() — US Representative George Santos admitted to stealing a man’s checkbook, which was in his mother’s possession, to buy clothes and shoes in 2008 in Brazil, in a statement Santos gave to police in 2010, according to 150 pages of documents from the case obtained by .
On June 17, 2008, Santos used stolen checks to make purchases at a store in Niterói, a city on the outskirts of Rio de Janeiro, according to court documents.
When making the purchase, Santos used an identification card with the name of the checkbook owner but a photo of himself, according to records.
The store clerk who accepted the forged check is listed as a victim in documents obtained by . Before leaving the store with the fraudulently purchased items, Santos wrote three contact numbers and an address on the checks.
Santos signed two checks at the store as if he were the account holder, court documents show. The checks were intended to pay for the purchase in two installments (set for July 25 and August 25, 2008).
The clerk became suspicious after the signatures on the checks did not match, he told police. Two days after Santos made the purchases, a man named Thiago walked into the same store with the shoes Santos bought and tried to return them for a different size. He said a friend gave him the shoes and he was unaware of any illicit activity.
The clerk had to pay the fraudulent purchase amount himself in installments to the store, he told police. The store ended up denying some of the payments to the employee, the store manager told police in 2010. The manager said that shortly after the sale they were able to find the owner of the bank account and speak to him on the phone. He said that he had closed the account in 2006 after losing the checkbook.
At one point, the employee was able to locate Santos using social media and says Santos promised to pay him back, but never did.
Screenshots of conversations between the employee and Santos are included in the documents obtained by .
The employee handed photos of Santos to police that he found on social media.
Several times in 2008, 2009 and 2010, police summoned Santos to speak with him.
On March 2, 2010, the police requested preventive detention for Santos, but the court denied the request at the suggestion of the Prosecutor’s Office, which at that time told the court that such a measure was not necessary.
Another citation was issued in November 2010.
On November 18, 2010, Santos’s mother told police that checks were stolen from a checkbook she kept in her purse belonging to Delio da Camara da Costa Alemao, who died a year before she spoke to the police. police in 2010. Santos’s mother was the nurse at Costa Alemao before her death. She told police that Santos used four checks in total.
On November 18, 2010, Santos spoke to police for the first time. He told police that he was an American with dual citizenship and that he was white and a teacher, police documents show. Santos confessed that he stole the checkbook from his mother’s bag, who used “some leaves” to make purchases. Santos confessed to having forged the man’s signature on two checks to buy clothes and shoes for a value of 2,144.00 reais (approx. US$1,313.63 on the date of the forgery), and confirmed that it was his signature on the forged checks.
Santos told investigators that neither his mother nor his friend Thiago were aware of the fraudulent purchases at the time of the crime.
Santos said his mother only found out about the stolen checks about a month after he took them. Santos said his mother asked him “desperately” to return the checkbook, but he had already torn up the remaining checks and dumped them down a gutter.
“The [Santos] He acknowledged being responsible for forging the signatures on the checks and also confirmed that he had destroyed the remaining checks,” authorities wrote in an investigative report on Santos. The document containing the confession was signed by Santos on November 18, 2010.
On June 20, 2011, investigators filed a request with the Civil Police to take immediate legal action against Santos. “Since we cannot remain indifferent to these facts and if action is not taken, this will only contribute to aggravating this state of insecurity in which we live, projecting an even more worrying future,” the document states.
On September 9, 2011, a judge summoned Santos to respond to the complaint through a lawyer. Neither Santos nor a lawyer ever responded.
On December 8, 2011, authorities attempted to serve a summons on Santos at his mother’s previous home, but were unable to locate him and she no longer lived there.
Additional subpoenas were issued for Santos on April 24, 2011, and December 14, 2011. He did not respond to either.
On January 13, 2013 and February 25, 2013, neither Santos nor his mother or grandmother at their previous addresses could be located.
On October 7, 2013, an edict was published in the Rio de Janeiro Diario de Justicia summoning Santos to appear in court after authorities were unable to locate him. Santos had 10 days to offer his defense but he never appeared.
