Driving his Mercedes around Edgewater, New Jersey, Fred Daibes weighed the possibilities available to him. It was 1997, and the waterfront real estate developer had watched as his projects sprouted along the Hudson River. He was born in Beirut and had spent the first 10 years of his life in a Palestinian refugee camp. When his family arrived in their new town in the late 1960s, around 4,000 people lived there. That number would almost quadruple as his high-rises replaced abandoned factories.
“I’ve always felt Edgewater was unique,” Daibes told a Star-Ledger reporter in the car. Its cottage-like homes, he said, gave the town a “quaint Cape Cod feel,” even though “it’s as close to Manhattan as any borough.” In the coming years, he modeled the St. Moritz, one of his condo buildings, after luxury hotels in the city that it overlooked, and he planned to recruit a concierge from one.
Edgewater has largely shaped itself around Daibes. He had a hand, he once said, in every construction project in town, and he founded a commercial bank with six branches. The St. Moritz would bear the address 100 Daibes Court and have a swimming pool on the roof. He moved into the penthouse and posed for a local magazine in front of the building with his collection of foreign cars. He was known to cruise down River Road, the primary artery in the 3.5-mile-long, two-block-wide town, blasting Lebanese music from a convertible—either his Cadillac or Rolls-Royce.
Daibes grew up working as a dishwasher and barback at a beloved local ferryboat restaurant, and he now oversaw a clubhouse of his own. Le Jardin, a French bar and restaurant on River Road with patio views of Manhattan, hosted politicians and businessmen who smoked cigars and took home complimentary bottles of wine. He and his family are thanked in the credits for Cop Land, the 1997 movie about a New Jersey sheriff, played by Sylvester Stallone, who tries to clean up his town after learning that the corrupt New York City police officers who live there are working with the Mob. It was partly filmed in Edgewater, and according to a former council member, Daibes liked to boast that Stallone called him the Donald Trump of the town.
“They make it sound like Daibes bailed out this crummy little factory town,” Batch added. “No, he took advantage of these properties, the Gold Coast, and they allowed him to do it.
In more recent times, the developer’s fortunes began to turn. After a six-year federal investigation, he was indicted in 2018 on bank fraud charges stemming from an alleged loan scheme involving two of his longtime business partners. He became a reviled figure at town council meetings, which often focused on overpopulation and congestion on River Road. He was ordered to pay a $1.7 million penalty for skirting environmental protections related to Le Jardin’s portion of the waterfront; his attorneys said he couldn’t make the required investments because of the costs from the fraud case. Le Jardin closed in 2019, and its co-owner and manager, Gus Lita, who also operated a nearby pizzeria, encountered legal trouble of his own. He pleaded guilty in 2022 to running a gambling parlor for an Albanian Mafia group.
In a certain light, these hurdles could be seen as temporary setbacks, or merely built-in costs of the job. Daibes has always worked in North Jersey real estate, a locale and an industry each with a potent, if somewhat facile, reputation for attracting a particular kind of operator. As he fought the bank charges, he traveled to London and Qatar to solicit investments in a development he was building atop an Edgewater Superfund site where coal tar for roofing and paving had once been manufactured. He found a potential buyer in Sheikh Sultan bin Jassim Al Thani, a member of the Qatari royal family who has also invested about $50 million in the right-wing news outlet Newsmax.
Eventually, federal prosecutors have claimed, he looked to an old Le Jardin regular to help secure the deal. Daibes has been a reliable fundraiser for Bob Menendez, the three-term US senator and chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. In August 2021, according to court documents, Menendez texted Daibes a statement he was about to release. He was planning to thank Qatar for its moral leadership in accepting Afghan refugees who wanted to come to the US and offered a heads-up: “You might want to send to them.”
The next month, Daibes sent the senator photos of a few different Patek Philippe watches and asked which one he liked. When federal agents searched Menendez’s home in 2022, they found 13 bars of gold worth more than $100,000, some of which had serial numbers showing that they had previously belonged to Daibes.
By then, the duo—and three other defendants, including the senator’s wife, Nadine Arslanian—were on their way toward being indicted in, as alleged, one of the most brazen political bribery schemes in recent American history. Menendez, authorities claimed, tried to interfere in Daibes’s fraud case by encouraging a US attorney candidate to revisit it, and otherwise sold his influence in exchange for gifts such as a Mercedes convertible and envelopes containing tens of thousands of dollars in cash. Arslanian, the indictment said, was on a texting basis with Egyptian intelligence and military officers and allegedly worked to introduce them to her husband. (Daibes, Menendez, and Arslanian did not return requests for comment.)
