Former Restaurant Worker Awarded Double Compensation
CONWAY, SC – Former Conway restaurant manager Bobby Paul Edwards is serving a 10-year prison sentence for forcing a man with intellectual disabilities to work more than 100 hours a week without pay. He will also have to pay $546,000 to the man he enslaved.
Edwards, 56, who is White, pleaded guilty to not paying 43-year-old John Christopher Smith, who is Black, any wages from 2009 to 2014.
Smith had been a buffet cook and had worked at the J&J Cafeteria in Conway restaurant since 1990, when he was 12 years old. When Edwards took over as manager of the restaurant in 2009, he stopped paying Smith, forced him to work seven days a week and live in a roach-infested apartment, and subjected him to racial epithets and threats. Authorities alleged Edwards also assaulted Smith to get him to work faster and as punishment for mistakes. Prosecutors said Edwards beat Smith with a belt, punched him, hit him with pots and pans, and burned his neck with hot tongs.
Social workers caught wind of the abuses and authorities arrested Edwards on a state charge of assault and battery.
In sentencing Edwards, the District Court originally determined that Smith was owed $273,000 in back pay. The 4th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that Smith should get twice that amount, because of federal labor rules that entitle him to double the pay and overtime he was owed. Edwards now owes the former employee restitution of $546,000, the court has ruled.
