Michael J. Madigan was a Moses engineer. From Robert Caro’s The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York (1974):
The son of an impoverished bartender, Jack Madigan had come out of the Pennsylvania hard-coal country in 1907 at the age of thirteen to enter the construction industry as a waterboy lugging buckets for thirsty work gangs, and by the time, in 1928, he was promoted to supervisor for one of the Jones Beach contractors, he had spent his whole life with the gangs. With his ruddy, square face and grizzled hair he looked like one of them, and he was as boisterous as they as he crowded with them into South Shore taverns after work to wash the sand of the barrier beach out of his throat. His “dese, dose and dem” speech revealed his lack of formal education; he was addicted to awesome malapropisms: “From the standing point of finances,” he would say of Tammany’s handling of the Triborough Bridge project, “what a terrible finesco!”Related reading
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