Mayor’s husband stole restaurant’s electricity for their $13M beachfront property, probe finds

The mayor of Allenhurst says a follow-up investigation of an electric cord that her husband stretched to their oceanfront home last summer, apparently from a nearby town property, has a shocking twist.

The cord was not pulling power from a town property, as she and many thought, but it was connected to a restaurant inside the town’s beach club.

“The town was stealing electricity from the restaurant,” Mayor Frieda O. Adjmi said this week. “So technically my husband, he was stealing from the restaurant.”

NJ.com reported this past September that an orange electric cord snaked onto Frieda and Alex Adjmi’s oceanfront property on Allen Avenue. The mayor said her husband stretched the cord, which was plugged into a cord at a beach badge hut on the boardwalk, so he could power his phone, “a few times on nice weekends.”

The Adjmis demolished the home on the property in 2024 to build a new one but used the property in the summer of 2025. They put up a temporary cabana-style structure in the middle of the Allen Avenue lot – which is valued at $13 million.

She pledged last year to pay back the town for the electricity use.

“I have advised our Borough Administrator to take immediate action and that (my husband) must be billed for this personal use of electricity to charge his phone. I want to be absolutely clear: I believe in full transparency and fairness. No matter how small the matter may seem, accountability is essential,” the mayor said in a statement.

NJ.com requested through the Open Public Records Act the payment or bills to the mayor’s husband and was told that no such records exist.

This week, Mayor Adjmi said the matter was a mistake by the borough, which apparently – and illegally – stretched a cord to the beach badge hut that is metered to The Reef Club restaurant inside the borough’s beach club.

The Reef Club won the lease for the space before the summer of 2025, but it was unable to obtain a certificate of occupancy in time for a full opening. Instead, only its outside space was open.

As the summer of 2026 fast approaches, it still had not received the certificate of occupancy as of late March.

The mayor said after NJ.com’s story, the town’s public works department, with an outside electric contractor, traced to the cord to the restaurant’s meter.

The mayor said the matter was blown out of proportion and The Reef Club’s operator said he often allowed people to charge their phones at the club and it was not a big deal.

Her account was generally corroborated by the borough’s attorney, David A. Laughlin, who added that the Monmouth County Prosecutor’s Office investigated the matter but apparently found no criminality.

Laughlin cautioned he has no firsthand knowledge of the electric cord issue, despite the mayor deferring some questions about it to him.

The mayor said she and her husband were not questioned in any such probe.

The prosecutor’s office did not immediately return a message seeking comment.

If anyone is owned money, the mayor said, it’s The Reef Club.

Mayor Adjmi said she finds the matter a relatively small incident that some in town just want to blow out of proportion because they dislike her, she said.

“This is disgusting,” she said. “I can deal with the hate.”

“But we’ve done some amazing things here.”

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