The North Shore Leader wrote in September, when few others were covering Santos, about his “inexplicable rise” in reported net worth, from essentially nothing in 2020 to as much as $11 million two years later. The story noted other oddities about the self-described gay Trump supporter with Jewish heritage, who would go on to flip New York’s 3rd Congressional District from blue to red, and is now under investigation by authorities for misrepresenting his background to voters.
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✓ But that system, which has atrophied for decades amid the destruction of news economies, appears to have failed completely this time.
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A tiny paper broke the George Santos scandal but no one paid attention
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"Months before the New York Times published a December article suggesting Rep.-elect George Santos (R-N.Y.) had fabricated much of his résumé and biography, a tiny publication on Long Island was ringing alarm bells about its local candidate.
The North Shore Leader wrote in September, when few others were covering Santos, about his “inexplicable rise” in reported net worth, from essentially nothing in 2020 to as much as $11 million two years later.
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The story noted other oddities about the self-described gay Trump supporter with Jewish heritage, who would go on to flip New York’s 3rd Congressional District from blue to red, and is now under investigation by authorities for misrepresenting his background to voters.
✓ “Interestingly, Santos shows no U.S. real property in his financial disclosure, although he has repeatedly claimed to own ‘a mansion in Oyster Bay Cove’ on Tiffany Road and ‘a mansion in the Hamptons’ on Dune Road,” managing editor Maureen Daly wrote in the Leader. “For a man of such alleged wealth, campaign records show that Santos and his husband live in a rented apartment, in an attached rowhouse in Queens.”
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The Leader reluctantly endorsed Santos’s Democratic opponent the next month. “This newspaper would like to endorse a Republican,” it wrote, but Santos “is so bizarre, unprincipled and sketchy that we cannot,” adding, “He boasts like an insecure child — but he’s most likely just a fabulist — a fake.”
✓ It was the stuff national headlines are supposed to be built on: A hyperlocal outlet like the Leader does the legwork, regional papers verify and amplify the story, and before long an emerging political scandal is being broadcast coast to coast.
But that system, which has atrophied for decades amid the destruction of news economies, appears to have failed completely this time.
Despite a well-heeled and well-connected readership — the Leader’s publisher says it counts among its subscribers Fox News hosts Sean Hannity and Jesse Watters and several senior people at Newsday, a once-mighty Long Island-based tabloid that has won 19 Pulitzers — no one followed its story before Election Day.
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When Santos apologized for “embellishing my résumé,” in a New York Post interview published Monday, he also vowed to serve out his term as a member of Congress.
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Local news doesn’t get much more local than the Leader. A weekly published and primarily run by Grant Lally, an attorney whose parents bought it in the late 1990s, most of the newspaper’s staff works part time and holds down other jobs to pay the bills. “Nobody can survive on local papers alone,” Lally said in an interview.
Lally was particularly well-prepared to cover the race for New York’s 3rd District. He had run for the seat himself in 1994, 1996 and again in 2014. A lifelong Republican, Lally was George W. Bush’s floor manager in Miami during the 2000 presidential election recount.
The Leader’s staff, which includes students and retirees, all are steeped in the largely wealthy local communities on the North Shore of Long Island, which gives them access to local political gossip. “We can boil that down very quickly,” Lally said.
A few years ago, Lally said, he went to lunch with Santos, who was soliciting support for his political career. “Right from the start, there was something off with him,” he recalled.
Santos told Lally that his family was from Belgium. Years later, Lally said, he watched Santos on the campaign trail “talking about his grandparents who had fled the Holocaust from Ukraine.” “It was just a flagrant, blatant concoction,” Lally said.
Lally has stayed in touch with his former staffers from his political campaigns, who would sometimes call him to gossip about local elections over the spring and summer. “You wouldn’t believe what we are seeing about Santos,” Lally recalled being told on some of those calls.
One tip came from a local home builder who said he had driven Santos around Long Island to look at mansions the candidate claimed to own and wanted to renovate. But Santos wouldn’t let the builder inside any of the homes, Lally said. He claimed he had tenants that prevented them from entering.
Another call came from a state senator who said a house in the Hamptons that Santos claimed to own was worth far less than the candidate said and was owned by someone else anyway. These tips helped inform the Leader’s reporting and its editorial, which were deeply skeptical of Santos’s claims of sudden riches.
“We expected it to pop a lot more than it did,” Lally said. For one, he thought that Santos’s opponent, Robert Zimmerman (D), would have made more of the Leader’s endorsement and “pushed” the contradictions his newspaper uncovered into larger publications such as Newsday and the New York Times.
Zimmerman told The Washington Post there were “many red flags that were brought to the attention of many folks in the media” but that “frankly, a lot of folks in the media are saying they didn’t have the personnel, time or money to delve further” into the story. “This experience has shown me just how important it is for everyone to support local media.”
