Businessperson tells jury he bribed Sen. Menendez with Mercedes-Benz

NEW YORK – Until recently, Jose Uribe was an obscure New Jersey businessperson who had been caught up in what prosecutors say was a sprawling and lucrative bribery scheme involving Sen. Bob Menendez, D-N.J., and others.

But after Uribe pleaded guilty in March and agreed to cooperate with authorities, he vaulted into a more prominent position: star government witness.

On Friday, Uribe took the witness stand in U.S. District Court in Manhattan and immediately said that he had bribed Menendez. He said that he had given the senator’s wife, Nadine, a Mercedes-Benz in exchange for gaining “the power and influence” of Menendez.

“When you bribed Robert Menendez, did you do that alone or with other people?” a prosecutor, Lara Pomerantz, asked Uribe.

“With other people,” he responded, and then named Wael Hana, an Egyptian American businessperson who founded a New Jersey halal meat company that prosecutors say was used to funnel bribes to the senator and his wife.

Menendez and his wife are charged with conspiring to accept cash, gold bullion and other bribes collectively worth hundreds of thousands of dollars in exchange for Menendez’s agreement to direct aid to Egypt and to meddle in criminal cases in New Jersey. One of those cases involved Uribe.

Prosecutors with the U.S. attorney’s office for the Southern District of New York say Uribe, a former insurance broker who worked in the trucking industry, sought the senator’s help in quashing criminal investigations into two of Uribe’s associates.

In return, an indictment says, Uribe helped to buy Nadine, then the senator’s girlfriend, a new Mercedes-Benz C-300 convertible worth more than $60,000.

“I knew that giving a car in return for influencing a United States senator to stop a criminal investigation was wrong,” Uribe said in court when he pleaded guilty, “and I deeply regret my actions.”

Uribe told jurors Friday that he was motivated by a deep concern for his son and a young woman who worked for him and was like family – both of whom had been approached by a detective with the attorney general’s office in New Jersey who was investigating an insurance fraud case tied to Uribe’s businesses.

And he began to explain the genesis of the bribery plot.

Hana, Uribe said, told him that he had “a way to make these things go away” and mentioned “the name of Nadine and Sen. Menendez.”

“He could go to Nadine, and Nadine would go to Sen. Menendez,” Uribe testified.

Soon after, Uribe said he met with Hana and two men who had received subpoenas in connection to the insurance fraud investigation at the Teaneck Marriott at Glenpointe in New Jersey. He said Hana told them that in exchange for “$200,000 to $250,000,” he could get a “resolution” that would “make these investigations stop and go away,” Uribe testified.

Menendez, 70, is being tried with two other New Jersey businesspeople – Hana and Fred Daibes – charged in the conspiracy. Nadine Menendez, 57, was also charged, but the judge, Sidney H. Stein, postponed her trial until July because she is undergoing treatment for breast cancer. All four defendants have pleaded not guilty.

Uribe took the stand one day after the jury heard testimony from Gurbir S. Grewal. Grewal was New Jersey’s attorney general in 2019 when prosecutors say Menendez contacted him in hopes of having the investigations into Uribe’s associates quashed.

Grewal, who now leads the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission’s enforcement division, testified Thursday about being summoned to Menendez’s office in Newark, New Jersey. During that meeting, he said, the senator raised complaints about the way Hispanic defendants tied to the trucking industry were being treated by prosecutors in Grewal’s insurance fraud unit.

Grewal said that when he asked if the senator’s concerns related to a specific matter pending before his office, Menendez said yes. Grewal said he immediately cut the conversation short.

“I didn’t know the case. I didn’t want to know the case,” he testified, adding, “It’s not something I was comfortable speaking to him about.”

Uribe’s potentially pivotal role in the government’s case was highlighted late Thursday when prosecutors wrote to Stein, asking that they be allowed to show the jury Uribe’s formal cooperation agreement with the government. The prosecutors say they want to counter blistering attacks on Uribe’s credibility by Menendez’s lawyers, and the agreement makes clear that prosecutors will seek leniency on Uribe’s behalf when he is sentenced only if he testifies truthfully and completely.

In an opening statement last month, Avi Weitzman, a lawyer for the senator, told the jury that the defense team intended to show Uribe to be an untrustworthy witness.

“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,” Weitzman said.

This is the second time that Uribe has pleaded guilty to a crime. More than a decade ago, he admitted to taking $76,000 in insurance premiums but failing to buy coverage for seven clients, all commercial drivers. He was sentenced in New Jersey to probation and stripped of his insurance broker’s license.

Earlier this week, prosecutors presented jurors with a chart summarizing 1,100 pieces of evidence, including scores of text messages, emails and voicemail messages. Text messages that Uribe sent to Nadine Menendez and Hana showed that the insurance fraud case appeared to be consuming Uribe.

“I need peace,” Uribe wrote in a text message to Nadine Menendez on Sept. 3, 2019, at 10:17 p.m. The next morning, Bob Menendez placed a call to Grewal to arrange the meeting according to prosecutors.

Uribe seemed to have advance knowledge of the meeting. “Thank you for everything you do for me. I am praying,” he wrote in a text message to Nadine Menendez a few minutes before the senator’s scheduled appointment with Grewal, “today’s meeting is in GOD’s hand.”

One of the people involved in the fraud investigation pleaded guilty in April in an agreement that required no prison time, according to the indictment. It was around that time that Uribe provided Nadine Menendez the car.

But it was clear from text messages that Uribe sent in the fall of 2019 that at least some component of the fraud inquiry continued to vex him.

In late October, Uribe asked Nadine Menendez if she had an “update” for him. “I just need peace. Sorry to bother you,” he wrote in a text message.

The next day, Oct. 29, the senator called Uribe from his Senate office, according to evidence admitted during the trial.

The conversation lasted less than three minutes. Uribe sent a text message to Nadine Menendez after hanging up, telling her that he was “a very happy person.”

“I just got a call,” he wrote in a text to her, adding, “GOD bless you and him for ever.”

Five days later, Uribe and the couple met for dinner and snapped photos of a Champagne toast. Uribe followed up with Nadine Menendez the next afternoon.

“Can you send me the last invoice for the car pay and your full social,” he wrote in a text. “I like to set it now in auto pay rather than buying money orders.”

“I have so much peace,” he wrote two minutes later. “Gracias a DIOS and to you guys.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.