Bad Vegan: What happened to Sarma Melngailis’s ex-husband Anthony Strangis?

Strangis spent a year behind bars at Rikers jail in New York

Netflix’s latest scammer documentary, Bad Vegan, arrived on Netflix on 16 March.

The four-part series explores how Sarma Melngailis – the celebrity restauranteur behind the starry New York establishment Pure Food and Wine – went from being a trailblazer in vegan cuisine to a wanted woman referred to as the “vegan fugitive”.

It tells the story of how, shortly after meeting a man named Shane Fox on Twitter in 2011, Melngailis began draining her restaurant’s funds and sending the money to Fox.

He had allegedly manipulated her into believing he could make her and her beloved pitbull immortal (a claim Strangis has denied), demanding that she wire him huge sums of money as a test of her trust.

A few years later, the couple got married and went on the run, after stealing nearly $2m (£1.5m) from the restaurant and its staff. They were eventually found hiding in a Tennessee motel by authorities, after Fox made the mistake of ordering a pizza to their room under his real name: Anthony Strangis.

According to an indictment produced in May 2016, “from January 2014 to January 201… Melngailis transferred over $1.6m (£1.3m) from the business accounts to her personal bank account. Strangis spent nearly $1m (£760,000) of these funds at Foxwoods Resort Casino in Connecticut, over $200,000 (£153,000) at the Mohegan Sun Resort Casino in Connecticut, over $80,000 (£61,400) at luxury watch retailers, including Rolex and Beyer, over $70,000 (£54,000) at hotels in Europe and New York and over $10,000 (£7,700) on Uber car rides. He also withdrew hundreds of thousands of dollars in cash.”

After the pair were arrested, they were taken to Rikers Island jail in New York – the prison where Anna Sorokin, the subject of Netflix scammer series Inventing Anna, served her sentence.

Melngailis was bailed out after her father paid the $300,000 (£230,000). Strangis’s bail was set higher, at $350,000 (£268,000), and no one offered to pay it for him.

Between the two of them, Melngailis and Strangis faced charges including second-degree grand larceny, second-degree criminal tax fraud, and first-degree scheme to defraud. They each faced up to 15 years in prison.

Both took plea deals: Melngailis pleaded guilty in May 2017 to grand larceny, criminal tax fraud, and a scheme to defraud, the New York Post reported at the time.

She served four months in Rikers Island and was released in October 2017 with an additional five years of probation. Strangis spent a year behind bars between May 2016 and May 2017; he was also sentenced to five years of probation as part of his own plea deal.

Sarma Melngailis (Netflix)

As Vanity Fair journalist Allen Salkin explains in the series: “Anthony sat in Rikers basically for most of a year, while the legal process went on. So, ultimately, when he pled guilty to the charges, he’d almost served all his time already as he’d never made bail.

“He was just sentenced to that time served, plus a little extra, and given probation for a period of time. There was no condition that he had to seek mental health assistance, nor was there really any provision or anything that was out out there to protect the next woman who was going to come along that he was gonna scam.”

The journalist added: “I would have preferred that somehow a warning label was stuck to this guy for the rest of his life. ‘Don’t give him any money. Beware of what he’s telling you.’”

Strangis refused to give a comment to the makers of Bad Vegan. However, viewers are played a phone call between him and Melngailis at the end of the series.

The call is from 2019, 22 months after Melngailis’s release from prison (she served four months).

“I miss you. I do miss you,” he can be heard saying on the phone. “I love you. You’re the smartest person I’ve ever met, OK. And you’re the most beautiful thing.”

Melngailis can be heard laughing. “It f***ing pisses me off because you’re right,” she tells him.

If Strangis has not committed any crimes since his release from Rikers, his probation should come to an end in May 2022.

Bad Vegan is out now in its entirety on Netflix.