David Remnick: In the through-the-looking-glass world of Donald Trump, he's the guy who drained the swamp of corruption, even as he orders the Department of Justice to drop corruption cases and stop investigating new ones. The situation with New York City Mayor Eric Adams is a case in point. The Justice Department suggested they would drop serious federal charges if Adams would just assist the feds on the immigration issue. The mayor's attorney insisted there was never any deal, but even so, a pack of federal prosecutors quit their jobs in disgust. This too is surprising, but maybe not too surprising. Weeks ago, Bob Menendez, the former New Jersey senator known as Gold Bar Bob for the golden cash tucked away in his house, was sentenced to 11 years in prison on corruption charges. Menendez walked out of the courtroom and directly made a plea to guess who?

Bob Menendez: President Trump is right. This process is political and it's corrupted to the core. I hope President Trump cleans up the cesspool and restores the integrity to the system.

[crosstalk]

Speaker 1: You're a Democrat. The case was brought by Democrats. How is this a witch hunt? How is this a witch hunt?

David Remnick: How did Bob Menendez, who voted to impeach Donald Trump end up begging him for a get-out-of-jail card? We turn to WNYC's reporter Nancy Solomon, who's been covering New Jersey politics for many years, so Nancy, ipso facto, knows a thing or two about corruption.

Nancy Solomon: One morning in June of 2024, during the trial of Bob Menendez, I was sitting in the hallway finishing a cup of coffee outside the courtroom. There was only one other person there standing next to the bench, looking out at the spectacular Manhattan view from the 23rd floor, Bob Menendez. He was singing, and it was killing me that I couldn't record it.

Tracey Tully: In that courthouse, you have no phones, nobody has recording devices, so they developed this cocoon-like space where the defendants, the reporters, the lawyers, we were all existing together for nine weeks.

Nancy Solomon: This is Tracey Tully. She's a reporter for the New York Times, and she was in court almost every day.

Tracey Tully: He would sing during breaks in court, sometimes in the courtroom, often outside in that vestibule that you described. I remember riding down an elevator with a crowd of people at one point, and one of the lawyers said, "I think it's a form of prayer."

Nancy Solomon: Bob Menendez grew up in Union City. His parents had come from Cuba. His father was a carpenter and a gambler and his mother a factory seamstress. He's often told the story about how he qualified for an honors program when he was a senior in high school but he couldn't afford the books.

Bob Menendez: I couldn't understand for the life of me in a public high school that I'd be barred from being in the honors program-

Nancy Solomon: This is from a public TV interview in 2012.

Bob Menendez: -so I created such a ruckus that they gave me the books, told me to shut up, and put me in the honors program. I didn't feel right about that because I had friends who had the ability and the grades and not the money, so I started a petition drive at 19 to change the school board, put a referendum on the ballot, passed a referendum at 19, and then ran at the age of 20 the first school board elections in my hometown.

Nancy Solomon: It wasn't long before Menendez developed a brand.

Bob Menendez: I grew up in a tough neighborhood. We had a bully in the neighborhood.

Nancy Solomon: The fighter you don't want to mess with.

Bob Menendez: [crosstalk] my mom and she said, "Avoid him."

Nancy Solomon: This stuck with him. From the Union City school board in 1974-

Bob Menendez: I got a piece of wood and whacked the bully and that [crosstalk]--

Nancy Solomon: -to his time as top Democrat on the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, nearly 50 years later.

Bob Menendez: I never got whacked again.

Nicholas Chiaravalloti: I didn't really get to know him until I went to work for the City of Bayonne.

Nancy Solomon: This is Nicholas Chiaravalloti.

Nicholas Chiaravalloti: Former state legislator, been in and around Hudson County politics since I was about 14 years old. We had a meeting in City Hall at a--

Nancy Solomon: It was a long time ago. Chiaravalloti was working for the City of Bayonne. The small, working-class town was in a fight over a piece of land that had been an old Army installation.

Nicholas Chiaravalloti: Truth be told, Nancy, I was way over my head.

Nancy Solomon: Chiaravalloti ended up in a meeting with Menendez, who was then the local congressman.

Nicholas Chiaravalloti: We had been making the case that the Army and the Port Authority were not dealing with us truthfully. The moment that the Army reiterated the lie to him, I remember as clear as day, he got up, kicked his chair over, and basically told them, "There's no freaking way you're getting this land." That was the moment that, quite frankly, I was like, "That's the type of guy I want representing me."

