Focus on the dog. By the time police arrested Sarma Melngailis andAnthony Strangis on May 10 of this year on fugitive-from-justicewarrants at a Tennessee hotel, where they’d been holed up for 40 daysand 40 nights, this is how insane their marriage had become: Melngailis,43, the radiantly blonde poster woman for vegan living, a Manhattanrestaurateur, and a Wharton graduate, says she had come tobelieve—really, really believe—that her pit bull, Leon, was on thecusp of being made immortal. This Lazarus-ian feat, and more, would beaccomplished by her husband, Strangis, 35, a gambler with a criminalpast she’d met on Twitter five years earlier.
The two were accused by the Brooklyn District Attorney’s Office ofdraining Melngailis’s 12-year-old raw-vegan restaurant, Pure Food andWine, of nearly $2 million, stiffing employees, duping investors, goingon the lam, and spending lavishly on hotels, watches, and casinos. Afterthey left town, in May of 2015, Melngailis went from feminist businessicon to clickbait—the “Vegan Vixen” and the “vegan Bernie Madoff.”(Attorneys for Melngailis and the attorney for Strangis deny allcharges.)
It was an attention-getting story because of the delicious reek ofhypocrisy. “She is guilty of conduct unbecoming a vegan,” one of thejilted investors, a Boston software entrepreneur, told me. It was widelyreported that, just before the arrest, the couple had ordered a Domino’spizza. Actually, the non-raw, non-vegan cheesy pie (plus a side ofchicken wings) was only for the 300-plus-pound Strangis, who placed theorder using his real name, thus leading authorities to their hotel, theFairfield Inn & Suites Pigeon Forge, just down the road from Dollywood,in the foothills of the Great Smoky Mountains. Melngailis, alerted to apolice presence by Leon’s barking while she was reading a book she’dbought at Goodwill, had been subsisting on vegan bowls from a nearbyChipotle. She begged the officers to treat the dog with care. Brooklyndistrict attorney Ken Thompson announced, “They were finally caught andwe intend to now hold them accountable for this outrageous thievery andfraud.”
It was a severe comedown. During Melngailis’s stint in the Sevier CountyJail, where she was held for nine days before being transferred toRikers, some of her female cellmates taunted her, asking if it was truethat vegans taste better. Their nickname for her was Sweet puss*. But toformer employees who used to call her Sarmama for turning the workplaceinto a surrogate family, and social-media followers who lusted after hervegan-deluxe life of tight dresses, biodynamic wines, TV appearances,and customers such as Tom Brady and Chelsea Clinton, the unansweredquestions have been how Melngailis got involved with Strangis and whyshe stayed.
“I don’t know how she got mixed up with Anthony,” Strangis’s ownstepmother, Ellie Strangis, said. “A woman like her—what did she seein Anthony?”
“Sarma lost her mind,” said the novelist Porochista Khakpour, a closefriend. “She really believed that her dog would live forever.”
A source close to Melngailis describes a scenario in which Strangisresorted to cult-like techniques, including gaslighting, sleepdeprivation, and sexual humiliation, to control her. (Strangis, throughhis court-appointed attorney, Samuel Karliner, denied all theseallegations but did not elaborate on his denials in responding to 80questions from Vanity Fair.) Perhaps if you can understand how a sane,successful businesswoman comes to believe the insane idea that her dogcan live forever, everything else snaps into focus—how that personmight be accused of bilking her investors of $844,000, owe heremployees more than $40,000 in unpaid wages, financially strip herrestaurant, and now find herself awaiting trial, with a potential15-year sentence. She had thought all harm would be magically reversed,just as Leon’s life span would be extended, according to her camp.
The arrest was a cold wake-up. After a court hearing in August, shespoke in a monotone, as if emerging, stunned, from a bunker:“Everything I worked for, and everything I cared most about, exceptLeon, is gone.”
Melngailis with Leon, N.Y.C., 2011.