On November 8, 2013, a prosecutor asked a judge to suspend the proceedings and the statute of limitations in the case until they could locate Santos.
On December 12, 2013, the judge suspended the statute of limitations so that the case could be reopened later if Santos is found, the documents show.
On October 9, 2020, a document from the judiciary said that they have still never been able to locate Santos to prosecute him for the crime.
The documents obtained by include images of the forged checks, as well as social media images the clerk used to identify Santos. In an interview with the New York Post last week, Santos denied having been charged with any crime in Brazil. and said: “I am not a criminal here, neither here nor in Brazil nor in any jurisdiction in the world. Absolutely not. That didn’t happen.”
Authorities in Brazil seek to reopen the case
Brazilian security forces will again file fraud charges against Santos, the Rio de Janeiro prosecutor’s office told , as the New York Republican faces a cloud of suspicion over his dubious resume.
Prosecutors said they will seek a “formal response” from Santos in connection with the checkbook stolen in 2008, after police suspended their investigation into it because they could not find it for notification for nearly a decade.
Authorities, after verifying Santos’ location, will make a formal request to the US Department of Justice to notify it of the charges, Maristela Pereira, a spokeswoman for the Rio de Janeiro prosecutor’s office, told . The prosecution told that the application will be submitted at the reopening this Friday.
previously confirmed that Santos was charged with embezzlement in a Brazilian court in 2011, according to case records from the Rio de Janeiro Court of Justice.
has contacted a lawyer for Santos for comment. The reinstatement of the fraud charges was first reported by the daily The New York Times.
Representative-elect George Santos, right, in a screenshot on Capitol Hill in Washington. File, Archive
He will take office despite the controversy
Santos, who helped Republicans win a narrow majority in the House of Representatives last year by taking a seat from Democrats, will take office despite admitting he lied about parts of his resume, after he The New York Times revealed for the first time that Santos’ biography appeared to be partly fictional.
confirmed details of that information about his college education and employment history and uncovered even more falsehoods by Santos, such as that he was forced to drop out of a New York private school when his family’s real estate assets collapsed and that he represented Goldman. Sachs at a major financial conference.
Santos’ claims that his grandparents fled the Holocaust as Ukrainian Jewish refugees and that his mother died for being present in the South Tower during 9/11 have also come under scrutiny, ‘s KFile has found.
In interviews with WABC radio and the New York Post On December 26, Santos admitted to lying about attending Baruch College and New York University, as well as misrepresenting his employment at Goldman Sachs and Citigroup, but said at the time that he still intended to serve in Congress.
Two days later, reported that the US Attorney’s Office for the Eastern District of New York had begun investigating the finances of Santos, who is facing questions about his estate and the more than $700,000 worth of loans he took out for his successful campaign 2022.
The same day, the Nassau County District Attorney’s Office announced that it was also investigating Santos’s false claims.
“No one is above the law and if a crime was committed in this county, we will prosecute,” Nassau County District Attorney Anne Donnelly said at the time.
The district attorney’s office did not specify what inventions it was exploring, and the US attorney’s office for the Eastern District of New York declined to comment.
has contacted a representative for Santos for comment on the investigations.
Santos’ reports to the Federal Election Commission (FEC) contain a number of unusual expenses, including exorbitant expenses for air travel and hotels, as well as a number of expenses one cent below the dollar figure for above which the FEC requires campaigns to save receipts.
“Campaign expenses for staff members, including travel, lodging and meals, are normal expenses of any competent campaign. The suggestion that the Santos campaign engaged in any illegal expenditure of campaign funds is, in the At best, irresponsible,” Santos’ lawyer Joe Murray said in a statement to on Saturday.
— ‘s AnneClaire Stapleton, Julia Vargas Jones, Marcia Reverdosa, Camilo Rocha, Rodrigo Pedrosa, Kyle Blaine, Andrew Kaczynski, Em Steck, Pamela Brown and Carolyn Sung contributed to this report.
