UNION CITY, N.J.— Four miles from the federal court in Manhattan where a jury would decide the fate of Sen. Bob Menendez — finding him guilty on all counts — is Union City, the most Latino town in New Jersey and where the Democrat grew up and got his start in politics.
In the weeks leading to the verdict, dozens of residents shared their views on Menendez and his situation, with some doubting the criminal charges and believing it was a strategy to oust him from office — while others said they weren’t surprised by the charges, bringing up that this wasn’t the first time he faced an indictment.
In a city where 8 in 10 residents are Latino, there was a sense of disappointment in the air, especially among older Cuban American immigrants who see Menendez as one of their own and a symbol of the American dream.
“I vote for the Republicans, I have never voted for Menendez, but he is Cuban American,” said Francisco Guzmán, a 70-year-old who immigrated to the U.S. from Havana in 1980 during the Mariel exodus. Guzmán said he feels “esteem” for Menendez. When Menendez was mayor of Union City, “he married me and didn’t charge me,” Guzmán said.
José García, a Nicaraguan immigrant who arrived in Union City in 1989 when Menendez was mayor, sees the senator as a good official.
“He may not be innocent, but it seems like they are small things that they made into big things to throw him out” (of office), García said.
“There are gifts to which one has to say no, because otherwise they get you involved. But I don’t think the man grabbed anything intentionally,” said the 55-year-old former Nicaraguan guerrilla fighter, now dedicated to Christian music.
But the majority of people interviewed on the streets of Union City before Menendez was convicted spoke without giving their name. In a small municipality where Menendez’s influence is strong, few dared to evaluate the senator’s career without the condition of anonymity.
After his conviction, Menendez said he would appeal.
“In politics, there are certain statements that you cannot make. He has a certain power,” said a 60-year-old Cuban man who also came to the U.S. following the Mariel boatlift.
“He has a lot of power,” said another Cuban, 82, as he cut a cigar with his right hand on a sidewalk on bustling Bergenline Avenue, where one can eat Venezuelan, Colombian, Dominican, Salvadoran, Mexican, Spanish and, of course, Cuban dishes in the many restaurants dotting two blocks.
The man, a retired bus driver who has lived in Union City since 1980, said that Menendez continues to have the support of the oldest Cuban community in the city, “the older people, the people who are from his town, friends that he had.” Many Cubans agree with Menendez’s staunch opposition to the Cuban government and his opposition to loosening sanctions against the country.
“Here it is not prohibited to have gold bars, he has been earning a lot of money for many years. There is no proven business of what they are accusing him of,” the man said, referring to the 13 gold bars and more than $400,000 in cash that the FBI found inside shoes and bags at the senator’s home in Englewood Cliffs, and which prosecutors said were part of the bribes he received — and the jury agreed.
Before his conviction, Noticias Telemundo sent several questions about the accusations to Menendez through his lawyer and his press team, but there was no response. On Tuesday , outside the courthouse following his conviction, Menendez insisted on his innocence. “I have never violated my public oath,” he told reporters without answering any questions. Noticias Telemundo sent requests for comment again on Wednesday.
A local son, then influential politician
The son of Cuban parents, Menendez grew up in an old tenement building in this overcrowded municipality of just over a square mile and 68,000 inhabitants.
In a city known as “Havana on the Hudson” after the arrival of thousands of Cubans fleeing their country after Fidel Castro’s 1959 communist takeover, Menendez began his political career in the 1970s, first as a member of the local school board and then as an aide and protégé to then-mayor and Democratic state Sen. William Musto.
In 1982, Menendez testified in the corruption trial against Musto, who was of Italian descent, and other Union City municipal officials. His testimony was key to Musto’s conviction on charges of extortion and fraud. Menendez attended court wearing a bulletproof vest at a time when some municipal politicians in northern New Jersey crossed paths with the local mafia.
Four years later, in 1986, Menendez became mayor of Union City and accelerated his political rise in Hudson County: Within six years, he arrived in Washington, D.C., as a Democratic member of Congress for New Jersey’s 13th District, which is majority Latino. In 2006, he was elected to the U.S. Senate, and in seven more years he was heading the influential Senate Foreign Relations Committee.
“I grew up as the son of poor refugees in a Union City building, the first to go to college. If you had told me then that he could be one of 100 United States senators in a country of 330 million people, I would have said that is not possible,” Menendez said in 2021.
By then, Menendez had already had his first serious run-in with the law: In 2015, he was indicted by the Justice Department under then-President Barack Obama for fraud and bribery in a case linked to a federal contract with the government of the Dominican Republic. In 2018, a hung jury resulted in a mistrial and the charges against Menendez were dropped; he also denied wrongdoing in that case.
