LAWRENCE — Sal Lupoli never stops moving.

In the conference room of his spacious offices overlooking the Merrimack River, the restaurateur and real estate developer sits on the edge of a filing cabinet. His feet are twitching and hands are in motion as he talks loudly and at length about the projects that have consumed him since he came to Lawrence five years ago.

"When I started here in 2003, there were just 35 companies and 600 employees," he says about the Riverwalk Mills complex he owns. "Now, there are 200 companies and 2,000 employees."

His cell phone chirps, for the 10th time in less than half an hour, and he pulls it from the belt holster and checks the caller ID.

"Some days, this thing never stops," he says, turning off the phone but not missing a beat before pointing to a photo display of before-and-after images of the 2 million-square-foot, 35-acre complex.

Before, it was rundown buildings with broken windows and collapsed roofs. Homeless encampments were set up in some; others were filled with rusted mill equipment, unused for decades.

After, it is gleaming offices with sand-blasted brick walls, tall windows, modern lighting and soaring ceilings — not to mention an Italian restaurant with a big deck overlooking the river.

Lupoli, just 41, has been an entrepreneur for 20 years. In that time he has built multiple restaurants, as well a real estate empire based largely in the Lawrence mills. His work in the Immigrant City has made him a key player in its revitalization.

Today is he CEO of Lupoli Companies, the parent company of Sal's Pizza, Mary's Pasta and Sandwiches, Salvatore's Restaurant and Riverwalk.

A self-made man with family values, a relentless entrepreneurial spirit and a passionate drive to carry out his mission, Lupoli wants to succeed — now.

He grew his pizza business from an 800-square-foot shop in Salem, N.H., to a chain of nearly 40 shops across the country. And he converted a dilapidated stretch of mill buildings on Merrimack Street into The Riverwalk, a modern-day office park complete with a 200-seat restaurant, early childhood education school, an indoor family play center and a variety of medical, professional and nonprofit agencies and organizations. And it's still growing, as Lupoli continues attracting new tenants as he renovates old mill space.

His story is one of astonishing growth, incredibly good luck and remarkably hard, shrewd work. He uses private investment to leverage public dollars, and political connections to make business connections.

Above all, he uses his powers of persuasion to push ahead when everyone around him says he's crazy.

'Always came back to pizza'

Lupoli seems to have been destined to own restaurants.

He started young, working for his father, Nicholas, who ran a couple of Italian restaurants in Boston in the early 1970s and the late 1980s.

When Sal Lupoli was still in college at Northeastern University, he talked about his future with his dad, who told him that the food business could be very lucrative but to pick his spot.

Lupoli began researching. He looked at Subway, Papa Gino's, McDonald's, Pizza Hut and others as models for success.

He decided beef-based restaurants weren't the way to go, because McDonald's, Burger King and other companies had a lock on that market. The sandwich market looked good, he said, but was limited to lunch.

"It always came back to pizza," he said. "It's the most recognized food in the world. It's a $50 billion industry. Julius Caeser used to eat pizza. It has lasted the test of time. And it caters to lunch and dinner."

Sometimes even breakfast.

He could control the production of pizza from start to finish, and the ingredients — mainly flour, tomatoes and cheese — are readily available and relatively inexpensive.

"Besides coffee, pizza is the highest-margin business in the country," he said. That is, a good businessman can make more on pizza than any other restaurant food.

Once he settled on the product, he came up with a plan.

"It was an opportunity to open multiple restaurants and franchise them," he said. "A pizza restaurant is fairly simple to operate, and, if successful, there's a lot of profit involved."

Plus, he said, "I always wanted to be in business for myself. And take my family with me."

Rocky start, lesson learned

After graduating cum laude from Northeastern in 1989 with a degree in business management, Lupoli and his brother Nick got right to work, with an eye toward a September 1990 grand opening of Sal's Pizza.

"We tried to open our first restaurant in Lowell," he said. "As I was negotiating, I found what I thought was going to be my second store location in Salem, N.H. At the last second, Lowell fell through, so we went to New Hampshire."

He signed a 25-year lease, investing all his money into the store. He even dumped his car, a 1983 Cutlass Supreme, for $3,000. In all, he cobbled together $60,000 to secure the lease, renovate the property and buy equipment.

"Nine months later, the landlord went bankrupt and the property went into foreclosure," Lupoli said.

He and his brother were forced out and had to start over.

Perhaps it was his experience on the gridiron that kept him going. A defensive lineman at Chelmsford High School, he went on to Northeastern with a full, four-year scholarship, playing nose tackle and captaining the squad.

"Football builds inner strength," he said. "You succeed when people don't think you can succeed. You trust your teammates."

