Bob Menendez, the once a powerful New Jersey senator, cried as he begged a Manhattan judge for leniency Wednesday — and was sentenced to 11 years in prison for selling out his lofty post for gold bars, cash, a Mercedes-Benz convertible and other bribes.
“Your honor, You have before you a chastened man,” Menendez, 71, said before choking up.
“I have dedicated my entire life to the service of others,” he said, dabbing his tears with a tissue. “I am far from a perfect man, but I believe in my half century of public service I have done more good than bad.”
The display of waterworks came before Manhattan federal court judge Sidney Stein handed the sentence to the three-term Democrat — who resigned in disgrace in August after a jury found him guilty of taking hundreds of thousands of dollars in payola in exchange for protecting and enriching businessmen and foreign governments.
“Somewhere along the way you became, I’m sorry to say, a corrupt politician,” Stein told the disgraced pol.
The former head of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee — tasked with approving massive sums of lethal military aid — did favors for Egypt and Qatar while go-betweens showered him and his wife, Nadine, with cash, gold bars, the luxury car, checks for a no-show job and payouts to a sham “consulting” firm, trial evidence revealed.
“What else can the love of my life do for you?” Menendez’s wife Nadine told an Egyptian official while her international affairs honcho hubby smoked cigars and swigged red wine at a May 2019 meeting at Morton’s Steakhouse, an FBI agent who secretly observed the scene testified.
Agents who raided the Menendezs’ cluttered Englewood Cliffs house in June 2022 found 13 gold bars worth $150,000 tucked inside a bedroom safe. Nearly $500,000 in cash was spread out all over the house— including wads of bills totaling $14,500 piled into a pair of Timberland work boots, and cash-filled envelopes stuffed into the pockets of his official Senate jacket.
Menendez did not testify during the nine-week trial. But his older sister tried to downplay the cash trove as an innocuous decades-long habit stemming from his distrust of banks due to their Cuban heritage.
“It’s a Cuban thing,” Caridad Gonzalez testified.
Prosecutors had asked the judge to sentence Menendez to at least 15 years in prison. They pointed out that the case was the first time that any US Senator — or any public official, for that matter — was found guilty of serving as an illegal “foreign agent” while in office.
“Menendez, who swore an oath to represent the United States and the State of New Jersey, instead put his high office up for sale in exchange for this hoard of bribes,” the feds wrote.
Defense attorneys had urged the judge to have “mercy” on Menendez, and impose a sentence of less than two years.
The guilty verdict has already “rendered him a national punchline and stripped him of every conceivable personal, professional, and financial benefit,” the lawyers argued in court papers.
Prosecutors at trial laid out a staggering slew of actions Menendez took between 2018 and 2022 on behalf of foreign nations and his alleged cronies, including businessmen Wael Hana, 40, and Fred Daibes, 66, who were also convicted of funneling bribes to the senator and his wife.
Daibes was sentenced earlier Wednesday to seven years in prison and fined $1.75 million, while Hana was handed a eight-year sentence and fined $1.25 million.
Among the favors Menendez doled out while the payoffs rolled in was ghostwriting a letter asking the US to unfreeze $300 million in military aid to Egypt that had been held up due to human rights concerns, jurors heard.
Menendez also leaned on the Agriculture Department to protect Egypt-born businessman Hana’s lucrative monopoly on approving halal meat exports to Egypt — awarded despite Hana having no prior experience with halal goods, trial evidence showed.
On top of that, Menendez tried to meddle in a state prosecution on behalf of insurance broker Jose Uribe, 57 — who flipped on the embattled pol and testified to buying Nadine a new Mercedes-Benz C-300 in exchange for the senator’s help, jurors heard.
“Congratulations mon amour de la vie, we are the proud owners of a 2019 Mercedes,” Nadine Menendez texted her husband after receiving the first payment toward the new car, using the French phrase for “love of my life.”
The then-senator later bragged during a dinner at upscale North Jersey Spanish restaurant Segovia that “I saved your ass, not once but twice,” Uribe testified.
Menendez also tried to get involved in a federal bank fraud case against his close friend Daibes, including by griping about the prosecution to future US Attorney of New Jersey Philip Sellinger, Sellinger testified.
Sellinger was in the running for the powerful Justice Department post at the time — and winning a potential blessing from Menendez, New Jersey’s senior senator, could have helped clinch his candidacy, jurors heard.
A jury of 12 New Yorkers convicted Menendez of all 16 charges he faced, including bribery, extortion, acting as an illegal foreign agent and obstructing justice.
Nadine was also charged by the feds, but her trial is currently set for March, after her case was delayed due to her being diagnosed with breast cancer.
Uribe, who is expected to testify at Nadine’s trial, will be sentenced after that case is resolved.
The Manhattan trial was Menendez’s second time facing federal corruption charges.
In an earlier case, New Jersey prosecutors charged him with accepting lavish bribes — including all-expense-paid vacations and private flights — in exchange for favors to a Palm Beach doctor. But that case ended in a mistrial in 2017.
Menendez has maintained his innocence and vowed to appeal his conviction.
At trial, Menendez’s lawyers claimed that he’d been merely “doing his job” by helping out constituents and engaging in “diplomacy.”
They also took the brazen step of blaming his wife for the gold bars found in their home.
The attorneys argued that the “beautiful, tall” Nadine, who is of Lebanese and Albanian descent, “kept him in the dark” about the payoffs. They claimed that receiving gold bar “gifts” was a typical Lebanese custom.
“It’s cultural,” attorney Avi Weitzman argued. “They like to give gold and other precious metals as gifts.”
Yet the feds presented evidence that the senator was the one calling the shots in their relationship.
Uribe, the insurance broker, recalled an evening meeting with Menendez at which the senator rung a small bell to beckon his wife onto their patio — after calling out to her, “mon amour!”
The feds reminded jurors of that moment in their final pitch to jurors, who found Menendez guilty after around 12½ hours of deliberations spread over three days.
“He’s not a puppet having his strings pulled by someone he summons with a bell,” prosecutor Paul Monteleoni said.
