Steel company owner advocated for minority-owned contractors
Nelson Carlo owned several manufacturing businesses in the steel industry, including Carlo Steel Co., and was a forceful advocate for minority-owned contractors in the construction industry.
“Nelson was a history-maker for Latinos and very specifically for Puerto Ricans, but for all Hispanics, for joining Latinos and African Americans together to increase our participation in all sectors of society in Chicago and Illinois and the Midwest,” said Charlie Serrano, a Chicago businessman who champions trade with Puerto Rico. “That takes a visionary.”
Carlo, 83, died of natural causes on Sept. 11 at the Clare assisted living community on the Gold Coast, said his wife of 29 years, Maritza Marrero Carlo. A longtime South Loop resident, Carlo recently had suffered multiple mini-strokes, his wife said.
Born in Cabo Rojo, Puerto Rico, Carlo moved with his family at an early age to New York and then to Chicago’s West Side. He attended Farragut High School.
After a stint in the Navy ended in 1962, Carlo worked several jobs before becoming a sales and purchasing trainee for Griffiths McKillen Steel Co.
That was Carlo’s entree into the steel industry, and in 1968, he was hired as a salesman at Abbott Specialty Metals on the Southwest Side, a metal fabricator that produced products for commercial, industrial and defense customers, including making test bombs for the U.S. military. By 1980, military contracts made up about 85% of Abbott’s business.
Carlo helped to more than triple Abbott’s sales, and by 1973 he had bought a 45% ownership stake in the firm. He soon bought out Abbott’s founder with a loan from the Small Business Administration, and expanded his focus by forming a separate company that made restaurant equipment.
“I make it a point to hire either Spanish-speaking or Black persons,” Carlo told the Tribune in 1977. “We’re located in an area of labor surplus, but we don’t have the problem of immigration agents pulling up to our doors and driving away busloads of our employees. These people are skilled workers and stable residents in the community.”
The Small Business Administration’s Midwest region named Abbott Group its “prime contractor of the year” in 1980.
“Nelson was just fearless,” said Joe Williams, a friend and fellow entrepreneur who, like Carlo, advocated for minority-owned business. “He felt that if people had a mandate (to hire women and minority-owned businesses) that they should adhere to that.”
In the 1970s, Carlo also helped organize Americana Federal Savings and Loan, which was the Chicago area’s first Hispanic-owned financial institution.
In 1991 Carlo bought another steel firm, Alert Steel Products, and renamed it Carlo Steel Co. The company was a subcontractor on the passenger terminals at O’Hare International Airport in the early 2000s and on Little Village High School. Carlo Steel also fabricated steel for many houses on the West Side.
Carlo worked with the city of Chicago to help create its Minority and WomenOwned Business certification program.
“He just sought fairness in the business place for all of us so-called ‘minorities,’ ” said Hermene Hartman, publisher of N’DIGO and a longtime friend. “For him, that meant women, it meant African Americans and it meant Hispanics. That was in the forefront of his work. He was a real inspiration for a lot of people.”
After the global financial crisis, construction ground to a halt, and in 2011 Carlo decided to close Carlo Steel. However, instead of retiring, he began working for a friend who owned a South Side cabinet company, Amberleaf Cabinetry.
“Nelson introduced them to developers and general contractors so they could begin to expand, and they’re doing extremely well now,” Carlo’s wife said.
Carlo was a founding member of the Hispanic American Construction Industry Association.
A first marriage ended in divorce. In addition to his wife, Carlo is survived by a daughter, Antoinette Yannias; a brother, Joseph; and two grandchildren.
Services were held.