The Fabulist

December 1, 2023
Mr. Ripley goes to Washington. George Santos is consistent only in his pathological lying. To call him a "fabulist" is to denature the criminal enterprise that, this account amply reveals, motivates Santos' every waking moment. Much of what we know about Santos owes to Newsday writer Chiusano's dogged reporting, and the story isn't pretty. Santos, who logged time in Brazil as a drag artist and check forger, to say nothing of a leech given to bilking his own grandmother ("He did it with others, too. He'd find someone else to borrow money from, and then disappear"), eventually wound up on Long Island, where his lies took on ever more bizarre dimensions. From working as a sales rep for a cable TV service who constantly upsold customers, he concocted a role as a high-level financial wheeler-dealer. Based on his constituency, he "seemed to recognize that a Jewish backstory could be a political tool," regardless of his true ethnicity. In the rise of Donald Trump, he "saw another Queens native with an outsider chip on his shoulder (warranted or not) who had no political experience but was bluffing and hustling his way to the White House anyway." How did such an obvious grifter get ahead in street-smart New York? As if channeling Herman Melville's novel The Confidence-Man, Chiusano suggests that America is a nation of wolves and sheep, where the wolves always win: Even though he's now under criminal indictment, Santos now claims that his cons add up to "an experience, you know, for a book or something like that." The author also vigorously criticizes the Democrats' opposition research, which should have turned up Santos' record and labyrinthine lies before he ever got close to winning his congressional seat. In a well-researched book, Chiusano offers fair warning to anyone who might consider voting for his con man subject.

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December 18, 2023
The deceits, frauds, and unlikely triumphs of the Republican congressman from New York are untangled in this labyrinthine exposé. Journalist Chiusano (Marine Park) explores the gap between Santos’s public image during his 2022 congressional campaign as a Wall Street highflier from a wealthy family with Jewish ancestry—none of which was true—and his reality as the son of working-class Brazilian immigrants in Queens. Chiusano’s colorful portrait of Santos’s early career is a tapestry of petty rackets, including check fraud charges in Brazil, a probable green-card marriage, and a charitable scam called Friends of Pets United (Santos allegedly set up a Go Fund Me page to fund cancer surgery for a homeless veteran’s dog, then pocketed the $3,000 he raised and let the pooch die). Pandering to MAGA diehards as a congressional candidate, Santos generated a flood of campaign funds that he skimmed with the help of shady accounting. The exposure of his frauds after his election victory, rather than ruining him, proved an apotheosis, Chiusano contends: Santos became a folk hero of sorts for shamelessly lying his way to the top of what is widely perceived as an intrinsically dishonest profession. Combining punchy reportage with thoughtful analysis, Chiusano’s richly textured profile makes Santos into a fitting embodiment of today’s declining public faith in politics.