AS a teenager, Mr. Schwab worked in a factory. Then he and his brothers formed Schwab Brothers Trucking in Buffalo, spending several years hauling coal with a single truck before the company took off as a major highway and sewer contractor. But default and bankruptcy followed, and Mr. Schwab, pursued by regulators and tax collectors  and suddenly the subject of unwelcome publicity in the local newspaper  decamped to Florida around 1969 and later took over his first demolition outfit, Cuyahoga Wrecking.

Demolition companies make much of their money on shrewd projections of what they can reap by selling off the scrap. Mr. Schwab had a knack for that, as well as sparkling blue eyes and a salesmen’s gift for gab. “He could talk the skin off an orange,” said Mike Taylor, executive director of the National Demolition Association.

In a business dominated by Italians and Jews, Mr. Schwab, a German-Irish Catholic, was often mistaken for a Jew and tossed out Yiddishisms here and there. “I am uneducated,” he would acknowledge years later, “but I’m not unsophisticated.”

A little bit Horatio Alger, a little Jesse James, Mr. Schwab was part of a generation of wreckers that emerged after World War II when there were no rules, no environmental inspectors and no fear of the lung-searing properties of asbestos. His companies were hired to dismantle the 1964-65 World’s Fair, to gut Grand Central Terminal, to knock down 17 power plants and a slew of steel mills.

“We had one-third of the country’s steel-making capacity under demolition,” he said. “The commodities market went crazy. We thought we’d get $35 a ton; instead we got $165 a ton.”

By the 1980s, he had control of the banks and owned a huge chunk of Hilton Head, was building housing developments in Florida and looking to run a casino. He had mansions in Pelham Manor, N.Y., and Ocean Ridge, Fla., that were officially owned by his 15  count ’em  children, whom he listed as the shareholders of two holding corporations that he created to shield the properties from creditors.

The ride up was not bump-free. Mr. Schwab’s wife, Mary Louise, filed for bankruptcy in 1969, relating to the business, and twice he had been criminally charged in Buffalo. One case ended in a mistrial, the other with his acquittal.