When New Jersey Senator Robert Menendez was indicted earlier this fall for allegedly accepting expensive gifts in exchange for contracts and favors, the charges against him were bad enough; it is never a great look for the chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee to be accused of acting as a foreign agent. But the seemingly damning details may have been even worse. Particularly memorable in the picture-heavy indictment was the revelation that on top of the $480,000 in cash the Feds found, Menendez and his wife had 13 gold bars, together worth more than $100,000, in their possession when federal agents came knocking. (Menendez’s required financial disclosures largely ignored all this.)
Now, Menendez’s gold problem is looking even more sordid. According to NBC New York, four of the gold bars found in his house appear to have been stolen. The outlet’s report centers on New Jersey real-estate investor Fred Daibes, who was robbed at gunpoint at his home in 2013. To help the search for his stolen property, police asked Daibes to file property release forms itemizing what was taken — including 22 gold bars with their serial numbers etched into them.
NBC New York found that four of the gold bars the FBI found in Menendez’s home have serial numbers matching those of the ones stolen from Daibes. Also unfortunate for Menendez: Daibes was accused in September of bribing the senator to use his influence to help appoint a U.S. attorney who would show leniency to Daibes on an unrelated bank-fraud charge. Records also show that one of the bars found in Menendez’s home was returned to Daibes in 2013 — so it wasn’t the thieves who gave Menendez the gold. (The four people who robbed Daibes were caught and pleaded guilty to the act back then.)
Daibes’s attorney has said he will be “exonerated” in time, while Menendez has denied taking bribes from Daibes, even as prosecutors allege that Daibes’s fingerprints are on the cash in the senator’s home. When he was first charged with brazen acts of corruption, Menendez said that he keeps extremely large sums of cash and gold bars in his home “for emergencies and because of the history of my family facing confiscation in Cuba.”
