(Headline USA) Four of the gold bars found in the home of Sen. Bob Menendez, D-N.J., home were previously stolen during a violent 2013 robbery, according to NBC New York.
The FBI discovered a stash of gold bars in Menendez’s home earlier this year after he was charged with bribery. The serial numbers on some of the recovered gold matches with identifiers that Fred Daibes, a businessman accused of bribing Menendez, reported as stolen in 2013.
The police report from 2013 said robbers broke into Daibes’s Edgewater, New Jersey, home and made off with $500,000 in cash and 22 gold bars. Police later arrested four suspects and found most of the stolen gold. Some of it, apparently, later ended up in Menendez’s hands.
“Each gold bar has its own serial number,” Daibes told investigators in 2014 when questioned about the stolen gold. “They’re all stamped … you’ll never see two stamped the same way.”
Daibes has been accused of bribing Menendez for a series of favors, including the senator’s help in disrupting a federal prosecution against him. Menendez allegedly helped Daibes by urging President Joe Biden to pick Philip Sellinger as U.S. Attorney for New Jersey, believing Sellinger would apply a lighter touch to a bank-fraud case against Daibes.
In return, Daibes allegedly gave Menendez’s wife two gold bars that were a kilogram each in March 2022.
The businessman is also alleged to have given the couple thousands of dollars in cash by virtue of the fact that his fingerprints were discovered on an envelope containing the cash, according to the indictment.
The serial numbers on the gold bars will make the government’s case against Menendez that much easier, since it will now be “really easy” to prove the chain of custody, according to NBC legal analyst Danny Cevallos.
“All of this spells bad news for Senator Menendez,” Cevallos said.
Menendez has denied the allegations against him and refused to resign from the U.S. Senate.
