Bob Menendezs golden rule - The Washington Post

More than four decades ago, before his suicide, before all this, Mario Menendez had some advice for his son.

“There’s only one thing the government can’t take away from you, the police can’t take away from you, the army can’t take away: It’s your word.”

Bob Menendez is thinking of his father’s words from a navy leather armchair in his office on Capitol Hill, a place some people, including dozens of colleagues, don’t think he deserves to be anymore. Not since the Justice Department indicted him on charges of conspiracy to commit bribery and honest services fraud and extortion, as well as acting as an unregistered foreign agent of the Egyptian government while serving as chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee — all of which Menendez denies.

“Think a lot about what you’re going to give as your word, but once you give it, then keep it, and be a man of your word,” the New Jersey Democrat continues, quoting his father’s wisdom. Now his voice is shaky. His throat won’t let the next word go, so the sound that comes out is a whimper. His mouth twists into a wordless sob. “Remembering my father,” he mumbles.

Advertisement

Mario Menendez hadn’t been certain that giving up what little they had and starting over in America would mean more stability than weathering the conflict between Fulgencio Batista’s military dictatorship and Fidel Castro’s uprising, his son would later write, but his wife, Evangelina, persuaded him to leave Cuba for Puerto Rico and then New York City. Bob was born there on New Year’s Day, 1954, and the family settled in a red-brick tenement in Union City, N.J., across the Hudson River.

Mario became a carpenter. Evangelina found work as a seamstress.

Their son grew up to be mayor of their city, a New Jersey state legislator and, eventually, a U.S. senator.

Mario died when Bob was 23, before seeing him reach those heights, but his son socked away that advice about integrity and thought of it whenever people came to him asking for favors or endorsements.

“When I gave them my word,” Menendez says in his office, regaining his composure after a few seconds, “it was as good as gold.”

Things that Menendez socked away as a senator, including literal gold, are part of the federal case against him; prosecutors allege that Menendez used his power and influence to benefit three business executives in exchange for hundreds of thousands of dollars in cash, mortgage payments, a luxury car for his wife and — intriguingly — gold bars (more on those later).

Menendez has denied the allegations in news conferences and court filings, but the indictment has nevertheless cast a shadow over his prospects for reelection in the fall. An October Stockton University poll found that 71 percent of New Jersey residents say he should resign, and both that poll and a November Rutgers-Eagleton poll found his favorable ratings in the single digits.

He rose in New Jersey politics as part of an anti-corruption alliance that ousted a Union City boss who had been convicted in a racketeering case in which a 28-year-old Menendez gave testimony. Now, Menendez’s American success story is at risk of becoming a cautionary tale of corruption, decadence and hubris.

“Embedded in that story are definitely all the elements of a Greek tragedy: the same purpose for which the character and the Greek tragedy started is what ultimately undermines the character,” says Frank Argote-Freyre, a former Menendez staffer. “Rather than reforming the system, the system seems to have changed him, based on these allegations.”

Then again, this is not Menendez’s first federal indictment. He’s beaten federal charges before without giving up his Senate seat. And even when some Democrats doubted his political future, he went on to lock down reelection.

“My history will not be defined by this case,” Menendez says in his office. “And I have every expectation that we’re” — his voice tightens — “gonna win.”

Menendez was not forged just by the words of his father. He was also forged by Hudson County, a cutthroat political fiefdom where it’s hard to win anything unless you have powerful friends standing behind you. The local mayors — nicknamed “the 12 Cardinals” — are considered more influential than some members of Congress, and their aides are expected to devote day and night to electing local candidates.

Menendez’s half-century in politics began here. After being elected to his local school board at age 20, he became a protégé of William Musto, the mayor of Union City, whose 2006 New York Times obituary described the pair as being “like father and son” (though Menendez says he didn’t see it that way). He later turned on Musto, he wrote in a memoir, after being bothered by what he believed to be shady dealings between the mayor and the president of the school board. “I refused to look the other way, and began to complain in public about illegal financial dealings,” Menendez wrote.

