Think Your Job Sucks? Man Illegally Keeps Slaves, Calls Them Employees

No overtime. Salary based on number of shifts, not hours served. Fees to work; even bigger fees to break the contract and work somewhere else. Opas Sinprasong admits to running his Colorado chain of Siamese Plate restaurants ‘like a slave ship’, hiring illegal aliens for easy exploitation and tax avoidance purposes, and treating employees like indentured servants.


Sinprasong was able to keep illegal immigrants as slaves for almost 8 years because of an investor program which allowed him to list these employees as ‘specialty workers’.

Sinprasong would force the Thai workers to sign a contract which basically converted them into owned property. They had to pay an initial fee to become his employee, $3000 in invented visa fees, and were liable to be fined $600,000 if they ‘violated terms’ — AKA went to work for someone who wasn’t running a slave house.

The contract also stipulated that payment would be doled out according to shifts worked, not hours. Overtime was often unpaid (albeit required by contract), and the monumental fees required of each worker were taken from their already paltry salaries.

These employees were unregistered and therefore, untaxed. Sinprasong faces prison time, deportation, and almost a million dollars in fines.