When George Santos was a political neophyte struggling to launch his first bid for Congress in the suburbs of New York City, he made a consequential early hire.
He brought on Nancy Marks, a fixture in Long Island Republican circles, to serve as campaign treasurer. Over the next three years, she used her deep ties to local Republicans and her stable of businesses to become indispensable to the campaign and to Mr. Santos.
She helped him meet donors and signed off on nearly every campaign invoice and financial filing. In May 2021, records show, the two even briefly went into business together as political consultants.
Now, as federal and local prosecutors examine the web of deceit Mr. Santos spun on his way to winning a closely contested House seat last November, they appear to be focused on a trail of financial dealings that suggests possible campaign finance violations or outright fraud. Campaign filings listed donations that exceeded the legal limit, hundreds of thousands of dollars in unexplained spending and a strange string of expenses for $199.99 — just pennies below the threshold beyond which receipts are required.
No one may be more central to that inquiry than Ms. Marks, who was, until now, an unheralded cog in New York politics, toiling in her converted garage on Long Island’s South Shore as a campaign bookkeeper to dozens of congressmen, judges and political action committees.
Battling for self-preservation, Mr. Santos has sought to blame Ms. Marks for his financial troubles, telling a conservative news outlet that “the former fiduciary went rogue.” Ms. Marks, in turn, has told at least two associates in recent months that she, like others, was duped by Mr. Santos. In late January, amid growing interest from the Federal Election Commission about financial irregularities, she resigned.
It will be up to investigators to determine whether Ms. Marks, 57, participated in any impropriety. But a review by The New York Times — including dozens of interviews and scrutiny of hundreds of pages of legal and campaign records — shows that even as her stature grew over two decades, Ms. Marks waded into ethically and legally murky territory.
A relentless entrepreneur, Ms. Marks worked her way into Republican favor, expanding her business with big-name clients like the former congressman Lee Zeldin. She became a civic leader, serving on the board of the local library and, in January, received honors from a local charity.
But while the kind of egregious irregularities in Mr. Santos’s reports do not appear in other campaigns she worked on, The Times found that Ms. Marks’s accounting and business practices repeatedly drew suspicion. Former clients have taken her to court, saying she overpaid herself or failed to pay bills, as have a long line of creditors. Her close business ties with a felon alienated some one-time allies.
And in at least two previously unreported instances, her actions have attracted scrutiny from the U.S. attorney’s office for New York’s Eastern District, according to several people with direct knowledge of the inquiries. In one, prosecutors investigated allegations that Ms. Marks attempted to help broker the sale of a ballot line; in another, authorities scrutinized whether she had embezzled money from clients. She was never charged.
Ms. Marks did not respond to calls and texts seeking comment. Her lawyer, Ray Perini, a former candidate for district attorney who used Ms. Marks as his treasurer during his campaign, did not answer a detailed list of questions about her record, including whether she was cooperating with the investigations into Mr. Santos.
The U.S. attorney’s office declined to comment, as did a lawyer for Mr. Santos, who said it would be “inappropriate” to do so given ongoing investigations.
Prosecutors are almost certainly more interested in Mr. Santos, who recently announced his intention to seek re-election in 2024. But campaign finance experts said that Ms. Marks could face her own criminal charges if she willfully misled the F.E.C. or covered up improper behavior.
“There are very fundamental errors that no accountant of her experience would make,” said Brett G. Kappel, an elections lawyer who advises both political parties. “If she submitted these knowing they contained false information, there are going to be consequences.”
A one-stop shop for candidates
Political campaigns are legally required to have a treasurer to oversee records of how money is raised and spent for state and federal authorities. The administrative role often falls to a family member or friend, especially for first-time candidates.
Ms. Marks realized years ago that there was a niche for someone like her to professionalize the position. State records show she does not have a C.P.A. license, but she taught herself election law and used connections forged as a low-level Suffolk County employee and political volunteer to become a one-stop shop for candidates’ needs.
She formed businesses like GMG Print and Marketing Resources and Campaigns Unlimited to handle everything from lawn signs and palm cards to fund-raising and bookkeeping. They all operated under her home address in Shirley, N.Y., where a statue of the Virgin Mary stood watch.
In an industry dominated by slick consultants, some clients relished the unvarnished, mom-and-pop quality of her business. Visitors described middle-aged workers running big piles of checks through auto scanners as they smoked cigarettes and drank Diet Cokes.
