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Sarma Melngailis in New York City, 2011. Right, Melngailis’s and Anthony Strangis’s mug shots, May 2016.LEFT, BY MARK CUDDIHEE SR.; RIGHT, FROM THE SEVIERVILLE POLICE DEPARTMENT. |
How Sarma Melngailis, Queen of Vegan Cuisine, Became a Runaway Fugitive
With customers such as Chelsea Clinton and Alec Baldwin, the Pure Food and Wine owner was a food-world star. Then, in 2011, she met Anthony Strangis. Now facing prison for grand larceny and fraud, Melngailis says her collapse was due to a spell he cast.
BY Allen Salkin
NOVEMBER 3, 2016
Focus on the dog. By the time police arrested Sarma Melngailis and Anthony Strangis on May 10 of this year on fugitive-from-justice warrants at a Tennessee hotel, where they’d been holed up for 40 days and 40 nights, this is how insane their marriage had become: Melngailis, 43, the radiantly blonde poster woman for vegan living, a Manhattan restaurateur, and a Wharton graduate, says she had come to believe—really, really believe—that her pit bull, Leon, was on the cusp of being made immortal. This Lazarus-ian feat, and more, would be accomplished by her husband, Strangis, 35, a gambler with a criminal past she’d met on Twitter five years earlier.
