Pirate's Booty Founder Loses Race, Insists He's Mayor

"It was supposed to be a simple, uncontested race," but the mayoral election earlier this week in Sea Cliff, New York, has been anything but. Per a statement from the Long Island village, incumbent Mayor Elena Villafane saw a "decisive victory" in Tuesday's ballot-casting, pulling in 1,064 votes to the 62 votes received by her challenger, who wasn't named in the statement. However, that challenger—Robert Ehrlich, founder of the Pirate's Booty snack empire—isn't ready to concede: ABC7 and NBC News report the 66-year-old has been staging a "mutiny" of sorts, after he jumped into the race as a write-in candidate a week before the election.

The outlets say Villafane's uncontested race took a turn on the morning of March 10, when Ehrlich showed up at Village Hall and declared himself Sea Cliff's mayor, declaring everyone in the office fired (though he said they could reapply for their jobs) and demanding he be given office space. "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 village said in a statement, adding police were called and that Ehrlich and whoever accompanied him finally left after "nearly an hour of escalating hostility."

Village officials say "they'd never seen or heard from Ehrlich before in any civic context," per NBC. The New York Times reports that Ehrlich had invoked a 2009 state law that gives residents the power "to dissolve their town or reformulate it." Ehrlich claimed to have the law's required signatures of 10% of the village's population, but he refused to show anyone the list, claiming the signees feared retribution. He declared himself a write-in candidate the next day after the Village Hall incident.

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And it doesn't appear, even after the election numbers flooded in against him, that Ehrlich—who compared his plight to that of Anne Frank in a text to the New York Post—is giving up his cause. "I'm mayor now," he told NBC when asked if he planned to run again in 2027, adding that the most recent election had been "rigged." "Why do I have to wait two years? I am mayor at this moment. I can write an executive order." Ehrlich claims he's now in charge of the "Incorporated Village of Sea Cliff Residents." (More Long Island stories.)