Pizza guy gets 8 1/2 years after conviction as a sadist who bullied and sometimes beat the undocumented workers he preferred to hire

The Globe reports a federal judge yesterday sentenced Stash's owner Stavros Papantoniadis, 49, of Westwood, to 8 1/2 years in federal prison for his conviction in June on three counts of forced labor and three counts of attempted forced labor after a trial that included accounts of him bullying, beating and harassing his workers for years.

The time he actually spends locked up will be reduced by the time he has spent in pre-trial lockup since his arrest on March 16, 2023; a judge had earlier determined he was too much of a threat to the workers cooperating with the federal investigation to be released.

Meanwhile, his family says what's left of his pizza empire is on the verge of bankruptcy because people are staying away and banks are refusing to do business with it. In a court filing, the family said all it now has left is a single pizza place on Belgrade Avenue, renamed Bel-Ave Pizza. City licensing and state corporate records, however, show one of the family's numerous LLCs is still listed as the owner of the original Stash's on Blue Hill Avenue and Columbia Road in Dorchester.

And Papantoniadis's legal battles aren't over. In April, he was indicted on separate wire-fraud charges alleging he defrauded government Covid-19 relief funds by filing a false claim for emergency funds for a restaurant he had sold months earlier.

In a sentencing memorandum, assistant US Attorney Brian Fogerty had urged a ten-year sentence for Papantoniadis:

Papantoniadis ran his network of pizzerias as a forced labor operation. He recruited and targeted undocumented, foreign national employees to staff his restaurants, particularly the "back of the house" positions, such as line cooks, prep cooks, pizza makers, and cleaners. Once employed, Papantoniadis subjected the workers to violence, threats of violence, and exploitation of their immigrant status. This scheme enabled him to operate his businesses with fewer workers, whom he paid less, and over whom he exercised a degree of control that no law-abiding employer could ever obtain. As a result, Papantoniadis obtained a substantial financial benefit and advantage over law-abiding competitors and profited thereby. The defendant forced or attempted to force at least six people to work up to fourteen hours per day for him, often seven days a week. He kept the victims, who lacked immigration status and work authorization, in service against their will by threatening to report them to immigration authorities and/or using violence to intimidate them. The defendant monitored his staff through an extensive network of surveillance cameras, and frequently demeaned and harassed them, including instances of sexual harassment. Workers could not take breaks. One victim worked such long hours that he could only wash his Stash's Pizza uniforms by wearing them in the shower. Another forewent medical treatment when the defendant insisted that he work, and so he performed the procedure on himself instead.

He kept his victims in his service by threatening them with deportation. Threats of violence and other reprisals further helped him to keep his victims working for him. The victims watched him throw one employee against a door so hard that he fell out of the pizza shop. When Victim 5, Thiago Teixeira, asked the defendant to respect his decision to leave Stash's Pizza, the defendant, a 290-pound man, violently choked him until Teixeira was able to flee. Papantoniadis threatened to harm another employee, boasting that he "had killed" a person and had broken somebody's teeth. When Victim 7, Julio Yanes Reyes, tried to leave and drive away from a pizza shop, the defendant chased him in his car, filed a false police report, and drove past his apartment multiple times, all to pressure the victim back into his service.

All that is nonsense, Papantoniadis's lawyers, Carmine Lepore and Robert Sheketoff argued in their sentencing memorandum, which asked for no more than a four-year sentence. While they said he and they accepted the jury's verdict, he was simply not the monster prosecutors portrayed. They appended 58 letters of support, from former elected officials in Greece to people in the Boston area, who characterized Papantoniadis as "extremely generous, caring, kind, hardworking, and dedicated to his family and community."

The letters included laudatory statements from former employees who praised him as a gentle boss who helped them improve their work, even, one who would gladly lent his car to employees without one who needed to get somewhere and:

When he had a craving for a breakfast sandwich from a nearby restaurant, he would make sure that all of us working that day would have one as well. When he would do his rounds of his different pizza shops in the morning, and would stop to get some donuts and pastries, he would make sure he would get enough for all of us.

His lawyers said he never went out of his way to hire the undocumented, that they all came to him for job, and that if he were such an ogre, one of the first things he would have done would be to seize their passports to hold over their heads, and he never did that.

And, his lawyers continued, the judge should exercise leniency because Papantoniadis's family needs him. His children, whose graduations and other significant events in their lives he has missed, "have been bullied, struggled emotionally, and suffered anxiety" and are all now in therapy, they wrote.

They continued:

Mr. Papantoniadis has already suffered severe collateral consequences because of his arrest, indictment, and conviction in this case, as well as the collateral Department of Labor civil suit. Having spent decades of his life building a successful restaurant business and a positive reputation in his community, Mr. Papantoniadis has lost nearly everything he has worked for all before he was even convicted. While there is one restaurant remaining, it is not clear how long Mr. Papantoniadis' wife, ... will be able to keep it running without Mr. Papantoniadis and no bank will work with Mr. Papantoniadis or his family. ... Since his arrest, [she] has struggled to care for the children and provide financially. Six (6) of the seven (7) restaurants have since closed. [She] works up to 72 hours a week at the one (1) remaining restaurant in Roslindale trying to keep the business open. While the Roslindale restaurant used to be profitable, because of the instant case, there has been a significant decline in sales which often do not cover the costs of payroll, food, and monthly utilities. As a result of this case, banks are unwilling to do business with the Papantoniadis family and [she] had to resort to obtaining a personal loan from her mother to keep the Roslindale store open. [Her] mother, however, cannot continue to provide personal loans and [his wife] will not be able to hang on much longer.

Government sentencing memorandum (197k PDF).
Defense sentencing memorandum (2.5M PDF).