New Jersey
Did he take bribes, or was he duped by his wife? Arguments under way in Menendez trial • New Jersey Monitor
After a slow start, Sen. Bob Menendez’s corruption trial hit warp speed Wednesday, with the defense team using opening arguments to blame everything on his wife and ending the day by demanding a mistrial.
With 12 jurors and six alternates seated after two and a half days of questioning, the case kicked off after lunchtime with prosecutor Lara Pomerantz methodically outlining the 18-count indictment against Menendez — a Democrat and New Jersey’s senior senator — and two of his co-defendants, businessman Wael Hana and Edgewater real estate developer Fred Daibes.
“For years, Robert Menendez abused his position to feed his own greed and to keep his wife happy,” Pomerantz said. “Menendez put his power up for sale, and Hana and Daibes were more than happy to buy it.”
But defense attorney Avi Weitzman told the jury that there were “innocent explanations” for all of prosecutors’ accusations, and he quickly cut to what might be the heart of his defense — Menendez’s claim that his wife, Nadine, kept him in the dark about the gold bars, cash, luxury car, and other bribes she allegedly took from Hana, Daibes, and a third co-defendant Jose Uribe, who pleaded guilty in March.
“The real question for you is: What did Bob know?” Weitzman told the jury.
Daibes and Hana are standing trial alongside Menendez, and their attorneys are expected to deliver their opening statements Thursday morning. Nadine Menendez was charged too, but U.S. District Judge Sidney H. Stein previously postponed her trial to July because she has a medical issue.
The senator’s wife
Despite her absence in the courtroom in Manhattan, Nadine Menendez loomed large over the trial Wednesday, with both prosecutors and the senator’s defense team repeatedly referring to her and her role in a bribery scheme that prosecutors say stretched back to 2018, when the couple began dating and a year after Sen. Menendez’s last corruption trial ended with a hung jury.
Pomerantz painted her as the insulation Menendez put between himself and his alleged benefactors, saying Nadine’s role as go-between gave the senator plausible deniability.
“Menendez was careful when he was committing crimes,” she said. “He was smart enough not to send too many texts. Instead, he had Nadine do that for him.”
Weitzman, though, portrayed her as a greedy manipulator who took gold, cash, and other bribes without her husband’s knowledge. The couple had separate finances, lived separately until April 2020, and have largely led separate lives since then, and FBI agents found all the gold bars in her locked closet, Weitzman said.
While the 70-year-old senator knew his wife had gold bars, he thought they were an inheritance from her family, who had built a fortune in the Persian rug business, he added. Instead, he said, Nadine had always been financially supported by other people, including a previous husband and by her wealthy family, and consequently “tried to get cash and assets any which way she could,” Weitzman said.
“I’ll acknowledge it smells a bit weird,” he said of what he called “the green and gold elephant in the room.”
Besides gold, investigators also found more than $400,000 stuffed in envelopes, jacket pockets, and shoes all over the couple’s home. Weitzman attributed that hoarded cash to the senator’s habit — forged after his family fled with nothing from Cuba in the 1950s — of making monthly withdrawals of $400 to $500 for decades and keeping the cash at home.
Prosecutors say the riches were corrupt payments for official actions that only a senator could deliver.
“Quid pro quo — this for that,” Pomerantz repeated throughout her opening statements.
Specifically, prosecutors have accused Menendez of taking gold, cash, and a no-show, “sham job” for Nadine Menendez from her longtime friend Hana to help Hana secure a monopoly on importing halal meat to Egypt.
“Hana didn’t actually have any experience in this business, but what he did have was a U.S. senator in his pocket,” Pomerantz said.
In exchange, Menendez also provided sensitive information about staffing at the U.S. Embassy in Cairo and even ghost-wrote a letter from an Egyptian official to U.S. lawmakers who had held up millions in military arms and aid to Egypt over concerns about human rights abuses there, prosecutors allege.
Menendez also tried to disrupt the U.S. Attorney’s Office in New Jersey’s prosecution of Daibes and a fraud investigation by the New Jersey Attorney General’s Office involving Uribe, an insurance broker who was friends with Hana, prosecutors said.
