George Santos even scammed the Amish

[Ken]

Stealing puppies from the Amish in order to sell them through your fake animal rescue charity?!? George Santos seems to be achieving some performance art aesthetic of pure corruption that is so pervasive you just have to step back and admire it at some level.

https://www.politico.com/news/2023/02/0 ... s-00082091

Rep. George Santos was charged with theft in Pennsylvania’s Amish Country in 2017 after a series of bad checks were written in his name to dog breeders, according to the court and a lawyer friend who helped him address the charge.

Just days after $15,125 in checks were made out for “puppies,” according to the memo lines, Santos held an adoption event at a Staten Island pet store with his animal rescue charity Friends of Pets United, according to the store’s Instagram account and a person who attended the event.

The charge was dismissed and his record expunged after Santos claimed someone had stolen his checkbook, according to the court and the lawyer.

The Pennsylvania theft charge, which has not previously been reported, is the latest revelation in a dizzying array of scandals for the beleaguered New York congressman, who fabricated much of his campaign biography. Santos is facing at least five law enforcement probes including an FBI investigation into his role in a service dog charity scheme tied to Friends of Pets United and a Brazilian fraud case.

Santos has said he merely fabricated parts of his résumé and has denied breaking any laws. A spokesperson and a lawyer for Santos did not respond to a request for comment.

A chance encounter with a former classmate

Attorney Tiffany Bogosian, who attended middle school with Santos but eventually fell out of touch with her classmate, ran into him at a Queens Starbucks in late 2019, she told POLITICO.

Santos told her he just lost a bid for Congress. Several weeks later, she said, Santos asked for help: He’d been awakened by a 4 a.m. knock on the door of his Queens home from NYPD officers who served him with an extradition warrant related to the Pennsylvania theft charge, he told her. On Feb. 15, 2020 she said he stopped by Bogosian’s New York office, where she tried to help him with some legal advice as a friend.

Santos said his checkbook had gone missing in 2017 and blamed someone he knew for its disappearance, she recalled. He told Bogosian he “canceled the checkbook” with TD Bank as soon as he’d noticed it was gone, just “days after getting it.”

Bogosian said one of the NYPD detectives told her and Santos they should contact a Pennsylvania state trooper about the warrant.

The NYPD referred questions about the warrant to Pennsylvania State Police, who said it doesn’t comment on prior investigations.

At her office in February 2020, Bogosian sent an email to “Trooper Adams” on Santos’ behalf, according to a copy of the message she shared with POLITICO.

In the email, Borgosian argued Santos’ case, as he’d relayed it to her.

“In 2017 he received four check books for the account at his request from the TD BANK branch he banked with in Queens, NY, and of the four one went missing,” Bogosian wrote to the Pennsylvania trooper.

“He immediately called his bank upon learning 1/4 check books was missing and all checks were canceled at that time, with a stop pay on all checks.”

“As such no checks were ever cashed or presented against his account due to his cancellation of all checks linked to this account. The account was closed on March 3, 2018, for personal reasons unrelated to any alleged fraud on his account (banking preference),” Bogosian wrote.

She attached copies of the nine canceled checks to eight different people and corresponding bank statements from Santos’ account showing a negative balance of $690 on Nov. 4, 2017 and another negative balance of $349 on Dec. 3, 2017.

She noted to the trooper that the signatures were different on each of the checks and attached Santos’ New York State driver’s license to show his signature on that ID didn’t match any of the ones on the checks. She wrote that Santos was clearly a victim of fraud — but hadn’t realized it until he was served with the warrant because he’d canceled the checks and later closed the account.

Santos told Bogosian, because he was involved in politics, he couldn’t have an outstanding charge against him. A week after their meeting, he went to Pennsylvania to address the warrant, and told prosecutors that he “worked for the S.E.C.,” successfully persuading them to drop the charges, she remembered him telling her after he returned.

Bogosian said she didn’t learn why the Pennsylvania State Police couldn’t locate Santos until 2020, or how they ultimately found him in Queens, but said the trooper seemed happy to have “finally found” Santos when she talked to him on the phone after she sent the email.

Bogoisan said she now doesn’t believe Santos’ story, after what happened a few months later.

Bogosian told The Washington Post last month that she introduced a personal injury client who’d won a big settlement to Santos in late 2020 after he’d promised lucrative investment opportunities. Santos tried to get the client, Christian Lopez, to invest with Harbor City Capital, a Florida firm where he worked that the Securities and Exchange Commission later said was a Ponzi scheme. Her client demurred, telling CNN the rate of return promised by Santos sounded too good to be true.

Santos has said he wasn’t aware of any illegality at the firm and is not named in the SEC complaint.

“I did think it was so weird at the time that his checks didn’t have his address or phone number listed on them. After the dinner with Christian [Lopez] I started having second thoughts, I thought, ‘Oh, he had the animal adoptions.’ To be honest, even at the time I questioned it,” she said, but she ultimately took Santos at his word.

