Jose Uribe, the businessman who has said he bribed Senator Robert Menendez in return for his help in quashing a criminal investigation involving two people close to him, testified on Monday that he had asked the senator directly for his help and that Mr. Menendez had said he would “look into it.”
Mr. Uribe said that on Sept. 5, 2019, the night before Mr. Menendez met with New Jersey’s attorney general to discuss the matter, he was invited to the senator’s girlfriend’s home in Englewood Cliffs, N.J., where he and Mr. Menendez sat on a backyard patio, with the senator smoking a cigar.
Mr. Menendez rang a little bell that he had on the table, calling out “mon amour” — French for “my love” — and summoning Nadine Menendez, the woman he married the next year, Mr. Uribe testified. He said she brought him a piece of paper and went back into the house.
At the senator’s request, Mr. Uribe wrote down the names of two friends and two companies he believed were under investigation. Mr. Menendez then took the paper, folded it and placed it in his pants pocket.
Mr. Uribe, who recounted the scene Monday during his second day of testimony at Mr. Menendez’s corruption trial, said he pleaded with the senator. “I beg him to please do anything in his power to stop anything that could cause harm to my family.”
Mr. Uribe had repeatedly been asking Nadine Menendez to have the senator intervene on behalf of his friends, eventually going to the senator himself.
“I asked him to help me get peace for me and my family,” Mr. Uribe testified in Federal District Court in Manhattan.
But Mr. Uribe also said the men never discussed the thousands of dollars in car payments Mr. Uribe had been making for a Mercedes-Benz convertible that, months earlier, he had provided to Ms. Menendez.
“I never talked to Mr. Menendez about making payments for the car,” Mr. Uribe testified.
Mr. Uribe, who has emerged as the prosecution’s chief witness in Mr. Menendez’s trial, said he assumed Mr. Menendez would have known he was providing the financial assistance to Ms. Menendez because she had been trying repeatedly to set up a meeting for Mr. Uribe with the senator, so that Mr. Uribe could seek his help with the state matters.
“The only reason why she’s trying,” Mr. Uribe said, “is because I’m complying with my part of the deal.”
Mr. Menendez, 70, and Ms. Menendez, 57, have both been charged with conspiring to take cash, gold, the Mercedes and other bribes collectively worth hundreds of thousands of dollars in return for the senator’s agreeing to dispense political favors at home and abroad.
The day after Mr. Menendez met with Mr. Uribe on the patio, the senator met with Gurbir S. Grewal, then New Jersey’s attorney general, whom Mr. Menendez had summoned to his office in Newark. Mr. Grewal testified last week that when Mr. Menendez indicated he wanted to discuss concerns about a specific matter before the attorney general’s office, Mr. Grewal cut the conversation short. “I didn’t know the case. I didn’t want to know the case,” Mr. Grewal testified, adding, “It’s not something I was comfortable speaking to him about.”
Later that same day, Mr. Uribe said, he received a call from Ms. Menendez asking to meet with him again, this time at the senator’s New Jersey apartment building.
He and the senator spoke briefly in the lobby, Mr. Uribe recalled. He said that although Mr. Menendez did not give him a final answer, the senator told him there was no indication of an investigation against “my family,” as Mr. Uribe put it in court.
Asked by a prosecutor, Lara Pomerantz, whether there came a time that he “got the peace” he was looking for, Mr. Uribe testified about a short phone call he received on Oct. 29, 2019, from a number with the 202 area code — it was the senator.
Mr. Uribe recalled Mr. Menendez’s words: “That thing that you asked me about, there’s nothing there. I give you your peace.”
After the call ended, Mr. Uribe texted Ms. Menendez. “I am a very happy person,” he wrote, adding, “GOD bless you and him for ever.”
Mr. Menendez is being tried with two other New Jersey businessmen — Wael Hana and Fred Daibes. Ms. Menendez’s trial was postponed by the judge, Sidney H. Stein, until July because she is being treated for breast cancer. All four defendants have pleaded not guilty.
Mr. Uribe, 57, who was also charged, pleaded guilty in March and has been cooperating with the government.
Mr. Menendez, who has emphatically maintained his innocence, told reporters as he left court on Monday to wait until Mr. Uribe could be cross-examined. Mr. Menendez’s lawyers have already sharply attacked Mr. Uribe’s credibility.
“We’ll have a lot to discuss at the end of the case about him — about his lies and his cheating and his crimes and all the ways he’s been incentivized to continue doing all of them,” Avi Weitzman, one of the senator’s lawyers, said in an opening statement in court last month.
Mr. Uribe, who began testifying for the government on Friday, said he had been deeply concerned about two matters before the New Jersey attorney general’s office. One involved the prosecution of a friend who had pleaded guilty in an insurance fraud case and faced sentencing. The other involved an insurance fraud investigation that Mr. Uribe believed was threatening to pull in a young woman whom he considered to be like his daughter.
Mr. Uribe said he had initially raised the matters with Mr. Hana, who had long been his and Ms. Menendez’s friend.
Mr. Hana told Mr. Uribe that in return for $200,000 to $250,000, he had “a way to make these things go away,” Mr. Uribe said.
“He could go to Nadine,” Mr. Uribe testified. “Nadine will go to Senator Menendez.”
Mr. Uribe, frustrated at the lack of any progress by Mr. Hana, said he eventually called Ms. Menendez directly, offering to buy her the Mercedes if she would have her husband “help me complete this deal.”
“She agreed to the terms,” Mr. Uribe testified; prosecutors say Mr. Uribe helped to buy her a 2019 Mercedes-Benz C-300 convertible worth more than $60,000.
Mr. Uribe testified that in the summer of 2020, the year after Mr. Menendez called him to say the matters had been resolved, he dined with the couple and Ms. Menendez’s adult daughter at a New Jersey restaurant.
At one point, Mr. Uribe said, when he was alone with the senator, Mr. Menendez addressed him in Spanish — and was blunt. He made it clear he had resolved both matters of concern to Mr. Uribe.
“He said, ‘I saved your ass twice — not once, but twice,’” Mr. Uribe recalled.
Ms. Pomerantz, the prosecutor, asked Mr. Uribe to describe Mr. Menendez’s demeanor at the time.
He seemed like a person who was “proud and confident,” Mr. Uribe said, “that he managed to get this done.”
“What, if anything, did you say in response to him?” Ms. Pomerantz asked.
“Best of my recollection: ‘I thank you,’” Mr. Uribe said.
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