As Mr. Biase sorted through the carwashes’ finances, he discovered that the accounts for the all-cash operations were “essentially nonexistent.” The payroll tax records listed just four employees for four carwashes: Mr. Vázquez himself, his girlfriend, his brother, and his octogenarian father. “Obviously,” Mr. Biase concluded, “these payroll tax returns were works of fiction.”
The trustees also discovered, hidden in a safe in Mr. Vázquez’s basement, a stash of nearly $1.3 million in cash that he had not disclosed. “I can say this,” Mr. Arenson said. “José Vázquez never failed to surprise us.”
The trustees concluded that there was no defense Mr. Vázquez could make at trial, and in December 2014 the lawsuit was settled. The men who had labored the longest at the carwashes received close to $200,000 each. Together, the 18 workers received $1.65 million.
But that was not the end of it. For months Mr. Arenson had been turning away employees of Mr. Vázquez’s businesses who had hoped to join the suit; the court’s deadline for submitting claims had long since expired. But Mr. Biase had been operating the carwashes (and paying a legal wage), and he understood that there were dozens more workers who might also have valid claims. He asked the court to allow more plaintiffs.
In the next few months, 88 more workers signed on. This is where a lot of cases would fold: with so many claims, some going back a decade or more, it seemed likely there would be no money to share. But it turned out that Mr. Vázquez owned not just the carwash businesses but also three of the four plots of land beneath them, including one property in a rapidly gentrifying corner of Harlem. Together the three parcels were sold for more than $30 million. A seven-story condominium is being built on the lot where the Harlem carwash once stood.
In December, five days before Christmas, the second group of plaintiffs received their settlement checks, ranging from a few thousand dollars to more than $90,000. Once the final payments are released this summer, the total settlement for all 106 workers, in both groups — including their attorney fees and expenses, which the judge ordered would be paid by Mr. Vázquez — will be roughly $8.5 million.
On a day when he suddenly had money for more than the bare necessities, Manuel Mercado talked about his old job as a car washer. “One of the managers, I never will forget, we had an argument, and he said, ‘You’re a nobody, you don’t even have papers.’” Mr. Mercado now owns a small restaurant in Brooklyn and plans to put some of his settlement money into his new business. But his big dream, he said, “is to be able to go to college and get a degree in this country.”
from Best News Viral https://ift.tt/2U5yTV9
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