Kim Como, a spokeswoman for Newsday, did not answer specific questions about the paper’s coverage of Santos but said in a statement: “We are continuing to cover the Santos story every day.”
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It’s possible that the Leader’s reporting fell into a void in part because there are fewer papers to cover the news than in the past. The number of journalists has declined by 60 percent since 2005, according to government statistics.
✓ Research from the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University this year found that on average two newspapers are disappearing in the United States every week. The nation has lost more than a quarter of its newspapers since 2005 and is on track to lose a third by 2025. There are now more than 1,600 counties with only one newspaper, typically a weekly.
“Local journalists are kind of like having beat cops walking the street,” said Tim Franklin, senior associate dean and professor at the Medill School. “Just as good beat cops can help keep a neighborhood safer, the presence of local journalists helps to keep our politics more honest and our government more accountable.”
Franklin predicts that “if we don’t fix the crisis in local news, we’re going to see more George Santos-type cases and instances of politicians going unchecked.”
Santos and his representatives did not respond to requests for comment.
Ashley Fetters Maloy and Azi Paybarah contributed to this report.
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The talented Mr. Santos: A congressman-elect’s unraveling web of deception
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The Republican who won a congressional seat on Long Island before his claims of being a wealthy, biracial, Ukrainian descendant of Holocaust survivors were debunked had, for a while, been generally consistent about two details in his improbable life: He has long said his first name is George and his last name is Santos.
But not always.
Before George Santos, 34, made a name for himself in politics, he had insisted on being called Anthony — one of his middle names — and often used his mother’s maiden name, Devolder, eventually incorporating a company in Florida with that name.
“He hated that we called him George,” a former friend and onetime co-worker said, speaking on the condition of anonymity to avoid being associated with him publicly. “His whole family called him Anthony. He wanted to be called Anthony. He would use the name Anthony Devolder.”
With echoes of the fabulist protagonist at the heart of “The Talented Mr. Ripley” book and movie, Santos has spun an elaborate web of lies and deceptions about his identity and his past, according to acquaintances, public records, media reports and, in some cases, by his own admission. He also claims to have suddenly come into millions of dollars in wealth over the past 18 months, even as the financial data company Dun & Bradstreet estimated in July that his private family firm, the Devolder Organization, only had $43,688 in revenue.
He said he is part Black. He said he is the grandson of Holocaust survivors. He claimed he helped develop “carbon capture technology.” He claimed to have worked at companies that never employed him. He claimed to be a graduate of two universities, only to admit that he has no college degree at all. He even said his parents’ financial hardship forced him to leave the prestigious Horace Mann School in the Bronx “months” before he could graduate. But that claim and numerous others have either been shown to be false or lacking evidence by The Washington Post and other news organizations.
Even by the low standards for truth-telling in politics, the scope of Santos’s falsehoods has been breathtaking. It has surprised Democrats who researched him and missed so many details, as well as Republicans who vouched for him.
In an unsuccessful House race in 2020 and his successful race for New York’s 3rd Congressional District in November, Santos pitched himself as a gay man of Brazilian descent at home in the Republican Party of Donald Trump. He spoke at a rally in D.C. on Jan. 5, 2021, telling the assembled crowd one day before the deadly attack on the U.S. Capitol: “Who here is ready to overturn the election for Donald Trump?”
In interviews as a congressional candidate, he described himself as “the American Dream.” . . . READ MORE
Inside The Tangled Web of George Santos
Rep.-elect George Santos’ “family firm” that supposedly managed $80 million in assets was initially registered at a gynecologist’s office in a Florida office park.
That is one of many curious details about Santos’ business dealings that TPM uncovered during an in-depth analysis this week. Santos, a New York Republican who is set to take office next month, has had aspects of his professional resume and personal biography called into question by a series of reports, including an exposé in the New York Times. Local news outlets have also been all over the sketchiness in Santos’ background for months.
Santos and several of his colleagues have ties to an alleged multimillion-dollar “ponzi scheme” and a complex network of companies. Among his associates, we found a businessman who claims to have the secrets to earning massive sums with a few keyboard clicks, a shady CEO who allegedly stole money to pay off seven-figure credit card bills, and the body armor wearing, QAnon slogan spouting “Spartan warrior” who ran against Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) in this year’s election.
Two of the firms linked to Santos and his associates are supposed strategy firms that have earned money from Republican congressional campaigns. One took in over $110,000 from the unsuccessful challenge to Ocasio-Cortez. The other did work for a candidate who claims to have never heard of the business.
