Carlos Bruno Simões, 39, was surprised to discover that the man he denounced for embezzlement in 2008, for a scam in a small store in Niterói, in the metropolitan region of Rio, was elected deputy in the United States.
“It was a surprise, he has some kind of compulsion to lie,” he told Sheet this Friday (23). The then 19-year-old who bought BRL 2,144 in clothes with two bad checks would become, at the age of 34, the elected Trumpist congressman George Anthony Devolder Santos.
“When another reporter called me I thought it was a prank, I didn’t even remember who it was. Then I put it on Google and some things came up in my memory. I remember why I had to pay that amount out of my pocket”, he says.
In the last week, Santos, who is the son of Brazilians, has had the version he created for his life dismantled. He began with a report by The New York Times on Monday (19), which raised a series of inconsistencies in his resume.
One of the shortcomings is the so-called fraud case in Brazil, a crime that Santos himself confessed to the Rio de Janeiro Civil Police in 2010. He admitted in a statement to having stolen and used checks from his mother’s purse, posing as an elderly she took care.
He didn’t calculate that the store clerk who would take payment, however, would go to such lengths to get the money back. Simões, who nowadays is a partner in a Japanese restaurant, says he did “everything he could to find him”, since he had to bear the loss.
He became suspicious as soon as the customer left through the trade door. He tried calling the three phone numbers written on the back of the checks, as well as going to the noted address, but he couldn’t get through. A few days later, he got lucky.
“The boyfriend [de Santos] went to change a shoe [que recebeu de presente], probably without knowing that it was a product of embezzlement. I followed him down the street, then got his mother’s address [de Santos], I went to their house. I remember being desperate after this guy,” she says.
Simões found the young man’s boyfriend, who worked as a courier at another nearby store, on Orkut, the most used social network up to that point. In his list of friends, he recognized the man who had identified himself as “Délio” in a profile named “Anthony Santos”.
The young man’s house was located in a dangerous neighborhood in Niterói, he describes, where the civil police officer who handled the case at the time said she could not enter alone. A stone wall with a wooden gate in Santa Rosa, he remembers.
“He was poor. Today he lives on Long Island, which is super expensive. Where did that money come from?”, asks the former salesman, saying he hopes he will be held accountable for the case.
In the case at the Court of Justice, there is a message sent by Santos a little after the event saying that he would pay the debt in installments, but Simões says he does not remember that and that he was never contacted by the current politician.
The American was even indicted by the police and denounced by the Public Ministry in 2011, but, as he was never found to be pronounced again, the Justice suspended the process in December 2013, accepting the request of the Public Prosecutor’s Office.
The action can resume when he is found or appoint a lawyer to represent him. “The crime has not prescribed. If there’s a lawyer who takes the case to indicate, I’m accepting it. Who knows how to recover that money, because it’s not worth little”, says Simões.
According to the New York Times, this period in which Santos was investigated in Brazil corresponds, in part, to the time when the elected deputy says he studied economics and finance at Baruch College, which did not find any records of his graduation in 2010.
So far, the politician has not yet explained the disagreements about his past and his finances. THE Sheet Tried to contact him via social media but got no response. This Thursday (22), he broke his silence and promised that he will speak out next week.
“I have my story to tell and it will be told next week. I want to assure everyone that I will address their concerns and that I remain committed to delivering the results I promised in my campaign,” he wrote in a Twitter post.
On the day the report was released, he only published a note attributed to his lawyer, Joseph Murray, who accused the newspaper: “It is not surprising that congressman-elect George Santos has enemies in the New York Times who try to smear his name with these statements defamatory”.
On Wednesday, Jewish publication The Forward reported that Santos may have also lied to voters about his Jewish ancestry and saying his maternal grandmother fled persecution during World War II.
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