What happened to Bob Menendez? 

It’s something I’ve thought about for a long time, which is why I went to his sentencing for bribery on January 29 at federal court in lower Manhattan. When I met the future U.S. senator in 1978, we were both twenty-four years old; I was a cub reporter covering Union City, New Jersey, for the Hudson Dispatch, and he was the secretary of the local school board, in charge of its finances.

His lawyer was quick to point back to those days when, as I knew, Menendez had acted with great integrity. He had detected the corrupt machinations being used to defraud the school system at the time, then fully and voluntarily assisted federal prosecutors when they began an investigation leading to the racketeering conviction of his political mentor.

“That’s part of the tragedy here,” federal judge Sidney Stein said before sentencing Menendez to eleven years in prison for accepting hundreds of thousands of dollars in cash, gold bars, and other bribes in return for flexing his clout to benefit two businessmen with ties to the Egyptian government.

The judge wondered out loud how Menendez had become this felon standing before him, quavering and tearful, convicted of what the prosecutors wrote may be “the most serious crime for which a U.S. Senator has been convicted in the history of the Republic.” Another note for the history books: the New Jersey Democrat was the first person to be convicted of serving as an unregistered foreign agent while also a public official.

The judge seemed somewhat perplexed. “I don’t know what led you to this. Greed was certainly part of it,” he said. “But that can’t be it. I don’t think that explains everything. Hubris was part of it; I don’t know. You’ll have to try to figure that out yourself over time.”

Your Honor, I submit that we can’t understand what happened to Bob Menendez without knowing the story of the man who ushered him into politics and whom Menendez ushered out. That was William V. Musto, the mayor of Union City, a powerful state senator—and to this day, my most unforgettable character. Musto was an old-time boss, a throwback to the days of Jersey City mayor Frank Hague, who recognized the young war hero’s potential and sent him to the state assembly in 1946.

I went to Musto’s City Hall office nearly every day. Outside, there was always a long line of people seeking his help for problems of every kind. Musto treated those people compassionately—with love, I would say—and the public responded to him in kind. I’ve never seen such a political bond. But Musto’s help demanded a fealty as binding as that required by any medieval knight’s oath. 

This was the system that nourished Menendez. As a mayoral aide, he escorted people from those long lines into the mayor’s office. He absorbed it all: Musto’s hardball patronage politics, his expertise in the mechanics of governance, his pleasure in helping supplicants, his merciless treatment of political foes. Menendez seemed to be the apple of the mayor’s eye, and as a Cuban American in a city that was three-quarters Cuban but run by Italian Americans, a someday-successor to Musto. 

Many saw it as a kind of father-son relationship, and it took on a tragic edge following the death of Menendez’s father. In June of 1978, I noticed an item on the police blotter about the suicide of a man named Mario Menendez. When the desk sergeant saw me reading it, he exchanged a nervous glance with another cop: they knew he was the father of a favored aide to the mayor. I was new to the paper and didn’t know; the officers kept it that way.

Around that time, Menendez was given his job as school-board secretary. Father-figure or not, Musto put Menendez in a terrible position: three-quarters of a million dollars in cost overruns had been granted to a mob-controlled construction company building additions to two local high schools. Federal investigators would later determine, after the builder turned informant, that the overruns were phony and that $572,000 of the proceeds were used to bribe Musto and other Union City officials. 

Menendez didn’t know about the payoffs, but he sensed that something was seriously wrong with the cost overruns. He was bound by the code of loyalty, but he was no fool. When a federal prosecutor called Menendez to find out what was going on, he helped. This would lead to claims that he betrayed a man who’d given him everything, supposedly for political motives. But really, Menendez was the one who’d been betrayed. To protect himself from being drawn into the swamp, he had to inform on a man he’d much admired and who, to that point, had been his meal ticket. 

Beyond the emotions involved, it was just plain dangerous. Musto had previously been indicted on a federal charge of conspiring to protect a gambling ring, a case eventually dismissed. Much of the time I spent in his office consisted of listening to him rant about the unfairness of the prosecutors and my own paper over the case, which was one of the early “sting” operations the FBI ran as it tried to make up for years of failing to police official corruption. One of the key witnesses before the grand jury that indicted Musto, municipal court judge Jack Prizzia, had been murdered gangland-style in 1976, a case that’s never been solved. 

Meanwhile, the construction company getting the big cost overruns had a history of mob ties; the paper I worked for revealed that it was half-owned by a reputed mob hitman. After that, the gangster purportedly left the company (he’s been missing ever since) but, it would turn out, the mob remained in control. I was writing regularly about this company’s ties to local politicians and heard from the city’s police chief and a second source that I might be in danger as a result.