In exchange, Uribe gave Nadine $15,000 in cash in a parking lot as a down payment on a $60,000 Mercedes Benz convertible and continued to make monthly payments afterward for years, Pomerantz said.
“This was not politics as usual. It was politics for profit,” she said. “Robert Menendez was a United States senator on the take, motivated by greed and focused on how much he could put in his own pocket, and in his wife’s pocket.”
Weitzman insisted prosecutors were “wrong, dead wrong.”
Menendez took no bribes and never acted as a foreign agent for any government, he said.
“The actions Senator Menendez took were actions on behalf of constituents,” he said.
His interactions with Egyptian and Qatari officials were merely him “engaging in diplomacy on behalf of the U.S. government,” he added.
Weitzman urged jurors to remember Menendez’s long history of public service. Menendez has served in the Senate since 2006, in the House from 1993 to 2006, and in the New Jersey Legislature and Union City politics before that.
“He’s an American patriot,” Weitzman said.
About that mistrial motion
Stein rejected defense attorney Adam Fee’s argument that Pomerantz tainted jurors during her opening statements by implying that Menendez agreed to publicly support Qatar to help Daibes land an investment from a member of Qatar’s royal family in exchange for gold bars and cash.
Fee accused Pomerantz of violating Stein’s order that prosecutors couldn’t discuss the substance of a resolution supporting Qatar that Daibes allegedly urged Menendez to introduce to help him secure the investment.
“This is angels dancing on the head of a pin, your honor. They are injecting this case with that inference,” Fee said.
But after a heated back-and-forth between Fee and prosecutor Daniel Richenthal, Stein denied the mistrial motion.
“There’s no basis for it,” he said.
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For Nora Corthren, the work goes far beyond organizing events or telling stories. It’s about helping people see themselves in hockey.
As the NHL’s Manager of Content, Audience Development, and Social Impact, Corthren works at the crossroads of storytelling and community engagement, helping shine a spotlight on initiatives that make our game of hockey more welcoming and inclusive. From Pride programming to the Willie O’Ree Community Hero Award and Hockey Fights Cancer, her role focuses on highlighting the people and organizations making a difference throughout the hockey world.
Over the past four years, Corthren has witnessed meaningful growth across the sport.
“It really has been wonderful to just see the hockey world continue to grow and develop and become more welcoming and more diverse and more inclusive,” she said.
Much of that progress comes from grassroots organizations working to create safe and welcoming spaces for players and fans from all backgrounds. Corthren’s job often involves identifying those stories and using the NHL’s platform to amplify them.
“I think it’s something that a lot of people who do the grassroots work of trying to make the game a more inclusive and welcoming space, they don’t do it for the attention,” she said. “They very much do it for the impact.”
That ability to elevate organizations and individuals making a difference has become one of the most rewarding parts of her work.
Among the initiatives closest to Corthren’s heart is the NHL’s continued involvement in Pride celebrations, including the annual New York City Pride March. For years, the league has marched alongside local hockey organizations and teams from across the New York metropolitan area, including the New Jersey Devils, New York Islanders, New York Sirens, and New York Rangers.
For Corthren, the importance of that presence cannot be overstated. Seeing the NHL shield, the NHL teams’ logos, and even, yes, NJ Devil, are important parts of representation to a marginalized community.
A notorious mob hitman who once testified against John “Junior” Gotti before cleaning up his life and becoming a councilman in New Jersey has been arrested on extortion and loansharking charges that, if proven, reflect a return to the lifestyle of his youth.
John Alite, 63, was arrested on Friday in New Jersey, where he was sworn in early last year as a councilman in the borough of Englishtown. Released after a court appearance Saturday, Alite is scheduled to return to court for a detention hearing Wednesday.
His attorney, Douglas Anton, responding to an email seeking comment, said he did not want to speak about the case before the next court appearance.
Alite faces multiple counts of extortion, corporate misconduct, loansharking and terroristic threats.
