Bob Menendez’s golden rule – The Washington Post

“Think a lot about what you’re going to give as your word, but once you give it, then keep it, and be a man of your word,” the New Jersey Democrat continues, quoting his father’s wisdom. Now his voice is shaky. His throat won’t let the next word go, so the sound that comes out is a whimper. His mouth twists into a wordless sob. “Remembering my father,” he mumbles.

Mario Menendez hadn’t been certain that giving up what little they had and starting over in America would mean more stability than weathering the conflict between Fulgencio Batista’s military dictatorship and Fidel Castro’s uprising, his son would later write, but his wife, Evangelina, persuaded him to leave Cuba for Puerto Rico and then New York City. Bob was born there on New Year’s Day, 1954, and the family settled in a red-brick tenement in Union City, N.J., across the Hudson River.

Mario became a carpenter. Evangelina found work as a seamstress.

Their son grew up to be mayor of their city, a New Jersey state legislator and, eventually, a U.S. senator.

Mario died when Bob was 23, before seeing him reach those heights, but his son socked away that advice about integrity and thought of it whenever people came to him asking for favors or endorsements.

“When I gave them my word,” Menendez says in his office, regaining his composure after a few seconds, “it was as good as gold.”

Menendez was not forged just by the words of his father. He was also forged by Hudson County, a cutthroat political fiefdom where it’s hard to win anything unless you have powerful friends standing behind you. The local mayors — nicknamed “the 12 Cardinals” — are considered more influential than some members of Congress, and their aides are expected to devote day and night to electing local candidates.

Menendez’s half-century in politics began here. After being elected to his local school board at age 20, he became a protégé of William Musto, the mayor of Union City, whose 2006 New York Times obituary described the pair as being “like father and son” (though Menendez says he didn’t see it that way). He later turned on Musto, he wrote in a memoir, after being bothered by what he believed to be shady dealings between the mayor and the president of the school board. “I refused to look the other way, and began to complain in public about illegal financial dealings,” Menendez wrote.

The U.S. attorney filed corruption charges against Musto, and prosecutors won a conviction thanks in part to Menendez’s testimony. (“I have never violated a public trust,” Musto reportedly said before being sentenced to seven years.) Whether Menendez had acted out of principle or political expediency when it came to Musto was “always an open — and maybe unanswerable — question,” wrote New Jersey politics watcher Fred Snowflack in a 2017 post on InsiderNJ.com. But “whatever the real reason, things turned out well for Menendez.”

Cuban Americans were a growing population in Union City, and in 1986, Menendez ran for his mentor’s old job — his second attempt — and became New Jersey’s only Latino mayor. “Just to become mayor in a little town, it was a big fight,” said Rafael Fraguela, who knew Menendez first as a student council president at their high school and later followed him into politics. Alliances in the local party split, Fraguela said, with some Democrats believing the seat “belonged to a non-Cuban or non-Hispanic.”

He became an assemblyman next, then a state senator. By 1992, he’d caught the eye of Ray Lesniak, the chair of the New Jersey Democratic Party, then in charge of redrawing the electoral maps. Menendez was a hard-nosed guy who could turn on the charm. “I saw him as a star — the star — in the Hispanic community at the time,” Lesniak recalls. And so the 13th Congressional District took the shape of a fish hook, Lesniak threw his weight behind Menendez before the seven-term incumbent even announced he was stepping down, and voters sent Menendez to Washington.

Havana on the Hudson indeed saw him as a star. Menendez “wouldn’t be able to walk very far” on the streets of Union City without Latinos coming up to greet him, according to Argote-Freyre, who was his press secretary in those days. They’d interrupt his lunches at El Único, on Park Avenue, and ask about relations with Cuba, about the political status of Puerto Rico, about the potholes he could no longer fix because he was no longer mayor.

“I can guarantee you that Bob Menendez never laid eyes on a gold bar when we were going around through Union City,” Argote-Freyre said.

In an office up Kennedy Boulevard, past two cemeteries and a boarded-up jewelry shop whose sign still reads “DINERO POR ORO,” Anthony Vainieri, Jr. was sitting at his wide wooden desk one December afternoon. Just outside his door was a darkened lounge with upholstered benches and flower vases. It didn’t seem like a likely destination for politicians, but they do come around. The governor was here a few weeks ago. And Menendez has been here too.

“For wakes,” Vainieri said.

“That’s what I’m talking about,” he said. He gestured at the unpeopled room outside. “It’s a funeral home. He’s been 100 times.”

Vainieri knows a lot about death: literal, figurative. Besides running the funeral home, he chairs the Hudson County Democratic Organization, a powerful committee that has historically functioned as a political machine here. He said he was the one to deliver the bad news to Menendez’s staff that Hudson County Democrats were no longer backing him.

“I supported him in every one of his elections,” Vainieri said, “but definitely cannot support him this time around. The charges are too serious.”

The first time the feds investigated Menendez, in 2006, the same year he was appointed to the Senate, the probe centered on an allegation that Menendez had helped a nonprofit obtain millions of dollars in federal funding, then collected rent from it — in effect funneling the government dollars into his own pocket. In 2011, prosecutors closed the investigation without charges as he was gearing up for his first Senate reelection bid.

Within a few years, Menendez was back in the crosshairs. The 2015 federal indictment homed in on his relationship with a Florida ophthalmologist who lavished him with gifts and trips to an ultraexclusive villa in a Dominican sugar-mill town. Prosecutors alleged that the senator had used his office to benefit the eye doctor’s businesses and help him secure U.S. visas for several of his girlfriends. But at his 2017 trial the jury deadlocked, and the Justice Department later dropped the charges.

Menendez’s friends largely stood behind him through his legal travails, and the senator seemed to resent certain others who did not. “To those who were digging my political grave so they could jump into my seat, I know who you are,” Menendez said, victorious on the courthouse steps. “And I won’t forget you.”

“I think with him, loyalty is a two-way…