Unbelievably tangled: George Santos’s web of lies and the Spider-Man disaster

Last week, George Santos became the sixth lawmaker to be expelled from the US Congress. 2023. Picture: AFP

At last the eternal question, is truth stranger than fiction has been answered in the negative as the member for New York’s 3rd Congressional District, George Santos was sent packing from Capitol Building.

If further proof is needed, one novelist recently published a tweet saying that he had toyed with a plot line of a career con-artist who lied all the way to become elected to the US Congress but scrapped it as it strained credibility.

Last week, Santos became the sixth lawmaker to be expelled from the House, voted out by his peers, 311 to 114 with 105 Republicans joining 206 Democrats to dispatch the Queens-born congressman to metaphorical Coventry.

Three of the other expelled congressmen were given their marching orders for “disloyalty to the Union” after they took up the musket and sabre for the confederacy. The remaining two were given the flick more recently; one for bribery in 1976, the other, Democrat James Traficant Jr, the near-namesake of Florida mob boss, sometimes implicated in the assassination of JFK, Santo Trafficante Jr.

With a nod to the Florida Don, James Traficant Jr. was expelled from Congress for racketeering among a string of related crimes that ultimately led to a long stretch in a federal penitentiary. That was in 2002.

Just three years ago, Santos lost the election to the Democrat incumbent, Tom Souzzi for the congressional seat which takes up large chunks of Nassau County on Long Island. Santos claimed that he was the victim of electoral fraud. He attended a Stop the Steal rally where he stated his belief he had won the election despite losing it by 13 points.

But in the 2022 midterm elections where control of the House was on the line, the GOP threw large amounts of money and resources at winning the district. Disquiet about his behaviour with brows furrowing over his resumè were swept aside and with Souzzi not nominating, Santos flipped the result, winning the district by eight points.

George Santos allegedly worked as a drag queen. Picture: Twitter.

Santos was also accused of helping to raise $US3000 to save pitbull Sapphire before making off with the money. Picture Montage: The Times

The triumph quickly turned sour. Within a month of his election, a laundry list of bizarre claims emerged, including that his mother was in one of the Twin Towers on 9/11. She survived somehow, according to her son, but breathing the dust of the collapsed buildings had led to her premature death. Immigration records show she was not in the country at the time.

Santos claimed to be a “seasoned Wall Street investor” working for Citigroup and Goldman-Sachs. Neither company had employed the man.

He claimed to have graduated from the Baruch College, a constituency college of New York University. It appears the closest he had been to studying at the highly esteemed college was to go by the campus on the bus.

Even the high school he claimed to have attended has no record of him being there.

In the flamboyant way of the conman, he claimed to have notched up screen credits with Disney, where he said he had roles in children’s television programs, including the wildly popular, Hannah Montana.

The online database for the industry, IMDb has only one entry for Santos, when he appeared as himself, whoever that is, in an interview on the US network, ABC World News Tonight program.

But by far the most amusing of Santos’s claims is that he was one of the producers of the Broadway musical, Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark, a catastrophic production that wrapped up in 2014 with losses of almost $100 million, a record then that remains the titleholder of bungled Broadway productions to this day.

Predictably the US site, Playbill lists the producers of the show and there is nary a mention of Santos. The senior producer of the ill-fated production, Michael Kohl, says he has never met Santos or had any business dealings with the man.

Actor T.V. Carpio, who replaced Natalie Mendoza, was also injured while playing the villain, Arachne. Illustration: Jacob Cohl/WSJ

The disaster that was Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark is the subject of a wonderfully funny book, Song of Spider-Man written by the production’s playwright, Glen Berger.

The songs were written by then-mega stars, U2’s Bono and The Edge. Marvel Studios had given their imprimatur to the production and the show began rehearsals with a dizzying array of wires and pulleys that would see Spider-Man and his foes zip along high above the audience.

What could possibly go wrong?

Everything as it turned out.

Bono and the Edge had no idea how to write musical theatre and Kohl was obliged to burn a four CD pack of 60 musical hits to get their creative juices flowing. The U2 duo dismissed the musical favourites, preferring to pen dark angst-ridden ditties that bemused audiences wanting a harmless singalong.

On opening night, Spider-Man got stuck on the wires and was left dangling 5m above the audience. A backstage member tried to prod the star of the show down with a broomstick in much the same way we might like to escort an arachnid from our ceilings but no dice.

Naturally the reviews were scathing.

Later, another star of the show broke a toe in rehearsals while flinging himself about near the theatre’s ceiling. Another cast member broke both his wrists in a fall. One more fell to the ground and landed on the head of the star who played the evil Arachne, Natalie Mendoza who suffered a concussion.

So troubled was Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark that the US satirical site, The Onion ran the headline, “Nuclear Bomb Detonates During Rehearsal for ‘Spider-Man’ Musical”, describing the thermonuclear explosion as “yet another setback” for the production.

The show ran for almost three years and shut down in 2014 with eye-watering losses.

Why would anyone – even a grandiose con-artist who had made his way to the Capitol – want to claim some association with this disaster? As it turns out, the answer is stranger than fiction.

In October, Santos was indicted on 23 felony counts, including aggravated identity theft, wire and credit card fraud, making false statements and falsifying records.