Guno צְבִי
We fight, We win, Am Yisrael Chai
Santos has said that he grew up in a basement apartment in Jackson Heights, in the Queens borough of New York City. Until Wednesday, Santos’ campaign biography said that his mother, Fatima Devolder, worked her way up to become “the first female executive at a major financial institution.” He has also said that she was in the south tower of the World Trade Center during the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks and that she died “a few years later.”
In fact, Devolder died in 2016, and a Brazilian community newspaper at the time described her as a cook. Santos’ friends and former roommates recalled her as a hardworking, friendly woman who spoke only Portuguese and made her living cleaning homes and selling food. None of those interviewed by the Times could recall any instance of her working in finance, and several chalked the story up to Santos’ tendency for mythmaking.
His apparent fabrications about his own life begin with his claims about his high school. He said he attended Horace Mann School, a prestigious private institution in the Bronx borough of New York City, and said he dropped out in 2006 before graduating and earning an equivalency diploma. A spokesperson for Horace Mann said that the school had no record of his attending at all.
By 2008, court records show, Santos and his mother were living in Brazil, just outside Rio de Janeiro in the city of Niterói. Just a month before his 20th birthday, Santos entered a small clothing store and spent nearly $700 in 2008 using a stolen checkbook and a false name, court records show.
Santos has denied that he committed crimes in the United States or abroad. But the Brazilian record shows that he admitted the fraud to both the police and the shopkeeper.
One who was close to Santos was Pedro Vilarva. Vilarva met Santos in 2014, when he was 18 and Santos was 26. Vilarva found him charming and sweet. They dated for a few months before Santos suggested they move in together. Vilarva said he felt on top of the world — even if he said he did find himself footing many of the bills.
“He used to say he would get money from Citigroup, he was an investor,” Vilarva recalled. “One day it’s one thing, one day it’s another thing. He never ever actually went to work,” he said.
Things began to unravel between the two men in early 2015, Vilarva said, after Santos surprised him with tickets to Hawaii that turned out not to exist. Around the same time, he said he discovered that his cellphone was missing, and believed Santos had pawned it.
https://news.yahoo.com/life-fantasy-comes-focus-george-124058513.html
In fact, Devolder died in 2016, and a Brazilian community newspaper at the time described her as a cook. Santos’ friends and former roommates recalled her as a hardworking, friendly woman who spoke only Portuguese and made her living cleaning homes and selling food. None of those interviewed by the Times could recall any instance of her working in finance, and several chalked the story up to Santos’ tendency for mythmaking.
His apparent fabrications about his own life begin with his claims about his high school. He said he attended Horace Mann School, a prestigious private institution in the Bronx borough of New York City, and said he dropped out in 2006 before graduating and earning an equivalency diploma. A spokesperson for Horace Mann said that the school had no record of his attending at all.
By 2008, court records show, Santos and his mother were living in Brazil, just outside Rio de Janeiro in the city of Niterói. Just a month before his 20th birthday, Santos entered a small clothing store and spent nearly $700 in 2008 using a stolen checkbook and a false name, court records show.
Santos has denied that he committed crimes in the United States or abroad. But the Brazilian record shows that he admitted the fraud to both the police and the shopkeeper.
One who was close to Santos was Pedro Vilarva. Vilarva met Santos in 2014, when he was 18 and Santos was 26. Vilarva found him charming and sweet. They dated for a few months before Santos suggested they move in together. Vilarva said he felt on top of the world — even if he said he did find himself footing many of the bills.
“He used to say he would get money from Citigroup, he was an investor,” Vilarva recalled. “One day it’s one thing, one day it’s another thing. He never ever actually went to work,” he said.
Things began to unravel between the two men in early 2015, Vilarva said, after Santos surprised him with tickets to Hawaii that turned out not to exist. Around the same time, he said he discovered that his cellphone was missing, and believed Santos had pawned it.
https://news.yahoo.com/life-fantasy-comes-focus-george-124058513.html
