How Low Can You Go? GOP'er George Santos says, "hold my beer."
Man's best friend is betrayed by the grifter who now holds power over us.
Newly-elected Republican House member George Santos has given the phrase “Man Bites Dog” —the code in journalism for a story worth reporting—new life due to his history of continuous grifting. It’s now linked to a report that Santos essentially killed a dog who needed a life-saving operation. It’s Man Bites Dog with a sad and tragic twist.
Reports today allege that Santos in 2016 stole money from a Go Fund Me account set up to pay for an operation to remove a cancerous tumor from a dog owned by a homeless Navy veteran.
The dog, Sapphire, belonged to veteran Richard Osthoff, a man who had fallen on hard times and was living in a tent shelter off Route 9 in Howell, New Jersey. The Go Fund Me Money request was put up on a site called “Friends of Pets United,” owned by Santos apparently as a scheme to defraud money from people who cared about animals like Osthoff’s dog.
$3,000, taken
According to a 2016 Facebook posting by Osthoff, people who went to the Friends of Pets United site and donated a total of $3,000 for Sapphire's operation. But before Osthoff could collect it to help his dog, Santos closed the account and pocketed the money for himself.
Osthoff took to Facebook in 2016 with an account of what happened, writing:
“To everyone who helped me and Sapphire raise money for her surgery, I’m sorry to say we were scammed by Anthony Devolder and Friends of Pets United (FOPU). Through a series of bad veterinary controls and subterfuge regarding payment, Sapphire has NOT received veterinary care and her (tumor) growth is 3 to 4 times bigger than it was when the campaign was fulfilled. She is facing euthenasia within months.”
It gets worse
As horrible as the story is, it’s gets worse for Santos in light of revelations from a friend of Osthoff, Michael Boll, the president of the New Jersey Veterans Network, who confirmed Osthoff’s account in the Daily Beast. Boll said he attempted to mediate the situation, but that Santos had been “totally uncooperative” before then dropping out of sight.
When Boll went to see Santos, who was then going by the name of one of his now known aliases, Anthony Devolder, Devolder/Santos claimed he took the money to “help other animals,” although there’s no legal record of “Friends of Pets United” ever being listed as a legitimate charity that used
money for that purpose.
Santos suggested to Boll that perhaps Osthoff’s vet was wrong or just trying to take his money by promising to help, when the dog’s condition was fatal. Santos apparently persuaded Boll to take the dog to a vet he knew in Queens for another evaluation.
Boll did, and the Santos-connected vet said there was nothing that could be done to help the dog, when the first vet Osthoff visited who had no Santos connections never made that claim and, in fact, said an operation could save Sapphire’s life.
After that, “Santos stopped answering my texts and calls and disappeared,” Boll told the Daily Beast.
Knee deep
Santos’s stealing money to save a dying dog joins a growing list of lies and scams coming to light since Santos’ election to Congress from Long Island’s 3rd Congressional District, including being a principal in Harbor City Capital, a Florida-based investment firm that was closed in 2021 for being, in the Securities and Exchange Commission’s words, “a Ponzi scheme that had defrauded investors of millions of dollars.”
After Harbor City Capital’s demise, Santos formed his own “Devolder Corporation,” named after the afore-mentioned alias. According to recent reports in the Washington Post, Devolder Corp. has “posted no public profile” as a legitimate organization, yet has paid out $3.5 million to Santos from 2021 to 2022. Further legal investigation is looking into whether these, or other as yet unidentified sources, were used to fund Santos’s winning 2022 Congressional campaign.
Those fraudulent actions combined with a growing string of lies about his personal background–that he attended prestigious colleges, earning both a B.A. and M.A., when he never attended college; played on a championship volleyball team at the college–hard to do when having never been enrolled there; worked at Goldman Sachs and Citigroup on Wall Street; and owned 14 rental properties where tenants had not paid rent in a year, admitting to the Washington Post recently that, too, was a lie and, in fact, he does not own any rental property at all and is currently living in his sister Tiffany’s house.
In a way, Santos has now graduated from holding life and death power over Richard Osthoff’s dog to holding even more power over the American people. Now that Republicans have won the House majority by a slim four-vote margin, Santos is riding high, as Kevin McCarthy has OK’d the House Steering Committee’s recommendations to award Santos with two House committee assignments–seats on the Committee on Small Business and the Committee on Science, Space, and Technology.
Our turn?
There, Santos will be given voting power to determine policy on various small businesses' ability to get federal contracts and the nature of oversight of small businesses–whether to increase, change, or reduce federal authority to decrease chances for fraudulent business practices. He also will have voting power on a committee that has complete jurisdiction over NASA, the National Institute of Standards and Technology, the National Science Foundation, and research and development efforts of the Department of Energy.
Although Sapphire now rests in peace thanks to Santos’s fraud and corruption, the American people may now remain restless, as a new member of Congress with a heart dark enough to steal money from a homeless Navy veteran and his beloved dog, wields power over us.
—trg
Thank you for bringing this newest fraud to light. The Republican Party has shamed itself yet again.