DOWN and are being used as slaves on traveller sites across Basildon.

The black market workforces are made up of vulnerable people society forgot.

They have included tramps, drug addicts, a care home runaway, mental health patients, illegal immigrants, fugitives and ex-cons.

On the first day of our explosive three-part investigation, we can reveal secret workers within sections of Hovefields, Wickford, and Sadlers Park caravan site, Bowers Gifford.

Many workers, known to travellers as "dossers" and "slaves", live in squalid conditions in crumbling caravans stashed away at the back of camps. There are believed to be up to 20 dossers within Hovefields, living in caravans on four of the camp's 25 plots.

During our extensive investigations, sources in the travellers community - including gipsy leader Dr Donald Kendrick - assured us that many slaves lived in harmony and became valued members of traveller families.

Dr Kendrick openly admitted some travellers sought out "strong workers of low IQ" to join their slave labour workforce.

However, we can also expose brutality and abuse towards dossers.

One illegal immigrant was smashed in the head with an axe and racially taunted after spending just a week at the illegal Hovefields camp.

In another startling incident, a homeless man was bundled into a van by travellers after he tried to flee the same camp, just a day after being picked up on the streets of London.

He was so terrified he leapt from the vehicle as it sped along the A127, before flagging down motorists begging to be saved.

An ex-con worker who contacted the Echo claimed he was punched in the face by his "boss" while he was driving a work van and received a "kicking" for forgetting to feed the dogs one morning.

He will tell his story in the third part of our investigation in Wednesday's Echo.

The men are usually employed as labourers, but some have also been involved in criminal activity for their traveller bosses, or made to do menial tasks such as cleaning on the sites.