Alite provided loans at exorbitant rates before threatening violence to collect on them, authorities said, citing the discovery in his home of metal knuckles, an expandable baton, six baseball bats and about two dozen knives, including switchblades.
The baseball bats, authorities said, included one stored near his home’s front door and five more in a kitchen storage bench.
An officer of the New Jersey State Police, an investigative arm of the attorney general’s office, said in court papers that it appeared that the weapons found in Alite’s residence were intended for use in collecting debts.
According to court papers, Alite had threatened one person he had lent money to, saying he would strike him across the head with a baseball bat if he didn’t meet his demands.
Alite also had bragged that he had in the past endeavored to “gut” people like “fish,” the court papers said.
In a release, prosecutors said Alite carried out crimes in part through his corporation, Straightened-Out Entertainment Inc.
They said he illegally obtained property and money from his victims by threats of violence in ways that reflected his 2009 testimony at a Gotti trial that ended with a deadlocked jury.
Alite told a Manhattan federal court jury that he killed a childhood friend to earn respect from fellow mobsters.
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The Garden State set a record for monthly iGaming revenue in May. Read how much for the biggest month ever in New Jersey iGaming.
New Jersey online casinos have been going strong all year, but May 2026 was especially notable. The Garden State’s iGaming market earned a record-breaking $276.3 million last month. This amount eclipsed the previous record of $273.2 million set in December 2025.
NJ online casino revenue for May 2026: $276.3 million
The $276.3 million earned in May 2026 represents an 11.9% year-over-year (YoY) increase from May 2025, when NJ online casinos earned $246.8 million.
This was yet another strong month and double-digit increase for New Jersey iGaming. The state had an identical 11.9% YoY uptick last month, when iCasinos made $263.1 million.
Year-to-date earnings for New Jersey gaming sites are $1.32 billion through May 2026. That’s up 14.4% compared to the same time period last year, when New Jersey had $1.16 billion through May 2025.
Golden Nugget enjoyed the strongest month
According to the May 2026 New Jersey iGaming revenue report, the Golden Nugget brand led all NJ iCasinos with $86.45 million. Of the three online casinos operating under Golden Nugget’s license, FanDuel made the most with $63.24 million from casino games online. BetRivers and Golden Nugget Online earned $12.43 million and $10.79 million, respectively.
Resorts Casino Hotel had the second-best month with $53.89 million. It doesn’t break down revenue by each online casino. But DraftKings is the biggest operator on this license on account of its progressive jackpot slots.
Retail casinos stay flat
Last month, brick-and-mortar casinos joined in the party with an 11.7% YoY increase. This month was a different story. New Jersey land-based casinos made $265.6 million in May 2026, just a 0.1% increase over the $256.3 million made the previous May.
The Borgata Hotel Casino & Spa had the best month among NJ retail casinos, earning $72.9 million. Hard Rock Atlantic City also had a solid month with $49.9 million, while Ocean Resorts rounded out the top three with $46.8 million.
Sports betting sees a big revenue decrease
In April 2026, sports betting had the largest growth out of New Jersey gambling verticals with a 12.8% YoY increase. However, May 2026 was a different story since NJ bookmakers earned $85.2 million—a 16.9% decrease from the $102.5 million made in the previous May.
The Garden State isn’t an outlier here since other states, like New York and Pennsylvania, also struggled with sports gambling revenue last month. US sportsbooks largely saw a smaller hold in May 2026 and are also dealing with increased competition from prediction markets.
iGaming continues to lead the way
Total gaming revenue for the state was $627.1 million in May 2026, representing a 2.0% YoY increase from the $614.7 million made in the previous May.
iGaming definitely looks to carry the torch moving forward. Many gambling operators are banking on real-money online slots to boost their revenue, while retail casinos and sports betting are currently struggling.
Responsible gambling
Legal US online casinos promote responsible play by allowing players to limit losses, sessions, wagers, and logins. They also offer timeout options for account breaks lasting days to weeks. Self-exclusion is a long-term option that shuts off access to an account for months or years.
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