He scraped up the money to buy a fire-damaged, bank-owned property just around the corner from his first location. In hindsight, Lupoli said, losing the original location "was the best thing that ever happened to me. We had a 25-year lease. If I hadn't been kicked out, I'd still be there."

After opening several more locations, including his second restaurant in North Andover and third in Derry, Lupoli reached a milestone in 1996: He bought a property on Broadway in Salem and erected a 35,000-square-foot building. The USDA- and FDA-compliant production plant allowed him to start selling to schools, supermarkets and other commercial institutions.

"We gambled we could get into that business," he said. "Going that route increased the cost of the plant by 200 percent. That's when the business really took off."

Timberlane in Plaistow, N.H., was the first school district to bite. Other schools and stores quickly followed.

"We are now the largest wholesaler of pizza in New England," he said. "We produce 60,000 pizzas a week for the schools and supermarkets." Of those, 15,000 go to schools and the other 45,000 to grocery stores.

In addition to his brother Nick, two of Sal's four other brothers have been involved in the venture. Michael, a Brown University graduate, is chief financial officer, while James helped build new stores and restaurants. His mother, Jeanette, 68, runs the collections department.

Sal's father lived to see his son's restaurant success, but died at age 61 in 2003. His brother, James, also is gone, having died of leukemia just last summer.

James is memorialized at the company headquarters in the Riverwalk with "Jimmy's Playroom," a converted office where the growing brood of the next generation of Lupoli children spend their time while their mothers and fathers work.

Married for 12 years, Sal Lupoli lives in Chelmsford with his wife and high school sweetheart, Kati, and his children Mary, 10, and Sal, 7. He continues to be involved in football, too, coaching a Chelmsford youth football team and serving as defensive line coach at Chelmsford High School, which just inducted him into its football hall of fame.

And then there's real estate

Pizza and family are just two slices of what might be called the whole, 19-inch, 3-pound pie — Lupoli's signature offering.

In 2002 while shopping for a pizza-box manufacturing plant, Lupoli came to Lawrence and met for the first time with the new mayor, Michael Sullivan.

Lupoli was quoted in a 2005 Eagle-Tribune story saying that the city and chamber of commerce "dragged me down to Lawrence" to help renovate the mills.

Sullivan remembers it a little differently.

"We talked about getting a Sal's Pizza on Essex Street," Sullivan said. "He was very positive. I was trying to talk to him about downtown. But he just latched on to the whole city."

Lupoli toured 354 Merrimack St., the mill building that now houses Salvatore's Restaurant and function hall. At the time, it was owned by James Crowe of Crowe & Sons Electrical Corp. in Lowell, who had just finished work on the building with one of the former tenants, GCA Corp., a defense contractor.

Together, Crowe and GCA had done $15 million in renovations to the mill, including creating a commissary and lunch room for the 300 employees they expected to work there.

But before they could occupy the building, GCA pulled the plug on its Lawrence location.

"They never turned the lights on," Sullivan said.

But a light went on in Lupoli's head.

"Sal saw that whole kitchen and the renovated mill as an opportunity," Sullivan said. "We all know what happened next."

In 2003, he bought 354 Merrimack St. — Building 1 of the Riverwalk Mills complex. Then he just needed to fill it. And he did, bringing in tenants such as Little Sprouts early childhood education and turning the industrial kitchen into Sal's Italian Restaurant and function hall with a 200-seat outdoor deck. The 12,000-square-foot headquarters for Sal's Pizza are on the third floor.

But one mill wasn't enough; Lupoli had bigger plans. Over the next three years he bought five more Riverwalk mill buildings, expanding his holdings to nearly 2 million square feet and roughly 35 acres of land. As he gained tenants, he renovated. And he bought two more buildings, which are awaiting redevelopment.

"Developing anything of that size, five years is pretty fast," Sullivan said. "He did it in three. He went from one building, then three, and ended up buying five other buildings. In 2003, there might have been 200 employees there, but now there are over 2,000. That's his vision. His work ethic is: Let's just do it now."

Symbolic gesture

The purchase of 3 acres of land dotted with crumbling, neglected buildings where Merrimack Street meets Interstate 495 along the Merrimack River helped put Lupoli on the map.

For several years, 500 Merrimack St. had been owned by John Walsh, a North Andover businessman who is CEO of the Elizabeth Grady line of products. Walsh, who purchased the property for $45,000 in 2002, wanted to turn it into a marina and mixed-use development. One thing holding him back, he said in a 2005 Eagle-Tribune story, was that the city's urban renewal zone didn't extend south of the river, so development of the property wasn't eligible for tax incentives. Without those breaks, the cost of renovating the property would have been prohibitive.

Congressman Martin Meehan, D-Mass., was pushing to get the zone expanded to the south side of the river to include both Riverwalk and the Wood Mill, which was purchased by Bob Ansin. Ansin, a Fitchburg businessman, bought the Wood Mill about the same time Lupoli bought his first building in Lawrence.