“She was lovely. Easy to work with. Knew what she was doing,” said David Catalfamo, a veteran Republican consultant who worked with Ms. Marks on Vito Fossella’s 2021 campaign for Staten Island borough president. “In the world of crazies in politics, she was normal.”
But Ms. Marks’s eagerness to assume greater responsibility rankled other political operatives, who said she tried to take on work she had not been hired or asked to do. Others said she appeared in recent years to have taken on more accounts than she could handle, leading to sloppy or rushed work.
By then, she had become the go-to treasurer in Suffolk County for the right. Among scores of clients were Mr. Zeldin, who ran for governor in 2022; John Flanagan, a state senator and former majority leader; and conservative political action committees like God, Guns, Life; Veterans for MAGA; and the 1776 Project, which works to elect school board members who oppose teaching children about the history of race.
Altogether, Ms. Marks’s businesses took in at least $3.3 million in political spending between 2009 and 2022, city, state and federal records show.
Roughly 10 percent of that came from one candidate, John Cummings, a Republican who raised $11 million in his unsuccessful 2020 campaign to unseat Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Mr. Cummings paid Campaigns Unlimited more than $90,000 for accounting, compliance, thank you notes and special projects. He spent another $250,000 on Ms. Marks’s printing and consulting operations, for a total of $340,000 — just over half coming after he lost.
Mr. Cummings did not respond to a request for comment.
Mr. Santos was also a lucrative account. Between his campaign, and associated PACs and committees, he paid Ms. Marks and her companies nearly $240,000, including reimbursements.
Far from becoming rich, though, Ms. Marks repeatedly found herself in debt.
Unpaid credit card bills led to a spate of judgments, and unpaid taxes threatened the handful of modest homes her family bought near the Canadian border. In 2014, Ms. Marks’s husband, Peter, was diagnosed with cancer, according to a GoFundMe page to support the family. More unpaid bills piled up.
In 2017, Chase Bank moved to foreclose on the Shirley home. Mr. Marks, a former corrections officer, died in 2019. The foreclosure dispute is ongoing.
Even as her business grew, Ms. Marks increasingly gave other Republicans reasons to question her judgment.
Many of the cases trace back to Fred Towle Jr., a former Suffolk County legislator for whom Ms. Marks worked as an aide and campaign treasurer. Mr. Towle pleaded guilty in 2003 to political corruption charges. Ms. Marks cooperated with the investigation, according to a report in Newsday, and was never charged. When other Republicans distanced themselves from Mr. Towle after he got out of jail, though, she kept working with him.
Their association came under scrutiny after a meeting they held with Tara Scully, a Republican judicial candidate in Suffolk County in the fall of 2015. At the time, Ms. Scully was looking for support from the local Conservative Party, which would come with a coveted ballot line that could improve her chances of winning.
At the meeting, details of which were first reported by Newsday in 2016, Mr. Towle said he could use his relationship with the Conservative Party chairman to help Ms. Scully secure the endorsement if she paid him a large consulting fee. He also suggested she donate $2,000 to the Conservative Party. As an added layer of caution, the pair offered to route the payment through Ms. Marks’s Campaigns Unlimited.
The offer caught the attention of local and federal prosecutors, who at the time were preparing to put the Conservative Party chairman on trial on charges of defrauding taxpayers. Ms. Scully’s team told them they believed Mr. Towle and Ms. Marks had dangled a blatant — and corrupt — quid pro quo. The two denied that interpretation.
Subpoenas were issued. Witnesses surreptitiously recorded each other. But prosecutors concluded they could not clearly establish bribery or extortion, according to four people familiar with the case who described it on the condition of anonymity. Prosecutors declined to bring charges.
Mr. Towle later entered a guilty plea for unrelated tax charges. His lawyer, J. Bruce Maffeo, said this week that the matter involving Ms. Scully had been “thoroughly investigated by the U.S. attorney’s office, and they declined to bring charges.”
Ms. Marks’s work left other clients feeling uneasy.
Peter Zinno turned to Ms. Marks for help with his run for a House seat on Long Island in 2010. He recalled her offering to charge him half of her usual rate because, he said, “She liked me, apparently.”
But after he failed to win the Republican nomination, he discovered that during his campaign, Ms. Marks had doubled the monthly rate paid to her company without notice. Some months she appeared to bill him twice.
