Joseph Cardillo & Sons Inc

Joseph P. Cardillo & Son Inc. is a heavy-civil contractor, not a home-improvement one. Its work is underground utility installation, road reconstruction, milling, commercial paving, DOT trucking and municipal snow plowing, and its customers are MassDOT, cities and towns, and commercial property owners. The company says it was started in the early 1900s by Italian immigrant Dominic Cardillo doing excavation and masonry, passed to David P. Cardillo in 1959, and has been run since 2000 by fourth-generation Mark J. Cardillo. Its BBB file puts the business start date at 1922 and lists 14 employees. It is a union shop, signatory with IUOE Local 4, a member of UCANE, and states MassDOT and NH DOT certifications for water and sewer mains, drainage, pump stations, road resurfacing, highway construction and bike paths. Salem hired it this summer: the city's July 2026 infrastructure notice names J.P. Cardillo as the contractor for the Bayview Avenue and Sutton Avenue drain improvements. The serious thing on its record is safety. OSHA cited the company as a repeat violator for willful and serious breaches of excavation safety standards at a Milton work site, proposing $144,400 in fines, and a CBS I-Team investigation in 2014 into the state hiring contractors with extensive safety violations reported that Joseph Cardillo of Wakefield had been fined for putting workers in an unsafe trench on that Milton job. A single Google review, from June 2025 and rated two stars, is a Durham, New Hampshire neighbour asking the crew on the Madbury Road project to stop leaving trash on her yard. Because this company does not sell to homeowners, no homeowner rating is published for it here. If you are a municipality or a general contractor considering it, ask directly about its OSHA history and its current trench-safety program, and confirm its DOT certifications with the agencies that issue them.