Mayor’s husband stole restaurant’s electricity for their $13M beachfront property, probe finds
The mayor of Allenhurst says there’s been a shocking development in the investigation following her husband’s electrical cord that he apparently ran to their oceanfront home last summer from a nearby town property.
The cable was not drawing electricity from a property in town, as he and many others thought; It was attached 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 was stealing from the restaurant.”
NJ.com reported last September that an orange electrical cord was wrapped around Frieda and Alex Adjmi’s oceanfront property on Allen Avenue. The mayor said her husband stretched the cord attached to the cable at a beachside shack “a few times on nice weekends” to power his phone.
The Adjmis demolished the house on the property to build a new house in 2024, but occupied the property in the summer of 2025. They built a makeshift shack-style structure in the middle of the Allen Avenue lot, valued at $13 million.
Last year he promised to reimburse the town for its electricity usage.
“I recommended that our County Executive take immediate action and that the electricity he used to charge his phone (my husband) should be billed for this personal use. I want to be absolutely clear: I believe in full transparency and fairness. No matter how small the problem may seem, accountability is essential,” the mayor said in a statement.
NJ.com requested payment or invoices to the mayor’s husband through the Open Public Records Act and was told no such records existed.
This week, Mayor Adjmi said this issue was a mistake by the borough, which apparently — and illegally — strung a cable to the beach badge shack, which is connected to The Reef Club restaurant inside the borough’s beach club.
NJ mayor says her husband didn’t steal the town’s electricity. It was a nearby restaurant.
Reef Club won the lease for the space before summer 2025 but was unable to obtain a certificate of occupancy in time for full opening. Instead, only the outside area was open.
As the summer of 2026 was rapidly approaching, a certificate of occupancy had still not been received as of the end of March.
The mayor said after NJ.com’s story that the town’s public works department, along with an outside electrical contractor, traced the wire to the restaurant’s meter.
The mayor said the issue had been overblown, and the Reef Club’s operator said he often let people charge their phones at the club and it wasn’t a big deal.
His testimony was generally corroborated by the county’s attorney, David A. Laughlin, who added that the Monmouth County Prosecutor’s Office investigated the matter but apparently did not find any wrongdoing.
Laughlin cautioned that he had no firsthand knowledge of the power cable issue, although the mayor deferred some questions about the issue to him.
The mayor said she and her husband were not questioned in such an investigation.
The prosecutor’s office did not immediately return a message seeking comment.
If anyone has money, it’s the Reef Club, the mayor said.
Mayor Adjmi said he found the issue to be a relatively minor incident that some people in town wanted to blow out of proportion because they didn’t like him.
“This is so disgusting,” he said. “I can handle hate.”
“But we’ve done some great things here.”
NJ mayor says her husband didn’t steal the town’s electricity. It was a nearby restaurant.
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