Nadine Menendez was sentenced to four and a half years in prison last month for bribery and corruption, her husband, disgraced US Senator Bob Menendez is currently serving 11 years on the same charges.
A Jury found the couple took in hundreds of thousands in cash, gold bars and a Mercedes convertible after Menendez misused his powerful position on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee to help two businessmen secure contracts and escape criminal prosecution. They were also found guilty of conspiring to help Egypt secure US weapons and cover up the murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi in 2018.
In this adapted excerpt from their new book “Gold Bar Bob: The Downfall of the Most Corrupt US Senator“, authors Isabel Vincent and Thomas Jason Anderson describe how the couple first met.
Statuesque blonde Nadine Arslanian was Bob Menendez’s dream girl.
The New Jersey Democrat noticed her right away during a fundraiser for his reelection campaign at the lavish Saddle River home of Armenian American donors in 2010.
Arslanian, an Armenian-American divorcée who had grown up in the lap of luxury in Lebanon before her family fled the country’s civil war, was in a relationship at the time.
For his part, the senator was dating Gwendolyn Beck, another leggy blonde who was a money manager for Jeffrey Epstein, and has been accused of taking part in his seedy lifestyle. When Beck ran as an independent for Congress in Virginia in 2014, Epstein donated to her election campaign.
Nadine played it cool during that first encounter, even as friends say she was drawn to the powerful US Senator like a moth to a flame.
“Even when she was involved… she was always looking for the next best thing,” said fashion designer and former “Real Housewives of New Jersey” star Kim De Paola. “When she used to come to my events, she had her boobs hanging [out] … always flaunting herself.”
Nadine, a hanger-on at parties with the “Real Housewives” and the cast of “Mob Wives” in New Jersey, was always chasing people with status. Although she would later tell the New York Times she had no idea Menendez was a US senator when she met him, no one in her circle of suburban socialites believed her.
“Nadine was always impressed with power,” said a friend. “When I heard she was dating Bob, I was like ‘Oh my God!’ But I wasn’t all that surprised.”
“It was ‘Bob, Bob, Bob, Bob!’ when she started dating him,” said another friend, adding that for at least a few months she seemed not to be able to choose between Menendez and Doug Anton, a celebrity attorney who had once defended the currently imprisoned R. Kelly.
Menendez, whose first indictment on corruption and bribery ended in a hung jury in 2017, eventually broke up with Beck.
In New Jersey, he moved in the same social circles as Nadine and they soon became romantically involved, although he later broke up with her when she couldn’t decide who she wanted to be with.
Although Nadine was involved with Anton, she was still interested in Bob, calling him on his 64th birthday on January 1, 2018, and suggesting that they meet to celebrate his acquittal.
“Nadine wants the world,” said a former boyfriend who dated her after the divorce from her first husband, New Jersey real estate developer Raffi Arslanian. “She wants a seat at every campfire.”
Known in the Armenian community as “psycho Barbie,” Nadine had allegedly stalked an ex. She was also accused of keying his new girlfriend’s car and showing up at his home on Christmas Day in 2010 with her two children to try to win him back, according to a restraining order.
“Nadine always believed she was above the law,” the former boyfriend said.
With Menendez, friends said she played hard to get, though, pitting him against Anton. When they began dating again in 2018, Menendez allegedly sent Capitol police officers from Washington DC to his rival’s office in Hackensack, New Jersey to get him out of the picture.
“He scared the s—t out of Doug,” said John Alite, a former Gotti crime family associate and friend of Nadine’s.
Still, Nadine refused to commit to Menendez. A friend of the couple often saw her hanging out with the lawyer at a favorite cigar lounge, then going on to meet Menendez for dinner at Regina’s Steakhouse and Grill, a favorite restaurant of the senator’s in nearby Teaneck.
Facing foreclosure on her home in Englewood Cliffs, Nadine finally chose Menendez, who, a source says, “promised her the world.”
Nadine — who Bob called “Bubbles,” in reference to her décolletage — wasted no time asking the powerful Democratic senator if he would meet with some Egyptian officials who were friends with some of her friends in New Jersey.
“Could you please discuss the country’s relations with the International Monetary Fund and other large projects, such as the ‘new Suez Canal,’”she texted him.
“Really???” Menendez texted back. Moments later, Menendez went online and searched “Egypt and International Monetary Fund.”
Meetings with the Egyptians took place at Bob’s favorite steakhouses in New Jersey and Washington DC. Soon the couple was involved in helping to secure a lucrative halal certification contract from the government of Egypt for Wael Hana, one of Nadine’s friends and a co-conspirator in their scheme.
Menendez also “ghost wrote” letters for Egypt when the country was trying to lobby his fellow senators to release a hold on $300 million in military aid to the country.
At Nadine’s urging, Menendez also helped Egyptian intelligence officials cover up the murder of Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi, who was killed and dismembered when he entered the Saudi consulate in Istanbul on October 2, 2018. Egyptian intelligence had provided the drugs to kill the Washington Post columnist.
Shortly after Khashoggi’s murder, Nadine hit and killed a pedestrian in Bogota, New Jersey. She insisted she “did nothing wrong,” and was never tested for alcohol or drugs. Luckily for her, one of her socialite friends who was waiting to have dinner with her at a local restaurant sent a well-connected former law enforcement official to the scene to assist her.
Nadine seemed to show little concern for 49-year-old Richard Koop, who lay on the dark roadway near her totaled Mercedes. She needed a new car, and appealed to Hana and his connections to get it for her in exchange for the favors that Menendez — who she dubbed “l’a amour de ma vie (the love of my life)” — would do for them.
Nadine received a brand new Mercedes convertible from the couple’s benefactors. She would go on to marry Menendez at an Armenian church in Queens in 2020.
A few years later, after federal agents found hundreds of thousands of dollars and gold bars stuffed into shoes and the Senator’s jacket pockets at their home, they were both convicted on bribery and corruption charges in separate trials.
At trial Menendez blamed his wife — by that time suffering with cancer — for everything.
In her tearful address to the judge during her sentencing hearing in September, Nadine, in turn, blamed her husband.
In seeking to minimize her time in prison, Nadine — who has been cancer free for a year, according to reports — prevailed upon her friends and relatives to write letters to the judge attesting to her “good character.”
The most memorable came from Nikole Juliano, her hairdresser.
“Over my career, I have touched hundreds of heads — many of them every single week for years — and yet Nadine stands out in a way few people do,” she wrote.
Juliano meant to extoll Nadine’s kindness and concern for others, opinions many now dispute.
The post How ‘Gold Bar’ Bob Menendez’ wife Nadine ‘flaunted’ her way into his affections: ‘Like a moth to a flame’ appeared first on New York Post.
