The Daily Santos: Vol. 28

George got a bit of a reprieve while we held our collective breath and waited for Trump to get indicted. As usual, reality is a cruel mistress, and the indictment still hasn’t dropped. Luckily there’s some new Santos updates to fill the criminality void.

A real fraud

We learned Friday that George will finally be held accountable for at least one crime: the check fraud he committed in Brazil in 2008. Brazilian prosecutors have accepted the deal proposed by Santos’ lawyer which asked for “a non-prosecutorial agreement in lieu of a trial,” and in which he, “would agree to formally confess to the crime and pay damages to the victim, a Rio de Janeiro area clerk.” 

Just to refresh your memory—after all, it was so many Santos scandals ago—he admitted to Brazilian police in 2010 that two years prior he’d taken the checkbook of an elderly man in his mother’s care, and wrote bad checks for shoes and clothes. He was never charged, and when authorities couldn’t track him down in the US, they gave up. Well, that is until his name and face were plastered across every news site in January 2023. 

Paying back $1,300 would be a drop in the bucket for the wealthy financier version of George that he created for himself. But the real George will have to make do with his civil servant salary. Or maybe the Long Island Nissan dealer who bought the $19 million yacht will help him out. 

Bad company

There’s yet another wrinkle in the story of the credit card skimming scheme to which George was allegedly connected: The man who was arrested and deported for carrying out the scheme may actually be on the run from Brazilian authorities in a child abuse case.

What we already knew: Gustavo Trelha was arrested in Seattle in 2017 after being caught skimming credit card numbers from ATM machines. George’s Florida address was found in Trelha’s rental car at the time, and he was later questioned by the Secret Service. Then on March 9th, Politico reported that Trelha had submitted a sworn declaration to the FBI, stating that George was the mastermind of the whole operation. The declaration was submitted to authorities by Trelha’s lawyer, a Long Island man named Mark Demetropoulos.

What we know now: Trelha had a warrant issued for his arrest in February 2022 for the abuse of his former live-in girlfriend’s two-year-old child. When Brazilian news outlet Folha recently spoke to Trelha’s father, he said he believes his son fled to FRANCE some time ago to avoid the warrant. He was also—much like his pal George—known to embellish his bio.

Folha also notes that Demetropoulos’ office is owned by Grant Lally, the publisher of the North Shore Leader (a publication I’d literally never heard of before December), who credits himself and the paper with being the only ones to blow the whistle on Santos and his lies before election day. Lally also previously ran as a Republican for the congressional seat Santos now holds.

Not entirely sure what’s up here, but it doesn’t seem like anything good.

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