Robert Menendez charges rattle New Jersey’s infamous Hudson County

Senator Robert Menendez appeared in a Manhattan court with his wife, Nadine, just over a week ago to plead not guilty to charges that he accepted gold bars and other bribes from businessmen connected to the Egyptian government.

At about the same time, Adrian Ghainda, a young Democratic activist, was sitting in a booth just across the Hudson River in one of Menendez’s regular haunts: the International House of Pancakes on Kennedy Boulevard in Union City, New Jersey. 

As he slurped a milkshake, Ghainda pondered questions familiar to any politically minded Hudson County resident. “Who will be the first person who breaks with him?” he asked. “Everybody’s got to figure out where they line up. Do they want to be seen trying to stick a knife in him?”

The case has since taken another lurid turn with reports this week that Nadine Menendez was allegedly gifted a luxury Mercedes after a 2018 car crash in which she killed a pedestrian — an accident that is now drawing closer scrutiny.

Menendez’s fate matters well beyond Hudson County. An exit from Washington politics could tip the balance of power in a closely divided US Senate — and would be invoked by Republicans vying for control of New Jersey’s state house in elections next month.

In Hudson County, though, the senator’s legal drama is a more visceral affair: like the toppling of a king who ruled over an asphalt realm, with all the attendant speculation about how the spoils might be divided.

Hudson County is the place where Menendez was reared, and where he began a 50-year political ascent that carried him from the local school board to the US Senate, and the chair of its powerful foreign relations committee. It is a corner of the state renowned for bare-knuckle politics, local potentates and a history of public corruption that makes even hardened New Jerseyans shake their heads.

Over the years, mayors, county executives and police officers have been marched off to prison on bribery and racketeering charges — often replaced by “reformers” who then succumbed to similar temptations. Not for nothing did The Jersey Journal run a front-page headline in October 1982 that read: “No Hudson Official Indicted Yesterday”. 

“It’s almost part of the institutions, no matter who the individual players are,” Chris Christie, then New Jersey’s attorney-general and now a candidate in the Republican party presidential primary, told the Philadelphia Inquirer in 2004. “They watch everybody take bribes and illegal campaign contributions, and when they finally graduate into positions of power, they just believe it’s their turn.”

Parts of Hudson County — notably Hoboken and Jersey City, where shiny waterfront towers wink across the river at Manhattan — have been determined to flip the script. For them, the latest Menendez indictment came as a fresh gust of shame. 

“I genuinely feel bad for the embarrassment he has caused all of New Jersey who trusted him with a vote. We work hard to change a bad narrative + the detail of his indictment tarnishes all of us in our state,” wrote Steven Fulop, the Jersey City mayor who has clashed with Menendez, in a post on X, formerly Twitter.

What makes Hudson unique? It is the most densely populated county in America’s most densely populated state. It is almost entirely urban and working class, with a changing cast of immigrants — first German and Irish; then, from the 1960s, increasingly Latino.

Its archetypal political boss was Frank “I am the law” Hague, a school dropout who served as Jersey City’s Democratic mayor from 1917 to 1947 and ranked among the country’s most powerful politicians. Hague brought services to the poor, including a maternity hospital named for his mother. But he also took a share of municipal workers’ pay, among other forms of graft. With an $8,000 salary he somehow amassed millions of dollars by the time of his death.

Even now, when politics is increasingly driven by national issues that play out on social media, Hudson’s neighbourhoods are governed as old- fashioned, machine-style fiefdoms whose potentates rule from diners such as the IHOP. It is often less about ideology than personalities and allegiances.

“A lot of the mayors have been there for a very long time, and they’re revered like celebrities,” a veteran Hudson political operative said. “You’ll see little kids running up to them in the street.”

They wield real power: so many layers of government in New Jersey create pressure points for businesses seeking permits. The promise of a municipal job in the fire or police department is the gift of a local politician that can change the trajectory of an immigrant family seeking a foothold in the middle class, the operative said. 

In return, those politicians expect their people to show up at elections, helping Hudson County to supply lopsided margins for the Democratic party that can prove pivotal in statewide contests.

“There are local pockets of power, and that’s where power resides,” said Micah Rasmussen, director of the Rebovich Institute for New Jersey Politics at Rider University. If a politician such as Menendez turns out the votes for the machine, then others tend not to concern themselves with their affairs. “It’s been this way for a long time — since Boss Hague,” he said.

Menendez, the son of Cuban immigrants, rose under the tutelage of William V Musto, the mayor of Union City from 1962 to 1982, with a four-year interregnum.

Musto was sentenced to seven years in prison for taking hundreds of thousands of dollars of bribes in exchange for school construction contracts. He was convicted thanks to testimony from Menendez, who took to wearing a bulletproof vest for protection. A successor, Robert Botti, was indicted just four months after taking over for bid rigging. Menendez was elected mayor four years later with a promise to clean the stables.

“To become a party boss, you have to take on a party boss, which is what Menendez did,” said David Wildstein, the founder and editor of the New Jersey Globe, an online politics site. (Wildstein is also a veteran of the state’s politics with past involvement in the “Bridgegate” scandal that doomed Christie’s 2016 White House bid).

Even after Menendez reached Congress, Wildstein noted, he still chaired the local Democratic party. “No matter how high he rose, he never took his eye off the ball in Hudson County,” he said, calling Menendez “a product of a political machine where, if you’re not a tough guy, you don’t succeed”.

The Hudson County taint followed Menendez into the Senate when Jon Corzine appointed him in 2006 to the seat he had vacated for the governor’s mansion.

Menendez was eventually indicted in 2015 for allegedly accepting luxury travel and other gifts from a Florida doctor in exchange for favours. The trial ended in a hung jury. True to his Hudson County roots, Menendez threatened payback from the courthouse steps.

“For those who were digging my political grave so they could jump into my seat, I know who you are and I won’t forget it,” he said. The Democratic party fell into line and supported him.

This time may be different. “The level that was in the indictment was so far beyond anything anyone had seen,” the county political operative said.

Powerful Menendez colleagues, including New Jersey’s other US senator, Cory Booker, have called for him to resign his seat in Congress.

Ghainda, a progressive Democrat who lost a bid earlier this year for county commissioner, was hopeful that Menendez’s downfall — if it happens — might lead to lasting change in local politics. “This creates a pivotal moment to get people behind the issues instead of behind the personalities,” he said.

While Hudson County Democrats have maintained a respectful silence, a representative from southern New Jersey plans to stand against Menendez next year. And the mayor of Hoboken is openly musing about challenging the first-term representative Robert Menendez Jr for the congressional seat delivered to him by his father.

“His political power is already dissipating before our eyes,” Rasmussen said of Menendez. “And it’s happening at warp speed.”