He was one of the most ruthless exploiters of Greek immigrant labor in the United States in the early 1900s. His name was Leonidas Skliris, and he came from Sparta.
After arriving in America, he established connections in the railroad construction and coal-mining industries and used his position to brutally exploit his fellow Greeks, whom he brought by the thousands to the American Midwest in pursuit of the American dream.
That dream turned into a nightmare. The “Czar of the Greeks,” as he was known, took a cut of workers’ wages, forced them to buy overpriced goods from stores he owned and made them work under appalling and dangerous conditions.
For Skliris and the companies he worked with, human life had no value. The dollar and profit were all that mattered, and he would stop at nothing to carry out his ruthless schemes.