The real-estate developer charged with leaving his pal to die after drunkenly crashing his Porsche in Sag Harbor insists he had a perfectly innocent reason for a recent trip to Puerto Rico — he needed a vacation, he told The Post in a jailhouse interview.
“There was a lot of pressure,” said Sean Ludwick, who is accused of trying to flee the country as he faces 32 years in the slammer if convicted in his friend’s death.
“I wanted to get some sun. I was on vacation.”
Prosecutors have countered that they caught Ludwick in Puerto Rico taking sailing lessons and arranging to buy a $385,000 boat so that he could flee to Venezuela.
A Suffolk County judge on Tuesday revoked Ludwick’s $1 million bail and threw him in the county jail in Riverhead.
But Ludwick, 43, told a Post reporter Thursday that there’s a good explanation for his dalliances in Puerto Rico. He was just catching some rays as he braced for his upcoming trial on aggravated vehicular homicide.
“I can’t drive because I have the DWI, so I went sailing. Makes sense, right?” he said.
The founder of Black House Development even blamed Mexican drug lord El Chapo for his getting nabbed.
An off-duty FBI agent moonlighting as a sailing teacher had called the cops on Ludwick after becoming suspicious of his student’s odd lines of questioning.
“My sailing instructor Googled me,” Ludwick griped. “Everyone wants to be a hero. With El Chapo in the news, it’s like, ‘Look! I stopped him.’ ”
“Does Venezuela extradite to the US” was one his Google queries, officials said.
“How do fugitives escape” was another.
“I’m an educated man,” Ludwick maintained. “I have two master’s degrees. I have five businesses. Where am I fleeing? I have two kids and my high-school sweetheart.”
Ludwick added, “In this day and age, you can’t run,” due to advances in technology. “It’s absurd.”
But Ludwick is charged with doing just that this past summer after allegedly crashing his 2013 Porsche convertible and leaving passenger and friend Paul Hansen in front of Hansen’s own house.
Prosecutors said Ludwick dragged Hansen out of the badly damaged car before trying to flee the scene. Cops caught up to him a quarter-mile away.
His lawyer, Benjamin Brafman, declined to comment.