For decades, Robert Menendez, 71, was one of New Jersey’s most influential Democrats. He began serving an 11-year sentence on Tuesday.
For decades, Robert Menendez had the ear of presidents and prime ministers. He controlled the flow of military aid as the Democratic leader of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. A son of Cuban refugees, he was a go-to authority on immigration policy.
But on Tuesday, just after 9 a.m., Mr. Menendez became a ward of the same government that he had once helped to lead when he entered a federal prison in Pennsylvania to begin an 11-year sentence for political corruption.
He will be known as prisoner No. 67277-050 at Federal Correctional Institution Schuylkill in Minersville, Pa., roughly three hours away from the home he has shared in New Jersey with his wife, Nadine Menendez, who is expected to be sentenced in September for her role in the scheme. Federal agents found bribes ranging from kilo bars of gold, a Mercedes-Benz convertible and more than $480,000 in cash during a search of the couple’s modest split-level home in Englewood Cliffs.
A federal spokesman confirmed Tuesday that Mr. Menendez was in the custody of the U.S. Bureau of Prisons soon after a red car with New Jersey license plates was spotted entering and exiting the facility.
After a nine-week trial in Manhattan, Mr. Menendez, a Democrat, became the only U.S. senator ever to be convicted of acting as an agent of a foreign government. Prosecutors have since called the crimes at the heart of a complex, yearslong bribery conspiracy “stunningly venal” and the most serious “in the history of the Republic,” as they argued for a sentence even stiffer than the one imposed.
Lawyers for Mr. Menendez, who is 71, have called it a death sentence.
“It is well recognized that inmates with a degree of celebrity,” they wrote in a legal filing, “are at increased risk of attention, harassment and violence from their fellow inmates.”
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