Like many tourists, Scott Payne of Phoenix had the worst pizza of his life in San Antonio, and it started with a flier under his hotel room door.

In October, Payne was in town for his daughter’s graduation from Joint Base San Antonio-Lackland. After spending a day checking out the Alamo and the River Walk, he and his family decided to watch a football game in their hotel room. They ordered chicken wings and two pizzas from a flier for what looked like a mom-and-pop restaurant: Il Villaggio Pizzeria on Marbach Road.

The pizzas arrived 35 minutes late and with the wrong toppings, but that was the least of the problems. They were small, cold and stale. Payne suspects they were frozen pizzas.

“Even bad pizza is still pizza. This wasn’t,” said Payne, who threw out the food. “This was an abomination on bread.”

The chicken wings were even worse. They looked old, smelled bad and tasted like “dead meat.” He took a nibble and spit it out.

When Payne logged into Yelp to give Il Villaggio a bad review, he realized his experience wasn’t unique. Other tourists said they ordered from Il Villaggio from a flier slipped into their hotel room and received nasty food that ended up in a garbage can.

Payne still didn’t know the full scope of the scheme, which has been pulled by a cluster of business owners since at least the early ’90s, interviews, court records and government documents indicate. It isn’t unique to San Antonio. Hotel managers who have worked elsewhere say it’s across the country.

The practice isn’t complicated: Employees of the restaurants sneak into hotels and slip fliers under the doors of unsuspecting tourists. When the tourists make an order, they often get poorly made food with low-grade ingredients.

Many of the restaurants that distribute fliers are frequently cited for health violations by the Metropolitan Health District, which has received complaints of customers getting sick after eating their food. Il Villaggio, for example, was found to have roaches during an inspection in June after a customer complaint about getting sick. An inspector who visited Chicago Pizzeria on Interstate 35 North in September saw roaches crawl out of a pizza box when an employee opened it to put in a pizza. Some of the restaurants have had their licenses suspended, but got them back later.

Five businesses that seem to take part in the scheme are linked to Michael Yetter, who opened a string of pizza joints here after leaving the Army in the 1980s. Now retired in Michigan, he was sued several times by hotel chains, faced court injunctions and had a lien on him for almost 20 years for unpaid sales taxes.

The businesses disguise themselves by rotating through names and phone numbers with the help of disposable phones, Police Chief William McManus said in an interview. The scheme, which hits hotels all over the city, tends to flare up during tourist seasons, such as Spring Break, summer and the Christmas holiday.

In some cases, police have been unable to find storefronts for the businesses.

“They’re not well-established businesses, if it’s a business at all,” McManus said. “They try to fly under the radar, they try to keep themselves from being discovered.”

The practice is a headache for the local hotel and tourism industries — “the bane of my existence,” said Justin Holley, general manager of the Wyndham Garden Riverwalk.

The trespassing pizza employees are a security threat to guests, hotel managers say.

Industry leaders have tried to stop the restaurants by suing them, blocking their phone numbers, reporting them to the health district, beefing up security and posting warnings to guests. The City Council passed an ordinance in 2010 making it illegal to distribute fliers on private property when told not to do so.

But the pizzas keep coming.

“We’d really like for this to end. It’s bad for the reputation of the hotel. It’s bad for business,” said Dusty Smith, general manager of the downtown Residence Inn by Marriott. “This just gives everyone a black eye.”

Recent offenders

At least five local restaurants have been part of the scheme, online reviews, Better Business Bureau complaints and fliers collected by hotels indicate.

The restaurants’ reviews are stomach-churning. Customers complain of pizzas that are burnt, cold, soggy, stale, uncooked, covered with hair. Chicken wings that are cold and pink inside. Salads with dirt on the lettuce. The orders often show up late or incorrect, and employees are rude, customers say.

“The only words I can find to describe how bad it was is that our dog loves pizza and even he wouldn't eat it,” one customer wrote on Ripoff Report about the Marbach restaurant.

Most of the restaurants have received health citations that offer a shocking look behind their counters.

