Where Billionaires Summer, a Gardener Died in the Snow

In winter, people in the Hamptons know how to protect the things they value. The decorative hedges outside multimillion-dollar homes are carefully wrapped in burlap. Bolts of cloth are unspooled, cut and pulled taut. Then they’re stitched closed by hand with specialized needles, sold in local shops.

That’s because the cold is potentially deadly to some of these plants — when the water inside them freezes, it expands, rupturing the cell walls.

On a sloping patch of ground less than a dozen miles from where the wealthy pay to swaddle their bushes, on a day cold enough to freeze a brook running through the woods, one of the men who stitched burlap around hedges disappeared on a Thursday in February.

The last time he was seen, Francisco Camey, 61, woke up on “his” side — the left side — of the enclosure he and his brother, Gilberto, 51, had created under a white tarp by stringing ropes between tall pines in a forest. Francisco headed out at around 9:30 a.m.

That night, the temperature dropped into the low 20s Fahrenheit, and the gusts off Peconic Bay made it feel as cold as 0 degrees. Francisco didn’t return to the shelter. It was still dark when Gilberto woke with a start after feeling an icy breeze, as if someone had pulled back the plastic sheet to enter the tent. “Is it you?” Gilberto called out, but no one answered.

The next day, Gilberto followed his brother’s tracks.

The trail in Riverhead, N.Y., crosses the brook, and then cuts across the side of a forest of towering pine and skeletal oak. You have to know where to look to spot the other inhabitants, many of them undocumented laborers from Guatemala.

Gilberto’s sneakers sank into the snow as he trudged up the trail, his hoodie pulled tightly against the cold. He emerged onto the bend of the highway and followed the two-lane road to the entrance of a park. Past the water fountain, next to a Little League field, Gilberto spotted something blue.

His brother had died on his back in a bank of snow, his white hair submerged in the powder, his only protection a blue Champion sweatshirt. His hands were clenched on his chest, like someone trying to cling to the last little bit of warmth.

“I thought I was going to die myself,” Gilberto said through a translator.

Across this chain of seaside villages comprising some of the most expensive real estate in the world, many of the migrant laborers who maintain the scenery cannot afford to live within it. The lucky ones rent a cuarto — a room inside a house crowded with other workers — for $800 to $1,000 a month. In winter, when landscaping work dries up, even that becomes out of reach for several dozen laborers, shelter workers and outreach staff say.

“It broke me to realize that in the Hamptons, plants are covered for the winter while people are left outside in the cold with nothing,” said Marit Molin, a licensed clinical social worker and the founder of Hamptons Community Outreach. “Like most other people, you think of the Hamptons as this place that’s lavish.”

The laborers’ encampments have become the home of a work force that is simultaneously essential and overlooked. Sheets of plastic hang in the woods in Bridgehampton, just down the road from Madonna’s 30-acre horse farm; in Southampton, where Calvin Klein built a glass-and-concrete fortress; and in East Hampton, where Jerry Seinfeld keeps an 11-acre estate.

The workers’ plight isn’t new. In 2022, a concierge for some of the Hamptons’ wealthiest patrons gave an interview describing how he had spent two years living in a six-by-six-foot tent in the woods. In 2024, a Guatemalan laborer who was living in the woods was struck and killed on a highway while walking to a bus stop, leading to an outpouring of concern.

But advocates for the workers say that the scale shifted in the last year. Where once the tents were clustered together, the workers have now spread out for fear of raids by Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

“People are more scared, and they tend not to seek help,” Ms. Molin said.

There is no permanent homeless shelter in the Hamptons, but an organization called Maureen’s Haven provides refuge during the winter months in a rotating network of churches. Francisco was a familiar figure there. Its office is just 1.2 miles from where Francisco’s body was found.

“He was a 5-foot-5 — a tiny guy,” one shelter worker remembered. “‘Little Francisco,’ we called him. He was a sweet guy.”

Hedge Couture

In the late 1800s, gardening manuals written for estate owners in rural New York recommended wrapping fruit trees in rough sacking as winter approached. Many years later, the practice had its critics. A gardening column in 1978 warned that no one wanted to look at a wall of burlap for months on end.

Today, the hedges in the Hamptons are not just covered — they’re upholstered. “It’s like watching Dior fit a ball gown,” an editorial in The East Hampton Star declared.

“Oligarch A on Lily Pond Lane does it, then Oligarch B, just down the road, says, ‘That looks pretty great,’” said Todd Forrest, head of horticulture at the New York Botanical Garden. Like other horticulturists, he believes most of the plants that are covered up don’t actually need to be.

Over the years, the need for gardeners in the Hamptons attracted immigrants from countries with agrarian roots. The Camey brothers, who were among 13 children of a sharecropper in San Raymundo, a town in Guatemala’s central highlands, arrived in the early 2000s. Francisco was 8 when he followed his father into the fields to plant corn, later cutting his hands removing the husks, and then transporting the cobs in a basket on his back, said his sister Marta Camey, who spoke via WhatsApp from beneath the corrugated tin roof of their family compound.