It’s a dizzyingly complex paper trail that reveals a network of companies operated out of a condo and the gynecological practice in Florida. At the center of it all is Santos’ supposed “family” firm, which, he’s suggested in financial disclosures, helped him earn a massive raise in recent years just as he poured money into his own run for Congress.
Some of the prior reporting on Santos by both Mother Jones and The Daily Beast delved into his business ties. However, our research has unearthed a slew of new details. Santos and his attorney did not respond to multiple requests for comment on this story.
Santos was elected in November to represent New York’s Third Congressional District, which includes parts of Queens and Long Island. Santos, who also mounted an unsuccessful bid for the seat in 2020, positioned himself as an unapologetic member of the GOP’s MAGA wing. During his first campaign, Santos made a trip to the White House when President Trump was in office. He also visited the former president’s private Florida beach club, Mar-a-Lago. Santos tried to adopt some of Trump’s businessman bravado. He touted himself as “a seasoned Wall Street financier and investor.” That description is based in part on a college degree the school has no record of him receiving and stints at Goldman Sachs and Citigroup that the Times found were not confirmed by the companies in question. Santos’ branding as a “financier and investor” also stems from the “Devolder Organization,” a relatively new firm with a far less illustrious history than the other companies on his resume.
During his race, Santos’ website described him as a “managing member” at “his family’s firm, Devolder Organizations.” That claim has since been deleted from his online biography. Devolder is Santos’ late mother’s last name and he has, at times, gone by “George Devolder Santos.” His campaign site initially claimed Santos was in charge of the “asset allocations” for $80 million that the company managed.
The “More and More Network”
The “Devolder Organization LLC” was formed in Florida in May 2021. Its original articles of organization identified its address as one used by a law firm in an office park in Melbourne, Florida. Public records don’t show other members of Santos’ family officially tied to the firm. Instead, the organization has multiple connections to former colleagues of Santos’ at the controversial investment company where he previously worked including a purported business guru who promotes an array of get-rich schemes online.
At the time of its formation, the registered agent for the Devolder Organization was listed as “D&D International Investment Services Inc.” (D&D), which was based at a different building in that same office park. Records show D&D was first incorporated in 2007 and led by two directors: DeVaughn Dames, a self-described “seasoned executive with two passports,” and Odette Daley, a gynecologist whose practice has earned decidedly mixed reviews. The pair, who are married according to multiple records, initially operated their company out of a residence before moving its “principal place of business” to the office park in 2010. In the park, D&D was headquartered at the same address as Daley’s gynecological practice, which has since closed.
D&D continued to be based out of Daley’s medical office even after she filed paperwork to resign her position as a director of the company in February 2020. Daley, who continued to be identified as a vice director at the firm in its 2021 and 2022 annual reports, did not respond to a message left at her office. In its 2022 annual report, D&D’s “principal place of business” was identified as the address of a mailbox rental company.
A slew of other businesses are linked to Dames. In addition to D&D, records show Dames has been listed as an officer or registered agent for 18 different entities in Florida including “BAHAMAS TRADERS CORP.,” “IMPORT EXPORT LOGISTICS GROUP LLC,” and “DEVAUGHN DAMES INTERNATIONAL LLC.” Many of the businesses associated with Dames use the address of Daley’s gynecological practice; however, at times, documents are filed with slight variations of the street address, including the law firm building that once appeared in the paperwork for the Devolder Organization. Dames did not respond to multiple requests for comment.
Dames has a prolific presence on social media where he touts his various ventures and discusses strategies for wealth creation. He also offers “coaching programs” for aspiring entrepreneurs through something called the “More and More Network.” Dames starred in a Facebook video associated with that program that had some spelling and grammatical errors in the title: “Buye Business with Other People Money.” In that clip, Dames boasted of his ability to find “lenders” without having capital up front.
“You can buy businesses without money, but when you come to the table you’re going to need somebody with money,” Dames said.
Dames also pointed to the “forex space” as “another arena for individuals who would like to get cash on hand” and indicated he offers a “30 day bootcamp” for those who would like to profit on the foreign exchange market. Dames suggested this can be incredibly lucrative with almost no effort.
“You can do side hustles, you can do side gigs, all of that’s good and well,” Dames said. “I prefer to come to the computer, hit a couple of buttons, and make anywhere from 4K to 20K a month in this space.”
Santos also seems to know a thing or two about wealth creation. In required disclosure documents filed in conjunction with his run for office in 2020, Santos claimed to have made a salary of $55,000 and a bonus of $5,000 that year working for a financial consultant, Linkbridge Investors. Santos did not identify any other assets in that disclosure. By 2022, Santos indicated he earned a $750,000 salary and between $1 million and $5 million in dividends from the “Devolder Organization” in both this year and last. The sudden wealth apparently enabled Santos to loan over half a million dollars to his campaign committee as he ran for Congress.