Another restaurant named Il Villaggio, on Hillcrest Drive, had its food establishment license suspended in October after an inspector saw that it was infested with roaches and employees weren’t washing their hands; the sink had no drain, and there was no soap or paper towels. The restaurant also didn’t have a hand-washing sink in January and August of last year. Last month, an inspector reinstated its license but observed it still had roaches.

In May, an inspector who visited Angelo’s Pizza on Austin Highway in response to a complaint noticed a baby was being kept in the kitchen, along with a playpen and a high chair blocking the hand-washing sink. “Diaper changing being done,” the report noted. The baby was taken to a sitter. The complaint was closed.

Hand-washing seems to be a challenge for the businesses. In the past five years, they’ve all been cited many times for either not having soap and towels at their sinks or because inspectors witnessed employees not washing their hands.

The health district has received 10 complaints about the Marbach restaurant over the past five years. In the last one, from June, a customer said he or she saw roaches in the restaurant and got sick after eating pizza with “sour” sausage.

When a Health District official followed up on the complaint, she spotted several dead and live roaches and noted the restaurant needed a “thorough cleaning.” The official came for another follow-up at 3:20 p.m. on July 6, but the business was locked, even though it was within operating hours, there was food on a preparation table and its lights and “open” sign were on. The official wrote that she would return the next day, but never filed another report.

The restaurant went more than a year and a half without a routine inspection — one that results in a score to be posted in the restaurant — after one in March 2014. Pizza restaurants typically receive routine inspections about every six months, said Stephen Barscewski, the health district’s sanitation services manager.

On Friday, after the San Antonio Express-News questioned the health district about the Marbach restaurant, an inspector visited and noticed an employee was eating on a food preparation area. The employee then began putting ingredients into containers without washing his hands. There were no paper towels and soap at the hand-washing sink. No certified food manager was present — someone who has taken training course in food handling — apparently violating a city requirement.

Name-changing

The pizza restaurants are hard to stop because of how often they change their names, locations, owners and phone numbers, Barscewski and other officials say.

When the health district starts taking action, the businesses sometimes switch locations or owners to reset the process, said Barscewski, who has worked on the problem with hotel and tourism officials.

Il Villagio on Marbach has gone by at least six names in the past seven years. It began as Fatonie’s Pizza in 2009, its certificate of occupancy shows. The next year, it changed to Donatello’s Pizza, and in 2014, to Uncle Bebo’s Pizza. It received a sales tax permit later that year under the name Il Villaggio Pizzeria. Recent Yelp reviews indicate it has gone by Giovanni’s and The Pizza Experts.

It has had three owners in the past two years. Gabriel Blanco handed it off to Basilia Rodriguez in January 2014, when the name switched to Uncle Bebo’s. In March, Maasias and Zemira Montejano took over, and the name became Il Villaggio. It hasn’t had a routine inspection since.

The restaurant is on a busy stretch of Marbach in a tiny, graffiti-covered strip mall with trash scattered around its parking lot. Its interior is dark and bare. On Monday evening, a pile of empty tomato sauce cans and boxes of dry pasta shards were next to its front door.

Owners and managers of some of the restaurants said in interviews that they’ve changed their business practices. Some of them, such as The Slice and Angelo’s Pizza, have had good Yelp reviews in recent months.

Marc Arredondo, who became owner of The Slice in July after working there for years, admits that he distributes fliers in hotels during the holidays. But he says he makes higher-quality food than the restaurant offered under past owners.

“I wasn’t pleased with the kind of business we were doing,” Arredondo said. “I’m trying to change things.”

The past owners — he declined to name them — would buy low-quality ingredients, hang up on customers and take orders they knew they didn’t have the time or ingredients to make, he said. They would pick fights with employees to get them to quit in order to avoid paying them, he said.

It was “not so much a scam,” Arredondo said. “It’s just being stingy and greedy more than anything.”

Earlier this month, Express-News reporters ordered a small pepperoni pizza and chicken wings from the five businesses. Four of them — Angelo’s Pizza, Chicago Pizzeria, The Slice on U.S. Highway 90 and Il Villaggio on Hillcrest — delivered on time with satisfactory food.

The other — Il Villaggio on Marbach — did not. An employee said the delivery would take 45 minutes, but it took an hour and 25 minutes. The pizza was cold, and its mushy, drooping crust seemed undercooked. The pepperoni was stiff and tasted strange. The chicken wings were edible, but lukewarm and strangely shaped, with large parts of the bones exposed.