Nancy Solomon: When he was young, Menendez stood up to his political mentor, a popular mayor who ended up getting convicted for allowing town contracts to go to a business with connections to the mob. Menendez even had to wear a bulletproof vest into the courthouse. Chiaravalloti was impressed with Menendez, and he ended up going to work for him.

Nicholas Chiaravalloti: He had a very different style than I did. We got into an argument once. He wanted me to deliver a message to an elected official, but he wanted me to deliver it in his manner. I delivered the message in my manner. He actually said to me, "I thought I was hiring a Rottweiler, not a poodle."

Nancy Solomon: A representative for Senator Menendez said that story is not true. What would you say some of the elements that make up his success?

Nicholas Chiaravalloti: I think intelligence was one. Two was work ethic. He just would work all the time, especially back then. He was a beast. Three was loyalty. Because once he was your friend, he would stick with you, even if it was against his interest.

Nancy Solomon: Menendez opposed the confirmation of Samuel Alito to the Supreme Court, despite the large number of Italians in his district that supported the New Jersey native. He voted against the Iraq war.

Nicholas Chiaravalloti: Being from Hudson County in New Jersey, if you remember, it was like, "Let's just do it." It's like, "Look, politically it's expedient just to vote for it." People want revenge. Bob Menendez, despite the intensity of his personality, in that moment, this is repeated throughout his career, could sit back and say, "Okay, but I looked at everything. It's not there."

Nancy Solomon: There is a subset of people, a large one, who believe Menendez has been corrupt from the beginning. They don't buy the hero testifying against the machine narrative. Jay Booth used to be a political operative in Hudson County who opposed Menendez from the start. Booth says, look at the charges in the current case where Menendez tried to pressure state and federal prosecutors. He says that's part of a long pattern.

Jay Booth: Menendez in his larger-than-life quest for political power, as I watched it, the first priority seemed to always be judges and prosecutors, trying to appoint people that are going to protect him and harm his enemies in the criminal justice system.

Nancy Solomon: Booth says he witnessed Menendez in action many years ago. He happened to walk into the kitchen of Puccini's, a legendary restaurant on Jersey City's west side that was a hangout for politicos, and there at the stainless steel prep counter was a meeting happening, presumably on the down low.

Jay Booth: I saw Menendez, who was then a congressman, sitting in a corner in the kitchen where no one could see him having lunch with the then Hudson County prosecutor, which of course would be perceived as unethical, or more particularly, something they were eating in there so that no one could see them, clearly.

Nancy Solomon: Elected officials are not supposed to hold back-channel meetings with prosecutors. A representative from Menendez says that one didn't happen. Either way, meals in a restaurant kitchen didn't seem to help Menendez the first time the feds came after him in 2015.

Speaker 2: Private jets, weekend getaways in the Dominican Republic, and hundreds of thousands of dollars in [crosstalk]--

Nancy Solomon: This case involved a wealthy Florida eye doctor who had been under investigation for Medicare fraud. The doctor had given Menendez expensive gifts and trips to the Dominican Republic and Paris. Menendez allegedly reached out to help the doctor's Medicare problems go away. He insisted the charges were unfair.

Bob Menendez: Prosecutors at the Justice Department don't know the difference between friendship and corruption and have chosen to twist my duties as a senator and my friendship into something that is improper.

Nancy Solomon: Was it corruption or business as usual in Washington? It depends who you ask.

Brad Lawrence: Maybe I drank the Kool-Aid, but I really thought it was unfair. They were criminalizing behavior that maybe wasn't wonderful but certainly didn't deserve a federal indictment.

Nancy Solomon: This is Brad Lawrence. He creates messaging for political candidates.

Brad Lawrence: These are all Menendez files.

Nancy Solomon: Lawrence has worked for nearly every major Democratic candidate in New Jersey for the past 40-odd years. He worked for Menendez the longest. That's like 18 inches of files.

Brad Lawrence: There's boxes. Don't forget this goes on since 1982.

Nancy Solomon: He was working for Menendez when the senator ran into trouble with the gifts from the eye doctor.

Brad Lawrence: I believe he legitimately felt he had done nothing wrong, certainly nothing illegal. I think he was very angry about that. I know he was very angry about that. I don't know that he moved.

Nancy Solomon: It's an interesting idea that was that a breaking point where he felt like, "Okay, they're going to treat me like this, then I'm going to really get everything I'm due"?

