Hold My Snacks: Pirate's Booty Founder Attempts a Seaside Coup

New York Times

19-03-2025

The little village of Sea Cliff, on Long Island's north shore, re-elected its mayor on Tuesday.
For the normally placid small town, the election capped eight turbulent days and seemingly ended a quixotic write-in campaign by a brash snack-food mogul.
But elections these days don't always end when they're over. And so even before the final vote had been counted, that snack food mogul — who professionally uses the title Captain Bootyhead — declared that the election was 'rigged' and that he was the mayor of Sea Cliff.
He received 62 votes.
'Our movement continues,' he announced. 'This place needs a voice, and at the moment it's me.'
It all started last Monday, when Robert Ehrlich, the founder of Pirate's Booty Snacks, marched into the Village Hall in Sea Cliff (pop. 5,000) and announced that he was now the mayor. Everyone else, he said, was fired.
Mr. Ehrlich, 66, was invoking a 2009 state law that empowers residents to dissolve their town or reformulate it. The first step is to gather signatures from 10 percent of the town's voters. Mr. Ehrlich waved an envelope that he claimed held 1,800 signatures. He declined to show them to anyone because he said the signers were afraid of retribution.
'I told him to leave and called the police,' said Brian Kennedy, the village administrator.
The following day, Mr. Ehrlich announced that he was running as a write-in candidate. As rationale, he offered a blizzard of dubious claims and unsubstantiated allegations.
Painting the current administration as calcified and no fun, he promised to lower taxes and cut regulations on local businesses. His greatest wrath seemed to be aimed at a restriction on outdoor dining, and at the officials who created it. Mr. Ehrlich, it should be noted, owns a cafe in town.
'If you ask me,' he said in an interview, sounding already like a national political figure, 'the election will be rigged.' But win or lose, he said, he would still be mayor. He vowed to call for a village-wide tax strike if he lost. 'Let's see where they go without any of the revenue,' he said.
Elections in Sea Cliff — a waterfront hamlet of wooden clapboard Victorian houses, originally founded as a Methodist tent camp — are not typically W.W.E.-style smackdowns. Elena Villafane, the incumbent mayor, who was running uncontested until Mr. Ehrlich's surprise announcement, won the last election with only 182 votes. The job pays $12,000 a year and is, she said, a lot of work.
'I would welcome a contestant,' she said. 'But you have to give people a chance to find out who you are and what you're going to do. You can't come out on the eve of the election and just throw everything up in the air.' She paused. 'Well, I guess in the current world order you can.'
She pointed out what she saw as a flaw in Mr. Ehrlich's electoral logic. 'He wants to dissolve the village,' she said. 'OK. There's a process for that. Go ahead. But then if you dissolve the village, there's no village to be a mayor of.'
Mr. Ehrlich said he was driven to take over the town by a group of residents who were fed up with the local rules and regulations and the difficulty of getting building permits. He declined to name these backers, and in two group conversations this week, none agreed to use his or her full name, fearing that if they publicly supported Mr. Ehrlich, they would never get a permit again.
Mr. Ehrlich, a political novice, started Pirate's Booty in 1987; it was acquired by B&G Foods for $195 million in 2013. He now runs Vegan Rob's snack foods.
He has a history of legal battles with the village. After a 2004 lawsuit over a zoning dispute, in which he accused town officials of discriminating against him because he was Jewish, he was ordered to pay $900,000 to cover the officials' legal fees.
On Tuesday, Election Day, Mr. Ehrlich and his supporters circulated what he called 'a second ballot,' which — unlike those at the polling center — included his name along with Ms. Villafane's. By midday he said he had collected nearly 800 votes. Surely this meant he was the true mayor, he said. 'This is not going to be a peaceful transfer of power,' he vowed.
Outside the polling center, he met voters, pro and con. Keep spreading the manure, Rob, yelled Dianna LeMieux, using an earthier word for manure. She said his entry in the race was unhelpful. 'This is a very connected village,' she said. 'People like each other here.'
Inside, voting was unusually robust.
Natasha Kosnac, an accountant, who declined to say how she voted, said she agreed with Mr. Ehrlich that village life was encumbered by too much red tape. His unconventional candidacy, she said, was 'bringing light' to Sea Cliff. 'I don't know,' she said. 'He could be good.'
A little after 10:30 p.m., the results were in: 1,064 votes for Ms. Villafane; 62 write-in votes for Mr. Ehrlich.
Ms. Villafane said she wanted a return to normalcy. 'I will not tolerate any further attempts to undermine the governance of this Village,' she wrote in a text message.
But Mr. Ehrlich was undaunted. 'I'm still the mayor,' he said, adding that he wanted to meet with the governor to enforce his claim. As for the current administration, he said he will sue them for $390 million for impeding his business opportunities. Speaking with an authority that only he recognized, he said, 'I plan on taking their homes.'