George Santos sits in the House chamber, Jan. 3.
Photo:
JONATHAN ERNST/REUTERS
‘Be careful with your present,” my mother, Duckie, used to warn her nine children, “because someday it will be your past.” The lesson implied in her words, which she routinely forced us to deduce, was that mistakes you make today may come back to haunt you at a most inconvenient future date.
George Santos
could have benefited from this wisdom. The recently elected New York congressman’s embellishments, exaggerations and flat-out lies about his ancestry, education, religion, employment and even alleged past crimes are multiplying faster than FTX lawsuits. Among the most disturbing accusations is the revelation that in 2008 Mr. Santos, then 19, allegedly forged checks while in Brazil, helping himself to $700 from the bank account of a patient for whom his Brazilian mother, an itinerant nurse, was caring.
Mr. Santos wasn’t very careful with his present then, and nearly 15 years later his past is revisiting him at a most inopportune time, his inaugural term as a U.S. congressman. Despite his recent claim that “I am not a criminal here—not here or in Brazil or any jurisdiction in the world,” Rio de Janeiro prosecutors announced Jan. 2 that they are reopening the forgery charges against Mr. Santos now that they know his whereabouts.
His allergy to the truth as well as his habit of playing fast and loose with other people’s checkbooks reminds me of another smooth talker, an immigrant to the U.S. whose past, which he thought he had buried, proved his future undoing.
In 1907, after four years of failing to achieve success in the U.S., 25-year-old
Charles Ponzi
moved to Montreal, where he found work as a manager at Banco Zarossi, a bank run by his Italian compatriot
Luigi Zarossi.
After Zarossi absconded to Mexico with piles of depositors’ money, the young Mr. Ponzi decided it would be comparatively…
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