The U.S. attorney filed corruption charges against Musto, and prosecutors won a conviction thanks in part to Menendez’s testimony. (“I have never violated a public trust,” Musto reportedly said before being sentenced to seven years.) Whether Menendez had acted out of principle or political expediency when it came to Musto was “always an open — and maybe unanswerable — question,” wrote New Jersey politics watcher Fred Snowflack in a 2017 post on InsiderNJ.com. But “whatever the real reason, things turned out well for Menendez.”

Advertisement

Cuban Americans were a growing population in Union City, and in 1986, Menendez ran for his mentor’s old job — his second attempt — and became New Jersey’s only Latino mayor. “Just to become mayor in a little town, it was a big fight,” said Rafael Fraguela, who knew Menendez first as a student council president at their high school and later followed him into politics. Alliances in the local party split, Fraguela said, with some Democrats believing the seat “belonged to a non-Cuban or non-Hispanic.”

He became an assemblyman next, then a state senator. By 1992, he’d caught the eye of Ray Lesniak, the chair of the New Jersey Democratic Party, then in charge of redrawing the electoral maps. Menendez was a hard-nosed guy who could turn on the charm. “I saw him as a star — the star — in the Hispanic community at the time,” Lesniak recalls. And so the 13th Congressional District took the shape of a fish hook, Lesniak threw his weight behind Menendez before the seven-term incumbent even announced he was stepping down, and voters sent Menendez to Washington.

Havana on the Hudson indeed saw him as a star. Menendez “wouldn’t be able to walk very far” on the streets of Union City without Latinos coming up to greet him, according to Argote-Freyre, who was his press secretary in those days. They’d interrupt his lunches at El Único, on Park Avenue, and ask about relations with Cuba, about the political status of Puerto Rico, about the potholes he could no longer fix because he was no longer mayor.

“I can guarantee you that Bob Menendez never laid eyes on a gold bar when we were going around through Union City,” Argote-Freyre said.

In an office up Kennedy Boulevard, past two cemeteries and a boarded-up jewelry shop whose sign still reads “DINERO POR ORO,” Anthony Vainieri Jr. was sitting at his wide wooden desk one December afternoon. Just outside his door was a darkened lounge with upholstered benches and flower vases. It didn’t seem like a likely destination for politicians, but they do come around. The governor was here a few weeks ago. And Menendez has been here too.

“For wakes,” Vainieri said.

“That’s what I’m talking about,” he said. He gestured at the unpeopled room outside. “It’s a funeral home. He’s been 100 times.”

Vainieri knows a lot about death: literal, figurative. Besides running the funeral home, he chairs the Hudson County Democratic Organization, a powerful committee that has historically functioned as a political machine here. He said he was the one to deliver the bad news to Menendez’s staff that Hudson County Democrats were no longer backing him.

“I supported him in every one of his elections,” Vainieri said, “but definitely cannot support him this time around. The charges are too serious.”

The first time the feds investigated Menendez, in 2006, the same year he was appointed to the Senate, the probe centered on an allegation that Menendez had helped a nonprofit obtain millions of dollars in federal funding, then collected rent from it — in effect funneling the government dollars into his own pocket. In 2011, prosecutors closed the investigation without charges as he was gearing up for his first Senate reelection bid.

Within a few years, Menendez was back in the crosshairs. The 2015 federal indictment homed in on his relationship with a Florida ophthalmologist who lavished him with gifts and trips to an ultraexclusive villa in a Dominican sugar-mill town. Prosecutors alleged that the senator had used his office to benefit the eye doctor’s businesses and help him secure U.S. visas for several of his girlfriends. But at his 2017 trial the jury deadlocked, and the Justice Department later dropped the charges.

Menendez’s friends largely stood behind him through his legal travails, and the senator seemed to resent certain others who did not. “To those who were digging my political grave so they could jump into my seat, I know who you are,” Menendez said, victorious on the courthouse steps. “And I won’t forget you.”

“I think with him, loyalty is a two-way street,” said William O’Dea, a Hudson County commissioner. “He demands loyalty — great loyalty — but he also gives great loyalty.”

“His reputation is that he’s fiercely loyal to people that are loyal to him,” said Steven Fulop, Jersey City’s mayor and a current gubernatorial candidate, who’s clashed with the Menendezes over the years. “And can be very, very aggressive when you’re his enemy.”