The point is, there was good reason that Menendez wore a bulletproof vest to court when he testified in 1982 at the trial of Musto, the two school board members, the school architect, two housing officials, a gangster, and his associate. All the defendants were convicted, but Musto was reelected mayor—he beat Menendez—the day after he was sentenced to seven years in prison. Four years later, Menendez was elected mayor of Union City, which is located just across the Hudson from midtown Manhattan.

So often, the news reports on Menendez have reminded me of Musto. Like Musto, he beat the first indictment against him. In 2015, the Justice Department charged Menendez with using his Senate office to do favors for a political donor who’d provided him with numerous vacations in the Caribbean, a luxury trip to Paris, and free travel. The case ended with a hung jury. He escaped the matter with just a “public letter of admonishment” from the Senate Ethics Committee. But, like Musto, he wasn’t chastened by the first indictment or the Senate rebuke.

After his second indictment, Menendez declared in a speech on the Senate floor that “[t]he U.S. Attorney’s Office has engaged not in a prosecution but a persecution. They seek a victory, not justice.” I’d heard language like that from Musto dozens of times. 

According to the evidence against Menendez, he misused his high office to try to protect his illicit benefactors from state and federal prosecutors in New Jersey, going so far as to push for selection of a new U.S. attorney he hoped would be compliant. (He wasn’t.) That smacked of Musto maneuvers, too; he tried every political avenue to pressure prosecutors to withdraw charges against himself. As chairman of the state Senate Judiciary Committee, he held power over whom the governor could appoint as a county prosecutor or judge.

Like Musto, Menendez thrived on doing good for his constituents, going well beyond the norm. His sentencing took on an eschatological vibe as Menendez’s lawyer, Adam Fee, asked the judge to weigh his client’s entire life, not just his crimes. “Ultimately we think, Your Honor, that the good outweighs the bad,” he said, adding, “He is unique because of his good works.”

Many of the 130 letters sent to the judge were about Menendez’s outstanding constituent work—for example, instances in which he saved lives by insisting that federal agencies grant temporary visas to people who wanted to enter the country to serve as organ donors.

But as chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Menendez abused his globe-spanning power, which the jury found he had put to use as an unregistered foreign agent, primarily to help Egypt at the request of the co-defendants who bribed him and his wife, Nadine Menendez, who is awaiting trial.

Menendez, though now seventy-one and white haired, looked much as I remembered him when we were both twenty-four years old. Calling himself “chastened,” he told the judge of some of his humanitarian deeds. One New Jersey political columnist wrote, “The merciless power broker of Hudson County pleaded for mercy.”

I wondered how I would feel about all this at Menendez’s moment of truth. Over the years, I’ve become very much disappointed in him. I often talked about this with my late friend Jim Dwyer, who covered Union City after me and later became one of New York’s great newspaper columnists. 

Even though Menendez was not convicted on the first influence-peddling indictment, I couldn’t understand how someone who had detected a secret corruption scheme when he was a political novice could have put himself so close to the precipice. It looked as if he’d lost the moral compass that once had saved him. 

And yet, I found myself hoping, even praying, for a merciful sentence as he stood before Judge Stein. 

What happened to Bob Menendez? I am sad to say that he turned into some version of Bill Musto, both for better and now for worse. He’d become what he detested: a power broker who fought the good fight, and fought it well, and then gave in to the temptation that he was entitled to use the power the people gave to him for his own benefit.

After the sentence was imposed—fair, under the circumstances, I think—Menendez was directed to report on June 6 to whatever confinement the U.S. Bureau of Prisons chooses for him. With a sentence of eleven years, he would need some kind of waiver to qualify for a minimum-security facility. Wherever he might go, he’ll be taunted as “Gold Bar Bob.”

He does have some reasonable grounds for appeal, given the Supreme Court’s proclivity for overturning political-corruption convictions. And it’s not beyond possibility that President Donald Trump would pardon him or commute his sentence, as Trump did for a doctor who was Menendez’s co-defendant in his first trial. Menendez is already angling for that.

I passed up the media scrum on the courthouse steps after the sentencing and went to leave the building by another exit. On the way, I encountered Bob and his lawyer, standing in a light-bathed, white-marble courthouse corridor, preparing to go before the cameras outside.

“Hello, Bob!” I said, too cheerily.

Apparently, I had blundered through some perimeter that courthouse security had established to protect Menendez, and the officers blurted out orders for me to leave.

Menendez didn’t recognize me at first and looked a little puzzled. So I told him my name, and then his face softened in recognition, and I saw a smile on his face for the first time that day. Here was a reporter who remembered a time when he did the right thing. 

And then I got out of there fast because the security people were closing in.