Brad Lawrence: I don't know. Was that literally transactional about it? I have a feeling that it certainly made him feel like playing by the rules certainly didn't get him anything, so you be angry. I think most people would be angry about being indicted and put through the wringer for something that they felt certainly didn't merit that. It's how you come out of that may be the more interesting question.

Nancy Solomon: The case ended in a hung jury and Menendez walked out of the courthouse defiant, as if he'd been entirely exonerated.

Bob Menendez: To those who were digging my political grave so that they could jump into my seat, I know who you are, and I won't forget you.

Nancy Solomon: The trial was also a pretty pivotal time in the senator's personal life. He and his fiancée broke up right before the trial began. Soon after the hung jury, he fell for someone new.

Nadine Arslanian: [unintelligible 00:11:36]

Nancy Solomon: He had met Nadine Arslanian at his usual breakfast spot, the IHOP in Union City.

Nadine Arslanian: I just wanted to hear your voice.

Nancy Solomon: Voicemails from Nadine were entered as evidence in the second trial.

Nadine Arslanian: I can't wait for you to hold my hand and go to sleep.

David Remnick: A message from Nadine Arslanian to then-Senator Bob Menendez, used by prosecutors as evidence. Our story continues in a moment. This is The New Yorker Radio Hour.

[music]

This is The New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. We're hearing the story today of Robert Menendez. He's the first senator or a former senator sentenced to prison for crimes in office in more than 40 years, which might tell you that political corruption is extremely rare, or in fact, it might tell you how rarely corruption is prosecuted. WNYC's reporter Nancy Solomon has been explaining Menendez's rise as a powerful New Jersey Democrat and then his fall. The evidence in the trial included gold bars, literal gold bars, and heaps of cash that were squirreled away in the house he shared with his wife, Nadine, who is also being prosecuted in the case.

Nancy Solomon: Nadine Arslanian was born in Beirut. Her parents were Armenian. They moved to New York in the late 1970s. She studied French culture and civilization at NYU and speaks French and Arabic. Nadine was a stay-at-home mom, raising her kids in Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey, and she liked a certain lifestyle. She drove her kids to a private French school in Manhattan and has been spotted with cast members of the Real Housewives of New Jersey. By the time she met Bob Menendez, she was long divorced and by all accounts, it was a whirlwind romance.

Bob Menendez: Never, never

Never, never

Nancy Solomon: 20 months after they began dating, Bob proposed to Nadine in front of the Taj Mahal.

Bob Menendez: Never be enough

Nancy Solomon: He's known for his crooning. The YouTube video of this one has been viewed 86,000 times.

Speaker 3: Oh my God.

Speaker 4: Wow.

Nancy Solomon: Nicholas Charvolatti, who recalled Menendez kicking his chair over in a meeting, understands what it might have felt like when Menendez began dating Nadine. As a former elected official himself, he gets the financial strain. Unlike plenty of politicians, Menendez is a guy who has never had a lot of money.

Nicholas Chiaravalloti: I think that puts some pressure on you and causes you some doubts about what you should be earning. I think that does have an impact because you can't really do the things that I think other people can do.

Nancy Solomon: Bob Menendez had a new girlfriend and Nadine needed money. She had financial problems and would soon face foreclosure of her home. Tracy Tully, the New York Times reporter, says the bribery case began with a friendship between Nadine and an Egyptian American who was just as broke as she was, one of the co-defendants, Will Hana.

Tracey Tully: Will Hana is a serial entrepreneur. He started a bunch of businesses and he lost his house in Bayonne. He's got no money. He becomes friends with Nadine Arslanian, who becomes Nadine Menendez.

Nancy Solomon: They both speak Arabic and were part of what you could call a lonely hearts club that often spent multiple nights a week hanging out in Bergen County restaurants.

Tracey Tully: Somewhere along the way, somebody comes up with the idea to create this halal certification company.

Nancy Solomon: Halal meat certification. These companies inspect meat butchering facilities to ensure that the process is done according to Muslim rules. It's like kosher, but it's halal. The Egyptian government chooses the businesses that certify meat imports into their country. Will Hana, Nadine's friend, was trying to work his connections in Egypt to get one of those contracts, but for a couple of years, prosecutors say he couldn't get any traction until Nadine started dating Menendez, the top Democrat of the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations.

Nadine Arslanian: Hi, it's me calling my very handsome senator.

Nancy Solomon: Within weeks, Nadine asks Menendez for a favor, that he meet with a high-level Egyptian official.

Nadine Arslanian: Just got off with the general. Since he has not met you before, he needs to have some clearance from Egypt as to why he's meeting a US Senator out of the embassy.