“Because they farmed land that belonged to other people, when the harvest came, it was divided in half — half for the owner and half for us,” she said. “That’s why they left — in order to help us get ahead, to help lift us up.”

The first brother to leave was Manuel in 2001, followed by Gilberto and Francisco in 2003 and 2004, and finally Rafael, according to Gilberto and Rafael. Having paid smugglers to help them cross into the United States, they joined an unprecedented wave of Latino immigrants to the Hamptons, where the Latino population in the two largest towns grew eightfold between 1980 and 2000. That population then nearly tripled in the decades that followed, according to census data compiled through the University of Minnesota’s National Historical Geographic Information System as well as demographic reports.

Today, Latinos account for over one-quarter of the population of East Hampton and one-fifth of the town of Southampton.

There are now so many Guatemalans — over 20,000, according to census data — that the country opened a consulate in Riverhead in 2021, not far from the forest where the brothers ended up.

The Camey brothers found housing in cuartos that cost as little as $150 per month. They joined the daily vigil in front of the 7-Eleven in Southampton, where landscaping trucks begin pulling up at 5 a.m.

But the backlash was already underway: By 2004, the year after Francisco arrived, the 7-Eleven in Southampton had posted “No Loitering” signs in Spanish and English, according to photographs taken by the sociologist Corey Dolgon and published in his history, “The End of the Hamptons: Scenes from the Class Struggle in America’s Paradise.” In 2006, a proposal to build a hiring hall in Southampton so that the laborers could wait for rides indoors was shelved in the face of stiff resistance. People holding a “Stop the Invasion” banner stood outside a building where the League of Women Voters had organized a forum to discuss the proposal, The Southampton News reported.

Petitions denounced the overflowing basements and homes divided by plywood walls where migrants lived together.

“The people who came to the Town Board insist there is nothing racial intended,” Theresa K. Quigley, the deputy supervisor of the Town of East Hampton, told The New York Times in 2012. She added, “They say they’re talking about overcrowding, but they’re talking about Latinos.”

At first, the Camey brothers’ wages were high enough that they were able to pay off the debt they owed to smugglers. Day laborers on average were earning around $10 an hour — $1,400 in a good month, $500 in a bad one, according to statistics in The Southampton Press. That meant that even in a bad month, they could still afford their cuarto. Manuel was able to go back to Guatemala to see his family, paying a smuggler a second time to return, he said. Manuel learned conversational English and secured a job in food prep in a restaurant, giving him the steadiness of year-round work.

Francisco worked as many shifts as he could to pay his expenses and send his mother 700 quetzales per month, about $90. For years, the cuarto economy worked for him.

But the gap between those who live behind the hedges and those who care for them continued to widen: Soon after he arrived, the average sales price of a home in the Hamptons soared past $1 million. Now, some homeowners are spending as much as $1 million per year to care for their hedges and landscaping. Roughly a decade ago, around the same time that trimming the hedges in the Hamptons became a luxury industry unto itself, Francisco slid off the grid into the woods, his family said.

The cost of a cuarto had ballooned to as much as $1,000 a month, and when work dried up after the first snowfall, he didn’t have enough money to make it to spring, his brothers said. He also drank — beer, the cheapest he could find. It was a way to blunt the isolation, and during the winter, a way to take the edge off the cold, his brothers said.

Francisco’s sister Marta said he had gotten worse after the death of their mother in 2013.

“One time, he contacted me, and he couldn’t bear to speak,” she said. “He was crying. And maybe then, because of the sadness, he chose to surrender himself to drinking.”

Six years ago, Gilberto was forced to join Francisco in the woods. “The numbers, they didn’t work anymore,” he explained.

By then, Francisco had lost contact with Manuel, Rafael and Marta. They repeatedly tried to contact him, but he hid from them, possibly because he was ashamed of his drinking, they said. Gilberto began caring for Francisco, sharing the earnings from the landscaping work he did, buying groceries for the two of them and cooking omelets and beans on the grill outside their tent.

On the morning when Francisco left and didn’t come back, he told Gilberto that he was going to go buy beer. Weeks after he died, empty 25-ounce cans of Natty Daddy still lay around his tent, like rings around a planet.

The Suffolk County medical examiner ruled that Francisco died of “chronic alcoholism,” based on his history of alcohol abuse and a blood alcohol concentration of 0.23 percent, nearly three times the legal limit for driving. The report does not discuss whether exposure to the cold played a role, and officials at the medical examiner’s office declined to be interviewed, directing inquiries to Suffolk County spokesman Michael Martino, who did not respond to questions sent by the Times.

But after reviewing the records at the request of The Times, three prominent forensic pathologists reached a different conclusion.

“He does have alcohol of 0.23, but in my opinion, if he had been indoors or in the shelter, he wouldn’t have died,” said one of the nation’s best-known forensic pathologists, Michael Baden, the former chief medical examiner of New York City as well as the former chief forensic pathologist for the New York State Police. “The cause of death is hypothermia from collapsing in the snow while intoxicated — but he’s not fatally intoxicated,” he said.