Mr. and Mrs. Fox
Melngailis first gained notice when she appeared with her boyfriend, thechef Matthew Kenney, on the cover of their cookbook, Raw Food, RealWorld: 100 Recipes to Get the Glow, in 2005. The restaurant theyfounded, Pure Food and Wine, had opened a year earlier in the groundfloor and vast back garden of a Gramercy Park town house on IrvingPlace. Inside, the bar scene hosted yoga-sleek patrons sipping signatureco*cktails, like the Master Cleanse Tini (organic sake with lemon juice,maple syrup, and cayenne pepper in a martini glass rimmed with crystaldate sugar). In the garden, lit by candle lights, the likes of AnneHathaway, Stevie Wonder, and Rooney Mara could be seen gracefullymasticating such offerings as cauliflower couscous with pickled Persiancucumbers and cultured tree-nut cheeses. On warm evenings, it felt asprivileged a place to be as gated Gramercy Park itself. It wasprofitable, too, often serving more than 200 covers on a night and, withrelated businesses, yielding revenues of around $7 million and profitsof about $500,000 annually, a former manager said.
Melngailis, sometimes sitting at a corner table in the garden, moreoften playing the role of gracious host around the bar even though smalltalk exhausted her, was at the center of it all. Back at Newton NorthHigh School, outside Boston, from which she graduated in 1990, she’d hada blue Mohawk. Taciturn in person, she loved a book called Party of One:The Loners’ Manifesto, a treatise on how the quiet ones change theworld. But on the cookbook cover, Melngailis, now blonde, did glow.
After a personal and professional split with Kenney the same year thebook came out—she claimed that the relationship drained hersavings—Melngailis kept the restaurant, vowing that it would spearheada raw-vegan movement. (She also opened three juice bars, called OneLucky Duck, and a brand of snacks sold in Whole Foods markets.) But herblog revealed struggles. In 2007, prompted by an e-mail she had receivedthat said, “Your life is my dream life!” she wrote, “And so I’mthinking, these people would all probably choke on their flaxcrackers ifthey knew that not only am I walking around often feeling entirelyspent, weary and even on the verge of a nervous breakdown, but that I’malso carrying a few hundred thousand dollars of personal debt . . .that I’m full of burning rage to build this empire . . . with aresidual and occasionally reappearing destructive closet eatingdisorder.”
As a relationship with a man 13 years her junior was fraying in 2010,Melngailis met Alec Baldwin, at her restaurant, and accompanied him to astaged reading of Moby Dick in the Hamptons. He soon confided inlate-night conversations how much he wanted a wife and children. Heradvice to the actor was to get a dog. He resisted, but she becameobsessed with the online photo of a red-nosed, brown pit bull namedQuinn at a shelter in Brooklyn. “One night I woke up crying at like4am,” she wrote in another blog entry. “My boyfriend woke up too andasked me what was wrong. I told him, ‘It’s Quinn.’ ”
She adopted him. Heartbroken when the boyfriend left, she had her puppy,renaming him Leon. “She wasn’t someone who dated a lot of people,”Baldwin told me. “She worked at the restaurant, did the books, wenthome, and passed out with her dog.”
After Baldwin met his future wife, Hilaria Thomas, at Pure Food andWine, in 2011, he set up a Twitter account for her. One of Hilaria’sfirst followers was a clever guy with the handle @DiscipleOfTodd, who’dalready been interacting with @AlecBaldwin. “At the beginning it seemedlike this fun thing,” Hilaria recalled. “He seemed nice. He used tomake us laugh.” Soon, @Sarma was following this fellow who used varioushumorous names, including Mr. Fox and Mr. LongBottoms.
Mr. Fox seemed to know just what to tweet to win @Sarma’s heart. OnOctober 28, 2011, Melngailis blew a Twitter kiss to Mr. Fox(@UKnowUWant_It) for guessing why she named her dog Leon—even thoughshe’d posted on her easily searchable blog a year earlier that it wasfrom Léon: The Professional, the Luc Besson film about a hit man. “I<3 anyone who guesses. usually i get ‘like, Kings ofLeon?’ ”
According to Melngailis’s camp, Mr. Fox was Strangis, perhaps usingTwitter to play six degrees of Alec Baldwin, figuring that somewhere inthe actor’s orbit was someone valuable. (Strangis’s attorney denies thathis client used these Twitter handles or aliases, or that he insinuatedhimself into Baldwin’s circle.) If so, the ploy worked. On November 12,Melngailis tweeted, “Mrs Fox be in love with Mr Fox. Can’t be helped.”
SALAD DAYS
Garden dining at Pure Food and Wine, N.Y.C., 2004.
By Phil Mansfield/The New York Times/Redux.
