Senator Robert Menendez’s sister testified Monday about her parents’ travels from Cuba and the family’s practice of hoarding cash at home, justifying the habit the senator said led to at least some of the $480,000 FBI agents seized during its search. Jersey home.
The sister, Caridad Gonzalez, was 8 when her family fled Cuba in 1951, three years before Mr. Menendez was born in New York City. She told jurors that her father, a tie manufacturer, stored money in the wrong bottom of a grandfather clock in their home in Havana.
“It’s a Cuban thing,” testified Ms. Gonzalez, who is in her 80s. “They were afraid of losing what they had worked so hard for.”
She explained that her parents and her aunt continued the practice after coming to the United States, where her father worked as both a carpenter and cloth manufacturer.
Her mother, a seamstress, stores money in a closet door frame; Her father kept the cash in a shoebox that he stored on a shelf in a closet. After his aunt’s house caught fire, relatives found $60,000 in a bag in the basement, M. Gonzalez testified.
It was a habit, she said, that Mr. Menendez, 70, adopted after hearing stories of visits from Cuban police officers who forced his father to shut down the manufacturing facility he operated in his backyard.
“Dad always said, ‘Don’t trust the bank. If you trust the banks, you never know what can happen,” Ms. Gonzalez said.
When she worked as Mr. Menendez’s legal secretary in the 1980s, Ms. Gonzalez said her brother once asked her to retrieve $500 in cash stored in a box in his family’s apartment in Union City, NJ.
Ms. Gonzalez was the first witness called Monday as the senator’s lawyers began presenting a defense against allegations that Mr. Menendez accepted gold bars, thousands of dollars in cash and a Mercedes Benz in exchange for political favors.
In a June 2022 search of the home where Mr. Menendez lives with his wife, Nadine Menendez, FBI agents found 13 gold bars and more than $480,000 in cash, much of it in envelopes stuffed into boots, bags and duffel bags.
Another defense witness, Katia Taborian, Ms. Menendez’s younger sister, described the bedroom closet where FBI agents found the gold bars. She said the door was kept locked, but said she saw it open about 10 times and gave jurors details about valuables inside, including family heirlooms.
Ms. Menendez kept the closet locked because her children’s nanny stole cash from the family years ago, Ms. Taborian said.
She said her grandmother gave Ms. Menendez gold bars, and jurors were shown a handwritten list of valuables signed by her father decades ago that included descriptions of gold and precious jewelry.
“My sister got my grandmother’s gold bars,” Ms. Taborian said. “My sister was my grandmother’s favorite.”
Mr. Menendez’s lawyers, in an effort to blame Ms. Menendez, have painted a picture of a couple who lived largely separate lives. They have insisted that all the gold found was found in Ms Menendez’s closet and claimed in an opening statement that the senator was unaware of “what she was asking others to give her”.
On cross-examination, Ms. Taborian was asked whether Mr. Menendez was asked to leave the couple’s room while his sister opened the closet to put on clothes — an attempt by the prosecutor, Lara Pomerantz, to challenge that assumption. No knowledge of its contents.
Gold bars found in the closet were stamped with the serial numbers of gold owned by two New Jersey businessmen, Fred Diabs and Val Hanna, who are accused of bribing the couple in exchange for political favors and are on trial with the senator. Ms. Menendez was also charged, but the judge, Sidney H. Stein postponed her trial because she is undergoing treatment for breast cancer. All four accused have pleaded not guilty.
The defense’s presentation to the jury comes as the trial enters its eighth week in federal district court in Manhattan. Mr. Menendez is defending himself against accusations that he and his wife conspired to take bribes to Egypt in exchange for steering assistance and weapons and interfered in several criminal investigations in New Jersey on behalf of his associates.
Ms. Gonzalez and Ms. Tabourian’s testimony gave Mr. Menendez’s lawyers an opportunity to present the jury with the kind of personal history of the senator that would otherwise have been available only through the senator’s own testimony had he taken the stand.
Lawyers for Mr. Menendez have not indicated whether he will testify in his own defense; A lawyer, Adam Fee, told the judge Monday that it was “still under consideration.”
The senator’s lawyers and prosecutors, in courtroom discussions outside the jury’s presence, disagreed over how much of the senator’s family history could be described to the jury.
For example, Mr. Menendez’s defense team wanted to call a psychiatrist to say that the loss of the family’s life savings while leaving Cuba and the death of his father by suicide led the senator to hoard cash at home. The senator’s father, a compulsive gambler, died after Mr. Menendez “finally decided to stop paying his father’s gambling debts,” his lawyers wrote in the filing.
The judge barred the psychiatrist from being called as a witness, but Ms. Gonzalez’s testimony was able to provide jurors a window into her family’s traditions. She was not asked about their father’s death.
Ms. Taborian’s testimony also drew jurors through a similar immigration story.
Ms Taborian, like her sister, was born in Beirut, Lebanon, but left in 1975 during the civil war. She said her family, originally from Armenia, was wealthy enough to keep goats for Mrs. Menendez and both. Mrs. Taborian.
After leaving Beirut, the family settled on Long Island after spending some time in London and California.
Part of Mr. Menendez’s defense rests on showing that during the months leading up to the alleged bribery conspiracy, the senator and his future wife were in an on-again, off-again relationship.
“At the time they are supposed to be acting together to betray the senator to his country, he is breaking with him,” Mr Fee said last week.
Ms. Tabourian said her sister contacted her on Election Day in November 2018, upset that she and Mr. Menendez had broken up. Her sister asked her to help broker a resolution.
“My sister had been in a previous relationship, an unhealthy relationship, and it was causing a lot of chaos in her relationship with the senator,” Ms. Taborian testified.
After Ms. Tabourian sent a text message to Mr. Menendez, he responded in an email that was shown to jurors.
The senator wrote that he “couldn’t get over her existence” with her ex-boyfriend “when she was with me.”
“Maybe time will heal but not today,” he wrote. “I wish it was different.”
In early 2019, the couple reunited. They got engaged later that year and married in October 2020.