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After eight years of litigation, a group of construction workers finally received the last of their stolen wages — the culmination of a case that began as a simple overtime dispute and unraveled into one of the most elaborate labor exploitation schemes in recent New York City history.
On the morning of March 26, a handful of construction workers gathered to receive what had taken decades to earn and years of litigation to recover. Some had nearly given up. One had not lived to see it.
The checks represented the final payment in a $4.5 million settlement from a class-action lawsuit against Long Island Concrete, a Queens-based construction company that systematically underpaid immigrant laborers through a shell company called Regulator.
Those present — Damien Mark, Adam Pizarro and Herminio Noe Hernandez, along with Elida Frederick, widow of Erwin Manaiza Bonilla, a worker who died shortly after joining the lawsuit — had worked on some of the city’s most recognizable projects.
They poured concrete at Google’s Manhattan offices, contributed to renovations at Saks Fifth Avenue and worked on sites for Louis Vuitton and Equinox. They helped repair LaGuardia Airport and build firehouses, emergency medical facilities and public parks under multimillion-dollar city contracts.
For much of that time, they say, they were paid as little as $10 an hour.
Though the case began in 2016 — when workers filed a complaint that they were working well over 40 hours a week without receiving overtime pay — workers noted the violations began as early as 2004.
Long Island Concrete ran a grinding schedule. On regular days, workers started at 7:30 a.m. On pouring days, they were on site by 6 a.m. and sometimes worked until 8 p.m. None of those additional hours were paid at the legally required overtime rate.
After failing to gain traction with management or the city, they approached the firm Arenson, Dittmar and Karban.
Attorney Steve Arenson has spent more than two decades representing workers subjected to wage theft, discrimination and exploitation. His clients are often immigrants — people who may not speak English, may not know their rights and often fear retaliation for coming forward.
In one separate, ongoing case, Arenson said supervisors warned workers during the 2024 election that ICE was coming for them. “Your days are numbered,” they were told. Those threats have not materialized, Arenson notes, but they have lasting effects on workers who don't know that.
Arenson filed suit in 2018. As his investigation progressed, the case expanded beyond unpaid overtime.
The company had secured a series of lucrative public works contracts with New York City, working on projects at LaGuardia Airport, the Park Avenue Armory and the Brooklyn Academy of Music. For a construction company, landing a city contract is seen as a significant prize. Contracts can reach tens of millions of dollars, but come with strict requirements.
Under New York Labor Law, contractors on public projects must pay prevailing wages — rates set through union negotiations that include benefits like health insurance and retirement contributions. At the time, those rates totaled roughly $60-$70 an hour.
Workers said they were paid between $10 and $18.
In the early stages of the investigation, workers mentioned, almost as an aside, that their paychecks didn't come from Long Island Concrete. They came from a company called Regulator. When Arenson asked what Regulator was, the workers were puzzled.
They had never visited a Regulator office. They had never met anyone from the company. The only place the name appeared was on their checks.
Regulator, the investigation found, was a shell company created to conceal a shadow workforce.
When Long Island Concrete submitted payroll records to the city, workers paid through Regulator did not appear. On paper, they did not exist — and workers who do not exist on paper cannot claim prevailing wages or file complaints about not receiving them.
In practice, everything about these workers' day-to-day experience was Long Island Concrete. They were supervised by its foremen, wore its uniforms and used its equipment. When paychecks were short, they went to its office to resolve disputes. Some had been hired directly by the company’s president, Tom Perno.
Neither Perno nor Long Island Concrete responded to a request for comment.
To make the scheme work, Long Island Concrete needed to keep its shadow workforce hidden — not just from city auditors, but from the unions whose representatives regularly visited job sites to ensure labor standards were being upheld.
When union inspectors arrived at a site, foremen instructed the non-union workers to disappear; hide on the job site. Get into a porta-potty. Wander away. And if an inspector got close enough to ask which local you were with, say you’re a member of a different union.
Long Island Concrete routinely dispatched workers to two or three different job sites in a single day, moving them by mid-morning from one borough to another, sometimes not finishing until 7 or 8 at night. The constant movement kept workers fragmented and disoriented, unable to build a clear picture of who they were working for, what they were building or what it was worth.
When the company's lawyers later challenged workers to identify the specific sites they had worked on, Arenson and his team sat down with clients and pulled up Google Maps, walking through street-level imagery until workers could point to a building and say: that one, a block from the six train, for example. It was painstaking work, Arenson said, but it established the breadth of the violations across years and dozens of sites.