After the indictment dropped in late September, Hudson County might have been the place where the senator stood the best chance of persuading old friends to take him at his word that he would clear his name. But the mayors of Hudson County all felt it was time to move on. On Nov. 15, they announced they were endorsing Tammy Murphy, the wife of New Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy (D) and a former Goldman Sachs banker, for the seat Menendez has held for 18 years.

At a time when the senator needs loyalty more than ever, Menendez seems to see the governor’s break with him as a betrayal.

“When Governor Murphy was sued after he won his first term, there was accusations that in his campaign, there were reports of sexual assault and whatnot,” Menendez says, referring a campaign worker’s 2019 lawsuit that led to a $1 million settlement. “I didn’t jump to the — I found it serious, but I didn’t jump to the conclusion that, in fact, he knew about it and he permitted it to take place.”

Advertisement

The senator adds that it “would’ve been impossible” for Murphy to have read the indictment before calling on him to resign on the same day, “because I hadn’t read it.”

“So it was premeditated,” he says. “And then to see that his wife is the one that he promotes to run? He’s been trying to get to Washington for some time. I guess this is what he sees as his avenue to achieve that.”

A spokesperson for Phil Murphy said he wouldn’t “dignify the senator’s attacks with a response” and noted that the governor said on a podcast that he’d personally called Menendez before putting out his statement.

The governor and the 12 Cardinals are not alone in their decision not to stand behind Menendez this time. Just one member of New Jersey’s congressional delegation is still overtly supporting the embattled senator: his son, Democrat Robert Menendez Jr. Lesniak, who helped the elder Menendez get to Congress in the 1990s, has called for him to resign. So has LeRoy J. Jones Jr., the current chair of the New Jersey Democratic Party, as well as the state’s junior senator, former Newark mayor Cory Booker, Menendez’s close ally. (In his statement, Booker had fond words about their friendship, but said Menendez ultimately had to make a sacrifice.)

“This is where loyalty didn’t matter — it was expediency,” Menendez says of those who turned on him.

Ravi Bhalla, the mayor of Hoboken, used to be willing to tolerate Menendez’s legal dramas. He stood just behind him at his reelection victory speech in 2018, after Menendez’s first trial ended with a hung jury, because he still thought the senator could help his constituents. No longer.

“It was a line that was drawn for me,” said Bhalla, who’s now challenging Robert Menendez Jr. for his House seat, “where I decided that this is not somebody that we want to represent the state of New Jersey.”

And where does he draw the line, exactly?

“Gold bars.”

“Cold, hard cash lining his Senate jacket pockets.”

“A Mercedes gifted to him.”

“The list goes on.”

Would you like to know about the gold bars now?

Prosecutors claim that a New Jersey real estate tycoon, Fred Daibes, gave Menendez the gold bars as bribes to get him to interfere in Daibes’s federal prosecution for fraud. Menendez allegedly did so by recommending that a sympathetic lawyer be nominated to be a U.S. attorney. Daibes has pleaded not guilty to the charges against him.

Andrei Bobkoff, a Belarusian immigrant in his 30s, has lived in New Jersey for about five years, but he hadn’t heard the name Bob Menendez until the indictment came down. His group chats, he says, lit up with photos and jokes about the senator because, well, Bobkoff deals in gold. And so do his friends.

He runs the Honest Coin Shop in West New York, which borders Union City. The shop is really a “media room” in the building where he lives; he brings people here to make deals. Bobkoff recently sold his last gold bar at a coin show in Parsippany after the indictment. (In a text, his business partner said that Menendez’s indictment boosted demand, and the gold-bar market quickly dried up.) The sale wasn’t anything too special — the bar went for $2,000 to another dealer.

But the 13 bars in the senator’s house?

“Those were unusual bars. Those were bars that were definitely not made at some point in the modern days,” he says. In other words: more valuable than bars of a more recent mintage. He looks at the prosecutors’ photos, Googles the price of gold, and estimates that each of the one-kilo ingots could fetch around $64,000.

The kinds of people who hold onto gold bars can be classified into two broad categories, Bobkoff says. The first kind keeps them as family heirlooms, passed down through generations by a distant relative who, say, immigrated to America. The other kind are the hoarders. “They just want protection from the day when the U.S. economy collapses. I know that sounds crazy.”