Mr. Zinno sued Ms. Marks in 2013 for $3,800, but lost his case when a judge said he lacked sufficient evidence, in part because he had waited too long to lodge his claim.
“Nancy is a hustler,” Mr. Zinno said in an interview. “And I got taken.”
Mr. Zinno’s experience appears similar to conduct that prompted a second pass at Ms. Marks’s business by federal investigators.
In that inquiry, investigators came to suspect that Ms. Marks might have been playing tricks with the books she kept. They confronted at least one of her clients with evidence that she used her position as treasurer to overpay herself, according to the client, who insisted on anonymity, and another official familiar with the matter.
It is unclear what prompted the outreach or if it was connected to a broader inquiry. The inquiry again ended without charges.
‘Her George’
Ms. Marks doted on many of her clients — offering encouragement regardless of how bad the polls looked. But in recent years, George Santos stood apart.
“She thought of George as her favorite client,” said Michael Rendino, the Bronx Republican Party chairman, who briefly hired Ms. Marks for his own race. “She had, I thought, a motherly love for him. That was ‘her George.’”
The relationship was mutually beneficial. Ms. Marks offered Mr. Santos decades of experience and relationships with key Republicans. Mr. Santos offered Ms. Marks a chance to expand her business, inviting her to join staff phone calls and accompany him on fund-raising trips out of state.
All the while, she filed reports with suspicious patterns of spending. There were payments to cleaning companies described as “rent”; $365,399.08 in spending that the campaign never explained; and nearly $800,000 in loans he made to his campaign over the years that raised questions about the source of his income.
And then there were the $199.99 payments to “anonymous” — totaling nearly $250,000 at one point — that have drawn the scrutiny of the F.E.C.
Mr. Santos is not the only client whose filings have drawn scrutiny. In late March, Mr. Zeldin amended years-old reports to clear up 21 payments of $199.99 to unnamed recipients during his 2020 House campaign. A review of his congressional filings shows that the Zeldin campaign also reported $110,000 in nonitemized spending that year, more than any sitting New York House member, apart from Mr. Santos.
Earlier this month, the F.E.C. wrote to Ms. Marks ordering Mr. Zeldin to refund $129,000 in contributions he collected improperly in 2021 and 2022 and then transferred to his campaign for governor.
“It shows a certain level of disregard for the rules,” said Saurav Ghosh, a former F.E.C. enforcement lawyer at the Campaign Legal Center.
The Zeldin campaign reviewed its filings in response to a request from The Times and found no issues, the former campaign manager, Eric Amidon, said. He added that he believed the F.E.C. to be mistaken about the contributions, but said that they would be refunded out of an abundance of caution.
The degree to which Ms. Marks was aware of Mr. Santos’s numerous biographical deceptions is not clear. But Florida corporate records show she went into business with him and some of his colleagues from Harbor City Capitol, a Florida-based investment company, just weeks after the Securities and Exchange Commission had shut the company down over concerns it operated as a Ponzi scheme.
In May 2021, Red Strategies USA was born.
Like Ms. Marks’s Campaigns Unlimited, the venture promised candidates convenience: one place to produce and place ads, manage social media and provide general political consulting.
Jordan Hafizi, a first-time candidate, turned to Red Strategies for help on a 2021 City Council race, paying the firm $22,450 to produce and promote a campaign video on social media, according to public campaign filings and a contract agreement reviewed by The Times.
But a review of the repository of ads on Meta, the company that owns Facebook, as well as a review by the ad tracking firm AdImpact, shows that only four Facebook ads were purchased on Mr. Hafizi’s behalf, and those were removed because they did not include a required disclaimer. The placements cost $3,800, though Mr. Hafizi paid Red Strategies $12,000, according to a person with direct knowledge of the arrangement.
Red Strategies was not the only company Mr. Hafizi patronized that was tied to Ms. Marks, who was also his treasurer. All told, Mr. Hafizi, who failed to garner the nomination in his City Council race, spent nearly $50,000 with Ms. Marks’s companies — roughly 60 percent of his campaign’s total spending, New York City campaign finance records show. He declined to comment.
As for Red Strategies, the company barely got off the ground: It handled just a few accounts, and was dissolved by the State of Florida in September 2022 for failing to file an annual report. By then, Ms. Marks and Mr. Santos were just a few weeks from an unlikely upset victory that would alter the course of their careers.
Rebecca Davis O’Brien contributed reporting. Sean Piccoli contributed research.