Santos’s maternal great-grandfather was born in Belgium and immigrated to Brazil in 1884. Santos’s parents were born in Brazil, and he has claimed to have dual citizenship.
Santos claimed that his maternal grandparents were Ukrainian Jews who fled to Belgium and then to Brazil to escape the Holocaust during World War II, and separately claimed that his mother was an “immigrant from Belgium”, but genealogical records and other evidence show that his ancestors have lived in Brazil for at least three generations and that there is nothing to indicate they have any connection to Ukraine, have any Jewish heritage, or are Holocaust survivors. Santos has used the name “Anthony Zabrovsky” to fundraise for a pet charity, while records contradict Santos’ claim that his maternal grandparents had a Ukrainian Jewish last name of Zabrovsky. Santos has also claimed that he was biracial and was born to an African American father, who had Angolan roots, but there is no evidence of that.
On his campaign website, Santos wrote that his mother was “the first female executive at a major financial institution” and that she worked in the South Tower of the World Trade Center and died “a few years later” after surviving the September 11 attacks. His mother’s actual occupation has been described as domestic worker or home care nurse. In July 2021, Santos stated on Twitter that “9/11 claimed my mothers life”; in an October 2021 interview, Santos said that his mother was “caught up in the ash cloud” during 9/11, but “never applied for relief” because the family could afford the medical bills; in December 2021, Santos stated on Twitter that his mother died five years prior; in December 2022, Santos claimed that both of his parents survived being “down there” at the World Trade Center during 9/11.
Santos claimed in 2019 and 2020 to have attended the Horace Mann School, an elite preparatory school, before withdrawing because of family hardship. The school reports it has no record of Santos.
After obtaining a high school equivalency diploma, Santos spent time in Brazil. In 2008, Santos (then 19) stole a checkbook from a man in Brazil who was being cared for by Santos’s mother, and wrote fraudulent checks. He confessed and was charged with check fraud, but did not respond to a court summons; Brazilian authorities told The New York Times that the case remains unresolved.
Santos claimed to hold a bachelor’s degree in finance and economics from Baruch College, but the school has no record of this, and the period Santos said he was at Baruch overlapped with his time in Brazil. He also claimed to hold a Master of Business Administration degree from New York University, but NYU has no record of his attendance.
From October 2011 to July 2012, Santos worked as a customer service representative at a call center for Dish Network in College Point, Queens. During this time, he reportedly told acquaintances and coworkers that his family was wealthy and had extensive real estate holdings in the U.S. and Brazil. He repeated this claim during his 2022 congressional campaign, claiming that he and his family owned 13 rental properties in New York. No such properties were listed on his campaign’s financial disclosure forms or in public records. Santos admitted to the Post that the claim was false and he owned no properties as of the end of 2022.
A 2013 Rio de Janeiro court notice of embezzlement charges against Santos describes him as an “American teacher”, 25 and single. In September 2014, an acquaintance lent Santos several thousand dollars he said he needed to move in with his boyfriend. The acquaintance recalled that Santos had claimed to be a graduate of NYU’s business school, even though Santos did not seem to know that that school is commonly known as the Stern School. Santos refused to pay the money back; a judge later rejected his claim that the money had been a gift and ordered Santos to repay it with interest, which he had not done as of 2022.
Santos said he founded a charity for rescue animals called Friends of Pets United in 2013 and ran it until 2018. He said the group was a tax-exempt charity, but the Internal Revenue Service has no record that the group was registered as a nonprofit organization. Friends of Pets United held a 2017 fundraiser event for a New Jersey animal rescue group, but the organizer of the rescue group said that Santos never gave it any of the proceeds.
Santos described himself as a “seasoned Wall Street financier and investor” and said he had worked for Citigroup and Goldman Sachs, but neither company has any record of him. Santos’s campaign website stated that he “began working at Citigroup as an associate and quickly advanced to become an associate asset manager in the real asset division of the firm” but Citigroup sold its asset management division in 2005. On a 2022 podcast he claimed that while employed at Goldman he attended the SALT private equity conference seven years earlier where, on a panel, he criticized his employer for investing in renewable energy, calling a taxpayer-subsidized scam. Anthony Scaramucci, who runs the conference, said there is no record of Santos having sat on a panel or even having attended any SALT conference.
Santos’s claimed employment at Citigroup overlapped with his employment as a Dish Network customer service representative during the same period. He clarified to the Post that a subsequent employer had been in limited partnerships with those companies and his claim that he had been employed there was “a poor choice of words … I will be clearer about that”.
Santos also claimed to have worked for MetGlobal, and by 2019 was working for LinkBridge Investors, eventually becoming a vice president, according to his campaign disclosure form and a company document. While running for Congress, he moved from LinkBridge to become a regional director at Harbor City Capital, a Florida firm the Securities and Exchange Commission subsequently accused of running a $17 million Ponzi scheme. Santos was not personally named in the lawsuit, nor were other colleagues of his, and he publicly denied any knowledge of the fraud.
According to his financial disclosures, Santos was the sole owner and managing member of the Devolder Organization, which he said was a family-owned company that managed $80 million in assets. On financial disclosure forms, Santos called Devolder a “capital introduction consulting” firm. Although based in New York, the company was registered in Florida, where it was dissolved in 2022 for failing to file annual reports. During his 2022 campaign for Congress, Santos lent his campaign more than $700,000, and reported receiving a salary of $750,000 and dividends of between $1 million and $5 million from Devolder, even though he also listed the company’s estimated value as in the same range. Despite the claims about the company’s size, Santos’s financial disclosure forms did not list any clients using the company’s services; three experts in election law interviewed by the Times said that this omission “could be problematic if such clients exist”. On December 20, 2022, the day after the Times article was published, Santos re-registered the Devolder Organization in Florida. Josh Marshall reported on Talking Points Memo that Santos listed himself as the registered agent on the paperwork, which could only be done if he lived in Florida and not New York. He gave as the company’s mailing address a Merritt Island apartment purchased by a couple in August.
In a November 2022 interview, Santos discussed the Pulse nightclub shooting in Orlando, Florida, saying: “I happened to, at the time, have people that worked for me in the club … My company at the time, we lost four employees that were at Pulse.” None of the 49 victims slain in the attack appear to have a connection to any of the companies named in Santos’s biography. In a December 2022 interview, Santos changed his account, saying: “We did lose four people that were going to be coming to work for the company that I was starting up in Orlando”.
