Here’s my latest on the Hofstra University Herbert School of Communication’s Long Island Advocate:
By Scott Brinton
Part one of two.
Diana Sanchez, regional organizer for the National Day Laborer Organizing Network, stood feet from the glass-door entrance to Nick’s Pizza, on Sunrise Highway in Rockville Centre, and shouted into a microphone, “Shame on you!”
The dozen protesters assembled in a tight semi-circle around her responded in kind four times.
The demonstrators were there Feb. 8 “to demand” one-time owner Nicholas J. Angelis, of Rockville Centre, pay eight of his former workers the hundreds of thousands of dollars in back wages that the New York State Department of Labor contends they are owed.
They are “workers who have families, who have children, who have to survive,” Sanchez said.
Roughly a decade ago, Angelis, now 62, was ordered by the DOL to pay a combined $421,0000 in back wages, interest charges and liquidated damages to eight of his kitchen workers at Nick’s Pizza, in addition to $311,500 in state penalties, for a total of more than $730,000. In a two-year probe that began in 2009, the DOL found that Angelis had paid the workers a rate below minimum wage from 2003 through July 2011, court documents show.
They are “workers who have families, who have children, who have to survive.”Diana Sanchez, National Day Laborer Organizing Network
The workers are yet to receive any of the funds that they are owed, despite two New York State Supreme Court judgments in their favor in July 2021 and May 2022 — hence the protest in front of Nick’s on Wednesday. All eight came to the U.S. as undocumented workers, from El Salvador, Honduras and Mexico, though one is now a permanent resident.
The Advocate first reported on the state orders and court judgments against Angelis last September. In further investigating the case in recent months, The Advocate uncovered four class-action civil lawsuits alleging wage violations against Pizza on Stone LLC, which does business as Adrienne’s Pizzabar, in between Pearl Street and the cobblestone-covered Stone Street, only blocks from Wall Street.
Angelis, who plays a key leadership role in Adrienne’s Pizzabar, according to its website, is named in the suits, along with Peter Poulakakos, one of the eatery’s owners and a restaurant developer who has steadily built an “empire” of roughly 20 high-end dining establishments across Lower Manhattan over the past two decades.
The wage-violation cases against Adrienne’s Pizzabar are four of a dozen such class-action civil suits filed against LLCs/restaurants owned by Poulakakos and others dating back to 2011. The suits were found on PACER, the online database of federal electronic court records, in a joint, four-month investigation by The Long Island Advocate and WABC “Eyewitness News.”
To date, 10 of the suits have been settled, with ventures owned by Poulakakos and his partners agreeing to pay more than $1.9 million combined to dozens of employees and their lawyers, though Poulakakos and others admitted no wrongdoing and their attorneys “sharply” and “vigorously” contested the allegations against their clients’ businesses in court filings.
Outside of the Adrienne’s Pizzabar cases, Angelis was not named in the other suits.
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