All five defendants initially pleaded not guilty, with Menendez making a statement that attributed the prosecution to “forces behind the scenes” who “cannot accept that a first-generation Latino American from humble beginnings could rise to be a US senator.” (One of the three indicted New Jersey businessmen changed his plea in March and agreed to cooperate with authorities.)
Taken together, the arrangements laid out in the government’s case sounded so breezy as to be outlandish. They blossomed from a set of ambitious businessmen and lawyers who tend toward eccentricity, flamboyance, and abandon. The broader scandal has amounted, at points, to the low-hanging image of New Jersey life and politics: cops and criminals, saints and sinners. And with a Manhattan trial slated to begin this month, it has set a destination for the intertwined paths of the senator, his new wife, and his old friend.
At 16 years old, Daibes went to the Binghamton ferry looking for work. The 230-foot boat was a local landmark that the Republican power broker Nelson Gross had recently turned into his next act, a Victorian-themed restaurant. Gross made his name delivering New Jersey for Richard Nixon in the 1968 presidential election, but his political career ended when he served a prison sentence for campaign fraud several years later. He was charismatic and outgoing, and the Binghamton became a hub for political players from both parties.
As he washed dishes, Daibes made an impression on the owner and several other influential men who spent time on the boat. He met Robert Fischetti, a longtime gambling operative who owned a nearby Italian restaurant. He built a relationship with James Demetrakis, a prominent real estate developer who part-owned the ferry, and began working at other restaurants that Demetrakis owned, eventually working his way up to manager. While Daibes was in college, his father, a mason known for his sturdy build and work ethic, died of lung cancer. Demetrakis came to see Daibes as a son.
Edgewater was on the cusp of its postindustrial turn. It had been a blue-collar town, home to workers at the Alcoa and Ford factories, but together, Daibes and Demetrakis worked to assemble the trappings of a bedroom community. “I didn’t have much when my father passed,” Daibes told a local luxury magazine. “And in our culture, the oldest son is responsible.” He expanded Assad Y Daibes and Sons, his father’s small construction business, into Daibes Enterprises, which built lucratively and sometimes ostentatiously along New Jersey’s Gold Coast.
One day in 1997, after leaving the Binghamton, Gross disappeared. The FBI and police spent a week looking for him before apprehending three teenagers from Washington Heights, one of whom worked as a busboy on the ferry. They confessed to kidnapping him with an empty gun and forcing him to withdraw $20,000 from a bank. They beat and stabbed him and drove him across the Hudson River in his BMW, leaving his body in a wooded area of their neighborhood.
Daibes had by now reached a level of authority similar to that of his mentors. The official account of Gross’s death didn’t satisfy him. “I’ll go to my grave believing that we’ll never know the full story of his death,” he told The Record. “Because a couple Dominican kids could never outsmart Nelson Gross, not even with a gun in his ribs.”
“To talk to him, the nicest guy in the world,” Chuck Batch, a fire inspector who clashed with Daibes over sprinkler systems in his buildings, told me. “He takes care of people. But what people don’t get is that you’re also indebted to him.”
“They make it sound like Daibes bailed out this crummy little factory town,” Batch added. “No, he took advantage of these properties, the Gold Coast, and they allowed him to do it. I guess these other developers really knew that he basically ran the town.”
The Posche by Kim D boutique is about a half-hour drive from Edgewater. Its fashion shows have served as the backdrop for some of the more explosive moments of Bravo’s Real Housewives of New Jersey, which, since its 2009 launch, has had its own role in reinforcing some of the ready-made ideas of its home state. In one memorable 2017 scene, cast member Teresa Giudice seemingly ad-libbed an acronym for Posche for the benefit of its owner, Kim DePaola—“piece of shit cokewhore homewrecker everyday”—and pushed a chair to the ground to drive home the point.
Nadine Arslanian came to a few of Posche’s shows and began seeing more of DePaola and her friends. “It’s very important what kind of car they drive, very important what bag they’re carrying. They’re very much into the Botox and the hair being done and the makeup,” DePaola said. “We’re all like that, this whole crowd, the New Jersey crowd. She seemed just maybe a little bit more.” They posed together at the opening of American Cut Bar & Grill in Englewood Cliffs, a nearby town where Arslanian lives, with the British bhangra and R&B singer Jay Sean also in attendance. Arslanian appeared in a photo with Giudice at a Kiefer Sutherland Band show in Teaneck. When DePaola held her birthday party at The Plaza one year, Arslanian was there.
Still, DePaola said, “We didn’t get close to her.” She found Arslanian somewhat distant and enigmatic, or “not a woman’s woman.” (DePaola is not, she has admitted, a scrupulous gossip, having told Giudice during their fight that she claimed that Giudice’s husband cheated “because I feel like it.”)