Menendez wouldn’t address the gold bars with us, promising a “convincing” explanation at his trial, which is scheduled for May, the month before the New Jersey Democratic primary. As for the cash, the senator previously said that he’d withdrawn it from his personal savings account and socked it away for “emergencies” and “because of a history of my family facing confiscation in Cuba.” (For what it’s worth, Donald Scarinci, who first met Menendez at 16 and has remained a loyal confidant, said: “As long as I’ve known him, he’s saved cash.”)

Menendez’s diaspora defense for his cash-hoarding strains credulity to Eliana Fernandez, the organizing director at the immigrant rights group Make the Road New Jersey. “It might be something that maybe some families do if they don’t have resources or access, so they can safeguard their belongings,” she said. “But I don’t think the correlation for something as big as this would be justifiable.”

Still, Fernandez had been reluctant to talk about the cash the feds say they found in Menendez’s home. The senator has been a vocal supporter of her group’s causes, including against the last privately operated immigrant detention center in New Jersey, near the group’s headquarters in Elizabeth. An immigrant from Ecuador, she can work legally because of DACA, the federal deportation-relief program that came to life thanks in part to Menendez’s advocacy. Whoever replaced him, she said, would have “big shoes to fill” with respect to immigration advocacy.

Menendez’s roots still matter to some people. Especially those who appreciate how being the child of Cuban immigrants might have shaped his politics.

More than the office he occupied, Latinos considered him a friend,” said Idida Rodriguez, a veteran Democratic consultant in New Jersey who worked to elect Menendez in his 2006 Senate run. “People felt close to him. Even if they didn’t know him, they felt they had a personal relationship to him. Latinos are very loyal.”

Up the street from Vainieri’s funeral home, at the West New York Town Hall, Albio Sires, a longtime friend and Menendez’s successor in the House, said he wasn’t going to comment on Menendez “because I don’t want to.” Teresa Ruiz, the state senate majority leader who received a “trailblazer” award from Menendez in 2020, wouldn’t sit for an interview after weeks of calls with her staff. A Newark Latino official declined to comment because it was better to “let things take their course,” and three Latino former staffers either declined to speak on the record or did not return requests for comment.

“People don’t want to talk about it because it’s like a member of the family, you know?” said Argote-Freyre.

Janet Murguía, a longtime friend and president of UnidosUS, wasn’t prepared to say whether Menendez should remain involved in politics. But she did say this much: If Menendez were to leave the Senate, “We’d be losing the most politically astute, most knowledgeable of the legislative process and most effective advocate of any Latino member to ever serve in Congress.”

Advertisement

Back in his office, Menendez says New Jerseyans could still reelect him “if we get our chance, in a timely fashion,” to fight the charges in court. He’s bullish he could beat the case before it gets to trial. As for his popularity, “I have never run where my poll — I mean, it wasn’t single digits — but I had never run where my poll was ever particularly good.”

The day after Menendez turned 70, the Justice Department announced a new superseding indictment against him. It added no new charges, but alleged that Menendez had taken more bribes for aiding Qatar, citing among other evidence a text exchange between Daibes and Menendez in which the developer offers him a selection of luxury wristwatches ranging in value from about $10,000 to nearly $24,000. In another text exchange cited by prosecutors, between the real estate tycoon and Menendez’s wife, Nadine, Daibes called the senator “as loyal as they come.”

A week later, Menendez strode onto the Senate floor, where he delivered a 20-minute defense. He accused the government of filing indictment after indictment to “keep the sensational story in the press” and convict him in the court of public opinion. Near the end of the speech, his voice started to waver. “After 50 years of public service, this is not how I wanted to celebrate my golden jubilee,” he said. “But I have never violated the public trust. I have been a patriot for, and of, my country.”

Some voters might take Menendez at his word. Others might weigh the evidence.

ncG1vNJzZmivp6x7uK3SoaCnn6Sku7G70q1lnKedZMC1xcueZqmnp5q%2FcH6Pa2toaGFkf3R7waiZZqWVo7KvsMSzZKudlaGypMDIqKVmmpmZeqK5yJ1kn52Umr%2BiuIycn5qql5rAcA%3D%3D