On Nov. 8, 2022, in a major Republican upset, a relative political newcomer with an almost Hollywoodesque life story won election to Congress in New York’s 3rd Congressional District. To the surprise and elation of his party’s leadership, he flipped a key seat that Democrats had held for two decades.
The winner, George Devolder Santos, only 34, was, according to his campaign bio, “a proud American Jew,” the son of Brazilian immigrants and descended from Ukrainian grandparents who had fled the Holocaust. Santos was openly gay and a self-made millionaire who, after graduating from Baruch University in 2010, worked for Citigroup and Goldman Sachs before striking out on his own and making big money in real estate. If he could be a fictional character, he wrote, he would choose Captain America.
One month later, as first reported in The New York Times and then in just about every news outlet in the United States, it turned out that virtually none of this was true. In addition, Santos had lied about his parents’ careers and wealth, that his mother had been in the South Tower of the World Trade Center on Sept. 11, 2001, but survived, that he founded an animal rescue charity, and a raft of other tidbits of his background, while omitting that he had been indicted for embezzlement in Brazil. As of this writing, Santos has not been accused of criminal behavior in the United States — he is under investigation by the Nassau County district attorney as well as federal prosecutors — but his finances are so smoky that few would be surprised if that were to occur. His entire resumé, it seems, was a series of whoppers so transparently false that even Inspector Clouseau would have, in the immortal words of Patrick Henry, “smelt a rat.”
