Former Congressman George Santos pled guilty to wire fraud and aggravated identity theft on Monday in Federal District Court in New York to avoid his trial scheduled for next month. He faced 23 counts, including multiple charges of wire fraud, money laundering, and making materially false statements.
Santos has repeatedly lied about his past, claiming among other things that he graduated at the top of his class at Baruch College, obtained his MBA from New York University, and was a multimillionaire Wall Street investor who had worked for Citigroup and Goldman Sachs. Only later did he confess that he never graduated from college and that his employment claims were “a poor choice of words.”
His deceits were not limited to biographical hyperboles, however. Santos also concocted bizarre fabrications. He once stated that his mother, who died in 2016, was in the World Trade Center on September 11th and “passed away a few years later when she lost her battle to cancer.” A subsequent investigation revealed that his mother was a resident of Brazil in 2001.
Nearly one year after he became the first Republican to be expelled from the House of Representatives, many onlookers wonder how a man who allegedly ran a fake pet charity was ever elected in the first place.
Santos is not the first political figure to manufacture his resume and gain access to the halls of power. In “A Wonderful Career in Crime,” I tell the story of Charles Cowlam, a Gilded Age swindler who managed to hoodwink many of the era’s leading politicians. He was a master storyteller who made a career by exaggerating his credentials and constantly reinventing himself. One contemporary newspaper reported that “he has as many aliases as there are letters in the alphabet.”
When the Civil War began Cowlam was in a Virginia prison for mail robbery. He succeeded in convincing both Abraham Lincoln and Jefferson Davis to grant him presidential pardons. After the war he conned his way into working as a detective on the Lincoln assassination investigation, and later parlayed that work experience into detective jobs with the Internal Revenue Service and for the British government in Ireland. After returning to the U.S., he persuaded local officials in Florida to allow him to run for Congress, and convinced Ulysses S. Grant to appoint him U.S. marshal for the Northern District of Florida. He also found time to start a fake secret society, become a serial bigamist, and pretend to be a 40-year-old Union colonel suffering from dementia.
Although scholars have written extensively about the confidence man in American business, few have considered the confidence man in American politics. Yet our political institutions operate using the same sense of trust and personal connections that sustain transactions in the marketplace. And public servants are just as susceptible to being duped by con artists as the everyday citizen.
The schemes crafted by Santos and Cowlam succeeded for a time, because the stories they told were compelling and had a patina of plausibility. Their lies reflected the same sorts of aspirations and heartfelt anecdotes that often captivate voters. Con artists are very good at telling their listeners what they want to hear – a valuable trait for any politician.
Americans are fascinated with con artists for the same reasons we find them convincing. They seem to represent qualities we admire, and showcase the particularly American values of upward mobility and assimilation. From outward appearances, confidence men appear successful and are able to blend in seamlessly as they take on a new identity. They personify the rags to riches story and play upon (and prey upon) the fluidity of American life. We appreciate them for their cleverness, even as we rebuke them for their dishonesty.
Cowlam and Santos also succeeded because the world of politics is inherently insular. Politicians project an image of themselves that can be difficult for colleagues to evaluate and verify. In placing their best foot forward, they take great pains to hide incriminating information from their past. Only when a candidate reaches extraordinary heights do political parties take on the burdensome task of making sure that their contender is thoroughly vetted.
The New York Republicans that encouraged Santos’s campaign were blinded by the same forces that concealed Cowlam’s criminal past from his contemporaries. No one bothered to ask.