A ‘Classic Ponzi Scheme’
The “Devolder Organization” is not Santos’ only connection to Dames. Before Devolder was formed, both men worked with a supposed asset management firm that has been embroiled in mounting legal troubles and allegations of misappropriating millions of dollars in investor funds.
In July 2020, Santos was hired as regional director of a Florida-based investment firm called Harbor City. On a Linkedin page, Dames identified himself as the chief financial officer of Harbor City from July 2019 to May 2021.
According to a complaint filed in a Florida court by the Securities and Exchange Commission the month before Dames’ apparent departure, Harbor City was operated in “a classic Ponzi scheme fashion” by its founder and CEO, Jonathan Maroney. In the complaint, the SEC accused Maroney of misappropriating over $6 million in investor funds. No other Harbor City employees were named in the complaint. Maroney, who did not respond to a request for comment, allegedly used some of the more than $17 million raised by the company “to enrich himself and his family” including by buying a “waterfront home,” a Mercedes, and by paying off credit card bills. While that case is ongoing, in court documents highlighted by Mother Jones, Maroney indicated he “is currently the target in a related criminal investigation.”
Earlier this year, Santos told the Daily Beast he left Harbor City in March 2021, the month before the charges were filed. In his comments to the site, Santos indicated he was unaware of any misconduct at the company and said, “I’m as distraught and disturbed as everyone else is.”
While he may have left Harbor City behind, Santos still has ties to Dames. On Tuesday, in documents highlighted by TPM’s Josh Marshall, Santos filed a reinstatement for the “Devolder Organization,” which as Mother Jones noted, revived the company after it was dissolved for failing to file an annual report. The document also removed any mention of D&D and the various office park addresses. It identified Santos himself as the company’s registered agent and claimed the Devolder Organization had its “principal place of business” at a three-bedroom condominium on Florida’s Merritt Island. Santos also listed the condo’s address as his own, which Marshall noted creates “some tension” with his representation of a district roughly 1,100 miles away in New York. The condo’s owners couldn’t be reached. A woman who is its current resident based on public records searches did not respond to a request for comment.
Political Strategy Firms
The reinstatement document seemingly cut Dames out of the Devolder Organization; however, the company actually remains linked to Dames. Devolder’s new address also ties it — and Santos — to multiple Republican campaigns.
Records show that the Devolder Organization isn’t the only firm headquartered at the Merritt Island condo. There are two other active companies based at the address: “Jayson Benoit & Associates Inc.” and “Redstone Strategies LLC.” Those firms are both linked in ways that go beyond their shared address at the condo.
Jayson Benoit & Associates Inc. is the registered agent for Redstone Strategies and the “Devolder Organization LLC” is an authorized member, though it is identified as having a Queens address in the company’s paperwork. According to Mother Jones, Jayson Benoit was the former chief technology officer of Harbor City. Jayson Benoit & Associates Inc. was first associated with the condo address in the company’s April 2022 annual report. Previously, the company, which was incorporated in 2020, was based in the same office park that was the first home of the Devolder Organization and Dames was its registered agent.
Two firms associated with Benoit have been paid by Republican congressional campaigns in New York.
Between June and December 2021, RED STRATEGIES USA, LLC, which was formed in Florida that same year, received 76 payments totalling over $110,000 from the campaign of Tina Forte, a right-wing activist who was badly beaten by Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) last month.
Like Santos, Forte is a proud MAGA Republican. Both Santos and Forte also reportedly attended the protests against former President Trump’s loss that took place in Washington D.C. on January 6, 2021. Federal Election Commission records indicate Dames was the treasurer of Forte’s campaign, which was based out of the Florida office park. Forte did not respond to a request for comment on this story.
Along with Benoit, records show that Dames’ firm, D&D, the Devolder Organization, and another company, “PAUL NICOLINI AND ASSOCIATES INC” were all authorized to manage and control Red Strategies. Paul Nicolini was a regional director at Harbor City. His firm was based at the office park and had D&D as its registered agent. In a phone call on Thursday evening, Nicolini hung up immediately after hearing the call was from a reporter.
“I’m not interested. Thanks,” Nicolini said.
Redstone Strategies LLC, the firm linked to both Benoit and the Devolder Organization, has also been paid by a congressional campaign. On April 30 of this year, Redstone received $1,160 from the campaign of Robert Cornicelli, an “America First” Republican who lost a primary race in the district adjacent to Santos’.
Reached by phone on Thursday, Cornicelli indicated he was completely unaware of Redstone Strategies and Benoit. Cornicelli was apparently dismayed to be associated with Santos. Cornicelli said he would follow up on the matter with his campaign treasurer.
“I’m just a regular frigging army guy who tried to run,” Cornicelli said. “I don’t know these people.”
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