Gold bars and wads of cash

Gold bars worth over $100,000. A new Mercedes-Benz convertible in the garage. Wads of cash stuffed in the pockets of a jacket with “Bob Menendez” embroidered on the breast.

The signature at the bottom of the federal indictment released Friday charging Sen. Bob Menendez, D-N.J., his wife Nadine, and three alleged accomplices with bribery, belongs to Damian Williams, U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York.

But the details of what federal agents said they found in June 2022 when they raided the Menendez home in New Jersey, and in their subsequent investigation of the couples’ email and phone accounts, could have been stripped from an episode of “The Sopranos.”

Menendez and his wife have denied allegations of wrongdoing.

Here are some of the highlights from the indictment:

• Nearly half a million dollars in cash was found stuffed inside envelopes and stashed inside the pockets of clothing hanging in the closets of the Menendez’s home in Englewood Cliffs, including a big roll of bills in a jacket from the Congressional Hispanic Caucus with Menendez’s name on it.

• Fingerprints belonging to the driver of co-defendant Fred Daibes were found on at least one of the envelopes, as well as his DNA and his return address, prosecutors said.”Thank you,” Nadine Menendez texted Daibes around Jan. 24, 2022, according to the indictment. “Christmas in January.”

Patrice Schiano, a former FBI forensic accountant who is currently a lecturer at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice, said that’s “pretty damning.”

“It doesn’t surprise me that there might be cash hidden in the house because if they took it to the bank that’s going to be reported,” Schiano said. “But that’s going to be hard to defend because any jury is going to be like, ‘That’s a lot of cash in house’.”

• Two other co-defendants in the case — Jose Uribe and Wael Hana — bought the Mercedes-Benz for Menendez’s wife in return for the Senator interfering in a state criminal prosecution of a Uribe associate charged with insurance fraud and an investigation of a family member who worked for him, according to the indictment. 

“You are a miracle worker who makes dreams come true,” Nadine Menendez texted Uribe, according to the indictment. “I will always remember that.” 

• Menendez also helped Hana secure military funding for Egypt in exchange for the promise of a no-show job for his wife, prosecutors said.

Later, Nadine Menendez forwarded to her husband a request from an Egyptian official to edit a request to the U.S. Senate to support $300 million in aid for Egypt.

Menendez then “ghost-wrote the letter on behalf” of the Egyptians and sent the letter from his personal account to his wife’s email, the Justice Department said. She then forwarded the email to Hana. Not long after, Menendez and his wife deleted those emails.

“Almost everyone in this digital age is at risk of having their digital lives revealed by law enforcement investigators,” Andrew Guthrie Ferguson, a law professor at the American University Washington College of Law said. “The fact that someone who should know better allegedly used a digital system to incriminate himself is a testament to how inescapable and commonplace it is to do everything — criminal or not — through a trackable digital system.”

• Two days after Menendez had a private meeting with an Egyptian official, Hana bought 22 one-ounce gold bars.

Each one has a unique serial number. And two of them were later found in the Menendez home by federal investigators, prosecutors said.

They also discovered that on Jan. 29, 2022, Menendez did a Google search for “kilo of gold price.”