As George Santos sought to woo influential Republicans last summer en route to a New York congressional seat, he quietly held a fundraiser at a lavish estate on Long Island’s North Shore.
The evening featured an appearance by the chair of the Nassau County GOP, as well as a performance by country singer Lee Greenwood, whose patriotic hit “God Bless the U.S.A.” became a staple at Donald Trump rallies.
Santos had two Miami Beach residents to thank for the affair. The estate’s owners were Leila and David Centner, wealthy political donors who founded a private school in Miami that caused an uproar in 2021 for telling teachers not to get vaccinated against COVID-19, citing public health conspiracies.
Five months before the August fundraiser, the Centner Academy leaders had pumped more than $43,000 into Santos’ campaign account and a pair of committees backing him, public records show.
The relationship — one of several South Florida connections that, along with a heavily fabricated résumé, helped Santos win his congressional seat — made sense on its face.
Santos was billing himself as a conservative champion in a district where the Centners had bought a nearly century-old estate in 2014. The Centners, who left New York for South Florida when their highway toll company was acquired by a billion-dollar private equity firm in 2018, are conservative power players who had previously given $1 million to Trump’s reelection fund.
Now they say they were just as naive as the American public was about Santos’ background. Since his November election, media reports have revealed that much of his life story appeared to be a farce — including that his mother escaped the 9/11 terrorist attacks and that he attended New York’s Baruch College and starred on the volleyball team.
“Every person in America was duped by George Santos, including us,” David Centner told the Miami Herald in a statement.
Santos first entered the Centners’ radar in the fall of 2021, David Centner said, when Leila Centner met an advisor to Santos at an event in Palm Beach. The couple initially didn’t accept a meeting with Santos, Centner said, but later decided to meet him at their home in Miami after a prospective Centner Academy parent from Long Island “spoke very highly of him.”
When the couple met with Santos last February, he was “charming and likable,” Centner said, and “seemed to be aligned with our political values.”
The Centners also say Santos’ claims about his hardscrabble upbringing resonated with them.
“He told us that he grew up poor, was raised by a single, immigrant mother, and worked hard to become a self-made, successful entrepreneur,” David Centner said. “Both Leila and I were able to find success despite our difficult upbringings, and George’s story had similar overtones.”
Centner said he and his wife spoke with Santos several times before deciding to support him, and assumed he had been vetted by the Nassau County GOP, which backed Santos at the time and is now calling on him to resign.
“This is not the first time a politician has been caught in a lie, and unfortunately, it probably won’t be the last,” Centner said. “It has taught us to be a lot more diligent with our screening of candidates.”
An attorney for Santos and representatives for his office did not respond to requests for comment.
Ruiz family mum about Santos ties
Santos’ relationship with the Centners is just one example of his success at courting political power brokers in South Florida, where Santos reported substantial campaign spending — some of which has prompted questions about the legitimacy of his reports — and held at least one fundraiser aboard a yacht anchored in Fort Lauderdale.
Family members of John Ruiz, a billionaire Miami attorney and businessman with close ties to the University of Miami, gave over $37,500 to Santos’ campaign and political committees last year.
Ruiz’s ex-wife, Mayra Ruiz, confirmed to The Daily Beast in December that entities tied to her family’s luxury powerboat company, Cigarette Racing, hired Santos’ company, the Devolder Organization, in early 2022.
Santos has claimed that the company, which was incorporated in Florida, handled yacht and plane sales for wealthy clients. And he has cited that business as the source of income that allowed him to loan over $700,000 to his own campaign, payments that were flagged in a watchdog group’s complaint to the Federal Election Commission.
The Justice Department is now investigating Santos’ campaign finances, according to The Washington Post, amid questions about the source of Santos’ wealth and whether he illegally siphoned money out of his company for his campaign.
But the Ruiz family has been mum about the details of the relationship since The Daily Beast published its report, declining to respond to the Herald’s inquiries about Santos and Cigarette Racing.
Mayra Ruiz and the family’s adult children, who help run the powerboat company, didn’t respond to requests for comment. John Ruiz, meanwhile, says he’s totally in the dark, noting that he did not personally contribute any money to Santos’ campaign account.
“Let’s see my name isn’t on there is it now!” Ruiz tweeted Jan. 2 in response to a screenshot showing his family members’ contributions to Santos. “I don’t know this man, Santos. Never met him never given him a dime. Never even knew who he was until days ago. My name is John H. Ruiz!”
That same day, Ruiz tweeted that he planned to take legal action against the author of an article about his family’s ties to Santos and against others who shared it, saying the story contained “lies.” Ruiz subsequently filed an Illinois Bar complaint against attorney Ari Cohn, who tweeted that he would offer free representation to anyone Ruiz sued.
Ruiz told the Herald the story had falsely accused him of having direct ties to Santos. He said he still plans to file a lawsuit “against a substantial number of people and companies.” His Bar complaint against Cohn has been dismissed, according to an email Cohn shared with the Herald.
In a phone interview, Ruiz said that, “from what I understand, [Santos] scammed a bunch of people.” Asked if his family members were among the victims, Ruiz said he didn’t know.
Ruiz, a personal injury and class action lawyer who amassed a fortune specializing in Medicare litigation, has struck a different tone in the past about donations by members of his family.
When the University of Miami baseball program detailed a $2 million donation from Ruiz’s ex-wife and three children last January, Ruiz said on Twitter amid a discussion of Ruiz’s role as a booster for UM athletes that “every donation we make is made as a family.”
Other Florida connections
The complete nature of Santos’ South Florida relationships may not become clear until federal investigations into his campaign conclude.
But it’s clear that Sunshine State donors helped facilitate Santos’ unlikely victory.
David Centner’s $21,600 donation to Santos’ joint fundraising committee last March was the largest single contribution by an individual to his campaign efforts, aside from the loans Santos made himself, records show. Santos compiled a campaign war chest of around $3 million between four fundraising committees.
The Ruiz family was also among the biggest contributors, as was another well-heeled Florida family: Albert and Gloria Cassidy of Winter Park, who gave over $34,000 in total. Albert Cassidy, a real estate investor whose father was once in business with baseball legend Ted Williams, was the executor of Williams’ will and famously said in 2002 that Williams wished for his body to be frozen.
Cassidy could not be reached for comment on his donations to Santos.
Santos has various ties to Florida. He was briefly registered to vote in Orlando in 2016 and said four people at his company died in the Pulse nightclub shooting there that year, a claim he later walked back. A small investment firm where Santos worked in New York was also based in Florida until its assets were frozen in 2021, when the Securities and Exchange Commission accused it of running a “classic Ponzi scheme.”