Nancy Solomon: Many meetings did happen. There were meetings with the Egyptian general and with Egyptian intelligence officers. Many of them included Hana, the halal meat guy.

Tracey Tully: Trial testimony showed that then the company took off and ultimately won a monopoly. Hana's company was the gatekeeper to all of that product, so it made him a very wealthy man.

Nancy Solomon: Larry Lustberg, Hana's defense attorney, says his client was able to get the Egyptian monopoly on the strength of Hana's own connections and business acumen. He's appealing the conviction.

Larry Lustberg: I will go to my grave believing that the government did not prove its case here.

Nancy Solomon: Regardless, Hana and another co-defendant were convicted of bribing Menendez in part with the money made by the lucrative halal business. The senator was convicted of three main things. One, he made calls to an official at the US Department of Agriculture to help Hana maintain the monopoly. That's the quid pro quo what he did for the bribes.

Two, he also contacted state and federal prosecutors and complained about criminal investigations against two of the men paying him off. That's obstruction of justice. Three, the Egyptian government gave Hana the monopoly. Menendez, ranking member of the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, released a hold on military aid to Egypt. That's the acting as a foreign agent charge. Menendez was convicted on all counts and resigned from the Senate. He's now on the verge of becoming the first senator to go to prison in more than 40 years, or maybe not.

Bob Menendez: President Trump is right. This process is political and it's corrupted to the core.

Nancy Solomon: When he emerged from the sentencing, Menendez made his direct pitch to Donald Trump that his prosecution is just as wrong as Trump's. That was January 29th of this year, and it seemed far-fetched that Bob Menendez, a progressive who voted to impeach the president, would get a pardon from him. Two weeks later, Trump's Department of Justice ordered federal prosecutors in New York to drop their case against the Democratic mayor, Eric Adams.

Ciara Torres-Spelliscy: As someone who's a constitutional law professor, this is really irksome.

Nancy Solomon: Ciara Torres-Spelliscy teaches at the Stetson University College of Law in Florida. She writes about political corruption.

Ciara Torres-Spelliscy: It looks like there was a offer of a quid pro quo from the Adams team to Trump's DOJ.

Nancy Solomon: What do you think about the possibility that Donald Trump may pardon Menendez?

Ciara Torres-Spelliscy: It would fit a pattern of the Trump pardons, both in his first term and early in his second term. He has had a habit of pardoning people who have violated anti-corruption laws, whether they're white-collar crime anti-corruption laws or campaign finance laws.

Nancy Solomon: Some have argued that Menendez because he is out of office and voted to impeach Trump is unlikely to get a pardon, but for Torres-Spelliscy, the president's history means all bets are off.

Ciara Torres-Spelliscy: It's hard to know who Trump will pardon next. One of the more recent pardons was for the former Governor of Illinois, Rod Blagojevich. He was a Democrat, so I'm not sure whether the Democratic label matters so much to Trump. He seems much more interested in undermining anti-corruption laws left, right, and center.

Nancy Solomon: Menendez has repeatedly denied wrongdoing. His lawyers aren't counting on a pardon and have said they'll appeal the conviction. The current US Supreme Court, it might actually help.

Ciara Torres-Spelliscy: The Roberts Supreme Court has been steadily deregulating corruption. They've done this both in white-collar crime cases and in campaign finance cases.

Nancy Solomon: The outlook for Bob Menendez is not quite as bleak as it might seem despite facing 11 years in prison. Whether or not he receives a pardon or wins his appeal, it remains an epic collapse of what was a historic political career. He was the first in everything he did, first in his family to go to college, first Latino in New Jersey elected mayor, state legislator and member of Congress. That's what makes this case and the cartoonish details of gold bars and stacks of cash squirreled away in his home so mystifying to those who knew and respected him, like Brad Lawrence, his consultant who worked on nearly every one of his campaigns.

Brad Lawrence: I don't want to be a Bob Menendez apologist, particularly in light of how it ended, but I also have a long history and a respect and affection for at least the first three-quarters of his political life. I don't have the answer to it. I wish I did, and I feel like I'm an idiot that I don't have the answer for it. It is, to me, an inexplicable and tragic way for him to go.

[music]

David Remnick: Robert Menendez was sentenced to 11 years in prison. He remains free so he can attend Nadine Menendez's trial. She also pleaded not guilty. There's more reporting on politics and crime from Nancy Solomon at deadendpodcast.org.

[music]

 

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