Nadine Menendez was found guilty on Monday of acting as the partner in crime of her convicted husband, ex-Democratic New Jersey Sen. Bob Menendez, by brokering backdoor bribery deals that saw the couple showered in gold bullion bars, wads of cash, and a Mercedes-Benz convertible.
Jurors, who got the case Friday, convicted Nadine of 18 counts, including conspiracy to commit bribery, conspiracy to commit honest services fraud, conspiracy to commit extortion, and obstruction of justice. The conviction carries a potential decades-long term.
The 58-year-old, known as Nadine Arslanian before she wed the embattled former lawmaker in 2020, was indicted alongside her husband in September 2023 on charges alleging she arranged a series of deals between her husband and a trio of New Jersey businessmen from 2018 through 2023, putting a price on his power as a senator and as chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.
Last July Menendez was found guilty of acting as a foreign agent, bribery, and other offenses and in January was sentenced to 11 years in prison, a term he’s set to begin serving on June 6 after reporting to the Bureau of Prisons.
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Bob and Nadine Menendez arrive at federal court in Manhattan in 2023. (Photo by TIMOTHY A. CLARY/AFP via Getty Images)
The ex-senator raked in almost half a million dollars in cash, $150,000 worth of gold bars, a luxury convertible for Nadine, designer watches, and Formula 1 tickets from his corrupt benefactors in exchange for pulling strings for them behind the scenes, jurors at both trials heard. The couple’s co-defendants, Wael Hana, 41, who ran a Halal certification business, and real estate developer Fred Daibes, 67, were also found guilty of related charges alongside Bob Menendez at his 2024 trial. The third co-conspirator, N.J. businessman Jose Uribe, cooperated in exchange for leniency.
Among other actions, Menendez coerced the highest levels of New Jersey state law enforcement to squash a criminal probe into Uribe and an associate, took bribes from Daibes to meddle in a pending federal prosecution against him in the Garden State, and pocketed bribes from Hana to pressure the U.S. Department of Agriculture to let him maintain an exclusive monopoly over U.S. exports of Halal products to Egypt.
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Bob and Nadine Menendez attend an event at the White House in 2022. (Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)
The fraud came to light after FBI agents searched the couple’s Englewood Cliffs, N.J., home in the summer of 2022 and turned up more than $100,000 worth of gold bars and over $480,000 in cash stashed away in closets, jackets embroidered with Menendez’s name, and envelopes bearing Menendez and Daibes’ fingerprints, according to trial evidence.
At Nadine’s trial, the feds argued she played a crucial role in the scheme, acting as a go-between by keeping him in the loop and urging him to carry out the businessmen’s requests. Her case was delayed while she underwent treatment for breast cancer, undergoing a double mastectomy while her husband went on trial last year.
This developing story will be updated.
