood,” Pizzi said Tuesday in a phone interview. “He may have had a gruff demeanor, a gruff exterior, but Joe actually had a very big heart.”

“There were so many people he helped who were sick or didn’t have jobs. I never saw him say ‘No’ to someone who asked him for help.”

One of Spiezio’s companies owned a pair of properties in Mount Vernon. But he otherwise had little connection to the city when he became a key figure on then-Councilman Richard Thomas’ campaign for mayor in 2015.

And when voters made Thomas the city’s youngest ever mayor, he continued to lean on Spiezio. Spiezio’s lawyer was hired to represent the city and its Industrial Development Agency in countless matters and another close associate of Spiezio’s was installed in the building department to streamline operations there.

And despite no law enforcement experience, Spiezio was made a controversial $1-a-year deputy commissioner of the police department. 

Judgements from lawsuits against his garbage company eventually led the Westchester Solid Waste Commission to suspend his carting license.

His lawyer in that case, former Yonkers Councilman John Murtagh, had known Spiezio since the mid-2000s, having rented an office at his 55 Main St. building in Yonkers.

Murtagh thought Spiezio was “railroaded,” the victim of selective enforcement in an industry where others who did worse things faced no consequences. He couldn’t pinpoint the motivation, but figured that Spiezio’s political efforts had made him enemies.

“Joe was a larger than life personality full of piss and vinegar, who always had great stories to tell,” Murtagh recalled this week.  

Spiezio was the father of three grown children, including a son, Joseph IV, who survived cancer as a child. That experience led Spiezio to philanthropic efforts on behalf of sick children.

He served on the advisory board of A Wish Come True, a New England-based organization that grants wishes to kids with life-threatening illnesses. And his family supported Hasbro Children’s Hospital in Rhode Island, including an initial donation a decade ago that helped establish the hospital’s palliative care program.

Mary-Kate O’Leary, executive director of A Wish Come True, wrote a tribute to Spiezio on the organization’s website after learning of his death.

“We always spoke of the smiles he was able to put on faces of children who had no choice but to deal with their illness,” O’Leary wrote. “I enjoyed my calls with Joe as he challenged me as a businesswoman. He always encouraged me to be strong and to be a leader during good and bad times. I will miss our conversations.”

Twitter: @jonbandler