Amish Country Farmers Say George Santos Took Puppies, Left Bad Checks

By Jonathan O’Connell, Emma Brown, Shayna Jacobs / The Washington Post

15:45 JST, February 11, 2023

YORK COUNTY, Pa. – It was after dark when George A. Santos approached the farmer in Pennsylvania’s Amish country looking to buy at least eight puppies.

He promised a wire transfer of more than $5,000, the farmer said, but it never appeared. He said Santos ended up writing a smaller check – and driving off with four golden retrievers.

“Something inside me said I just cannot trust him,” the farmer told The Washington Post, speaking on the condition of anonymity to protect his privacy.

The check bounced.

The farmer, who has not previously spoken to the media, said he called police after the encounter in 2017. It took nearly two years for the authorities to locate Santos back home in New York, but he was eventually charged with theft by deception, according to a brief mention in the Star, a newspaper in York County. In May 2021, the paper reported, the case was dismissed under a provision of Pennsylvania law that allows misdemeanor charges to be dropped when a prosecutor consents and “satisfaction has been made to the aggrieved person.”

Indeed, the farmer said he was finally paid for his four dogs. In his handwritten bank ledger, he wrote: “George Santos reimburse bad ck.”

The farmer told The Post he did not think that Santos, a Republican elected to Congress in November after brazenly lying to voters about his past, should be in public office.

“Sometimes people change for the better,” the farmer said, “but would he really, after crimes like this?”

Police and court officials said no record of such a case is available. Pennsylvania law allows for the expungement of cases that end in dismissal, which then erases records related to those cases and bars officials from acknowledging their existence.

Santos’s attorney, Joseph W. Murray, declined to comment. David Sunday, the York County district attorney, did not respond to requests for comment.

A lawyer friend of Santos’s who said he consulted her after police came knocking gave The Post copies of nine checks from a “George A. Santos” bank account, six of which mentioned “puppies” or “puppy” in the memo line. She said he told her that he did not write the checks and that they did not clear his account. They were written for amounts totaling $15,125 and were dated November 2017 – a period in which Santos, then the head of a purported animal rescue charity, was holding puppy-adoption events on Staten Island. The checks and the charge against Santos were first reported Thursday by Politico.

The farmer whose complaint sparked the theft charge is one of four dog breeders in Amish country, flanking the Susquehanna River in southern Pennsylvania, who told The Post that they received bad checks bearing Santos’s name that month. The checks were used to buy golden retrievers, German shepherds and Yorkshire terriers. The other three breeders said they did not file police reports and were never paid.

Shown photographs of Santos, the farmer in York County and another of the breeders The Post contacted identified him as the man they said wrote the checks. Two others said they could not tell whether it was him because they had seen him only one night in the dark more than five years ago. All spoke on the condition of anonymity to guard their privacy.

The recipients of the five other checks could not be reached.

Tiffany Bogosian, the lawyer friend who has stayed in touch with Santos since they attended junior high school together, said in an interview that he called her in a panic one day in February 2020, during his first run for Congress. He told her that New York City law enforcement officials had informed him that he was wanted in Pennsylvania regarding bad checks and needed to report there immediately. He sent her copies of the nine checks, she said.

Bogosian said Santos wanted to keep the case quiet because he was in the middle of his first congressional campaign. “He said if this comes out it will be a scandal,” she said.

Bogosian said she contacted a Pennsylvania state trooper who had been assigned to the case. In an email, she told the trooper that Santos said that he did not write the checks and that his checkbook had gone missing shortly after he opened the account.

She described Santos to the trooper as “a victim of fraud.”

She said she also spoke to the trooper by phone to assure him that Santos would report to Pennsylvania.

“I was like, ‘Listen, he’s definitely going to turn himself in because he’s running for Congress,'” she said.

Bogosian said she then advised Santos to get a lawyer with credentials to practice in Pennsylvania. Bogosian said she has since come to believe that Santos was behind the scheme, prompting her to share her experience with reporters.

The state trooper declined to comment.

