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GUEST VOICE - I’ve been rereading with great pleasure John Le Carré’s mid-80s novel A Perfect Spy, which is a kind of roman à clef about the writer’s turbulent relationship with his father, Ronnie Cornwell, an extravagant trickster and confidence artist, who, in one of his most elaborate hoaxes, ended up running for Parliament. But Le Carré’s twisty tale of fraud and duplicity among the English moneyed classes (and those who would exploit their greed) can’t really hold up to the career of New Jersey’s own apex con man, Robert Menendez, whose personal embellishments and political fictions have become so labyrinthine that now that he’s been caught with gold bars in his closet, he can’t even get his own life story straight.
As in Le Carré’s complex thriller, Menendez has been living close to the edge for decades, managing one narrow escape after another (including a corruption trial six years ago that ended in a hung jury), each close call only seeming to make him more resolute to pull off an even bolder caper the next time, the final one (so far) featuring a starring role by his guileful wife, Nadine. According to the 39-page federal indictment, Nadine acted as her husband’s go-between in a scheme to leverage the senator’s position as a political powerbroker on the Hill in return for under-the-table cash payments of more than $500,000, a new $60,000 Mercedes convertible (to replace the one Nadine wrecked when she hit and killed a pedestrian), top-line exercise machines, mortgage payments, and bars of gold bullion. Menendez was so eager to learn the value of the gold bars that after returning from a “fact-finding” trip to Egypt in 2021, the Senator did a web search for “how much is one kilo of gold worth.” Answer: $150,000 on today’s market. Some of the cash payments were found by the FBI during a search of his closet still in their envelopes, stuffed in the pockets of jackets embroidered with Menendez’s name and the seal of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus.
In return for this largess, Menendez, one of the staunchest defenders of autocrats in the US Senate, promised to use his position as a top member of the Foreign Relations Committee to help protect Egypt’s access to billions in annual US aid against the remonstrances of political do-gooders, even as evidence of systemic corruption and human rights abuses under the Sisi regime mounted. Here again, Nadine played a crucial role as a cut-out, by passing messages from the senator to an American-Egyptian businessman named Wael Hana, who maintained close ties with Egyptian military and intelligence officials. In a text to an Egyptian general, Hana referred to Senator Menendez as “our man.”
Were Egyptian intelligence agents trying to recruit Menendez as a spy? Did they try to turn him, like Le Carré’s Pam, through bribes or blackmail? Did they even need to in order to get what they wanted from him?
Menendez was the perfect mark. Arrogant, vindictive, greedy and totally convinced of his own impunity. You can understand why he may have felt that way. After all, this was a man who had migrated through the swamps of corruption his entire political career. In fact, Menendez, similar to the corruption-fighting Rudy Giuliani across the river in Manhattan, first made his mark in New Jersey by turning snitch against his political tutor, Union City Mayor William Musto. The young Menendez, who claimed he wore a bulletproof vest for a month, testified that Musto and other city officials had pocketed bribes to approve construction projects. Musto went to prison; Robert Menendez went to Congress.
As is so often the case with confidence men, Menendez thought he had learned from the blunders of his mentor. As he eagerly launched his own career on the corpse of Musto’s, Menendez didn’t abandon the back-room horse-trading that was then endemic to New Jersey politics, he tried to perfect it. For nearly two decades, Menendez’s secret dealing-making has attracted the scrutiny of federal prosecutors, even as he rose up the ranks of the Democratic leadership. Like Clarence Thomas, Menendez always seemed to have his hand out and his senate office door open to anyone willing to pay the price for his attention, the price often coming in the form of luxury vacations, trips on private jets and accommodations at seaside villas. By 2018, Menendez’s excesses had become so extravagant that he was hit with a finger-wagging chastisement from the Senate Ethics Committee (so-called), which said his “actions reflected discredit upon the Senate.”
The rebuke didn’t deter Menendez from running for re-election that year and winning and it didn’t stop his longtime senate pal Chuck Schumer from making Menendez chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee, when the Democrats regained control of the Senate in 2020, where the hawkish Menendez’s role has been almost entirely malign, especially as regards the economic strangulation of Cuba and Venezuela. He also exploited his position to protect his own proclivity toward political graft. It was, after all, Menendez who singlehandedly blocked the passage of bipartisan legislation in 2020 that would have strengthened the law regulating foreign influence and lobbying in Washington. That same year, Menendez’s daughter, Alicia, landed a weekend show (American Voices) on MSNBC and two years later, Menendez’s son, Rob, won his father’s old seat in Congress. The seeds of his legacy have been planted and fertilized. Thus Menendez, who grew up in a Jersey tenement, has become a fixture in the Democratic Party establishment and one which it may prove very hard to dislodge.
Schumer knew what was doing. Menendez was a known quantity and a toxic one. But he served his purpose. He could be counted on to do the party’s dirty work on foreign policy, from protecting contracts to arms makers to subverting any attempt to loosen ties to brutal US client states. And Menendez was more than willing to take the blame. And profit from it.
When Menendez and the zaftig Nadine were indicted by the Feds last week, he quickly went on the attack, claiming he’d been “falsely accused” by nameless forces “who simply cannot accept that a first-generation Latin American from humble beginnings could rise to be a U.S. senator.” Feeling that this wasn’t perhaps an explicit enough defense, he returned to the microphones a day later to identify the hitherto nameless force as none other than his old manufactured nemesis, Fidel Castro: “For 30 years, I have withdrawn thousands of dollars in cash from my personal savings account .. for emergencies and because of the history of my family facing confiscation in Cuba.” Of course, that’s simply the “legend,” the false political identity the Senator created for himself and deftly exploited for a gullible press corps for decades. In fact, “our man” in Jersey, Robert Menendez, was born in New York City in 1954, a year after his impoverished family fled Cuba, then still firmly under the tyrannical grip of the US-backed dictator Fulgencio Batista, the same kind of repressive puppet regime he’s been running Congressional cover for his entire political career.
(Jeffrey St. Clair is editor of CounterPunch. His most recent book is An Orgy of Thieves: Neoliberalism and Its Discontents (with Alexander Cockburn). He can be reached at: [email protected] or on Twitter @JeffreyStClair3. This story was first featured in CounterPunch.org.)
