The owner of two Boston-area pizza shops has been sentenced to more than eight years in prison for subjecting employees to years of violence and intimidation, according to prosecutors.
According to a news release from the US Attorney’s Office for the District of Massachusetts, Stavros Papantoniadis was sentenced in federal court on Friday to 102 months in prison, along with one year of supervised release and a $35,000 fine.
In June, he was convicted on three counts of forced labor and three counts of attempted forced labor.
Acting US Attorney Joshua Levy in the news release, “Labor trafficking exploits the vulnerable through fear and intimidation, all in pursuit of the almighty buck. That is what Stavros Papantoniadis did when he violated the rights of the people working in his restaurants.”
Authorities discovered that Papantoniadis operated his pizza shops with a skeletal staff, forced workers to perform grueling shifts of 14 hours or more, often seven days a week. He closely monitored them with surveillance cameras, according to prosecutors.
He also violently choked a worker who expressed his intention to quit, causing the victim to flee in fear, investigators found. When a different employee attempted to leave, Papantoniadis chased him down Route 1 in Norwood, Massachusetts, and falsely reported him to the police in a effort to intimidate him into returning to work.
