Move over The Tinder Swindler — Bad Vegan: Fame. Fraud. Fugitives. is poised to be America’s next true crime obsession.
The Netflix four-part documentary series takes viewers inside one of New York’s strangest scandals: the downfall of “Queen of Vegan Cuisine” Sarma Melngailis, who went from a celebrated restaurateur to a fugitive when she went on the run with husband Anthony Strangis after swiping nearly $2 million from investors and employees.
They were arrested in May 2016, after ordering a non-vegan Dominos pizza to the Tennessee motel room where they were hiding out. Both later served jail time after pleading guilty to grand larceny, tax fraud, and conspiring to defraud.
That’s not even the craziest part of the story, which Bad Vegan: Fame. Fraud. Fugitives. will explore in full when it’s released on the streaming platform March 16. In a trailer for the series, which dropped on Tuesday, a producer asks one of Melngailis’ former associates, “Do you know about the meat suit?”
“What’s the meat suit?” she asks, in total confusion and panic, before asking again with dread, “Oh no, what’s the meat suit?”
“I’m going to need a minute,” she says, after hearing her answer.
Netflix
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The series comes from Chris Smith, the executive producer of Tiger King and director of Fyre: The Greatest Party That Never Happened. (Let’s just say, he knows a thing or two about stranger-than-fiction stories). It features interviews with chefs, former coworkers, and friends of Melngailis, all giving their perspective on what happened.
Before meeting Strangis, Melngailis owned and operated New York’s Pure Food and Wine, which won acclaim as “the top raw vegan restaurant in the world” and attracted a number of celebrity patrons including Owen Wilson, Gisele Bündchen, and Woody Harrelson.
“It was ahead of its time,” says one of the people interviewed for the series of the upscale spot, which according to the New York Times also served as the place where Alec Baldwin met his wife Hilaria in 2011. “It was a high-end, fine-dining vegan experience.”
But that changed after Melngailis became romantically involved and eventually married Strangis, a convict from Fairhaven, Massachusetts, with prior arrests for grand theft and for impersonating a police officer.
“There were tons of conspiracy theories about why she married him,” one former associate says of Strangis, who also went by the name Shane Fox. “Was there some sort of blackmail involved?”
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Netflix
The documentary certainly seems to suggest Strangis had a control over Melngailis. The opening moments in the trailer plays back audio of Strangis telling Melngailis, “You signed on to this. You told me you wanted happily ever after. If I tell you to take all your money out of the bank and light it on fire, do it.”
Later, the audience hears that he allegedly promised her he was going to make her beloved pitbull immortal. “Anthony told Sarma, she had to perform a series of tests,” an associate says. “It is a complete madness.”
Soon Melngailis began draining her restaurant’s funds and funneling the money to her husband so, as the the show’s description says, “he could make her dreams a reality.”
But then there’s the bigger question: was Melngailis, as prosecutors later claimed, in on it the whole time. And could she be, as someone asked in the trailer, “running a scam on him? What if that’s the con? It makes her look like the vegan Bernie Madoff.”
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Viewers will have to decide for themselves when Bad Vegan: Fame. Fraud. Fugitives. hits Netflix next month.
And they’ll get to hear from Melngailis herself, too. The former restaurateur will appear in the series.
