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This yacht sale wasn’t some high mark of success before he ran for Congress—it was a transaction a few weeks before his election, taking place between two of his big donors. If that got him a six-figure fee, was it partly a way to funnel money to his campaign well beyond contribution limits?
Raymond Tantillo, a Long Island auto dealer, bought the 141-foot yacht in question from Mayra Ruiz, the wife of a Miami lawyer and businessman, paying $19 million for it. The yacht has an infinity pool and waterfall and sleeps 12 guests. Tantillo had given Santos’ campaign and affiliated committees $17,000, while his estranged wife and an ex-wife had each given $5,000. Ruiz had given Santos’ joint fundraising committee $10,800.
Santos reportedly proposed the sale to Tantillo in August, and Tantillo agreed to the deal in September. The sale became final in November, with the yacht heading from Florida to the Bahamas and returning with a new owner and flying a new flag—the Cayman Islands, naturally.
In December, The Daily Beast reported that Tantillo’s auto dealerships and two Ruiz-affiliated organizations were Devolder Organization clients, along with a firm associated with another Long Island-based Santos donor. But if Santos’ only known clients were also donors, and he was funneling money from his company to his campaign in potentially illegal ways, the conveniently timed sale of a yacht raises more questions.
“One theory is that the Devolder Organization was a shell that functioned to allow wealthy donors to secretly bankroll Santos’s 2022 run for Congress,” Brendan Fischer, deputy executive director of government watchdog Documented, told The Daily Beast in December. “If that [were] the case, it could implicate not just Santos but anyone who used it to knowingly evade disclosure requirements and contribution limits. But even if the Devolder Organization [is] a legitimate company, then Santos could still have violated the law if he diverted corporate funds to his campaign.”
Santos went from allegedly stiffing veterans and dog breeders, being repeatedly hit with eviction proceedings, working for an alleged Ponzi scheme, and being charged with check fraud in Brazil to helping one of his five-figure campaign donors sell a $19 million yacht to another of his five-figure campaign donors. It looks suspicious to the untrained eye, and apparently the FBI and federal and county prosecutors are thinking the same thing.
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