The proprietor of the Greater Boston chain Stash’s Pizza, who was arrested earlier this month on a prison criticism charging him with compelled labor and each bodily and verbally abusing his employees has now been indicted on the costs by a federal grand jury.
Stavros “Steve” Papantoniadis, 48, of Westwood, was indicted Wednesday on 4 counts of compelled labor and three counts of tried compelled labor.
“Papantoniadis’s Stash’s Pizzerias was a forced labor operation,” the indictment doc alleges.
“He targeted and recruited undocumented, foreign national employees. He hired the victims to work at the Stash’s Pizzerias and forced them to continue working long hours, often refusing to pay overtime and overdue wages, while subjecting the victims to threats of deportation and violence and to actual violence to prevent them from quitting, demanding their overdue wages, overtime pay, and better pay and working conditions.”
A prison criticism alleging the costs was filed March 15 and Papantoniadis was arrested the following morning and appeared that afternoon in federal court docket in Boston the place U.S District Court Magistrate Judge Judith G. Dein remanded him to the custody of the U.S. Marshal service.
In all, the indictment alleges that Papantoniadis compelled or tried to pressure a minimum of seven worker victims to adjust to extreme calls for and used violence or threats of violence to again up these calls for.
In explicit, one worker obtained a brunt of the alleged abuse. Papantoniadis is accused of violently attacking this individual a number of instances, throwing the worker to the bottom, hurling a non secular slur on the worker, kicking the worker within the genitals and hanging and choking the worker to the purpose that the sufferer misplaced tooth.
Prosecutors say Papantoniadis maintained this stranglehold on his staff by threatening to have them deported.
Following a full detention listening to on March 20, Dein ordered Papantoniadis detained, as he stays.
“The defendant’s history of violence and threats puts potential witnesses at great risk. While home confinement and electronic monitoring could physically keep the defendant away from potential victims and witnesses, the court is unable to fashion conditions which would prevent the defendant from being in contact with or threatening them,” Dein wrote within the March 22 order.
Source: www.bostonherald.com”