Sarma Melngailis was the face of New York’s trendy vegan movement.
Jumping on the craze early the Ivy League grad – she has B.A. in Economics from the University of Pennsylvania and a B.S. in Economics from Wharton School – saw vegan food as a lucrative market and in the mid noughties
opened up New York City’s first upscale raw food restaurant, Pure Food and Wine.
The 43-year-old capitalised on the fashionable food faction with her eatery becoming a favorite among A-list devotees like Alec Baldwin, Woody Harelson and Daryl Hannah.
As her hip status sky rocketed so did her profits but it now it’s being alleged there was a seedy side to the vegan poster girl’s purity.
Melngailis is on $485,000 bail and facing 15 years in jail after being accused of siphoning $2.78 million from her business and using it to bankroll her lavish lifestyle, including fancy European holidays, gambling debts, Rolexs and $10,000 in Uber car rides.
It is alleged that Melngailis neglected to pay staff for nearly five months and in the end it was a Domino’s cheese pizza that saw her ethics-preaching empire collapse.
Melngailis and her husband Anthony Strangis were on the run from police for 10 months but one night when they got hungry “detectives were able to track down Anthony Strangis and Sarma by a pizza delivery sent to their hotel,” Bob Stahkle, a spokesman for the Sevierville, Tennessee Police Department, reports the NY Post.
The well-known restaurateur spoke to the NY Post from prison and rebuffed any misconduct.
“It’s the worst nightmare you can think of,” she said from her prison cell. “If I had terminal cancer, it would be better than this, because at least [then] I did not cause it … I love my workers. When I come out, I will find something to do and pay it back.”
Melngailis also threw some shade on the influence of her husband, Mr Strangis who has previous convictions for grand theft and impersonating a police officer.
Melngailis said: “Things were going well when I was single.”
But in a he-said-she-said style argument Mr Strangis’ lawyer told the NY Post “We really just ask that the public reserves judgment until we figure out what’s going on.”
