Sen. Bob Menendez’s (D-NJ) bribery and corruption trial has not only exposed the seedy side of politics but has also highlighted some quirks held by the once-powerful Democratic senator and his wife, Nadine.
Both are accused of accepting bribes from three New Jersey businessmen in the form of 13 gold bars, a Mercedes-Benz convertible, and $500,000 in cash. In exchange, federal prosecutors allege Menendez greased the wheels in deals that benefited co-defendants Wael Hana and Fred Daibes.
A third businessman, Jose Uribe, has already pleaded guilty and is expected to be sentenced Friday.
He testified that he offered to buy Nadine Menendez a car in exchange for the sitting senator to make fraud investigations into his family and friend’s insurance businesses go away.
Uribe spent four days on the stand and lifted the veil on some of the Menendez family quirks, including the senator ringing a small silver bell to summon his wife of two years and the couple’s penchant for hoarding gold bars.
Menendez, Hana, and Daibes have all pleaded not guilty and are on trial together. Nadine Menendez was supposed to be tried alongside her husband but had her court date pushed back to at least August following a cancer diagnosis that required immediate medical attention.
The trial taking place in a Manhattan federal courtroom isn’t Menendez’s first rodeo.
In 2017, he dodged conviction on a laundry list of other corruption charges. That trial also revealed some oddities surrounding the senator who was forced last year to resign as head of the powerful Senate Foreign Relations Committee.
Here is a list of just a few of those learned over the course of two federal corruption trials.
The bell
On his third day on the stand, Uribe testified that he had been trying to score a sit-down with the senator for months and, after much wrangling, finally had a face-to-face in September 2019.
Uribe and Menendez were seated outside at a patio table in the backyard of Nadine Menendez’s New Jersey home. After a brief chat, the senator allegedly asked Uribe for the names of the people who were being targeted by investigators, Uribe said.
Menendez realized he had nothing to write on and rang a tiny bell on the table that summoned his wife, who appeared from inside the home with paper. Uribe scribbled down the details and handed over the paper to the senator.
At trial, Menendez’s lawyer, Adam Fee, took issue with the bell, grilling Uribe over how it looked, sounded, and if it even existed. Fee told jurors Uribe stopped at a bar before the meeting, had been known to use Xanax without a prescription, and got Uribe to admit he couldn’t remember if Nadine Menendez brought the paper immediately or if she came out and then went back inside to get it.
Fee also asked Uribe if he shared the “super weird” incident with anyone before he became the government’s star witness against Menendez.
Fee also suggested that prosecutors pushed back on the bell story but Uribe didn’t back down. After Uribe finished his testimony, prosecutors called a paralegal to read two text messages Nadine Menendez sent to someone saying she was “looking for the perfect bell.”
‘Mon amour’
Uribe also said the senator called out, “Mon amour, mon amour, please come here,” before ringing the bell to summon Nadine Menendez, who was his then-girlfriend.
The scene he painted could have been one out of a mob movie. Uribe said the senator was drinking a glass of Grand Marnier and smoking a cigar when he rang the bell for her.
After she rushed in, he asked for paper. Uribe wrote down the names of people being investigated, Menendez took a puff from his cigar, folded the piece of paper with the names, and put it into his pants pocket.
The bell and the “mon amour” underscored the peculiar relationship between the now-married couple.
Menendez’s defense strategy has largely been to blame his wife. His lawyers claim he was lovestruck and didn’t know what she was up to.
Morton’s
FBI investigative specialist Terry Thompson testified that she was eavesdropping on one of Menendez’s frequent dinners at the uber-expensive Morton’s steakhouse in Washington when she heard Nadine Menendez tell an unidentified diner, “What else can the love of my life do for you?”
Menendez is infamous for holding court at the steakhouse, where a 16-ounce New York strip steak goes for $64, and billing it to his political action committee.
Menendez has spent almost $40,000 at Morton’s, according to Federal Election Commission filings. Since 2003, he’s spent $386,000 at Morton’s for meals, catering, and fundraising events.
Before the jury was even seated in his trial, his attorney argued that prosecutors were unfairly painting the dinner as something nefarious. Instead, they argued that the upscale hot spot was his local haunt and that he goes there 250 nights out of the year.
“There is nothing unusual about having dinner there with a diplomat or with a friend,” Fee told Judge Sidney Stein.
Prosecutors argued that just because Menendez went there a lot, it didn’t mean all the dinners were above board.
Gold bars
Investigators found more than a dozen gold bars during a June 2022 search of Menendez’s home.
Menendez claimed he had them because his Cuban heritage has given him PTSD. Specifically, he suffered from “intergenerational post-traumatic stress disorder” because of his parents’ experience in Cuba, with confiscated property, before he was born.
He also said they were tied to his father’s death.
Menendez “experienced trauma when his father, a compulsive gambler, died by suicide after Senator Menendez eventually decided to discontinue paying off his father’s gambling debts,” a court filing reads.
The senator, after charges were filed against him last year, said stashing gold bars and cash was common among immigrant families in case of “emergencies.”
Juror talks
At Menendez’s first trial in 2017, juror Evelyn Arroyo-Maultsby told the judge in August that she had a long-scheduled family vacation to the Bahamas in mid-November. The judge told her she could go if the trial was still going on, which it was, and he excused her.
Arroyo-Maultsby promptly left the courtroom and told reporters what had been happening inside the secret jury room.
A year later, Arroyo-Maultsby showed up at a Menendez political rally and then again at his election night victory party.
“I never really knew anything about him before the trial,” she told Northjersey.com. “He’s a good man. I was in that jury room, and I know he didn’t do anything wrong.”
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Menendez was accused of using his power to help South Florida doctor Salomon Melgen obtain visas for his foreign girlfriends. Prosecutors also alleged the senator intervened in a port security contract in the Dominican Republic and a multimillion-dollar Medicare dispute.
Melgen was sentenced to 17 years in prison. Former President Donald Trump pardoned him and commuted his sentence in what federal prosecutors called one of the biggest Medicare fraud cases in U.S. history.
