Irishman Finds Only Suicide at End of Dark Rainbow

No promise of streets paved with gold led Liam Mason out of County Monaghan this spring. It was driveways paved with hot asphalt that lured the young man across the Atlantic on his first trip out of Ireland.

He arrived March 15 at Kennedy International Airport, promised good work and better pay from a New Jersey paving subcontractor. Instead, the 23-year-old Irishman worked 14-hour days for a fraction of his promised wages.

Three months later, depressed and destitute, Liam Mason was dead--a suicide, authorities said. But friends and family say Mason’s demise was far more complex than the finding on his death certificate.

Mason’s story is one of deceit leading to utter despair, of a callow youth’s exploitation, they say. Irish American activists fear that it is just one example of a growing problem, as more such tales emerge.

Last winter, Mason and four countrymen were promised $1,000 a week each for three months’ work in the United States, a potential windfall for the young men from Irish farm country.

They slipped through U.S. immigration with a winking promise that they were just tourists. Their spirits were high, their wallets soon to grow fat.

They wound up stranded in a $50-a-night New Jersey motel, packed five to a room. Their cash “bonanza” totaled just $100 a week. The man holding their tickets home disappeared, and has yet to resurface.

Mason managed to flee the Jersey shore for a heavily Irish enclave in the Bronx. But he had no money, feared retribution from his employer, and felt embarrassed at the prospect of returning home a failure.

On June 13, with $1.20 and his passport in his pockets, a despondent Mason was seen running toward Van Cortlandt Park in the north Bronx.

Two days later the young man’s corpse was discovered by three youths drinking in the park. Too broke to afford even a rope, he had hanged himself from a tree branch with the laces of his work boots.

Mason was from Castleblaney, a town of about 2,500 just south of the Northern Ireland border. A shy man, he enjoyed the solitude of hunting and fishing. “He was best described as a quiet fellow,” said Castleblaney police Det. John Costello, who would deliver news of Liam’s death to his parents and six siblings.

In a Castleblaney bar, he learned this winter of a lucrative stateside job, air fare and lodgings included.

It sounded promising. But interviews with Mason’s friends, Irish American activists, and authorities in New York and Ireland indicate that promise was empty.

The offer came from a fellow Irishman, Ken McCarthy, who had recruited Irish help for the last three years.

Mason’s friends say McCarthy would import cheap, seasonal labor for backbreaking work in New Jersey--a business that proved more profitable for him than for his workers.

McCarthy, 23, got subcontracting work from his brother-in-law, Tom Small, who runs a Perth Amboy, N.J., paving business. Small, upset that his name was ever mentioned in Mason’s death, has distanced himself from McCarthy.

“You can pick your friends, but you can’t pick your family,” Small said angrily. “He’s married to my sister, he had no work . . . . This had nothing to do with me.”

McCarthy housed Mason, his friend Anthony Walsh and three other Irishmen in Room 21 of the 9Holmdel Motor Inn, a one-story bunker off New Jersey’s Route 35. There was one bathroom, one window and a TV set.

McCarthy held their return tickets, ensuring that his new hires wouldn’t bolt prematurely.

Their work proved brutal: 12- and 14-hour days, with barely the time or money to gulp down two slices of pizza on the job. The pay was next to nothing: $20 a day. McCarthy, the workers later told friends, was a stern taskmaster.

On June 1, Walsh, Mason’s co-worker, fled. He begged a ride from a New Jersey woman to the Woodlawn section of the Bronx, where he fell in with a group of Castleblaney immigrants.

Walsh lived with them for a week, sleeping with a machete beside his bed and growing increasingly paranoid that his former employer would hunt him down.

Father Tom Flynn of the Aisling Irish Center in the Bronx vividly remembered meeting an “anxious, frightened” man “on the verge of a breakdown.”

Flynn said Walsh obviously was scared witless of his ex-boss.

“I don’t know exactly why that was,” Flynn said. “I don’t know how controlling the man was. I have no knowledge of that. But certainly, he contributed something to the fears of Anthony Walsh.”

Flynn arranged a flight home for Walsh that same night. The Irishman’s fear lingered among his Bronx roommates; they asked that their last names not be used in this story.

Mason was the last one out of the room, on June 9, evicted because the hotel bill wasn’t paid. The same New Jersey woman who had ferried Walsh brought Mason to Woodlawn.

Friends who knew Mason from Castleblaney were shocked. “The weight he’d lost was unbelievable,” said Rory, 28, who immigrated in 1990.

Mason told friends that McCarthy had closed down his operation due to bad weather, departing for Ireland with Mason’s return ticket. But the reticent man didn’t say much more.

“He’d speak, but he kept a lot to himself,” said a 23-year-old friend, Martin, also from Castleblaney. “He was very quiet.”

He was set up with a job in Woodlawn. But he awoke homesick and desperate on the morning of June 13, deciding to skip work for a possible flight home, friends said.

“He said he wanted out of this hellhole,” Martin remembered.

Mason borrowed some money and called a cab for Kennedy Airport. On the ride out, he told his nightmare tale to the cabby and wrote down the name of the man he believed was responsible:

“Ken Carthy,” he scribbled in a shaky hand.

The cab driver said that he offered to wait for Mason in case he couldn’t get on a flight. Mason waved him off and walked into the British Airways terminal, ticketless but hopeful that his story would elicit sympathy.

Mason’s roommates had told him to meet them in a bar, The Quays, if he couldn’t get on a plane. When he never showed, they assumed that he had somehow managed to board a flight back home.

Mason instead returned to the Bronx, using money borrowed from a friend to pay for his cab ride back. He was last seen running along 237th Street toward Van Cortlandt Park.

For days, the laces from his work boots remained wrapped around the tree limb, which had been bent almost to the ground by his weight.

Immigration officials confirm there are cases involving Irish youths imported for cheap labor. But prosecution is difficult. A charge of immigrant-smuggling doesn’t stand up, and criminal charges in a suicide are rare.

The U.S. Labor Department began investigating in mid-July after several Irish American groups took up Mason’s cause.

“I want to see justice done,” said Brian O’Dwyer, head of the Emerald Isle Immigration Center. “If they find criminal laws were broken, I want to see people in jail. If civil laws were broken, I want people fined.

“Our job is to get justice for Liam, to give him a voice.”

Costello, the Castleblaney detective, said Ken McCarthy was contacted early in the investigation, then disappeared. “He was very much saddened about what happened,” Costello said. “But he didn’t believe that he did anything wrong.”

Brother-in-law Small said he had not spoken to McCarthy since Mason’s death. “There are two sides to every story,” he said. “I don’t know what went on. I don’t want to know. I feel sorry about the whole thing.”

Once word of the Mason case spread, several similar reports of labor abuse floated into the Irish American Labor Coalition and other organizations.

“It’s not an isolated incident,” said Father Flynn. “On the other hand, I don’t think it’s widespread. Unfortunately, there are crooked elements in any business.

“In this case, we saw that at its extreme.”

Aer Lingus flew Liam Mason home in a casket on June 19. He was buried two days later in the cemetery at St. Mary’s Church. Most of the town turned out to mourn.

In the Bronx, there is only one reminder of his fateful trans-Atlantic journey: a badly bent tree limb in the woods of Van Cortlandt Park.