As many as four gold bars seized from Sen. Robert Menendez in September as part of a federal corruption investigation have been linked to the 2013 armed robbery of a New Jersey businessman who is now accused of making payoffs to the senior Democrat.
Bergen County prosecutors say Fred Diabes, a real estate developer, called police in the Edgewater borough a decade ago to report that he was the victim of a robbery after four armed bandits broke into his home, tied him up at gunpoint and fled with $500,000 in cash, as well as a collection of 22 gold bars marked with unique serial numbers.
Police quickly caught up with the suspects and recovered the stolen valuables. Daibes went to the station to get his property back, but to do that, he had to sign release forms to verify the small trove indeed belonged to him.
In a 2014 deposition to build a case against the four robbery defendants, Daibes told investigators that “Each gold bar has its own serial number” and noted that “you’ll never see two stamped the same way,” according to a report by NBC News 4 in New York.
Menendez, 69, was indicted in September as federal agents raided his Clifton home and found $500,000 in cash stuffed inside envelopes and jacket pockets, as well as two gold bars that previously belonged to the stash heisted from Daibes 10 years earlier.
Another two gold bars turned up at a local jeweler, where someone reportedly dropped them off to be sold, investigators revealed previously.
On Nov. 27, Menendez and his wife, Nadine, pleaded not guilty to charges alleging the couple traded his political influence in Washington for hundreds of thousands of dollars in bribes.
The couple appeared at a New York courthouse on Sept. 27, where attorneys entered not-guilty pleas for them as well as co-defendants Daibes and Jose Uribe, a former insurance agent.
The indictment alleges Menendez used his influence to pressure an official at the U.S. Department of Agriculture to protect a lucrative Egyptian enterprise led by American dual citizen Wael Hana, a fifth co-defendant in the case who also pleaded not guilty.
Menendez continues to deny the salacious charges, maintaining he never took payments from Daibes, although federal investigators said previously that they collected Daibes’ fingerprints and DNA from envelopes full of cash they found stashed inside the senator’s home.
Since being charged, Menendez has stepped down from the Senate Foreign Relations Committee but vowed he would not resign from the Senate despite a growing list of Democrats calling for him to give up his seat.
Previously, Menendez called on the public to wait for the truth to come out.
“For 30 years, I have withdrawn thousands of dollars in cash from my personal savings account, which I have kept for emergencies and because of the history of my family facing confiscation in Cuba,” he said on Nov. 27 after emerging from his arraignment, in which Magistrate Judge Ona Wang granted the senator a $100,000 personal recognizance bond. “These were monies drawn from my personal savings account based on the income I have lawfully derived over those 30 years.”
In 2017, Menendez faced unrelated corruption charges in a case that ended in a mistrial.
