How Gold Bar Bob Menendez Got His Start

This is the On the Media Midweek podcast.

I'm Brooke Gladstone.

Bob Menendez will become the first senator to go to prison in more than 40 years when he reports to federal penitentiary next week.

Most of you will no doubt be aware of the broad strokes of his corruption and bribery case.

You know, the gold bars and cash found in his suburban ranch home.

But our home station, WNYC, has produced a podcast that goes deeper than most of the media coverage.

So we're bringing you the first episode just released today of Dead End, the Rise and Fall of Gold Bar Bob Menendez.

It's hosted and reported by Nancy Solomon, who'll take things from here.

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.

In that courthouse, you have no phones.

Nobody has recording devices.

So there developed this sort of cocoon-like space where the defendants, the reporters, the lawyers, we were all kind of existing together for nine weeks.

This is Tracy Tully.

She's a reporter for the New York Times, and she was in in court almost every day.

He would sing during breaks in court, sometimes in the courtroom,

often outside in that vestibule that you described.

And 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.

This is Dead End, the rise and fall of gold bar Bob Menendez.

Over the course of three episodes, we're going to tell you about the epic collapse of New Jersey's senior senator.

He was convicted of a bribery scheme involving a monopoly on halal meat exports to Egypt and helping that country obtain U.S.

military aid.

We'll dig into the details and try to solve a mystery.

How could a successful politician at the peak of his power do something that ultimately ruined him.

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.

And 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.

This is from a public TV TV interview in 2012.

So I created such a ruckus that they gave me the books, told me to shut up and put me in the honors program.

But 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.

It wasn't long before Menendez developed a brand.

I grew up in a tough neighborhood.

We had a bully in the neighborhood.

The fighter you don't want to mess with.

And this stuck with him.

From the Union City School Board in 1974.

Got a piece of wood and whacked the bully and that was a good idea.

To his time as top Democrat on the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations nearly 50 years later.

I never got whacked again.

I didn't really get to know him until I went to work for the city of Bayon.

This is Nicholas Cheravolatti.

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

long time ago.

Chara Vallati 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.

And truth be told, Nancy, I was way over my head.

And Charavolati ended up in a meeting with Menendez, who was then the local congressman.

We had been making the case that the Army and the Port Authority were not dealing with us truthfully.

And the moment that the Army reiterated the lie to him, I remember as clear as that.

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, you know, quite frankly, I was like, That's the type of guy I want representing me.

I mean, 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.

Chara Vallatti was impressed with Menendez, and he ended up going to work for him.

And, you know, 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.

And I delivered the message in my manner.

And he actually said to me,

I thought I was hiring a Rottwald and not a poodle.

A representative for Senator Menendez said that story is not true.

And what would you say, like some of the elements that make up his success?

So I think intelligence was one.

Two was work ethic.

I mean, he just would work all the time, especially back then

he was a beast.

Three was loyalty, right?

Because once he was your friend, he would stick with you even if it was against his interest.

Chara Vellati was working for Menendez when he first got to the Senate.

Menendez faced a tough choice about whether to confirm Samuel Alito to the Supreme Court.

Especially because Alito was from New Jersey.

No matter one's political persuasion, we all take pride in the honor that has been bestowed on a fellow New Jersey.

And Chara Velotti reminded Menendez that, like Galito, many of his voters were Italian-American.

I remember going and talking to him, saying, look, you know, Italian Americans, you know, they're pretty, you know,

centrist folks and like this is one of their own.

And

he's like,

he's like, I'm not going to get there.

This is not going to happen.

Like, this guy shouldn't be on the court.

Like, he doesn't, he's going to overturn some of the basic beliefs that we have.

This is my first vote in this body, and I had hoped to cast it in support of this nominee.

But after reviewing his record and his testimony before my fellow senators, I cannot.

And so the newly minted junior senator from New Jersey rose on the Senate floor to make his first ever speech about Alito.

If it's not where you come from that matters, but where you will take the nation, does a Supreme Court with Justice Alito take the nation forward or move the nation back?

Will it be an America where a woman does not have access to the best medical care?

Will it be an America where a woman does not control her own body?

Char Velati also worked with Menendez back when he had been in the House, when he bucked local sentiment and voted against the Iraq War.

Being from Hudson County in New Jersey, where it was,

if you remember, it was like, let's just do it.

And it's like, look, politically, it's expedient just to vote for it, right?

I mean, people want revenge.

And like, Bob Menendez, despite sort of the intensity of his personality in that moment, and this is like repeated throughout his career, could sit back and say, okay, but I looked at everything.

It's not there.

But 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.

The first priorities seem to always be judges and prosecutors trying to appoint people that are going to protect him.

That's coming up after the break.

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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.

Menendez,

in his larger-than-life quest for political power, as I watched it, was always 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.

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.

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.

Elected officials are not supposed to hold back-channel meetings with prosecutors.

A representative from Menendez says that one didn't happen.

But either way, meals in a restaurant kitchen didn't seem to help Menendez the first time the feds came after him in 2015.

Private jets, weekend getaways in the Dominican Republic, and hundreds of thousands of dollars in cannabis.

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.

Prosecutors at the Justice 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.

Was it corruption or business as usual in Washington?

It depends who you ask.

Maybe I drank the Kool-Aid, but I really thought it was sort of unfair.

They were criminalizing behavior that maybe wasn't wonderful, but certainly didn't deserve a federal indictment.

This is Brad Lawrence.

He creates messaging for political candidates.

These are all Menendez files.

And 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.

Well, and there's boxes.

I mean, don't forget, this goes on for since 1982.

And he was working for Menendez when the senator ran into trouble with the gifts from the eye doctor.

I believe he legitimately felt he had done nothing wrong, certainly nothing illegal.

And I think he was very angry about that.

I know he was very angry about about that.

And I don't know that he moved on.

But it's an interesting idea that

was that a breaking point where he felt like, okay, they're going to treat me like this, that I'm going to really get everything I'm due.

I'm going to,

you know.

I don't know who was that literally transactional about it, but I have a feeling that it certainly made him feel like

playing by the rules certainly didn't get him anything.

And so you'd be angry.

I mean, 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, maybe the more interesting question.

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

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.

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.

And soon after the hung jury, he fell for someone new.

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

I just wanted to hear your voice.

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

I can't wait for you to hold my hands and go to sleep.

By all accounts, it was a whirlwind romance.

Hi, it's Nate calling my very handsome senator.

And only 24 days after their first date, Nadine arranged for the top Democrat on the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations to meet off the books with an Egyptian general.

Let's start off with the general.

Since he has not met you before, he needs to have some kind of clearance from Egypt as to why he's eating

a U.S.

senator out of his, the embassy.

Why would the new girlfriend of Bob Menendez be arranging a meeting with an Egyptian general?

That's coming up on episode two of Dead End, the rise and fall of gold bar Bob Menendez.

I'm Nancy Solomon.

I made this series with Emily Botine and Jared Paul, our sound designer and music composer.

We had help from Alex Brady, Amber Bruce, Rex Done, Katie Graham, David Krasnow, Mike Kuchman, Valentina Powers, and Jackson Vail.

Thanks for listening.

Thanks for tuning in to the Midweek podcast.

Check out the big show on Friday.

It usually posts around dinner time, and we got a lot to talk about.

See you then.