After Santos was elected in November to represent New York’s 3rd Congressional District, helping Republicans secure a narrow majority in the House, news reports revealed that he had lied about many aspects of his biography, including that he was a college volleyball star and that his grandparents were Holocaust survivors. He has apologized for what he called “résumé embellishment.” He stepped down from House committee assignments but has rejected calls from New York GOP leaders for his resignation.

The Justice Department is investigating Santos’s campaign finances amid questions about $700,000 in loans he reported making to his 2022 campaign and $254,000 in payments the campaign briefly reported to recipients listed as “anonymous.” Santos’s attorney has not commented on the investigation.

The Securities and Exchange Commission is also investigating Harbor City Capital, the Florida investment firm where Santos previously worked that the SEC has called a “classic Ponzi scheme.” Santos has said he had no awareness of any wrongdoing at the company.

The farmer with the golden retrievers said Santos arrived after 9 p.m. on Nov. 13, 2017. Santos said he would pay more than $5,000 by wire transfer for eight puppies, the farmer said, and insisted that he could see via his cellphone that the money had been transferred.

“He was there for more than an hour trying to convince me,” the farmer said. “His tongue waggles, he talks fast. Smooth talker is how I’m going to explain it.”

Wary, the farmer called his bank, which had a customer-service line open late. He was told no payment had been wired to his account.

Santos then offered to take just four dogs and to pay by check, the farmer said. Santos said he would come back with cash for the rest of the puppies, but he never did. The Post is not specifying the exact amount of the check to protect the farmer’s anonymity.

Another farmer said he received a bad check from the same checking account on the same night for two German shepherd puppies. Shown a photo of Santos from his first week in Congress, the farmer told The Post he is confident it was the same man. After the check bounced, the farmer said, he tried to reach Santos by phone but couldn’t.

“I tried to reach him back numerous times, never got an answer,” the farmer said. “It just almost floors me that you tell me that this person is a member of Congress. … People like this need to be stopped.”

Two other farmers said they received bad checks from Santos’s account on the evening of Nov. 22, 2017, which matches the dates on the checks provided by Bogosian.

“What caught my attention was the check just had his name on it, it didn’t have his address or anything,” one farmer said.

Still, the farmer said he accepted a check for more than $2,000 for three or four Yorkshire terriers. The farmer said that when he went to the bank two days later, the check did not clear. He said he did not call police because he did not think it would make a difference.

One breeder interviewed by The Post said he received a bad “George A. Santos” check for an English cream golden retriever. The man who wrote the check already had a carload of puppies when he arrived late at night and claimed to own three pet stores in New York City, the breeder recalled. “Obviously he was going around buying puppies,” he said. He said he was not sure whether Santos, as pictured in several photographs, was the same man who had written the check.

At the time, Santos was running what he described as a pet-rescue charity called Friends of Pets United, or FOPU. FOPU held several puppy-adoption events at Pet Oasis, a local chain on Staten Island, according to posts on the store’s Instagram and Facebook pages.

On Nov. 16, 2017 – three days after farmers interviewed by The Post received the bad checks for golden retrievers and German shepherds – Pet Oasis advertised the next FOPU event with a photo of the animals that would be up for adoption. They included golden retriever and German shepherd puppies.

On Nov. 24, 2017, the store advertised another FOPU adoption event with photographs of dogs whose breeds matched those taken from Amish country two days earlier.

Staten Island resident Michele Vazzo said she adopted an English cream golden retriever at one of FOPU’s Pet Oasis events that year, paying the charity $300 or $400. She said Santos told her at the time that the dogs had been rescued from an Amish puppy mill.

Daniel Avissato, who owned Pet Oasis at the time, said the store did not share in any of the money Santos took in and cut ties with him after a short period. When the store gave a check to Santos’s charity, the cashed check showed that the charity name had been crossed out and replaced with Santos’s name, Avissato said.

The episode was first reported by the New York Times.

“That’s when things got really heated and I no longer had anything to do with him,” Avissato said in an interview Friday. “We were a legitimate business. He was a con artist.”