Until recently, Jose Uribe was an obscure New Jersey businessman who had been caught up in what prosecutors say was a sprawling and lucrative bribery scheme involving Senator Robert Menendez and others.
But after Mr. Uribe pleaded guilty in March to trying to bribe Mr. Menendez and agreed to cooperate with the authorities, he vaulted into a more prominent position: star government witness.
On Friday, Mr. Uribe took the witness stand to begin testifying against Mr. Menendez, a New Jersey Democrat, in Federal District Court in Manhattan, as the senator’s corruption trial ends its fourth week.
The senator and his wife, Nadine Menendez, are charged with conspiring to accept cash, gold bullion and other bribes collectively worth hundreds of thousands of dollars in exchange for Mr. Menendez’s agreement to direct aid to Egypt and to meddle in criminal cases in New Jersey. One of those cases involved Mr. Uribe.
Prosecutors with the U.S. attorney’s office for the Southern District of New York say Mr. Uribe, a former insurance broker who worked in the trucking industry, sought the senator’s help to stave off criminal investigations that the New Jersey attorney general’s office was conducting into two of Mr. Uribe’s associates. In return, an indictment says, Mr. Uribe helped to buy Ms. Menendez, then the senator’s girlfriend, a new Mercedes-Benz C-300 convertible worth more than $60,000.
“I knew that giving a car in return for influencing a United States senator to stop a criminal investigation was wrong,” Mr. Uribe said in court when he pleaded guilty, “and I deeply regret my actions.”
Mr. Menendez, 70, is being tried with two other New Jersey businessmen — Wael Hana and Fred Daibes — charged in the conspiracy. Ms. Menendez, 57, was also charged, but the judge, Sidney H. Stein, postponed her trial until July because she is undergoing treatment for breast cancer. All four defendants have pleaded not guilty.
Mr. Uribe is expected to take the stand one day after the jury heard testimony from Gurbir S. Grewal. Mr. Grewal was New Jersey’s attorney general in 2019 when prosecutors say Mr. Menendez contacted him in hopes of having the investigations into Mr. Uribe’s associates quashed.
Mr. Grewal, who now leads the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission’s enforcement division, testified on Thursday about being summoned to Mr. Menendez’s Newark office. During that meeting, he said, the senator raised complaints about the way Hispanic defendants tied to the trucking industry were being treated by prosecutors in Mr. Grewal’s insurance fraud unit.
Mr. Grewal said that when he asked if the senator’s concerns related to a specific matter pending before his office, Mr. Menendez said yes. Mr. Grewal said he immediately cut the conversation short.
“I didn’t know the case. I didn’t want to know the case,” he testified, adding, “It’s not something I was comfortable speaking to him about.”
Mr. Uribe’s potentially pivotal role in the government’s case was highlighted late Thursday when prosecutors wrote to Judge Stein, asking that they be allowed to show the jury Mr. Uribe’s formal cooperation agreement with the government. The prosecutors say they want to counter blistering attacks on Mr. Uribe’s credibility by Mr. Menendez’s lawyers.
In an opening statement last month, Avi Weitzman, a lawyer for the senator, told the jury that the defense team intended to show Mr. Uribe to be an untrustworthy witness.
“We’ll have a lot to discuss at the end of the case about him, about his lies and his cheating and his crimes and all the ways he’s been incentivized to continue doing all of them,” Mr. Weitzman told the jury.
This is the second time that Mr. Uribe has pleaded guilty to a crime. More than a decade ago, he admitted to taking $76,000 in insurance premiums but failing to buy coverage for seven clients, all commercial drivers. He was sentenced in New Jersey to probation and stripped of his insurance broker’s license.
A seven-page cooperation agreement that Mr. Uribe and his lawyer signed in March says that prosecutors will seek leniency on Mr. Uribe’s behalf when he is sentenced only if he testifies truthfully and completely.
Prosecutors say in the letter that Mr. Uribe’s testimony is especially important because the government plans to have him testify about his texts and conversations with the senator, his wife and others “that at least in some cases are coded or subject to interpretation.”
The insurance fraud case appeared to be consuming Mr. Uribe, according to dozens of text messages he sent to Ms. Menendez and Mr. Hana.
“I need peace,” Mr. Uribe wrote in a text message to Ms. Menendez on Sept. 3, 2019, at 10:17 p.m. The next morning, Mr. Menendez placed a call to Mr. Grewal to arrange the meeting according to prosecutors.
Mr. Uribe seemed to have advance knowledge of the meeting. “Thank you for everything you do for me. I am praying,” he wrote in a text message to Ms. Menendez a few minutes before the senator’s scheduled appointment with Mr. Grewal, “today’s meeting is in GOD’s hand.”
One of the people involved in the fraud investigation pleaded guilty in April in an agreement that required no prison time, according to the indictment.
But it was clear from text messages that Mr. Uribe sent in the fall of 2019 that at least some component of the legal problem continued to vex him.
In late October, Mr. Uribe asked Ms. Menendez if she had an “update” for him. “I just need peace. Sorry to bother you,” he wrote in a text message.
The next day, Oct. 29, the senator called Mr. Uribe from his Senate office, according to evidence admitted during the trial.
The conversation lasted less than three minutes and left Mr. Uribe feeling relieved.
“I just got a call and I am a very happy person,” he wrote in a text to Ms. Menendez. “GOD bless you and him for ever.”
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