A federal appeals court has upheld the forced-labor conviction and 8 1/2-year prison sentence meted out to Stavros Papantoniadis, who used coercion and sometimes physical attacks to keep his undocumented-immigrant workers in line at his pizza shops in Roslindale, Dorchester and Norwood.
In its ruling, the US Court of Appeals for the First Circuit concluded there was more than enough evidence for a federal jury to convict the owner of Stash’s pizza places of using threats of violence and ICE to deprive his mostly immigrant kitchen staff of overtime and days off and to try to keep them from quitting, that he got a fair trial and that issues he raised related to evidence production and the length of his sentence did not warrant action:
“Finding no reversible error, we affirm [the verdict and sentence],” the court concluded.
The court’s decision details testimony from several of the workers, who cooperated with federal investigators before and after Papantoniadis was arrested in 2023. He was convicted in June, 2024 on three counts of forced labor and three counts of attempted forced labor.
In addition to the force-labor convictions, he pleaded guilty in a separate case to Covid-19 fraud charges related to emergency federal funding he got for a restaurant after he had already sold it. The judge in that case sentenced him to two years – with 18 months to be served at the same time as his forced-labor sentence and with six additional months for him to serve after he ends that sentence.
The Westwood resident is currently housed at a federal prison in Danbury, CT, with a scheduled release date of Nov. 14, 2030.
He sold the Norwood pizzeria, and other suburban outlets, before his arrest. His family still owns the Stash’s at Blue Hill Avenue and Columbia Road, as well as another pizza place, renamed Bel Ave Pizza, on Belgrade Avenue in Roslindale, according to city and state records.
