According to the maker’s blurb, the Embraer Legacy 600 with full fuel should have made Sao Paulo – Long Island with one intermediate stop anywhere between Manaus and Puerto Rico. With 7 passengers and crew, they should have offloaded some fuel and so narrowed that choice of staging airfields. If as Broomstick Flyer reports (#70) they intended to land at Manaus, they would have had no practical reason to squeeze range and speed performance by climbing illegitimately. But they would almost certainly have had to make another stop - Fort Lauderdale for instance as BF also suggests. By climbing beyond Manaus they might have made the ferry’s three stages into two. Any sign that they refiled after take off – to land at Caracas for instance ?
Notwithstanding BF, I suggest again that, once the captain in such a situation goes over to the wild side, he would get what he is looking for more effectively by cruise climb than by a step change of altitude. How he covers his tracks is another matter.