Mayo Alive August 1998

Please publish this article as a warning to some of the wonderful yet naive men and women leaving Mayo for the states.

Danny Clem

JOB promise lures Irish lad to despair, death in U.S.
by LARRY McSHANE
Associated Press writer
NEW YORK

- 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.

His friends and family say Mason's story is one of deceit leading to utter despair, of a callow youth's exploitation. Irish- American activists fear it is just one example of a growing problem, as more such tales emerge.
This past winter, Mason and four countrymen were promised $1,000 a week for three months work in the United States. They slipped through the U.S. immigration with assurances that they were just tourists. Their spirits were high, their wallets soon to grow fast. They wound up stranded in a $50-a-night motel, 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 an Irish enclave in the Bronx. But he was broke and feared retribution from his employer. On June 13, with $1.20 and his passport in his pockets, a despondent Mason was seen running toward Van Cortland 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.

'A quiet fellow'

Mason was from Castleblaney, a town of about 2,500 near the Northern Ireland border. A shy man, he enjoyed hunting and fishing.
"He was best described as a quiet fellow," said Castleblaney police detective 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, airfare 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.

McCarthy housed Mason, his friend Anthony Walsh and three others in Room 21 of the Holmden 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 his new hirees would not bolt.

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 coworker fled. He begged a ride form 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. Broke and desperate 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. 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 was set up with a job in Woodlawn. But he awoke homesick and desperate on the morning of June 13, opting to skip work for a possible flight home, friends said. Mason borrowed some money and called a cab for Kennedy Airport. On the ride out, he told his nightmare tale to the cabbie and wrote down the name of the man he believed was responsible: "Ken Carthy," he scribbled in a shaky hand. Mason's roommate 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 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 Cortland 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. Aer Lingus flew Liam Mason home in a casket June 19. He was buried two days later in the cemetery at St. Mary's Church. Most of the town turned out to mourn.

Towns and villages in County Mayo, Ireland