PIZZERIAS LEAVE A BAD TASTE IN THEIR MOUTHS

Workers accuse hundreds of eateries of cheating them out ofthousands in pay – & some of the joints have agreed to settlements

Meet the real pizza rats of New York City.

Hundreds of sauce-slinging slice shops across the five boroughs have been cheating their employees out of thousands of dollars in hard-earned dough by underpaying them, refusing to dish out overtime and violating other federal Fair Labor Standards Act requirements, according to multiple lawsuits filed on behalf of workers.

Pie joints ranging from institutions like L&B Spumoni Gardens to hipster upstart Roberta’s have been hit with suits, sometimes multiple times, that end up in hundreds of thousands in settlements often paid out to undocumented immigrants, mostly from South and Central America, who staff many city pizzerias.

Even Little Italy’s Lombardi’s, purported to be the first pizzeria in the United States, settled a claim for $75,000 in 2021 with six workers who sued for wage theft.

The restaurants often settled the claims with their workers without admitting wrongdoing, and some end up back in court litigating the same issues again.

Jordan Sapon, 22, had never eaten pizza before he immigrated to New York City from his hometown in Guatemala in 2016 at the age of 14.

As an undocumented worker, he acquired a taste for it in 2018, when he landed a job at Francesco’s Pizza on Columbus Ave., a no-frills pie place four blocks north of Lincoln Center.

Starting at the age of 16, he dedicated the next six years to the restaurant, doing everything from mopping and cleaning to folding pizza boxes to making pies and delivering them, usually working 72 hours over a five-day week, according to a pending wage theft claim filed in Manhattan Federal Court.

It was grueling work, he said. “It’s a really heavy workload and there was always a lot to do,” Sapon told the Daily News. “The worst part was they wouldn’t give us enough time to eat. They didn’t care, they would just have us working.”

Sapon, who is undocumented, said he needed a job so he continued to work the long hours.

He regularly worked 12-hour shifts for his starting pay of $50 a day in 2016, less than half the $10.50 minimum wage required in New York for small businesses, according to his federal lawsuit. By the time he quit the restaurant, he was making $110 a day, still about a dollar less than minimum wage, not including overtime pay, civil court papers show.

Sapon said it was hard to live on his meager earnings. He shared an apartment in Brooklyn with his brother, cousins and nephew and they learned to stretch a dollar.

“Basically, you just have to live really, really tight, not spend anything that you don’t need to spend,” he said.

Sapon, who worked at Francesco’s with his cousins, said that they complained to owner Vito Rappa that they were overburdened.

“They just said it was busy and [we] had to work, there’s nothing else that can be done,” Sapon said. “Sometimes, it would be so bad that workers were just starting to feel faint from working so hard.”

He quit the job in August and filed a still-pending lawsuit in Manhattan Federal Court in November. It’s the second wage theft action filed against Francesco’s owners in five years.

“They just can’t keep getting away with it,” Sapon said.

In April 2019, the restaurant agreed to compensate two of its former employees $87,500 for not