Lúcia Guimarães: George Santos’ scams are proof that too many rascals get in the way

To understand Congressman George Santos, one has to remember another George, who died in 1936 in the infamous Sing Sing maximum security prison in northern Manhattan. George C. Parker who, like Santos, went by other names, none of them Kitara Ravache, was a very clever salesman of properties he didn’t own.

We owe Parker an American idiom that defines the contemporary sucker: “If you believe that, I’ve got a bridge in Brooklyn to sell.” Yes, the talented rogue Parker liked to sell public monuments and managed to get money from multiple tamale “selling” the majestic Brooklyn Bridge. Time and again the police had to arrest the silly shoppers who were trying to erect toll booths on the bridge, which are free to cross.

To understand George Santos, it is necessary to admit that New York, where he was born, the son of Brazilian immigrants, is not enough as an explanation. It is necessary to know the surroundings of my city, which produced an adage at the height of the wisest coined by ancient philosophers: “Too rascal gets in the way.”

George Santos frequented Rio de Janeiro when he lived in Niterói more than once, between 2005 and 2011. He does not correspond to the benign clichés of the folklore of the Rio malandro, in part because some of the witnesses who declared themselves his victims were treated with special cruelty.

But the almost daily revelations are beginning to suggest that the parliamentary rogue has screwed up badly.

Mother Jones magazine revealed this Wednesday (1st) that the rogue Santos dragged at least one unwary relative in the practice known as “scarecrow donation” in political campaigns. It consists of circumventing the law that limits the amount of donations made by individuals using the name, address and US CPF of people who have not donated to the politician. There is growing evidence that Santos’ two congressional campaigns — the losing one in 2020 and the winning one in 2022 — reported scarecrow donors, including multiple close relatives, which is a federal crime.

“Wait a minute,” readers will say. “If the 2020 campaign was already lavish with oranges, how did the intrepid hoaxer go free to victory in a second campaign?”

The explanation may lie in the culture of American capitalism. A country that produces fraudulent epics — like Bernie Madoff’s pyramid, the energy company Enron, the Theranos of fake tech innovation and the FTX of cryptocurrencies — requires, in addition to smooth-talking rascals, an extraordinary degree of credulity in a system exalted as vehicle of “exceptionalism”, but which actually functions as the trickster’s useful idiot.

A loquacious source, with decades of access to Long Island political spree, which includes part of the district represented by George Santos, tells this column that the region’s Republican political machine received 5% of municipal employee wages back.

In this case, the gringa crack did not only benefit a New York family, but the mafia of families generous in employing relatives at the expense of the taxpayer, who graced the Capitol with a senator and several deputies. Credit where credit is due. The crack was not improved by the captain’s family wandering aimlessly around Orlando. At most, they can be accused of plagiarism.