According to records obtained by AWN, George Santos, a Republican candidate for representative, admits to taking a man’s chequebook that was in his mother’s care in 2008 and using it to buy clothes and shoes.
150 pages of case documentation reveal that Santos made the admission in a statement to police in 2010.
Santos had been missing for almost ten years, so police had to put an end to their inquiry into him. However, according to AWN on Tuesday, Brazilian law enforcement will reopen the New York Republican’s fraud charges.
On June 17, 2008, Santos made purchases at a store in Niterói, a town outside of Rio de Janeiro, using stolen checks, according to court records. According to police records, he made the transaction using an ID card that had his own photo and the name of the checkbook’s owner.
Santos was called by the police on many occasions in 2008, 2009, and 2010 to speak with them. In November 2010, Santos’ mother reported to the police that her son had used four of the stolen checks from Delio da Camara da Costa Alemao’s chequebook, which she kept in her purse. Delio died a year earlier to the mother’s police report. Costa Alemao was cared for by Santos’ mother before he passed away.
In his initial conversation with the police that month, Santos admitted to stealing his mother’s chequebook and using “certain papers” to make purchases. On the day of the forgery, Santos admitted to writing two checks totaling roughly $1,313.63 for clothing and footwear with the man’s fake signature on them. He also verified that it was his signature.
According to police records, he also identified himself as an American with dual citizenship, White, and a professor.
Approximately a month after the checks were taken, according to Santos, his mother requested him to return the chequebook “with despair,” but he had already torn up the remaining checks and dumped them in a manhole.
In an inquiry report regarding Santos, the authorities stated, “He [Santos] acknowledged having been responsible for forging the signatures on the checks, further stating that he had destroyed the other checks.” On November 18, 2010, Santos put his signature on the document that contained the confession.
suspicious inspections
According to court records, Santos endorsed two checks at the store under his own name. The checks were written with the intention of making the purchase over two instalments on July 25 and August 25, 2008.
He informed authorities that the store clerk became concerned when the signatures on the checks did not match. Two days after Santos made the purchases, a guy by the name of Thiago entered the same shop carrying the shoes Santos had bought and attempted to exchange them for a different size. According to him, a buddy provided him the shoes and had no knowledge of any illegal activities.
The store eventually waived part of the payments for the clerk, the store manager informed police in 2010, but the clerk still had to pay the sum of the illegal purchase to the store in instalments, he said to the police. The manager stated they were able to track down the owner of the bank account quickly after the sale and spoke to him on the phone. He claimed that due to the loss of the chequebook, the account had been terminated in 2006.
The clerk claims that he once used social media to locate Santos and that Santos made a promise to repay him but never followed through. The shopkeeper provided the police with images of Santos that he had discovered on social media. In the records that AWN was able to get, there are screenshots of the exchanges between the clerk and Santos.
Both Santos’ mother and his friend Thiago were unaware of the fraudulent transactions at the time of the crime, he said police.
The hunt for Santos
In June 2011, detectives asked the Civil Police to initiate immediate legal action against Santos. He received a summons from a judge in September to reply to the charge via counsel. Santos and a lawyer were never contacted. Authorities attempted to serve a summons on Santos at his mother’s former residence three months later, but they were unsuccessful because they could not find him there and because she had moved out.
Santos, his mother, and grandmother at their previous homes could not be found in 2013, either. After authorities failed to find him, an edict was published in Rio de Janeiro’s justice gazette in October of that year summoning him to appear in court. Ten days were granted to Santos to provide his case, but he never did. The documents reveal that a court ultimately ordered the statute of limitations to be suspended so that the case could be revived if Santos was later discovered.
Santos had never been found, according to a document from the judiciary from as recently as October 2020, and he had never been charged with the crime.
Maristela Pereira, a spokesperson for the Rio de Janeiro prosecutor’s office, told AWN that Brazilian officials, having now confirmed Santos’ whereabouts, will submit a formal request to the US Justice Department asking them to inform Santos of the allegations. The request will be submitted when it reopens on Friday, the prosecutor’s office informed AWN.
Santos said in a recent interview with the New York Post that he had not been accused of any crimes in Brazil and added, “I am not a criminal here – not here, in Brazil, or in any jurisdiction in the globe. Definitely not. That didn’t occur.
