Giuseppe Cecchi, developer behind the Watergate, 93

Giuseppe Cecchi, a real estate developer who became known as the Washington area’s “condo king” but left perhaps his most enduring mark on the capital as the project manager in charge of the construction of the Watergate complex in the early 1960s, died April 4 at his home in McLean, Va. He was 93.

He had a heart ailment, said his son John Cecchi.

Cecchi had not yet turned 30 when he arrived in the United States in 1959, an Italian engineer dispatched by the Società Generale Immobiliare — owned in part by the Vatican, the largest real estate and construction company in Italy — to explore an expansion into North America.

He soon found himself in Washington, where SGI bought 10 acres in what at the time was an industrial site on the banks of the Potomac River. “As a European I didn’t see the warehouses and gasworks, and I didn’t think in those terms,” Cecchi told The Washington Post years later. “I saw the river and the distance to the White House.”

That tract of land became home to the Watergate. Designed by Italian architect Luigi Moretti, and built between 1963 and 1971, the complex was one of the first mixed-use developments in the District, with luxury apartments, a hotel, offices and stores.

With it sleek, curvilinear design, the Watergate in short order became one of the most sought-after addresses in Washington, with high-powered residents from across the city’s political, business and cultural circles.

Also in relatively short order, the name of the complex entered the political lexicon following the break-in on June 17, 1972, at the offices of one of its tenants, the Democratic National Committee — the precipitating event in the “Watergate” scandal that ultimately drove President Richard M. Nixon from office.

Cecchi went on to form the company that became the IDI Group Cos. and established himself as what The Post described as “Washington’s undisputed ‘condo king,’” a developer who rivaled Oliver T. Carr Jr. and Charles E. Smith in their influence on the world of real estate in Washington and the surrounding region.

According to his family, Cecchi and his company developed 28 residential communities that included a total of 14,000 homes, 2.7 million square feet of office and commercial space, and 1,400 hotel rooms.