The workers Long Island Concrete recruited were, by design, among the city's most vulnerable. Many were recent immigrants who spoke little or no English.
Adam Pizarro was around 18 or 19 when he started. “I always knew I was getting paid straight time,” he said. “I didn’t know it was illegal.” He simply showed up and worked. Only later did he understand his rights had been violated.
Damien Mark arrived in the United States from St. Lucia on September 15, 2001. He was 19 years old. He found his way into construction through a friend, tried roofing and didn't like it, and eventually landed at Long Island Concrete around the age of 22.
He would stay for over a decade, longer than almost anyone else who eventually joined the lawsuit, and by his own account absorbed more mistreatment than most.
"I'd been in the company before all these guys," he said at the press conference. "I took more heat than anyone."
As a father, he says the fight was never just about money. "I have kids — I don't want to see my kids go through what I went through."
Herminio Noe Hernandez, a skilled carpenter, should have earned close to $90 an hour on public works projects. Instead, he was paid $18 to $20. Across a standard 40-hour week, that gap represents a shortfall of nearly $3,000 — every single week.
He raised the issue with supervisors. He tried to reach the owner – Tom Perno – directly. He asked about moving into a different job classification. Each attempt was deflected or ignored. Then came the episode that he said, in retrospect, revealed the nature of the company's operations. Noe arrived at Perno’s office at 6 a.m. one morning to collect his paycheck. Instead of addressing his concerns, the company put him to work repairing their office.
Over eight years, the construction company mounted a series of procedural defenses and complicated discovery. Documents were reported lost, they allege, at one point due to a flood.
One of the key legal battles in the case involved the employer's attempts to probe workers' immigration status — demanding Social Security numbers, tax returns and work histories. The firm successfully blocked these lines of inquiry, citing well-established case law holding that an employer who never questioned a worker's immigration status at the time of hiring, and who paid that worker illegally for years, cannot later use that status as a legal shield.
The company’s main defense was that the workers were employed by Regulator, not Long Island Concrete.
The breakthrough of the case came when, on the advice of partner Avi Mermelstein, Arenson subpoenaed bank records from Signature Bank. These “smoking-gun documents,” Arenson said, showed that the owner of Long Island Concrete was a signatory on Regulator’s account and that large sums were regularly transferred from Long Island Concrete to Regulator — funds the firm argued were used to pay its workforce.
The firm won the lawsuit and the court approved a $4.5 million settlement in late 2024. They received the majority of payment in March 2025, and only now, after months of delay by the defense, are they receiving the final installments. Though, he mentioned, many of the attorneys at the firm have not been paid in full yet, due to the company’s constant delay.
The legal timeline of the case, however, contains an injustice that no court could remedy. When the lawsuit was filed in 2018, New York law allowed claims to reach back six years — to 2012. But the violations had been running since at least 2004, when Damien Mark first started at the company. More than eight years of exploitation fell entirely outside the reach of the law.
"Damien started in 2004," Arenson said. "For many of those years, we were never able to recover anything. The violations started long before we could reach." Damien left the company in 2015, meaning the period for which he could be compensated was limited — even as his testimony about the company's earliest operations proved invaluable to establishing the continuity and scope of the scheme.
The settlement also imposed no restrictions on Long Island Concrete’s ability to continue bidding on public contracts. The company remains in operation.
When asked about the city’s role in prohibiting such exploitation, Arenson said the comptroller has the authority to enforce prevailing wage laws, but often, public enforcement is limited by resources. Complex cases like this — involving years of investigation, subpoenas and litigation — are difficult for government agencies to pursue.
“Enforcement is lukewarm, frankly,” he said.
The most affecting moment of the press conference came at the end when the workers expressed their gratitude for the firm. Adam — now a health and safety professional who runs his own business — discussed going back through years of text messages the night before. He had found exchanges dating to 2021: late-night messages answered with hour-long explanations of where the case stood and what it meant.
"It wasn't just 'sign this paper and don't worry about it,'" he said. What he wanted to talk about, more than the money, was the integrity he had witnessed over eight years. When Long Island Concrete played dirty — when company representatives tried to approach workers privately, when documents disappeared, when deposition answers seemed designed to mislead — the firm never responded in kind. "You never told us to play the same game," Adam said.
Also present was Elida Frederick. Her husband, Erwin Manaiza Bonilla, had worked for the company, joined the lawsuit and died before it concluded.
Through a translator, she accepted the final payment on behalf of their three children.
The money will help support them. It cannot replace their father, she said. But it affirms that his decades of toil had value — and that justice can come, even if it takes years.
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