Four Irish men walk into a bar. But this isn’t the first line of a joke. As hundreds of pub landlords are finding out, it can instead mark the start of a very modern nightmare.Gary Sidwell is a case in point. He runs The Purley Arms, an old-school boozer in a working-class neighbourhood of South Croydon. Here, his ordeal began on a Wednesday afternoon in October last year, when young, burly Brian Mongan visited the premises, accompanied by his brother Pete and their friends Paddy and Tom McDonagh.What happened next is now the subject of an escalating legal battle, with Gary’s entire livelihood riding on its outcome.It revolves around a single, undisputed fact: that Mongan and his mates left The Purley Arms about 60 seconds after walking in. And a thorny question: why?Gary says he refused to serve the group because of their strange behaviour. Mongan and his chums say he booted them out for a very different reason. One that could now cost him money. Lots and lots of money. Gary Sidwell, who runs The Purley Arms, ended up in a court battle after refusing to serve Brian Mongan and his brother and friends Gary alleges that the men ‘looked too young to buy alcohol’ and refused Mongan and his friends after concluding they were troublemakers The Purley Arms (pictured) was hit with a massive compensation claim of £16,000 from Mongan and his companionsLet’s get the landlord’s version of events first.’They all came in together and went to separate areas of the pub and none of them had ordered any drinks,’ Gary recalled in a subsequent witness statement. He alleges that the men ‘looked too young to buy alcohol’ and had an intimidating manner that had left his barmaid feeling ‘a bit worried’.Crucially, his statement adds, one of the youngsters had walked up to the bar and declared that he and his chums were, variously, ‘Irish Travellers’ and ‘Fairground Travellers’. He then asked if he and his friends were going to be served.It’s an odd way to order a pint. So, concluding that Mongan and his friends were troublemakers, Gary recalls answering: ‘Not today, no.’Fast forward three months – and Mongan and his chums offered a very different take on proceedings.It came via a letter which plopped on to the doormat of The Purley Arms on January 25 from law firm Howe & Co.Over some 15 pages, it argued that the four men had been refused service that day ‘for reasons of race’ and were therefore entitled to ‘exemplary damages’ under the 2010 Equality Act.Oh, and it turned out that they had also been secretly recording the whole conversation on their smartphones.’Our clients left the premises extremely embarrassed, upset and distressed as a result of the unlawful discriminatory conduct of your staff,’ it read. ‘The sole reason for the refusal of service was our clients’ race.’Perhaps understandably, Gary was stunned. He no longer had CCTV footage of the incident, which – under data protection protocols – had been deleted after 28 days. And it soon became clear that the four ‘Irish Travellers’ were after a very large compensation payment indeed.’The whole incident, from start to finish, lasted no more than 60 seconds,’ Gary recalls.’I’d thought nothing of it at the time. Then one day in January, I get hit with a massive compensation claim. Initially, they wanted me to pay £3,000 each, plus extra for legal costs. The total amount they were after worked out at about £16,000.’Re-reading the ‘letter of claim’, Gary began to suspect foul play: namely that Mongan and his friends had deliberately manufactured the incident in which they were refused service, and had recorded it to make money from a discrimination lawsuit. Travellers set up camp on fields close to The Purley Arms The traveller camp included multiple trailers parked up on the nearby field  A white sudan and a white van are seen parked next to two caravans A black pick up truck is seen parked next to two caravans And Gary soon discovered that he was not the only landlord to be targeted in this way.For on the very afternoon the group visited The Purley Arms, they had gone into at least two more nearby pubs: The Bull’s Head and The Surrey Cricketers. Each time, they had also behaved oddly – and been asked to leave. And both incidents were now the subject of a £16,000 compensation case involving Howe & Co.Details emerged of two letters dated January 25 which were sent to the two landlords.They included ‘similar claims’ to the one Gary had received, including a paragraph informing each landlord that Mongan and his chums were after ‘damages in compensation for their injury to feelings, embarrassment, distress and inconvenience’.The letters reveal that at 5.30pm – 90 minutes after they had pitched up at The Purley Arms on October 25 – the group were asked to leave The Surrey Cricketers, a mile away, by landlord Trevor Weller.A quarter of an hour later, at 5.45pm, a near-identical scenario was played out at The Bull’s Head, around the corner, where they were refused service by publican John McFarlane.All very unusual. Suspicious, even. And the plot would further thicken over ensuing months, when several other Croydon landlords found themselves receiving curiously similar discrimination lawsuits.Indeed, when we met a few days ago, Gary told me that he believes an astonishing 24 pubs and restaurants in this single commuter town, on the outskirts of London, are being sued for alleged racial discrimination by members of the Travellers’ community.’Every case is similar,’ he said. ‘A group of lads will walk in, behave oddly and instead of ordering a drink, they’ll start asking the barman if they serve Irish Travellers. Sometimes they’ll say they have a big group of mates who want to come along, or claim they’ve been banned from other pubs in the area, which is exactly the sort of thing that will make a landlord refuse to serve them.’Gary explains: ‘Every time, they turn out to have been recording the whole thing and the lawyers’ letters arrive a couple of months later. Most are being handled by the same two or three law firms.’Often, they’ll hit up to three or four pubs in a day and then put in claims for tens of thousands of pounds. We know of at least one local landlord who paid out thousands to make them go away. Not bad for an afternoon’s work.’What started in Croydon is spreading, too.According to industry sources, pubs across the South East have, in recent months, been hit by a tidal wave of near-identical litigation, causing serious financial hardship and stress to hundreds of landlords.The trend has become so widespread that one major national chain, speaking on condition of anonymity, told me that it is currently dealing with more than 40 separate compensation claims. Another, which runs several hundred pubs, says: ‘It’s come out of nowhere and we are aware of 50 cases, all of them launched within the last year.’ The group were also turned away by Trevor Wellers at The Surrey Cricketers during the same afternoon Trevor (pictured outside The Surrey Cricketers) asked the group to leave his pub shortly after they arrived  John MacFarlane also refused the group service at his pub The Bulls HeadA leading brewing source adds: ‘The lawsuits are being filed by a small group of people and a handful of law firms, but they are incredibly prolific and obviously making cash. The trend seems to have started in London and the South East, but we are increasingly seeing cases further north.’Someone told me that if Labour’s smoking bans don’t finish off pubs, their human rights laws will. The industry is already losing 700 pubs a year. This is the last thing we need.’ Fuller’s, which has 400 pubs in and around the capital, recently emailed its landlords, relaying a warning from police to be on the lookout for ‘issues involving members of the Travelling community’. The email said the firm was ‘passing on important information and guidance, recently received from the Hounslow West licensing police’ who had warned of ‘individuals or groups of Travellers visiting premises, sometimes recording these visits secretly, and attempting to goad members of staff into refusing service on the basis of their ethnicity’.Techniques pursued by fraudsters had, the email claimed, ‘involved statements such as ‘We’ve just been turned away from the pub nearby because we are Travellers. You wouldn’t do the same would you?’It added: ‘Alternatively, they may employ tactics such as an individual entering, making a purchase, and engaging in conversation and then mentioning that a group of fellow Travellers will soon join him, implying an expectation of acceptance.’For landlords on the receiving end of such litigation, the experience can be traumatic. Trevor, from The Surrey Cricketers, who has recently been diagnosed with leukaemia, told me that he and his wife have found the demands for compensation ‘incredibly stressful’. And they fear that fighting the claim could drive them into insolvency.’I’ve got a lot of medical problems and I am shaking just talking about this,’ he said.The landlady of another Croydon pub, also the subject of a Howe & Co claim, told me that the experience had left her suicidal. ‘I’ve had to go on to medication,’ she said. ‘It’s very, very stressful. I’m at the point where it’s very difficult for me to function, and this is a customer-facing job.’You get letters arriving late on Friday and the stress hangs over you all weekend.’They want some £20,000 to settle and say if I don’t find the money in a few weeks, we’ll go to court. I can’t afford a lawyer and I don’t have that sort of cash.’ The landlady, who the Mail is choosing not to name, adds: ‘What is particularly hurtful is that I’m half-Indian and had to grow up with discrimination in the 1970s and 80s. I take it very seriously and the claim that I’m racist hits a nerve. I’ve worked in the trade since in my 20s. I’m now 51 and nothing has made me want to quit this work more than this.’Whatever the rights and wrongs of individual cases, one thing is for sure: Brian Mongan is a seriously prolific claimant.In addition to the three pubs in Croydon, he’s also instructed Howe & Co to sue the owner of Ganley’s Irish Bar, in nearby Morden, over an incident on February 7. And he’s using a second law firm, Julia & Rana, to sue two adjacent pubs in Dartford, Kent, which refused to serve him and three chums at 2.41pm and 2.44pm on February 17.One of the landlords on the receiving end of that litigation tells me that on the day in question ‘this guy came in and kept saying again and again: ‘Do you serve Irish Travellers?’ We had a wedding booked that afternoon, so I said: ‘Not today, mate!”To which he responded: ‘What about tomorrow then?’ He was getting more and more aggressive and I didn’t know what to do to get rid of him so I asked him to leave. And several months later, I hear from his lawyers. I initially thought it was a scam so I didn’t reply. Then we got a second one. I know of four local pubs who were hit up the same way.’In two of the Dartford cases, Mongan and three relatives are seeking £30,000 each. Or to put it another way, they’re after a combined £240,000 for events that occurred over five minutes. ‘Either he’s the unluckiest man alive, who keeps ending up in pubs with seriously racist landlords, or he’s a chancer who has come up with an ingenious way to make money,’ says one landlord.Mongan’s take on this is unclear. He was not at home this week when the Mail visited his red-brick semi in the London suburb of West Drayton, owned by Peabody Trust, and has yet to respond to requests for comment. Neither did law firms Julia & Rana and Howe & Co. Martin Howe, the founder of the latter, has acted for both former Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn and his shadow chancellor John McDonnell. Mr Howe’s firm was also behind two test cases against the pub industry. One, involving Wetherspoons in 2015, saw it represent a group of Travellers denied entry to a pub in Holloway – in a case that left the chain saddled with legal costs of £1million.A second case, which hinged on the Equality Act introduced by the last Labour government, followed in 2022 – when 12 Irish Travellers were paid a five-figure sum after being denied service at a Greene King pub where they wanted to watch a Tyson Fury boxing fight. Landlord Trevor Wellers outside The Surrey Cricketers pub.  Gary says he would rather go bankrupt than pay the claimants a pennyBoth victories were trumpeted in press releases from Howe & Co, which advertise its services on Facebook, saying: ‘The UK’s leading law firm for discrimination challenges on behalf of Travellers, Gypsies and Roma people.’Quite how many of this year’s crop of discrimination claims will succeed is anyone’s guess.One major pub chain said it had not responded to dozens of letters from Howe & Co, saying: ‘We have no intention of paying them a penny because we think these people are trying it on.’In Croydon, Gary also offers fighting talk: ‘I’m disgusted by these people and what they are doing to landlords. And if they think they can get rich off the back of me, they can think again.’I’d rather go bankrupt than pay them a penny and will fight this all the way.’The already-beleagured landlords of Britain will doubtless wish him well.÷ Have you suffered a similar ordeal? Contact guy.adams@dailymail.co.uk