Theft by deception charge

A representative from York County District Court in Pennsylvania confirmed Santos was charged in November 2017 with theft by deception, but said the record was expunged on Nov. 24, 2021. No further information about why the charge was expunged could be given, the representative said.

One of Santos’ bounced checks was written out to Jacob Stoltzfus, a dog breeder in Bird-in-Hand, Pa., in the amount of $775 for “puppy” and dated Nov. 22, 2017, according to a copy of the check obtained by POLITICO. Stoltzfus said that would have been a typical amount for one of his purebred dogs at the time.

The recipients attempted to cash the checks at Coatesville Savings Bank and Bank of Bird-in-Hand in Pennsylvania.

Just three days after the $775 check is dated — on Nov. 25, 2017 — Santos’ animal charity Friends of Pets United held a puppy adoption event at the Staten Island pet store Pet Oasis.

“Friends of Pets United has a puppy overload … We’ll be cuddling: Golden Retriever, Lab, Yorkie, Border collie, American Eskimo and Shepherds … #adoptdontshop,” an Instagram post from Pet Oasis read.

The New York Times reported this week that Santos had an unusual request for the pet store owner Daniel Avissato after an adoption event at Pet Oasis. He asked Avissato to make a check with the proceeds out to his name instead of the name of the charity. Avissato said he refused, but later noticed — when he looked at his bank records — that the check had been changed to the way Santos wanted it, according to the Times.

Later that same year, in December 2017, Michele Vazzo said she met Santos at Pet Oasis when she adopted a puppy at another event. Santos told her the golden retriever was rescued from an Amish puppy mill. There were many dogs at the charity events, and adoption costs ranged from $300 to $400, she recalled.

“The fees were always different and he always had a ton of puppies and a ton of people helping him,” Vazzo said in an interview.

Santos told her different stories about where the puppies came from, sometimes saying he found pregnant dogs on the street and other times claiming he rescued them in Puerto Rico or other places, she said.

After Vazzo adopted her puppy, Santos asked her to volunteer for his charity to foster dogs and coordinate adoption events. She grew disillusioned with him after she said she fostered an estimated 30 dogs in one month, but the only help Santos offered was some money for paper towels.

The charity was not a registered nonprofit or rescue group, according to The New York Times.

[barnhart]

On some level I admire his commitment to his own story telling. There are so many career options open for that skill set, author, writing screen plays, acting, defense lawyer, public relations ect... Now that I think about it, politics is on that list as well. I think he will do fine as long as he can stay out of jail.

[Ken]

On some level I admire his commitment to his own story telling. There are so many career options open for that skill set, author, writing screen plays, acting, defense lawyer, public relations ect... Now that I think about it, politics is on that list as well. I think he will do fine as long as he can stay out of jail.

He's like the students who go to extraordinary elaborate schemes to cheat on tests. When that same level of effort would probably earn them an A on the test the ordinary way.

If you add up all the time and effort he has put into all this endless scams, and just applied that same effort to working an ordinary job he probably would have come out ahead. I don't think he will walk away this time though. There is far too much white hot attention on him now and no DA is going to let him skate. Being successful at this sort of grifting really requires that you keep a low profile.

[Sliceitup]

I can’t decide if the guy is brilliant or stupid or some combination of both. It’s exhausting just thinking of all the lies and schemes he had going.

[Grace]

I can’t decide if the guy is brilliant or stupid or some combination of both. It’s exhausting just thinking of all the lies and schemes he had going.

He is a politician. I was thinking the same thing on Tuesday evening, although it was another politician whose lies were exhausting.

[steve-in-kville]

He's like the students who go to extraordinary elaborate schemes to cheat on tests. When that same level of effort would probably earn them an A on the test the ordinary way.

Or coworkers who put more effort into getting out of doing work, then it would be to just do the work.

Seriously, most of what I know about current politics is from watching Saturday Night Live clips on Youtube. Is this Santos guy that much of a fraud? The past few weeks, SNL really hammered on him.

[Bootstrap]

Seriously, most of what I know about current politics is from watching Saturday Night Live clips on Youtube. Is this Santos guy that much of a fraud? The past few weeks, SNL really hammered on him.

Yeah, he really does seem to be quite a fraud.

We'll find out as investigations proceed, but the following reports seem credible:

• In 2020, Santos' personal financial disclosures claimed that he had no assets over $5,000 - no bank accounts, no stock accounts, no real property. In 2022, he claimed 11 million dollars, with no real explanation of where the money came from.
• Santos has unresolved charges for check fraud in Brazil.
• Federal prosecutors for the Eastern District of New York were investigating Santos's finances, and the Nassau County district attorney was investigating him for unspecified reasons.
• Santos claimed that he had graduated from Baruch College summa cum laude with a 3.89 GPA. He never graduated from any college. He never attended Baruch College.
• Santos claimed he had worked at both CitiGroup and Goldman Sachs. Both firms say he never worked for them.
• Santos lied about being Jewish, perhaps to court the Jewish vote in his district. He lied about his maternal grandparents, saying they were Jewish Holocaust refugees who had fled Soviet Ukraine and German-occupied Belgium. (Both of his maternal grandparents were born in Brazil.)
• George Santos reportedly divorced a woman 2 weeks before running for office in 2019 despite suggesting he's been 'openly gay' for a decade.