In March 2005, after a year of negotiations with Walsh, Lupoli bought 500 Merrimack St. for $3.1 million. Two months later, the urban renewal zone was extended, enabling Lupoli and Ansin, along with other property owners, to take advantage of millions of dollars in tax credits.

"I had been working on the designation for a long time," Meehan said. "When you see someone like Sal, you realize he was tailor-made for that designation. It's exactly what was envisioned. Sal just makes things happen."

To date, Meehan said, $15 million in tax credits have been awarded to Lupoli and other property owners on the south side of the river.

"Sal was looking for any help he could get," Meehan recalled. "He was committed to making it work. You couldn't give him enough credit for taking the risk. Sal is a roll-up-your-sleeves, tenacious, hard-working entrepreneur."

Plus, he knows how to work the system.

"It's not like he's a political guy, but he's very effective at understanding that government can help," Meehan said.

And he understands the importance of giving back. For more than a year, an old coal storage building and steam plant on the Merrimack Street property had been ranked as the No. 1 target for demolition by a task force formed to clean up blighted areas of the city. Soon after he bought it, Lupoli made Sullivan and other city officials very happy when he demolished the eyesore.

Politics and business

For Lupoli, making good political connections — and making politicians look good — is simply good business.

After he bought 500 Merrimack St. and demolished the coal building and steam plant, he began casting about for tenants for the remaining buildings. He targeted Merrimack Valley Federal Credit Union, which had been based in North Andover across from the old Lucent plant for years but was looking for new headquarters.

"We had looked at different sites around the Valley," said John MacDonald, a former credit union spokesman who now works for Lupoli. "We had some questions (about Lupoli's site), and the governor (Mitt Romney) called to encourage us, asking if there was anything the state could do to help make the decision to move to Sal's."

Lupoli smiled. "Gov. Romney, himself, called the credit union."

The credit union has been in the refurbished building about a year now.

Others have made calls on Lupoli's behalf, too.

Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass., "helped facilitate businesses moving here from other communities," Lupoli said.

Current Gov. Deval Patrick has been to Riverwalk, as have Sen. Ted Kennedy, D-Mass., Congresswoman Niki Tsongas, D-Mass., and just about every state representative and senator in the region, past and present, Lupoli said.

Sen. Susan Tucker, D-Andover, said Lupoli is smart about how he uses his connections.

"From the political angle, it's more about being part of a team than him calling for favors," Tucker said. "He has an extraordinary ability to put teams together. He is the best kind of leader."

Lupoli has landed a host of local, state and federal agencies as tenants, including the Registry of Deeds, sheriff's offices and nonprofits that work with local, state and federal agencies.

"I said we need to bring some of those state jobs here because Lawrence needs an economic boost," Lupoli recalled telling different politicians.

He's also courted local politicians, in turn earning tax increment financing for his project. The financing allows him to defer full property tax payments for 10 years while he renovates.

Sullivan helped Lupoli by adopting fast-track permitting.

"He wanted to get things done in 30 days, not three years," Sullivan said. "We've complemented that."

Sullivan also established a team of top administrators who meet with prospective tenants of Riverwalk to talk about permitting and other issues. It has evolved into something of a marketing team that includes police Chief John Romero, who touts the dramatic drop in crime in the city to help persuade businesses to consider Lawrence.

It was a weekend "permit team" meeting in September 2006 that ultimately helped persuade the leadership at Pentucket Medical Associates, based in Haverhill, to move its medical offices from North Andover and Methuen to Riverwalk. That move is scheduled to be complete in the next couple of weeks.

"Sal once told me that he had restaurants or some kind of presence in 30 other cities and towns and had never had a better reception from any City Hall than in Lawrence," Sullivan said. "I didn't know any better. I thought we were here to help."

Tom Schiavone, Sullivan's economic development director, said Lupoli's success is important.

"He's the driving force behind much of what's happening in the city," he said. "Because of Sal and the investments he's made, the tenants he's attracted and the jobs he's created, other developers have purchased buildings and are now creating jobs and spending millions of dollars in the city."

Dave Tibbetts, general counsel for the Merrimack Valley Economic Development Council, said that there had been little economic development activity on the south side of the river until Lupoli's arrival.

It took "someone from the outside, with a fresh set of eyes, to come in and see the potential," Tibbetts said.

"Sal is for real," said Charlie Daher of Commonwealth Motors, a longtime booster of Lawrence who bought One Mill Street in 2000, renovated it into a restaurant and conference center and later sold it.

"It's brick and mortar. People are filling the buildings; investors see that, they say, 'He's making it work," Daher said. "It's something that's growing and growing, instead of people just talking and talking."