N.J. businessman pleads guilty to bribing U.S. Sen. Bob Menendez with a $60,000 Mercedes

A key codefendant in the bribery case against U.S. Sen. Bob Menendez pleaded guilty Friday and agreed to cooperate with prosecutors, marking a significant break in the Justice Department’s latest effort to convict the New Jersey Democrat on corruption charges.

Jose Uribe, a former insurance broker from Union City, told a federal judge in Manhattan that he bought Menendez and his wife, Nadine Arslanian, a Mercedes-Benz worth more than $60,000 in 2019 in hopes of convincing the senator to interfere in a pending criminal investigation involving two of his associates.

As part of the deal he struck with prosecutors, Uribe agreed to “cooperate fully” in the ongoing probe, though it was not immediately clear from court filings whether he will be required to testify against Menendez at his May trial.

Uribe’s attorney, Daniel J. Fetterman, declined to comment after the unannounced hearing Friday in which his client entered his guilty pleas to counts including conspiracy, obstruction of justice, tax evasion and honest services fraud — the most serious of which now threaten to send him to prison for up to 20 years.

Lawyers for Menendez — who has denied the bribery allegations and resisted calls for his resignation — also declined to comment on the plea.

Uribe was one of three businessmen charged last fall with plying Menendez and Arslanian with gifts of hundreds of thousands of dollars in cash, gold bars, and the luxury car in exchange for the senator’s assistance with their legal and business problems.

» READ MORE: Who is Bob Menendez’s wife, Nadine? Who else was charged in the indictment?

Prosecutors have accused Menendez, the former chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, of using his position to take action that benefited not only the businessmen but also the governments of Egypt and Qatar, where in some cases investigators believe officials were aware of the bribery efforts.

For his part, Uribe admitted Friday that he gave Arslanian $15,000 in cash during a meeting in a restaurant parking lot, which she used the next day as a down payment to purchase a 2019 Mercedes-Benz C-300 convertible.

She’d totaled her previous car in December 2018 after striking and killing a pedestrian in Bogota, N.J. — an incident for which she did not face criminal charges and was never tested for drug or alcohol intoxication.

» READ MORE: Bob Menendez’s wife, Nadine Arslanian, fatally hit a man in 2018. N.J. officials are now reportedly investigating.

Uribe continued to make financing payments on Arslanian’s new car for several months.

At the time, Uribe told the court, he had hoped to convince Menendez to weigh in on an ongoing insurance fraud investigation involving his associates. At the time, Uribe had already been convicted of fraud and had his insurance license revoked.

“The deal is to kill and stop all investigation,” Uribe wrote in a message to another defendant in 2019, according to the indictment.

Menendez, meanwhile, purportedly pressured a senior official in the New Jersey Attorney General’s Office to resolve those cases favorably for Uribe’s friends both in phone calls and an in-person meeting. Ultimately though, prosecutors say that effort failed.

One of the charged Uribe associates pleaded guilty and was sentenced to probation; the other was never charged.

Regardless of that outcome, Uribe appeared satisfied with the results.

“I am a very happy person,” he texted Arslanian in 2019, according to the indictment. “God bless you and him forever.”

Several nights later, they celebrated over a dinner with a champagne toast — an event memorialized in a photo included in court filings.

Lawyers for Menendez have disputed that account and contend that even if the Mercedes could be considered a bribe, the senator had no authority over state prosecutions. They contend that any influence he brought to bear on Uribe’s behalf can’t be considered an official action to support a bribery conviction.

They have asked U.S. District Judge Sidney H. Stein to dismiss the indictment — a motion on which court has yet to rule.

This latest case comes less than six years after Menendez escaped the threat of conviction in a separate federal bribery probe — one alleging that he accepted lavish gifts, flights on private jets, and campaign support from a Florida eye doctor.

A jury weighing those charges deadlocked in 2017, and the judge later acquitted Menendez of some of the charges before prosecutors opted not to retry the case.

» READ MORE: From gold bars to a pricey car: All the bribes Sen. Bob Menendez has been accused of accepting over the years

Back then, he managed to hold onto his Senate seat. But after a second corruption indictment in less than a decade many former allies — including Gov. Phil Murphy and his Senate colleague, Cory Booker — to withdraw their support.

Menendez has vowed he’s not going anywhere and yet the race to succeed him has emerged as one of the most closely watched contests of 2024.

Murphy’s wife, Tammy, is facing off in a heated Democratic primary fight with U.S. Rep. Andy Kim. Meanwhile, several Republicans have announced their intentions to run for the seat in November.