[steve-in-kville]

• In 2020, Santos' personal financial disclosures claimed that he had no assets over $5,000 - no bank accounts, no stock accounts, no real property. In 2022, he claimed 11 million dollars, with no real explanation of where the money came from.
• Santos has unresolved charges for check fraud in Brazil.
• Federal prosecutors for the Eastern District of New York were investigating Santos's finances, and the Nassau County district attorney was investigating him for unspecified reasons.
• Santos claimed that he had graduated from Baruch College summa cum laude with a 3.89 GPA. He never graduated from any college. He never attended Baruch College.
• Santos claimed he had worked at both CitiGroup and Goldman Sachs. Both firms say he never worked for them.
• Santos lied about being Jewish, perhaps to court the Jewish vote in his district. He lied about his maternal grandparents, saying they were Jewish Holocaust refugees who had fled Soviet Ukraine and German-occupied Belgium. (Both of his maternal grandparents were born in Brazil.)
• George Santos reportedly divorced a woman 2 weeks before running for office in 2019 despite suggesting he's been 'openly gay' for a decade.

So what is to the joke of him dressing in drag?

[Bootstrap]

So what is to the joke of him dressing in drag?

I didn't know about this until you asked, but Google pulled it right up. I think that's about two times he dressed in drag at public events in Brazil. At least one of these is on Youtube.

Here he is being interviewed in drag:

[Ken]

Here is today's update in the Washington Post with more detail on how he scammed Amish dog breeders. This is a gift link so you should be able to read the article without hitting the paywall: https://wapo.st/3HRPiqs

Amish country farmers say George Santos took puppies, left bad checks

YORK COUNTY, Pa. — It was after dark when George A. Santos approached the farmer in Pennsylvania’s Amish country looking to buy at least eight puppies.

He promised a wire transfer of more than $5,000, the farmer said, but it never appeared. He said Santos ended up writing a smaller check — and driving off with four golden retrievers.

“Something inside me said I just cannot trust him,” the farmer told The Washington Post, speaking on the condition of anonymity to protect his privacy.

The check bounced.

The farmer, who has not previously spoken to the media, said he called police after the encounter in 2017. It took nearly two years for the authorities to locate Santos back home in New York, but he was eventually charged with theft by deception, according to a brief mention in the Star, a newspaper in York County. In May 2021, the paper reported, the case was dismissed under a provision of Pennsylvania law that allows misdemeanor charges to be dropped when a prosecutor consents and “satisfaction has been made to the aggrieved person.”

Indeed, the farmer said he was finally paid for his four dogs. In his handwritten bank ledger, he wrote: “George Santos reimburse bad ck.”

The farmer told The Post he did not think that Santos, a Republican elected to Congress in November after brazenly lying to voters about his past, should be in public office.

“Sometimes people change for the better,” the farmer said, “but would he really, after crimes like this?”

Rep. George Santos (R-N.Y.) has falsified his personal history, padded his résumé and made other outlandish claims that have put him in hot water. Police and court officials said no record of such a case is available. Pennsylvania law allows for the expungement of cases that end in dismissal, which then erases records related to those cases and bars officials from acknowledging their existence.

Santos’s attorney, Joseph W. Murray, declined to comment. David Sunday, the York County district attorney, did not respond to requests for comment.

A lawyer friend of Santos’s who said he consulted her after police came knocking gave The Post copies of nine checks from a “George A. Santos” bank account, six of which mentioned “puppies” or “puppy” in the memo line. She said he told her that he did not write the checks and that they did not clear his account. They were written for amounts totaling $15,125 and were dated November 2017 — a period in which Santos, then the head of a purported animal rescue charity, was holding puppy-adoption events on Staten Island. The checks and the charge against Santos were first reported Thursday by Politico.

A lawyer friend Santos consulted after police came looking for him gave The Post copies of nine canceled checks from a “George A. Santos” bank account, six of which mentioned “puppies” or “puppy” in the memo line.

The farmer whose complaint sparked the theft charge is one of four dog breeders in Amish country, flanking the Susquehanna River in southern Pennsylvania, who told The Post that they received bad checks bearing Santos’s name that month. The checks were used to buy golden retrievers, German shepherds and Yorkshire terriers. The other three breeders said they did not file police reports and were never paid.

Shown photographs of Santos, the farmer in York County and another of the breeders The Post contacted identified him as the man who wrote the checks. The other two said they could not tell because the encounters occurred one night in the dark more than five years ago. All spoke on the condition of anonymity to guard their privacy.

The recipients of the five other checks could not be reached.

There's more at the link.