New Jersey
Gold bars in baggies and cash crammed in boots: Prosecutors detail Menendez's hoarded riches • New Jersey Monitor
Peek into Sen. Bob Menendez’s closets and basement, and you’ll learn he’s secretly a slob, with his and his wife’s belongings strewn around as if a typhoon just blew through.
But in 2022, that chaos hid something worse, federal prosecutors said Thursday — proof of his corruption. Jammed into jackets and boots and crammed into bags and boxes were 13 gold bars and $486,461 in cash, the fruits of five years of bribes New Jersey’s senior senator and his wife took from three businessmen hungry for Menendez’s influence, prosecutors said.
On the fourth day of the Democratic senator’s corruption trial in Manhattan, prosecutor Lara Pomerantz spent several hours chronicling the cash, gold, and other items FBI agents found during a June 16, 2022, search of the couple’s Englewood Cliffs home.
Aristotelis Kougemitros, the FBI special agent who led the search, narrated photos of the senator’s home and its hoarded riches, and Pomerantz gave the confiscated cash and gold, sealed in evidence bags, to jurors for inspection.
Investigators found so much money in envelopes — banded together in stacks or loose in bags — that they quit photographing it and Kougemitros called for backup, he testified. Two agents arrived with an automated cash counter.
“The sheer volume of bills that we encountered was too much to count by hand,” he said.
Thursday, Pomerantz and Kougemitros took so long to list all the loot investigators found around the Menendezes’ split-level home that U.S. District Judge Sidney H. Stein stood up to stretch his legs.
Menendez lawyer Avi Weitzman had told jurors on Wednesday that the senator’s wife, Nadine, took the cash, gold, and other bribes without her husband’s knowledge and stashed much of it in her deadbolted closet and the locked safe inside it.
The senator had a habit of keeping cash at home, rooted in his experience as the son of immigrants who fled Cuba with nothing, Weitzman added. Check the money’s date, he told jurors, saying they were older bills long out of circulation that would prove Menendez collected them over decades.
On Thursday, Pomerantz clearly sought to deflate that defense. She showed seized stacks of hundred-dollar bills with April 2022 dates stamped on the bank’s band. She told jurors most of the money was found packed into pockets of the senator’s coats and in bags in the commonly accessible basement.
The closet in question became a point of debate, with Kougemitros insisting investigators found Menendez’s navy blazer and men’s ties hanging inside the closet, suggesting it was a shared space.
But Adam Fee, a Menendez attorney, pushed back on cross-examination, countering that the blazer was hanging on the back of the master bedroom door, not inside the closet, which he said was Nadine’s alone.
The men’s ties? They belonged to a teenager who used to live in the home, Fee said, pointing to the skulls and cheese-eating mice dotting several ties. Nadine Menendez had two children from a previous marriage, including a son named Andre.
Fee asked Kougemitros if he’d ever seen the senator wear such sassy ties.
“In fairness, I haven’t really studied photos of Senator Menendez wearing ties,” Kougemitros responded.
In court, Menendez’s ties have leaned patriotic, every day a different variation of red and blue.
Cash aside, all the gold bars the FBI seized were found in the closet, Fee said. Whoever put them there didn’t worry about their storage, photos showed. One was wrapped in a paper towel, shoved in a Ziploc bag, and left on the floor beneath other detritus.
Beyond the cash, gold bars, jewelry, air purifier, and fitness machine the couple allegedly accepted as bribes, the FBI’s photos show the couple liked luxury brands, with bags branded Prada, Giorgio Armani, Burberry, and more making appearances in the pictures.
Menendez listened to the testimony without much of a reaction, occasionally resting his cheek in his palm.
Criminalizing friendship?
Before Pomerantz called Kougemitros as the case’s first witness, the attorneys for Menendez’s two co-defendants — Wael “Will” Hana and Fred Daibes — delivered their opening statements.
Hana is an Egyptian-American businessman and longtime friend of Nadine Menendez who prosecutors say bribed the couple with gold and cash to help him gain a monopoly on exporting halal meat to Egypt, free up military arms and aid to Egypt, and supply sensitive U.S. government information to Egyptian officials.
Daibes is an Edgewater real estate developer who prosecutors say gave Menendez gold and cash to disrupt a bank fraud investigation into him by the U.S. Attorney’s Office in New Jersey and help him land a lucrative investment from a member of Qatar’s royal family.
Attorney Lawrence Lustberg, who represents Hana, told jurors prosecutors were making innocent actions look sinister by criminalizing friendships, commercial success, and advocating for one’s homeland.
Hana had been close friends with Nadine Menendez for 15 years and gave her gifts out of friendship, Lustberg said. Gold is a gift people particularly from the Middle East like to give, he added.
“Will’s gifts got nicer as his business succeeded,” Lustberg said.
Prosecutors say Hana also gave Nadine Menendez a low- or no-show job at his meat exporting business as a bribe. Lustberg conceded Hana paid her three $10,000 checks to help him set up operations in other countries as his business expanded. But she didn’t do the work, so “he fired her,” he added.
“Ask yourself – is this what a briber does?” Lustberg said.
Attorney Cesar de Castro, who represents Daibes, echoed Lustberg’s sentiment, saying prosecutors were “sensationalizing” gift-giving. This is the argument Menendez and his friend and co-defendant, Salomon Melgen, made during their 2017 corruption trial, which ended in a hung jury.
“Investing in precious metals like gold is normal and common … gold is even sold at Costco,” de Castro said. “There’s nothing criminal about being generous.”
Fee is expected to resume his cross examination of Kougemitros Friday. Prosecutors have indicated they plan to call an FBI agent to testify Monday to talk about Menendez’s actions in Egypt.
A cancer diagnosis
While Menendez treks to Manhattan daily to fight his second corruption case in the past decade, his wife has been home battling a medical crisis that prompted Stein to postpone her trial to at least July.
Thursday, as de Castro was defending Daibes, Menendez’s Senate staff sent out a statement revealing that Nadine Menendez has stage III breast cancer and needs a mastectomy, follow-up surgery, and possibly radiation treatment.
In the statement, Menendez said his wife decided to ask him to disclose her medical condition “as a result of constant press inquiries and reporters following my wife.”
“We are of course, concerned about the seriousness and advanced stage of the disease,” he said in the statement. “We hope and pray for the best results. We ask the press and the public to give her the time, space and privacy to deal with this challenging health condition as she undergoes surgery and recovery.”
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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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