The experts who reviewed the results pointed to the absence of liver cirrhosis or other disease that would support alcoholism as the primary cause, as well as the circumstances in which Francisco was found: lying in the snow with his pants off, a phenomenon known as “paradoxical undressing.”

Dr. Baden said that in his time as chief medical examiner in New York City he had diagnosed at least 100 cases similar to Francisco’s: a person is drunk or on drugs, loses their balance or faints, and falls in the snow. Once the body’s temperature begins to plunge, one of the cruelest tricks of the cold takes hold: The body’s thermostat breaks. Instead of pulling blood to the core to protect the organs, the blood is pushed to the extremities. The person freezing to death has a sudden and intense sensation of burning up. In their final moments, they strip off their clothes.

A leading expert on hypothermia, Roger W. Byard, an emeritus professor of pathology at the University of Adelaide in Australia, concurs: “I just can’t ignore the snow,” he wrote in an email. “Clearly the circumstances point to hypothermia.”

Not long after she moved to the Hamptons in 2015, Ms. Molin noticed children sitting in the landscaping trucks parked along her street, watching movies while their parents mowed lawns. Ms. Molin, now 48, started a free summer camp for the children of laborers. And when an arctic cold snap brought freezing temperatures in 2023, she learned of a cluster of tents in Southampton where seven men from Guatemala and Mexico were living.

“I was deeply shaken — standing in the woods, in the cold, hearing them panic about the coming weather,” she said, describing how she had decided on the spot to get them motel rooms. Today she regularly heads into the woods to deliver socks and Gatorade, and the donations she collects pay for hotel rooms during blizzards, phone credits, food and back rent for those who fall behind.

Ms. Molin remains one of the few direct lifelines for the men in the forest. Maureen’s Haven, the nonprofit that works with churches to shelter homeless people, was sued over zoning violations by the town of Riverhead last year and is looking for a new location while litigation continues. Earlier this year, a Guatemalan laborer arrived at the office, leaning on another man for support, shuffling forward on feet so damaged by frostbite that doctors later amputated portions of both, said a shelter employee who asked to remain anonymous because of the lawsuit.

The shelter later paid for a $300 one-way ticket back to Guatemala, a voluntary repatriation coordinated with the Guatemalan Consulate.

That has been the consulate’s main role, said one of its administrators, Sergio Rendon. “When they are in trouble, we help them repatriate,” he said through an interpreter.

Two weeks after Francisco’s death, Gilberto and Manuel walked Ms. Molin to the sloping hill where their brother’s body had been found.

Gilberto showed her the picture he had snapped on his phone, with Francisco naked from the waist down, having taken off his jeans and thrown off his shoe. Before the police arrived, Gilberto had struggled to dress his brother.

Ms. Molin raised the money for the funeral and sent a minivan to the bend in the highway near where Francisco’s body was recovered to pick up other laborers living in tents. On a chilly afternoon in March, the group rode to a hotel, where the men from Guatemala, Mexico and Honduras took turns showering and getting their hair cut.

They changed into the black pants and T-shirts Ms. Molin had laid out for them on the hotel bed before heading to the church.

Out of Focus

Francisco’s funeral was held in an airy church in Riverhead, a gathering place for Guatemalan migrants.

The only picture that the brothers could find of Francisco is out of focus. He is sitting on a tarp eating a tamale, framed by the golden beach grass that grows near the Hamptons. The image was framed and placed at the head of the church on a small table, covered in a cloth embroidered with blue angels.

In the pews, the brothers divided themselves according to their economic status. On one side of the aisle, Gilberto took a seat in an empty pew. Manuel and Rafael sat side by side on the other. Having secured regular housing in cuartos, they looked immeasurably younger than Gilberto, even though the brothers are close in age. All three brothers blamed Francisco for his vicios, or “vices,” viewing his descent into the woods as a personal failure as much as an economic one.

As the white-cassocked priest sprinkled the coffin with holy water, Gilberto used the hem of his T-shirt to wipe his eyes. When the casket was carried outside, he turned his back and covered his face with his hands.

A small group of mourners headed to a Guatemalan deli nearby, where they loaded their plastic plates with pepian de pollo. On the wall were advertisements in Spanish for rooms to rent: “One cuarto available for one person or two,” one said. “Preferably men who don’t have vices” — “vicios,” it says.

The brothers again sat at different tables. As he left, 48-year-old Manuel — who still has full-time work at a restaurant — slipped Gilberto $100. “Get yourself a room,” he said softly. “Please stop drinking.”

In April, Gilberto moved into a $900-a-month cuarto, with help from Manuel and Ms. Molin. It was his first time outside the woods in years, but he still struggles to sleep. Everywhere he looks, he said, he sees his brother.

Susan C. Beachy, Kitty Bennett and Sheelagh McNeill contributed research.