The Fall of New Jersey's Sopranos Senator

The Sopranos is a documentary, I’ve always been fond of saying. The early 2000s mafia show captures the New Jersey that I grew up in. Although the glory days of organized crime ended long ago, local politics are still infused with the Tony Soprano spirit: backroom wheeling and dealing between petty local strongmen.

The fall of Sen. Bob Menendez (D–N.J.) captures that spirit well. Menendez was convicted on Tuesday for a bribery scheme involving gold bars and—in true Sopranos style—a shady meat business. He is likely to face 10 years in prison, NorthJersey.com reports, and Menendez reportedly told his allies on Wednesday that he will step down.

Ironically, the egregious corruption that Menendez engaged in has opened the door to uncorrupt New Jersey politics. After Menendez ran into legal trouble, the state Democratic Party tried to coronate an unpopular replacement. Rep. Andy Kim (D–N.J.) and other dissident Democrats sued for a more open primary process, forcing the state to adopt reforms.

Menendez had gotten away with alleged corruption in the past, but this scandal mixed the low-level corruption of New Jersey politics with high-level international intrigue and national security issues. While trading favors with Wael Hana, an Egyptian-American meat importer, Menendez and his wife Nadine Arslanian got involved with Egyptian intelligence officers, who pumped them for information and help with arms deals.

In February 2018, for example, Arslanian sent a voicemail to “my very handsome senator,” saying, “I have a favor to ask you.” She wanted him to meet with an Egyptian general at Egypt’s embassy in Washington. A few months later, Menendez texted Arslanian an itemized list of U.S. weapon sales to Egypt that he was going to approve. He told Arslanian to forward it to Hana, who forwarded it to Egyptian officials.

Prosecutors testified that unknown agents even tried to intimidate U.S. diplomat Bret Tate, who had raised concerns about Hana’s growing monopoly on Egyptian beef liver imports, by following him around Cairo and searching his apartment.

“I have never been anything but a patriot of my country and for my country,” Menendez said while leaving the courthouse. “I have never, ever been a foreign agent.”

And in a way, he’s not wrong about his loyalties. Menendez, the former head of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, was committed to letting anyone from New Jersey grease his and Arslanian’s palms. Their dealings with Egypt were just an extension of local politics, since Hana happened to be a constituent.

The court also convicted local real estate developer Fred Daibes for bribing Menendez to make a bank fraud case go away and bring Qatari investors into Daibes’ business. Jose Uribe, yet another local businessman who gave Arslanian a luxury car to get out of a criminal investigation, flipped and testified against Menendez.

The most salacious aspect of the case was the gold bars. The FBI found 13 gold bars at Arslanian’s house, and Menendez’s search history showed that he had looked up how much a kilogram of gold was worth during a return trip from Egypt. Menendez tried to imply that he stashed gold because of his Cuban-American family’s trauma from communism, which doesn’t make much sense, because the Menendez family left Cuba years before the communists took power.

Menendez has made New Jersey into a bipartisan punchline. Sen. John Fetterman (D–Pa.), who has a longstanding vendetta against the state, has spent the last few months taunting Menendez. He even hired George Santos, another former congressman facing criminal charges, to make a video message for “Bobby from Jersey.”

And at the Republican National Convention on Wednesday night, Rep. Matt Gaetz (R–Fla.) joked that “inflation has gotten so bad, you can no longer bribe Democrat senators with cash alone. You have to use gold bars just so the bribes hold value!”

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