The founder of Pirate’s Booty Snacks lost his chaotic bid for mayor of a tiny New York community after he claimed he was the village leader and had the authority to replace the entire local government, officials said Thursday.
Elena Villafane, the incumbent mayor of Sea Cliff, defeated Pirate’s Booty Snacks founder Robert Ehrlich, 1,064-62, on Tuesday in the village, which is about 26 miles northwest of midtown Manhattan.
Villafane had been running unopposed for her third two-year term when Ehrlich jumped into the fray a week ago Monday.
That's when Ehrlich went to Village Hall and "presented a statement falsely asserting his authority as mayor, demanding access to office space, and declaring that the entire Village staff was fired effective immediately but could reapply for their jobs," the village said in a statement.
"While Village staff remained calm and professional throughout the incident, Ehrlich and his associates raised their voices, used profane language, made outlandish claims, and engaged in direct harassment of Village personnel," the statement said. "Despite multiple requests to leave, they refused, creating a hostile and disruptive environment that required police intervention."
The brazen assertions stunned village officials who said they'd never seen or heard from Ehrlich before in any civic context.
"To the best of my knowledge, he has never participated in any government entity, in any volunteer agency, any board or commission," Village Administrator Bruce Kennedy told NBC News on Thursday.
Ehrlich rejected election results, saying they were “rigged” and counted in secret.
He said that poll workers weren’t properly checking rolls — and that he'd know, claiming his supporters made repeated visits to the voting booth.
"So one of my supporters voted three times," Ehrlich claimed to NBC News. "Another one voted four times, and they didn’t even realize that he was coming in that many times. "
Ehrlich insists he and other village residents have power, under the New York Government Reorganization and Citizen Empowerment Act, to completely replace the village government structure with another.
"I don't want to dissolve the village. I want to consolidate the village," said Ehrlich, who calls himself the duly elected mayor of the “Incorporated Village of Sea Cliff Residents.”
"Consolidation means that one entity, the ruling entity, the residents, who actually are the boss of the other entity, could then absorb that entity into this entity, making everything run the way it is now, except without the abuse and fear and threats that come to this village."
Ehrlich's primary beefs with village government are remarkably pedestrian. He says that services aren’t delivered in a timely manner and that not enough is being done to revitalize business on the main drag, Sea Cliff Avenue.
"They really could not care less and do not want businesses to thrive," he said. "The place needs foot traffic. It needs people from the outside coming into Sea Cliff, from [other North Shore Long Island communities, such as] Roslyn, from Great Neck."
Ehrlich said he has collected 1,900 "votes" at his coffee shop for the past four years, saying such an unusual ballot has holy precedent.
"Nineteen hundred votes since our election," he said. "The longest election in history was from 1268 to 1271, when they couldn't find a pope. So actually, I have the longest election in history."
In theory, Ehrlich or anyone else could submit a petition with 10% of the village's registered voters asking for Sea Cliff to be dissolved.
Once such signatures were verified, a villagewide vote would be held to ask whether Sea Cliff should be eliminated and then folded into the town of Oyster Bay, Kennedy said.
"He had a FedEx-type envelope that was sealed that he was waving around," allegedly with petition signatures, at the March 10 meeting, Kennedy said. "And when he was asked, 'Do you want to submit that?' and he said, 'No.'"
As a write-in candidate, Ehrlich had virtually no chance of winning Tuesday.
Asked whether he might take another shot at running for mayor in two years, using more conventional methods that could land him on the ballot, he said: "No, I'm mayor now. Why do I have to wait two years? I am mayor at this moment. I can write an executive order."
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