In September last year, the Justice Department filed bribery charges against Menendez and his wife, Nadine Menendez, among other charges, also accusing him of secretly helping the Egyptian government and later adding new allegations linked to the government of Qatar.
Influencing local politics
Though Menendez left for Washington decades ago, he remains “an influential figure” in Union City, said a Cuban resident interviewed in José Martí Park, because “he left a [political] machinery here.”
Playing in the big leagues of federal politics did not make him give up his influence on the local scene: Today, when people in New Jersey are asked about Menendez, one of the first things they recognize is his cunning in maintaining control of the ropes that move the Democratic machine in the state and not loosening his ties with the communities that saw him begin his public life more than 40 years ago.
“This is a guy who rose to the top of power by working on both ends simultaneously, accumulating national power and at the same time recognizing that you have to hold on to the local power that has been created and not take it for granted,” said Micah Rasmussen, director of the Rebovich Institute for New Jersey Politics at Rider University. “People make that mistake all the time and abandon their local politics. And then, suddenly, local politics leaves them behind. That was not a mistake Menendez ever made,” he added.
Menendez never left Union City. Since 2010, he has held his traditional annual Hispanic Heritage Month celebration, with notable politicians, journalists and invited artists. Ten of the 12 events have been held at Union City High School , the high school from which he graduated. It was in his high school’s gymnasium that he announced his Senate re-election campaign in 2018 after the mistrial, with almost all of the 2,800 students (and many Democratic figures) filling the stands.
Residents are used to seeing him eating at the Cuban restaurant La Gran Vía on Bergenline Avenue in Union City. And his influence as a senator has worked in favor of the city: In February 2024, Union City was one of five state school districts to benefit from $19 million in funds for zero-emission vehicles. “I’m proud to have gotten that funding for clean school buses,” Menendez said.
And over the years, Union City has thanked the senator at the polls. In populous Hudson County, this municipality has been his stronghold in the last three elections, garnering more than 80% of the votes, a figure that almost doubles the average state support, according to data analyzed by Noticias Telemundo.
Electoral support began to fall, however, after the first corruption trial in 2018, and the new accusations seem to have deepened the schism: a Monmouth University poll released in early March found that 75% of state residents believed that the senator is “probably guilty;” a similar number disapproved of his work as a senator and 6 in 10, including Democrats, thought he should resign.
“I think his days are numbered. I think there is no turning back,” Rasmussen, who was press secretary for Democratic Gov. Jim McGreevey 20 years ago, said in an interview before Menendez’s conviction Tuesday.
“In this case, it is not difficult for the public to understand what happened. I don’t think we’ve heard a good reason for him receiving gold bars. There is a feeling of personal betrayal. It’s not the reason people believed in him all these years,” he said.
Similar sentiments are heard on the streets of Union City: “This country gives you every opportunity, but you put your foot in it and it ends … everything he did in his life disappears,” one resident said.
“How is he going to prove where he got gold bars,” said a 70-year-old Ecuadorian immigrant who didn’t want to give his name because he does some volunteer work for Union City mayor and state Sen. Bryan Stack, who’s been a longtime supporter of Menendez but like other Hudson County officials, didn’t support him publicly after the latest charges.
Menendez’s political support now “is very local, very old,” Rasmussen said, “people he has known for 50 years, people he can trust in good times and bad.” But no one seems willing to speak against him either.
“There is a perception that he is a guy who plays very hard and that if you attack him, he will attack you,” Rasmussen said. “Let’s not forget what he said on the courthouse steps after his jury was unable to reach an agreement.” In November 2017, after his mistrial, the senator warned: “To those who were digging my political grave to jump into my seat, I know who they are and I will not forget them.”
“Hudson County Democrats have been one of the most legendary political machines in the country for a long time, 100 years or more. They are not used to losing,” Rasmussen said.
Before the verdict, Dominican American resident Román Cepeda, 80, reflected on Menendez as he was sitting on a bench in front of the municipal building where the senator began his public life four decades ago.
“Justice will take care of it,” he said. “If he is guilty, let him pay.”
Andy Kim, Democratic representative from New Jersey, is emerging as Menendez’s successor in the Senate: polls give him the advantage, and Menendez’s conviction could end his attempt to run as an independent candidate. “He has to convince the public that he did nothing wrong,” Rasmussen said. “It’s a very, very high hill to climb.”
A version of this story was first published in Noticias Telemundo.
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