When Strangis was about three years old and living in a raised ranchhouse in Brockton, Massachusetts, a suburb of Boston, he pulled a pairof dice out of his pocket and uttered, “Baby needs a new pair ofshoes.” His mother, Patricia, aghast, knew her husband, John, a localpoliceman, gambled. But this? “He was holding Anthony in one arm androlling the dice with the other,” she recalled. The couple was marriedfor seven years, having one child. Around 1984, when she informed Johnshe was leaving, Patricia said, “he pulled out a gun. First he put itto my head. He put it in my mouth. He pushed me back in the chair. Andhe had the gun pointed at me. Anthony came running out. John pulled upthis ottoman and we sat there three or four hours.” Finally he walkedout, and she called the police. “They called John. He came back andripped the phone out of the house.” (The lawyer for Strangis denies hismother’s version of events.)
As a kid, Strangis would live with both parents. (His mother tried butfailed to secure full custody rights.) In 2004, Strangis, then 23 (henever graduated from college), was said to be living with his father inthe Orange Acres trailer park, in Sarasota, Florida, when he met StacyAvery, a young mother separated from her husband, at a gym. She saidthat he came on so strong that she agreed to marry him in Las Vegas afew months after they met. She was taking birth control, she said, butStrangis pushed her to stop. Then, after she became pregnant, shealleges, he pawned her jewelry, telling her he was due to inherit $5million from an aunt. “He went as far as to take me to RaymondJames”—the financial-advisory firm—“and to say he wants his moneyinvested in this stock and that stock,” Stacy Strangis said. “Oneaccount was to be for my daughter for her college.” Strangis had movedin with her (“I had a house; he didn’t have a house,” Stacy said,bitterly), and things got creepier. There was the time at his father’strailer when he theatrically tripped over a heating vent. “He lifts thevent up,” Stacy said, “and it had a grenade in it. He said, ‘They areout to get me.’ ” She scoffed, pointing out that it was an antiquewith no pin and that she knew he had put it there. Even so, she startedquestioning her own sanity: “You say, ‘Why am I staying with this guy?Who is they?’ ” When Stacy fell three months behind on her mortgage in2005 and all her electronics had been pawned, she said, Strangis tookoff for good, leaving a healthy eight-month-old son he has apparentlynever visited nor sent a penny to support. (Strangis’s attorney deniesthe ex-wife’s allegations.)
According to Strangis’s mother, it’s possible that when her son firstbegan communicating with Melngailis, in 2011, he was living in a vanwith his father near the docks in New Bedford, Massachusetts. She saidthat the two, who often quarreled, had been living rootlessly, travelingtogether from casino town to casino town. (Strangis’s attorney says hisclient was living with a friend.) On July 6, 2012, John Strangis Sr. wasfound dead in that van. An obituary said he had “died unexpectedly” at72, but did not say of what.
When Melngailis and Strangis first met face-to-face, in New York in lateNovember 2011, a source close to Melngailis said, he was in decentshape, though not as rugged as he’d appeared online. According to LeoCandidus, Melngailis’s confidant since high school, she told Strangis,when they got into bed after a boozy night in the first weeks of theircourtship, that she was in the fertile part of her menstrual cycle. Shethought he would understand this to mean he should not ejacul*te insideher, Candidus said. Instead, he did not pull out. (Strangis’s attorneydenies this account.) Without conferring with him, Melngailis, angry,had an abortion on January 12, 2012. But soon, the source said, Strangiswas promising to give her enough money to become independent of meddlinginvestors, help anyone she wanted, and pay off her debts, includingthose related to a $500,000 mortgage she says she had taken to bailKenney out of a floundering investment in a Maine restaurant property,and more than $1 million to Jeffrey Chodorow, the original backer ofPure Food and Wine. By April 2012, according to Melngailis’s camp, noneof this money had materialized. (Strangis’s attorney denies thesepromises were made.) By then, she had told Strangis she’d terminated thepregnancy, and stopped responding to his messages. “I love my dog,”she tweeted. “Leon will never lie to me.” The breakup didn’t take. Acity of New York marriage license was issued on December 5, 2012.Melngailis told almost no one about it. “He told me if I was his wifeI’d be more protected,” she said. “It was vague.” (Strangis’sattorney denies that his client made such promises.)
