The Rembis Report and Other Fascinating Topics - Volume LXXXII

This newsletter is the second in a series about George Anthony Devolder-Santos. If you are just tuning in please click this link to read Russian Nesting Dolls, Gremlins, and Tribbles - Part I.

Let's take a closer look at gremlins. What exactly is a gremlin? A little mischievous creature, basically. I don't think we need to get into more detail than that to describe a gremlin, but to understand one - that's a whole different ball of wax.

You might think that George Santos is a gremlin. That he is in Congress just to make people upset as an agent of chaos. While that could be true to some extent, I do not believe that is his primary function. His primary function is to help somebody make money.

But who?

First, ask yourself this - why would anybody want to work in Congress? For the excitement? To live in Washington DC and be part of the governmental process? To do great things for America? Sure, it has to be those things because it could not possibly be for the money, right? Congressional representatives only get paid $174,000 a year. That's more than I make, so the pay is pretty darn good, but is that worth the hassle of driving to work in District of Columbia traffic and listening to people argue all day and fielding calls from constituents? Doesn't sound like much fun to me. You must have to be a real patriot who truly cares about people to want to do a job like that. Or you have to be power hungry. Or you have another agenda.

Why did George Santos run for Congress to begin with? Forget about his platform. Whatever he said to get a vote is irrelevant. He has no public service track record with a clear goal of fighting for the American people. He came out of nowhere. A Manchurian candidate, for lack of a better term.

For those unfamiliar with the term, The Manchurian Candidate is a book about a brainwashed man who was placed into politics as a sleeper cell to create chaos. A gremlin.

Maybe he is a Manchurian candidate. Maybe not. Either way he has an agenda. When you loan your own campaign $705,000 to get elected for a job that only pays $174,000 a year, that is not economically sound for your personal balance sheet in the short term, especially when you have signed a pledge to support term limits in Congress. It is going to take four years to recoup.

His best case scenario is that he is able to maintain three consecutive terms and gross $339,000. Unless a Term Limits amendment never passes. Then he has nothing to worry about. But it is not about his paycheck anyway. George Santos position in Congress is about something else. It is about other people's money.

To really get a sense of what he is up to we need to start at the beginning. Way back in Brazil. According to the latest reports, Georgey Boy was a drag queen in 2008.

Santos denies this. Maybe that is going too far back. If this is true, okay fine, everybody needs a hobby. Nothing wrong with that. And being a drag queen has nothing to do with campaigning for elected office.

But he did live in Rio De Janeiro. This is where he likely made some connections with people he would later work with at LinkBridge Investors. The founder of that company is a Brazilian fellow named Pablo Oliveira, who now goes by Pablo Patrick and also attended Baruch College just like Georgey Boy, started LinkBridge as an investors networking and introductory service, presumably bringing people with money together to make more money together. All well and good, nothing to get excited about.

In 2013, Pablo was hired by Markets Group, Inc. for $10 an hour plus possible performance bonus to chase down leads and get people to network. He saw a way to do it better and by 2016, Pablo was done working for peanuts and started LinkBridge to make more money and give his employer some badly needed competition. The former employer sued Pablo for allegedly swiping his customers, but lost, because Pablo got his leads from the same place Markets Group did - the phone book.

So Pablo built a pretty good business making introductions through closed door meetings and brought his wife, Naira Trassi/Trazzi Oliveira, (last name is spelled Trassi on LinkedIn and Trazzi in her email, two places she would control spelling of her own name) to help out. Good for them.

Meanwhile, Santos was building his resume.

Much of what this says has been disputed as fiction, but not the association with LinkBridge, which Santos sites as the sole source of income on his first financial disclosure in May of 2020.

Just a month before that, Harbor City Capital was accused of being a Ponzi scheme by the Securities Exchange Commission.

Wait, you lost me Mike, what do they have to do with Georgey Boy?

Glad you asked. In July of 2020 George Santos went to work for Harbor City Capital when his first congressional bid was nearly over and not gaining traction. Yet, according to the Federal Election Commission records, Devolder-Santos For Congress raised $393,000 for his 2019-2020 campaign, $81,250 of which was a loan to the campaign from Georgey Boy himself. Then, when they raised $3,720,000 for the 2021-2022 campaign, once again, he was his own top contributor with a $705,000 loan.

Whoa!

Whoa is right. How did LinkBridge pay so well that he could afford to loan himself over $80,000 for the first campaign? And if he was a Vice President getting paid well enough to toss $80K on a losing gamble, why bother to get a job at Harbor City Capital, or try getting into Congress at all?

More money?

Bingo. But we really need to speculate here. Let us set the stage and dig into what he may have been trying to accomplish in 2019. 

Back then he was living in an apartment building in Queens, just under an hour's commute on the F train to LinkBridge's Manhattan office. He was a VP, making connections with masters of industry, all trying to figure out how to make more money by helping somebody else make more money, and somehow, he got the idea that politics was right for him. But instead of getting involved at a local neighborhood level, like joining the city council or working at the mayor's office, he ditched the beads and garter for a suit and prepped for success. Georgey Boy went full throttle head first and rallied support to become a state representative for New York's 3rd district. 

