A Fugitive Vegan Restaurateur Was Busted After Ordering Domino’s

Last year, the popular New York City raw vegan restaurant Pure Food And Wine started popping up in the news for all the wrong reasons: The staff staged a walkout and protest after not being paid for weeks. The restaurant's owner, Sarma Melngailis, was curiously absent and unreachable. She popped back in briefly to say there was financial problems and that she was "spending 100 percent of every waking moment trying to find a solution," but then she disappeared and has been missing since. The restaurant closed in July, one of her investors filed a lawsuit claiming Melngailis stole $280,000 from the restaurant's bank account, and the employees unionized and sued for back wages.

But now, after a year on the lam, detectives have tracked Melngailis down and finally have her in custody. The clincher: A detective caught the raw food pioneer and (former?) vegan when they busted her and her accomplice (and Kevin Smith lookalike) Anthony Strangis after they ordered a likely non-vegan Domino's pizza to their hotel room in Sevierville, Tennessee.

Pure Food and Wine opened in 2004, and was a hot spot popular amongst model types and vegan celebrities like Alec Baldwin and Woody Harrelson, operating alongside a sister restaurant, One Lucky Duck. From afar, you wouldn't guess that Pure Food and Wine was in financial trouble, with its pretty tony Gramercy Park-area location. But Melngailis was allegedly bleeding the restaurant dry behind the scenes.

Melngailis and Strangis are now in Sevierville jail, and Melngailis is facing charges of grand larceny, criminal tax fraud, scheme to defraud, and violation of labor law. Prosecutors are saying that Melngailis failed to pay more than $40,000 in wages to 84 employees, stole nearly $850,000 from investors, and didn't pay $400,000 in taxes, according to the New York Daily News. The Daily News is also reporting that Melngailis and Strangis spent $2 million at Foxwoods and Mohegan Sun casinos and on splurges like jewelry, European vacations, and Uber rides.

But for some, one of the most embarrassing indictments would be that Strangis may have lapsed into a dreaded omnivorous diet—involving Domino's pizza, no less! (Two restaurateurs in San Francisco recently found out the hard way what happens when vegans stray from the course after receiving hate mail and protests from customers who discovered that they reverted to eating meat.) However, it's too soon to know what really happened. According to a spokesman for the Sevierville police, Strangis definitely ordered the pizza. "We cannot confirm if the pizza is vegan or not," the spokesman added.

Nevertheless, Strangis and Melngailis were done in by a pizza, as was a mob boss in Italy last month. Would-be criminals beware—your love of pizza can take you down.