Connecticut Steakhouse Owner Charged With Bribing Staff Who Reported Chef's Alleged Assaults

When two kitchen workers at MIX Prime Steakhouse tried to report what they described as sexual assaults by the restaurant's head chef, someone they believed to be a lawyer listened. What allegedly came next was the restaurant's owner offering each of them $20,000 to go away.

Ljatif "Tony" Ramadani, who owns MIX Prime Steakhouse in Woodbury, Connecticut, and the Red Rooster Pub, was charged with bribery of a witness after Connecticut state police alleged he made those payments to two different employees who had come forward about head chef Walid Gad. Gad was separately arrested on multiple counts of first-degree sexual assault. Arrests and charges were reported in late March 2026.

The alleged assaults span from mid-2023 into 2025, according to state police warrants, and involved multiple current and former kitchen employees. Three of the alleged victims were undocumented, police said, and some required translators to make their initial reports. Two of the employees identified in police documents as reporters of the alleged conduct were women aged 48 and 36.

The immigration status of those workers was not incidental. Investigators allege Ramadani threatened to alert immigration officials as a tool of intimidation, a tactic that carries particular weight in back-of-house kitchens where undocumented employees often have no HR department, no union, and limited ability to escalate a complaint without risking their status. For line cooks and prep workers already navigating language barriers and wage inequity, the threat of deportation can outweigh almost any workplace grievance. It is also, investigators say, something the owner of this restaurant understood well enough to use.

The case exposes a structural failure that runs through restaurant kitchen culture: when ownership closes ranks around a valuable chef, the mechanisms meant to protect workers from abuse, reporting channels, legal recourse, even basic corroboration, can be flipped against the people using them. In this instance, the workers who sought legal counsel and filed formal reports generated the paper trail that led to criminal charges against the man who tried to buy their silence.

Ramadani was free on a $100,000 bond as of late March 2026 and is due to appear in Waterbury Superior Court in April. Gad's case on the sexual assault counts proceeds on a separate track.

For workers in similar circumstances, labor and immigration attorneys and local worker centers can advise on which reporting channels are shielded from immigration enforcement. In many jurisdictions, those protections exist; the workers at MIX Prime who needed translators to be heard at all had to navigate that risk without knowing whether anyone on the other side of the table was actually working for them.