New Menendez details: a diamond ring, a 'James Bond' phone and Covid tests

A luxury Mercedes-Benz, gold bars, exercise equipment and wads of cash featured prominently in a federal indictment accusing Sen. Robert Menendez of accepting a sordid series of bribes.

Now prosecutors say a diamond engagement ring for the senator's future wife, Nadine Menendez, was also part of the elaborate bribery scheme — and a source of infighting among co-defendants who are expected to stand trial together in May.

Wael Hana, a longtime friend of Ms. Menendez who is also charged in the alleged conspiracy, tried to cheat her out of the entire value of the ring, according to court documents filed late Monday by prosecutors in Manhattan.

In doing so, Mr. Hana, an Egyptian-American businessman who founded a halal meat company that prosecutors say was used to funnel bribes to the Menendezes, threatened to derail plans for the senator to help Egypt's government — part of the complicated plot. he is accused.

“[Hana] was about to screw things up with Bob,” said a confidential source in contact with Egyptian officials, according to government documents. “Bob starting to listen to us.”

Mr. Menendez, a New Jersey Democrat, has pleaded not guilty, as have Ms. Menendez, Mr. Hana and two other defendants.

Attorneys for the senator did not immediately respond to a request for comment, and attorneys for his wife had no comment. Mr. Hana's lawyer, Lawrence S. Lustberg, had no comment other than to say he would respond to the government's filing with the court, which is due Monday.

Nicholas Biase, a spokesman for the U.S. attorney's office in the Southern District of New York, where the suspects have been charged, also declined to comment.

The new filing comes in response to the senator's request to suppress evidence seized during searches of the home he shares with Ms. Menendez in Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey. Menendez.

But in justifying the need for the arrest warrants, prosecutors from the Southern District of New York offered a wealth of new details about the alleged bribery plot itself.

There are excerpts of secretly recorded conversations and details of where investigators found two bags containing about $100,000 in cash each. (“In the basement of Menendez and Nadine Menendez's home, on top of a large rack of coat hangers,” prosecutors wrote, adding: “Underneath the coats were four boots filled with cash, including one boot containing more than $5,000 in $50 bills.”)

As part of the bribery plot, prosecutors said Mr. Hana arranged for a carpet installation at Ms. Menendez's home. And sometimes the senator called what the couple called Ms. Menendez's “007” phone — “an apparent reference to the fictional character James Bond,” prosecutors wrote.

But perhaps the most unusual new detail in the filing concerns an element of the lengthy federal investigation that did not appear to play a role in any of the three subsequent indictments against Mr. Menendez, Ms. Menendez and three New Jersey businessmen.

Prosecutors noted that during the pandemic, in late 2020 and early 2021, Mr. Menendez contacted mayors in New Jersey to ask them to authorize the use of a specific laboratory — which Ms. Menendez was paying at the time — to test Covid-19 to perform tests.

Taken together, prosecutors said, these details amount to “substantial evidence that Menendez was indeed aware of the corrupt compensation.”

Prosecutors say the engagement ring was given to Nadine Menendez as part of a $150,000 bribe from a man who had sought Mr. Menendez's help to avoid criminal penalties after being charged with insurance fraud in New Jersey.

Some of the money went toward a new Mercedes-Benz convertible for Ms. Menendez, prosecutors said.

The new car replaced a vehicle that, according to police records, was Ms. Menendez in December 2018 was driving when she struck and killed a pedestrian, Richard Koop, in Bogota, NJ. Ms. Menendez was not tested for drugs or alcohol and was not charged with wrongdoing. The New Jersey attorney general's office has said it is reviewing the crash investigation but has declined to respond to questions about the status of the investigation.

About $35,000 of the $150,000 in bribes was intended to cover the purchase of a diamond ring, according to prosecutors.

But the ring Mr. Hana bought cost only $12,000. He used the excess money to buy himself two watches, a bracelet and a necklace, but had the jeweler provide a receipt showing that the ring he gave Ms. Menendez cost $35,000, prosecutors said.

“The Hana employee also explained that Menendez knew that Hana had shortchanged him on the ring, and that Nadine Menendez (the 'gander') had returned the ring to the jeweler and learned that it was worth less money” , the court said. noted, citing a code name used for Ms. Menendez.

In their filing on Monday, Southern District prosecutors also responded sharply to a claim by Mr. Menendez's lawyers that the case arose from “the administration's apparent zeal to 'get back at' Senator Menendez” for a conviction in had avoided a 2017 federal corruption trial. in New Jersey, which ended in a hung jury and the dismissal of the charges against him.

Prosecutors, noting that the senator's previous case involved different facts, a different co-defendant and a different prosecution team, called the accusation “patently false.”

Prosecutors also refuted a claim made by Mr. Menendez in an affidavit accusing the FBI, which searched his home in June 2022, of leaving the house “in complete disarray.” Interior doors had been forcibly broken off, furniture had been haphazardly moved and filing cabinets, desk drawers, dressers and cabinets had all been ransacked and their contents strewn about, Mr. Menendez wrote.

Prosecutors, who called the senator's claim “hyperbolic at best,” said that while physical searches require the movement of some objects, time-stamped photos of entry and exit taken by the FBI search team “demonstrate that the house was in substantially similar condition at the time it was visited. end of the quest as it was in the beginning.”