When an Express-News reporter placed calls to the restaurant to make the order and check on its delivery, employees answered the phone with three names: The Pizza Experts, Angelo’s and Il Villaggio. After getting the order, the reporter called the restaurant again to describe the poor quality of the food. An employee said a replacement order was on its way, but it never arrived.

Long-running problem

The five businesses linked with the scheme have one thing in common. They’re connected in one way or another to Michael Yetter.

Yetter is the former owner of Chicago Pizzeria, The Slice and Angelo’s Pizza. Gabriel Blanco, who owned Il Villaggio on Marbach until last year and who Yetter said now is its manager, once worked for him. So did Jose O. Martinez, owner of Chicago Pizzeria. Fahed Mashal, who owns Il Villaggio on Hillcrest, used to work for Blanco, Yetter said by phone.

All four men have criminal records. Several of Yetter's restaurants were delinquent in paying their city, state and school district taxes throughout the 1990s and early 2000s, government records show. For almost 20 years, the state had a lien against Yetter for unpaid sales taxes.

Yetter said he entered the pizza business in the early 1980s after leaving the Army in Killeen, starting as a manager in a restaurant that distributed fliers in apartment buildings.

He admits he put fliers in hotels after opening his own place around 1989 at Broadway and Mulberry Avenue, but says he did it with permission. The problems came from the people he leased his business to, who went “haywire,” he said.

“They were a little unscrupulous. It took me a while to find out that things are going on, of course,” Yetter said. “I’m about 10 percent responsible for some of the stuff going on. I can’t say I’m 100 percent not responsible.”

Starting in 1991, Yetter’s name shows up in lawsuits filed by hotel chains. Motel 6 sued him that year, accusing him of scattering leaflets for one of his restaurants, Pizza Pride Pizza, in six of its motels. A judge issued an injunction ordering him to stop.

The injunction doesn’t seem to have helped much. In 1993 and 2006, Yetter was found in contempt of court after his restaurants — Angelo’s Pizzeria, Big Tony’s Pizzeria, Italiano’s Pizzeria, New York Pizzeria, Pizza-N-Things and Pizza Time, some of them sharing a phone number — distributed leaflets in Motel 6 locations. In the 2006 lawsuit, Motel 6 claimed one of his employees assaulted one of its hotel managers.

The Drury Inns hotel chain targeted Yetter in 1997, when it issued an injunction against him and other owners of pizza restaurants. A decade later, it filed a restraining order against him and other owners, including Blanco and Mashal.

Yetter says his name was only on the lawsuits because he owned the buildings that the businesses were in.

“I was drawn into it, you know what I mean?” he said. “They didn’t want to go after the sub-leasors. They wanted to go after me, for some reason.”

His tax problems were the result of his inexperience when he started out as a business owner, he said.

He’s adamant about one thing: He always made good pizza. “I always had a good product, I always had good service, I always took care of my customers,” he said.

Yetter says he left the pizza business years ago. He has only one property left in San Antonio, on South Presa Street. The former site of a restaurant named Angelo's Pizza, it now houses a fruteria.

But the problem continues, hitting tourists such as Joe Mitchell of Arlington, who ordered from the Marbach restaurant in August while on a weeklong vacation with his wife and grand-nephew.

They ordered a large pepperoni pizza, a Philly cheesesteak and a house salad from the flier for The Pizza Experts that was slipped under their door. The bill came to almost $50; Mitchell, a former taxi driver, always leaves a generous tip.

He felt less generous when he looked at the order. The pizza was scrawny and overcooked, with only a handful of pepperoni, he said. The cheesesteak had no cheese and only a few scraps of meat. The salad was wilted, with no dressing. The delivery included burnt breadsticks that he didn’t order.

“They were literally inedible. … It was burned right through — there was actually a hole where it was burned. And the pizza was the same way,” Mitchell said. “It was a pretty disappointing night.”

The family members had fruit and soda from the hotel shop for dinner. Their order, like so many others from the tiny pizza place on Marbach, ended up in a garbage can.

rwebner@express-news.net

@rwebner