For decades, Robert Menendez had the ear of presidents and prime ministers. He controlled the flow of military aid as the Democratic leader of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. A son of Cuban refugees, he was a go-to authority on immigration policy.
But on Tuesday, Mr. Menendez is set to become a ward of the same government that he once helped to lead when he enters a federal prison in Pennsylvania to begin serving an 11-year sentence for political corruption.
He will be known as prisoner No. 67277-050 when he enters Federal Correctional Institution Schuylkill in Minersville, Pa., roughly three hours away from the home he has shared in New Jersey with his wife, Nadine Menendez, who is expected to be sentenced in September for her role in the scheme. Federal agents found bribes ranging from kilo bars of gold, a Mercedes-Benz convertible and more than $480,000 in cash during a search of the couple’s modest split-level home in Englewood Cliffs.
After a nine-week trial in Manhattan, Mr. Menendez, a Democrat, became the only U.S. senator ever to be convicted of acting as an agent of a foreign government. Prosecutors have since called the crimes at the heart of a complex, yearslong bribery conspiracy “stunningly venal” and the most serious “in the history of the Republic,” as they argued for a sentence even stiffer than the one imposed.
Lawyers for Mr. Menendez, who is 71, have called it a death sentence.
“It is well-recognized that inmates with a degree of celebrity,” they wrote in a legal filing, “are at increased risk of attention, harassment and violence from their fellow inmates.”
The Schuylkill facility includes a medium-security, 980-person lockup that houses notorious criminals like James Coonan, the onetime head of a Manhattan gang known as the Westies, and Gurmeet Singh Dhinsa, a Brooklyn gas station magnate serving a life sentence for murder.
Mr. Menendez is expected to be assigned to a 225-man camp in the complex, where prisoners sleep in bunk beds in dormitory-style rooms designed for about 50 people.
The two sites have several things in common, according to Brad Troup, who was convicted of distributing heroin that caused a death and served his final years of incarceration at Schuylkill’s medium-security prison.
Prisoners eat the same meals, can purchase identical items from the commissary and participate in a shared prison industry — electronics repair and recycling. At the camp, prisoners are taught to fix broken electronics, like computers and electrocardiogram machines. Items that are deemed beyond repair go to the medium-security prison, where they are dismantled and the metals are separated to be sold for scrap, Mr. Troup said.
Books can be sent to detainees through approved vendors, and visiting privileges can be adjusted based on behavior.
The population of Schuylkill is about 60 percent Black, 21 percent Hispanic and 18 percent white, according to a recent federal report. And during meals and in the yard, it is highly segregated by race, according to Mr. Troup, 47.
“It’s like going back in time,” he said. “Whites with whites. Blacks with Blacks. Gangs with gangs. There’s constant tension.”
Mr. Menendez’s training as a lawyer, and his ability to help other inmates draft appeals and legal motions, is likely to be helpful, Mr. Troup said.
“The main thing is, you really have to get into the flow of things,” he said. “It usually takes about six months for you to get a pattern. It’s very humbling once you enter prison.”
Before his trial last spring, when Mr. Menendez decided against running for re-election to the Senate as a Democrat, he released a nine-minute video chronicling what he saw as his most meaningful congressional contributions. And few people familiar with the long arc of his career in New Jersey would dispute that Mr. Menendez was once among the most influential politicians in Congress.
He worked relentlessly to get federal assistance to residents devastated by Superstorm Sandy in 2012 and helped to write the legislation to expand health care coverage that became known as Obamacare.
He entered politics at 20 as a member of the school board in the community where he was raised, Union City, N.J. He served as the city’s mayor and its representative in the State House before being elected to the U.S. House. In 2005, he became the first Latino to represent New Jersey in the Senate.
“This is a sad and humbling day,” said Michael Soliman, Mr. Menendez’s longtime political adviser who ran his campaigns. “But the jury verdict does not erase Senator Menendez’s profound and longstanding positive contributions in so many areas affecting New Jersey and the country.
“Those, too, will be a part of his earned legacy.”
The trial judge, Sidney H. Stein, before handing down one of the longest sentences ever issued to a federal official, said Mr. Menendez lost his ethical bearings “somewhere along the way.”
“Working for the public good,” Judge Stein said, “became working for your good.”
Prosecutors with the U.S. attorney’s office for the Southern District of New York spent weeks laying out an audacious international bribery scheme. A jury convicted Mr. Menendez of acting as an agent of Egypt, including ghostwriting a letter for Egyptian officials to influence his Senate colleagues and steering arms to the country. He was also found guilty of trying to quash state and federal criminal prosecutions on behalf of New Jersey allies.
Mr. Menendez’s stunning fall from grace led to sweeping changes in his state’s political life. Hours after he was indicted, a young member of the House, Andy Kim, jumped into the race for Mr. Menendez’s Senate seat. Mr. Kim vanquished the state’s first lady, Tammy Murphy, and, after a filing a lawsuit, ended a practice that gave political bosses who thrived during Mr. Menendez’s era outsize power to select candidates. Mr. Kim won election to the Senate in November by nearly 10 percentage points.
Last week, a federal appeals panel voted 2 to 1 to reject Mr. Menendez’s request to delay the start of his sentence, pending the outcome of his appeal.
That same day, Mr. Menendez took to social media to again plead his case to an audience of one: President Trump, who has granted a flurry of pardons to political allies during the first five months of his second term.
Mr. Menendez, in posts on X, has mimicked many of the president’s complaints about a “weaponized” Justice Department. In some, he has tagged Mr. Trump. In others, he refers to the president as “DJT.”
“President Trump is right,” Mr. Menendez wrote, minutes after he was sentenced. “This process is political and has been corrupted to the core. I hope President Trump cleans up the cesspool and restores integrity to the system.”
Such lobbying efforts have paid off for others, including Mayor Eric Adams of New York, a Democrat, whose indictment on corruption charges was dropped by federal prosecutors. The Justice Department has made clear that some of the offenses for which Mr. Menendez was convicted are no longer even a priority.
Long before Tuesday, Mr. Menendez had become a pariah in New Jersey.
A former close friend declined to discuss his longtime ally’s fate. His lawyers, Adam Fee and Avi Weitzman, did not respond to requests for comment, nor did Senator Cory Booker of New Jersey, who in 2017 was willing to vouch for Mr. Menendez’s character during his first corruption trial, which ended with a hung jury.
Mr. Menendez and his wife have been keeping their own counsel in New Jersey, former associates say. Last weekend, after winning a weeklong delay to the start of his sentence from Judge Stein, the two attended Ms. Menendez’s daughter’s wedding in Massachusetts.
Mr. Menendez is the last of the three men convicted last summer in the corruption scheme to enter prison.
Fred Daibes and Wael Hana, who were convicted of bribing the senator in exchange for political favors, began serving sentences last month at a federal prison in New Jersey.
Even before Mr. Trump’s blitz of pardons, their lawyers had argued that Mr. Daibes’s seven-year sentence and Mr. Hana’s eight-year sentence were disproportionate to other recent penalties for political corruption.
“Excessive and brutal,” said Lawrence S. Lustberg, who represented Mr. Hana, the founder of a halal meat certification business that was used to funnel bribes to Mr. Menendez and his wife.
“Anyone who has ever been to a prison knows that even a day, a week or a month is horrible. But seven, eight and 11 years — that is way beyond what is required for either punishment or deterrence.”
Kirsten Noyes contributed research.
Tracey Tully is a reporter for The Times who covers New Jersey, where she has lived for more than 20 years.
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