According to prosecutors, the owner of two pizza shops in the Boston area got more than eight years in jail for abusing and threatening his workers for years.
A press release from the US Attorney’s Office for the District of Massachusetts said that Stavros Papantoniadis was given a 102-month prison term on Friday, along with a $35,000 fine and one year of supervised release.
Prosecutors say Papantoniadis forced or tried to force six people—five men and one woman—to work in difficult conditions at his Stash’s Pizza locations. He used violence and threats of deportation to make sure they did what he wanted.
He was found guilty in June of three counts of forced labor and three counts of trying to force a person to work.
CNN has reached out to Papantoniadis’ lawyer to get his opinion.
In the news release, Acting US Attorney Joshua Levy said, “Labor trafficking takes advantage of weak people by scaring and intimidating them in order to make a lot of money.” “Stavros Papantoniadis did that when he broke the rights of the people who worked in his restaurants.”
Levy said Papantoniadis hired illegal workers for back-end jobs and lied about their immigration status on purpose.
Authorities found out that Papantoniadis ran his pizza shops with very few employees and made them work long, hard shifts, sometimes seven days a week. Prosecutors say he kept a close eye on them with video cameras.
Investigators found that Papantoniadis violently choked a worker who said he was going to quit, making the victim run away in fear. When another worker tried to leave, Papantoniadis followed him down Route 1 in Norwood, Massachusetts, and called the cops on him without a reason to try to scare him into going back to work.
“He exploited and abused his employees, denying them the basic dignity every person deserves,” said Michael J. Krol, who is in charge of Homeland Security Investigations, in the news release. “Today’s important sentence tells employers that workers deserve to be safe at work and not have to deal with harassment and abuse.”
Source: Massachusetts Pizza Shop Owner Sentenced to Over 8 Years for Forced Labor and Deportation Threats