Like any politician, there was no way for him to do it alone. There had to be some conversation about how to accomplish such a monumental task. Somebody he trusted sat down with him, maybe over lunch in a nice Italian restaurant, and offered their two cents on how he could get elected.

"Tell me, Georgey Boy, why do you want to be in politics?" they asked.

"I want to make America great again and be a famous billionaire, just like my hero Donye."

"Terrific. And I mean that in the most archaic sense. Do you have any idea what you are going to have to do?"

"Get votes."

"Right. To get those votes you are going to have to reinvent yourself. Start from the ground up. Find out what the Republican party is lacking and fill that void. Be that guy they want. You're married right? Got kids?"

"Married, yes. Kids, no."

"Too bad you're not gay. LGBTQIA-plus Republicans would be all over you."

"Done. What else?"

"Quick decision for joining such a big acronym, but okay. You're Catholic. Too bad you're not a Jew. A gay Jew would rock this district."

"I can be Jew-ish. As long as I don't have to go full kosher, I'm in."

"Wow. You will do anything won't you?"

"Never say never."

"Well, your resume is outstanding, so I think we may have a shot."

"I wrote it myself."

"Impressive."

Santos divorced Uadla Vieira in September of 2019, signed his pledge to restrict term limits, and campaign contributions started coming in.

Let's take a look at a timeline of events.

2019

• September - Divorced from Uadla Vieira 

• October 10 - GDS* Signs pledge for term limits

• November 19 - First 2020 campaign donations come in ($900 between two donors)

• December 2 - Rocco arrested

• December 31 - GDS* Loans $5,300 to his own campaign

GDS* George Devolder-Santos

Hold up! Who is Rocco?

So glad you asked.

Rocco Oppedisano was busted on human smuggling charges when the US Coast Guard found 14 Chinese people and a Bahamian on his 63 foot yacht in Florida waters. He also had $172,000 in Bahamian cash and $41,000 in U.S. dollars and allegedly charged his passengers beaucoup bucks for their one way tickets to detention. Rocco's family owns a nice restaurant in Queens where Georgy Boy has doled out over $25,000 since August of 2020, according to Federal Election Commission (FEC) records, for the sole purpose of campaign related business expense. 

Nothing wrong with getting the gang together for some team building and hearty meals once in a while, but Santos took it a step further, spending exactly $199.99 at that restaurant seven times, raising the ire of investigators, who find that many purchases for that exact amount to be highly suspicious of something, but they don't know what exactly. Maybe it was an all you can eat deal.

It is an odd amount to spend over and over again. And it was done in multiple establishments, not just the restaurant. During his second campaign there were 37 separate disbursements for exactly $199.99 at not only Il Bacco Ristorante, but also at American Airlines, Amtrak (2x), Best Buy (3x) BJ's Wholesale (2x), Clear, Delta Airlines (4x), Hyatt Hotels (2x), parking at JFK airport, two diners in Florida, Priceline, Staples (2x), Target, Uber (5x), W Hotel South Beach Miami, Walgreens, and Walmart. How we have not yet seen footage of Georgey Boy at Walmart, I can't say, but this is where you can surmise that money laundering may be afoot.

But how, Mike? How does anybody launder money in $199.99 increments?

Here is how.

If you set up an American Express card to pay two people at once, you can pay whoever you like $199.99 (or any amount) and pay somebody else any other amount at the same time. I don't know if this happened and neither does the FEC. Reporting requirements are lax. You tell them what you spent and that's it. There is no audit or investigation unless there is suspicion of fraud, and as we all know, investigations take a while. So spending is a free-for-all. Five former FEC employees wrote this article for Campaignlegal.org, calling the FEC highly ineffective. Nobody is going to check. If anyone wants to it is going to take a court order.

Did Il Bacco and Rocco have anything to do with money laundering?

Probably not, but you know how the media loves scandal, and when we see any possible connection between a politician and a human trafficker, everybody pays close attention. Especially since Oppedisano family members contributed $7,000 to the Devolder Santos Victory Committee in 2022 and Rocco himself kicked in $500.

Mike, where are you getting this financial information?

From the public portal at the Federal Election Commission website.

You can download spreadsheets and search them every which way you can search any excel file to find out all sorts of fascinating information. Who gave money to whom, how much, when, everybody's address, and how the money was spent.

So that is what I have been having fun with this week; searching for gremlins.

Next week I will complete the timeline for 2020 through 2022, analyze the influx of cash into the Devolder-Santos campaign, and take a closer look at their expenditures. I will also host a deep dive into Harbor City Capital, LinkBridge Investors, and Georgey Boy's Devolder Organization LLC where I may be able to explain who is connected to who, how, why, and what exactly they want George Anthony Devolder-Santos for. 

Hint: It is not for his drag routine.

Thanks for reading.

Continue reading Russian Nesting Dolls, Gremlins, and Tribbles - Part III

If you are new to the Rembis Report and would like to read any of the previous issues, PLEASE CLICK HERE to access the archives. To read it from the beginning, PLEASE GET A COPY of The Rembis Report: An Observation. Please share this with all of your friends and tell everyone to sign up so nobody misses a trick.