Santos and the Amish puppies
It was after dark when George A Santos approached the farmer in Pennsylvania’s Amish country, looking to buy at least eight puppies.
He promised a wire transfer of more than US$5000 (NZ$7900), but it never appeared, the farmer says. Santos ended up writing a smaller cheque – and driving off with four golden retrievers. The cheque bounced.
‘‘Something inside me said I just cannot trust him,’’ said the farmer, who did not want to be named.
The farmer, who has not previously spoken to the media, said he called police following the encounter in 2017. It took nearly two years for the authorities to locate Santos back home in New York, but he was eventually charged with theft by deception, according to a brief mention in The Star, a local newspaper in York County.
In May 2021, the paper reported, the case was dismissed under a provision of Pennsylvania law that allows misdemeanour charges to be dropped when a prosecutor consents and ‘‘satisfaction has been made to the aggrieved person’’.
The farmer says he was finally paid for his four dogs. In his handwritten bank ledger, he wrote: ‘‘George Santos reimburse bad ck.’’
He does not think that Santos, a Republican elected to the US Congress in November after brazenly lying to voters about his past, should hold public office.
Santos’s lawyer, Joseph W Murray, declined to comment.
A lawyer friend who says Santos consulted her after police came knocking gave The Washington Post copies of nine cheques from a ‘‘George A Santos’’ bank account, six of which mentioned ‘‘puppies’’ or ‘‘puppy’’ in the memo line. She says he told her that he did not write the cheques, and they did not clear.
They were written for amounts totaling US$15,125, and were dated November 2017 – a period during which Santos, then the head of a purported animal rescue charity, was holding puppy adoption events on Staten Island.
The farmer whose complaint sparked the theft charge is one of four dog breeders in Amish country in southern Pennsylvania who say they received bad cheques bearing Santos’s name that month.
The cheques were used to buy golden retrievers, German shepherds and Yorkshire terriers. None of the other three breeders filed a police report or was ever paid.
Shown photographs of Santos, two breeders identified him as the man who wrote the cheques. Two others said they could not tell whether it was him, because they had only seen him one night in the dark more than five years ago. All spoke on the condition of anonymity. Five of the breeders could not be reached.
Tiffany Bogosian, the lawyer friend who has stayed in touch with Santos since they attended junior high school together, says he called her in a panic one day in February 2020, during his first run for Congress. He told her that New York City law enforcement officials had informed him that he was wanted in Pennsylvania regarding bad cheques, and needed to report there immediately. She says he sent her copies of the nine cheques.
Bogosian says Santos wanted to keep the case quiet because he was in the middle of his first congressional campaign. ‘‘He said, ‘If this comes out, it will be a scandal’.’’
Santos told her that he did not write the cheques, and that his chequebook had gone missing shortly after he opened the account.
After Santos was elected to represent New York’s 3rd Congressional District in November, helping Republicans secure a narrow majority in the House, news reports revealed that he lied about many aspects of his biography, including claims that he was a college volleyball star, and that his grandparents were Holocaust survivors.
Santos has apologised for what he called ‘‘re´sume´ embellishment’’. He stepped down from House committee assignments, but has rejected calls from New York GOP leaders for his resignation.
The US Justice Department is investigating Santos’s campaign finances, while the Securities and Exchange Commission is investigating Harbor City Capital, the Florida investment firm where Santos previously worked, which the commission has called a ‘‘classic Ponzi scheme’’.
The pet rescue charity Santos was running at the time of his dealings with the Amish farmers was called Friends of Pets United (FOPU). It held several puppy adoption events at Pet Oasis, a local chain on Staten Island, according to posts on the store’s Instagram and Facebook pages.
On November 16, 2017 – three days after the farmers received the bad cheques for golden retrievers and German shepherds – Pet Oasis advertised the next FOPU event with a photo of the animals that would be up for adoption. They included golden retriever and German shepherd puppies.
On November 24, the store advertised another FOPU adoption event, with photos of dogs whose breeds matched those taken from Amish country two days earlier.
Staten Island resident Michele Vazzo adopted an English cream golden retriever at one of FOPU’s Pet Oasis events that year. She says Santos told her that the dogs had been rescued from an Amish puppy mill.
Daniel Avissato, who owned Pet Oasis at the time, says the store did not share in any of the money Santos took in, and cut ties with him after a short period.
He says that when the store gave a cheque to Santos’s charity, the cashed cheque showed that the charity’s name had been crossed out and replaced with Santos’s name.‘‘He was a con artist.’’