A FAMILY of Irish Travellers held homeless men they had falsely promised to pay for work laying tarmac and paving stones as forced labour, a court in England has been told.
Thomas Connors snr (52), his sons Johnny (28), Tommy jnr (27), James (24) and Patrick (22), and his son-in- law are charged with servitude and forced labour. Mr Connors’s daughter Josie (30) is charged with keeping one man in conditions of servitude and requiring forced labour at a Bedfordshire caravan site.
“They may not in the strict sense have been slaves, but they were not free men,” Frances Oldham, prosecuting, told Luton Crown Court yesterday.
One of the alleged victims, who later told detectives that some men had been beaten, ill-fed and left unpaid, said conditions had been “like a concentration camp”.
The men were recruited off the street or at homeless centres, and promised £50 a day, but they never received the money and were blocked from leaving, it was alleged. They were forced to work from 4am to 11pm six days a week, sometimes without food, while some were beaten, the barrister said.
At weekends, the men went door to door to find new customers and were threatened if they failed to win business or tried to flee.
One man, now in his 40s, had been with the family since he was 14, but he refused to stay at a rescue centre after a raid by police on a Traveller site at Leighton Buzzard last September, and he returned to the caravan site. Ms Oldham said the alleged victims were “not always physically imprisoned but they lacked the resources or even the will to get away”.
