One brief past boyfriend, who was a dishwasher at a Florida surf-and-turf restaurant when he met Santos on Grindr, told me that this new friend seemed charming and high class: “I was mostly McDonald’s and Taco Bell. He can be charming, and he knows how to flash the impression of having money, whether it’s the Cartier watch he claims is a family heirloom or the way he’d ostentatiously pay for another bottle of wine at dinner. The embattled congressman is a strange character to interact with, as if all his shape shifting has deformed his sense of how a person should or needs to move in the world. “He was trying to get any type of money for free as fast as possible,” one of his ex-roommates told me, recalling his time living with Santos in New York in the 2010s. Family members say he has run off with money from close relatives, even mooching off his grandmother. I’ve found three people on two continents to whom he raised the prospect of immigration-related marriages-to himself or others. The public allegations against Santos are just the tip of the iceberg. (She knew Santos as Anthony Devolder, a portion of his full name he used before his life in politics.) As we spoke, Parizzi passed her phone across a table to show me texts in Portuguese in which she blamed Santos for absconding with her jewelry, while Santos called her a whale and worse. “Anthony is moved by money,” that girl’s mother, Adriana Parizzi, told me in April. There was the young girl who once considered Santos an uncle figure, and who can’t forget him dancing with her, wearing a bra and a towel on his head, to the tune of Lady Gaga’s “Bad Romance.” There was the drag mentor Eula Rochard, who showed Santos how to brush wigs and choose earrings, and who remembers Santos saying he wanted to marry rich someday. There was the family friend who said Santos was known as a drag queen. After journalist Marisa Kabas found a picture there of Santos, dressed in drag at the dawn of the Obama era, the congressman told reporters that he was not a drag queen, but simply a young man who “had fun at a festival.” That was not the recollection of multiple people I spoke to in and around Niteroi, the city next to Rio where Santos lived on and off as he came of age. Sorting fact from fiction for Santos was an adventure that took me as far as Brazil. For the past few months, I’ve delved deeper into his activities and background for my forthcoming book, “The Fabulist: The Lying, Hustling, Grifting, Stealing, and Very American Legend of George Santos.” In the years that followed, I wrote about his lack of a fixed address, his vagueness on biographical details, his campaign finance irregularities, and his (unverified) suggestion that he was paying legal bills for Jan. He was supposedly launching his first run for Congress, but said he was at a work conference in Miami, some 1,300 miles from the district he wanted to represent. I started reporting on Santos in 2019, when I called him for a routine introductory item for Newsday, Long Island’s paper of record.
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