Jolley: Five Minutes With Sam Rovit, Swift & Company

6/8/2007 8:33:00 AM

When Sam Rovit agreed to take the top job at Swift & Co two years ago, he wasn’t banking on the business becoming front line news. Sure, lots of friendly press on the brand would have been nice. But the news was about pre-Christmas ICE raids that emptied out the plants of every worker who was even remotely of Latin heritage, killed production for weeks and drilled a deep, cash hemorrhaging hole in the corporate P & L.

One would also guess that it was a well-aimed shot through the corporate heart of the Swift organization, fired by a sharpshooting Michael Chertoff. Swift had worked long and hard with the feds in an effort to solve the lingering problems created by illegal immigrants. For their efforts, they were expecting a major “attaboyâ€