DePaola said she primarily knew Arslanian as the girlfriend of Doug Anton, a locally famous attorney who specializes in entertainment and sports law, with a focus on criminal defense and trial work. “Some crazy trials that people think there’s no way anybody’s gonna win this,” as he described them in the fall, “and somehow I pull it out.”
Karen Gravano, an Anton client who is the daughter of former Gambino crime family underboss Sammy “The Bull” Gravano and who was a cast member on VH1’s Mob Wives, remembered Arslanian similarly. “Seemed like a nice lady,” Gravano said. “Didn’t know much about her, other than that she was dating Doug.”
Anton represented R. Kelly in the lead-up to the singer’s federal sex trafficking trial in Brooklyn and said he has worked with Kid Rock since law school, helping the singer with a synchronization license, contracts, a divorce. He recently began working with Lil Mav, a Bronx hip-hop producer, and outlined their plans to release music with Lil Mabu, the Upper East Side rapper who graduated from the oldest private school in the country.
“Clients come in for one thing,” Anton said as finished his rapid-fire rundown, “and at least do another thing.”
Anton and Arslanian met at Grissini, an Italian restaurant in Englewood Cliffs. In DePaola’s telling, Arslanian walked up to Anton and gave him her number even though she was seeing someone else at the time. Anton had a different recollection. A mutual friend pointed out that she was Armenian and he was half Armenian: “Maybe you could talk.”
They began dating in 2011, and Anton said he performed some legal work for her, including getting her a restraining order against an ex-boyfriend. They found other points of connection. “She loves Louis Vuitton bags, and she likes wearing it and—‘Look at me, everybody,’” Anton said. “But who doesn’t like that? You know, when I would get my Zegna suit on, I’m like, Yeah, bitches, I look good in this Zegna suit.”
As Anton introduced Arslanian to his network of friends and clients, she also formed her own relationships. DePaola began receiving reports from a friend who was on a similar social schedule as Arslanian and saw her spending days at Daibes’s Le Jardin.
“One of my friends used to bounce around, a wise guy,” DePaola explained. “He bounced around a lot by himself. You know men like that, they’re always in this place, that restaurant.”
Fundraising brought Menendez particular dread, according to the staffer. “‘I just want to win the lottery and say fuck you to everyone,’” they remembered him saying. “He wouldn’t have to kiss anyone’s ass anymore.”
Menendez got his first job in New Jersey politics at 20 years old. The child of Cuban immigrants, he had an early mentor in Union City mayor William Musto, sometimes described as a father figure to him, and served as secretary of the school board. Menendez’s father, a carpenter, died by suicide when Menendez was 23. As he worked on the board, Menendez learned that officials at two local high schools were working with a Mafia-run construction company to siphon city funds. In 1982, he testified against his old boss in a federal corruption trial, wearing a bulletproof vest under his trench coat. A local judge had been assassinated a few years prior.
Menendez became Union City mayor himself in 1986 and continued to rise through the State Assembly, the State Senate, and then, in 1992, the US House. He always had ambitions to become a senator, one of his congressional staffers told me, and could be ruthless about it: “If you crossed him once, you’re dead forever.” When there was a problem getting out the vote somewhere, “or suppressing the vote somewhere,” the staffer said, Menendez brought in Sean Caddle, a longtime Democratic political consultant who functioned as “his Ray Donovan.”
Fundraising brought Menendez particular dread, according to the staffer. “‘I just want to win the lottery and say fuck you to everyone,’” they remembered him saying. “He wouldn’t have to kiss anyone’s ass anymore.”
“He wanted to get rich,” they went on, “and he knew he was gonna do it.”
After Menendez made his way to the Senate, he remained a social fixture in North Jersey. He spent time, Anton said, at Edgewater’s River Palm Terrace steakhouse and Jamie’s, a cigar bar and restaurant. “Every place he went, Freddie Daibes was around.”
It was a relatively small scene, and Daibes met an affable but struggling businessman named Wael Hana at Le Jardin. Hana comes from a connected, well-to-do family in Egypt, according to associates. Still, he had trouble finding his footing after moving to the US on a lottery visa as a 22-year-old in 2006. Around 1 a.m. one night in 2014, police arrested him on a DWI charge and said he threatened one of the officers when they took him to the hospital for treatment. He kept losing money even as his family offered further resources. In late 2017, when Hana started a business for certifying halal exports, Daibes provided financing and office space in a building he owned down the road from his restaurant.
Arslanian functioned as a linchpin among the group of men. She knew Hana from their nearby dinners with a mutual friend, and they started going to Le Jardin together for cigars. She was raised as a “rich young lady” by Armenian parents in Lebanon, Anton said, where she and her sister each had their own caretaker. Her family fled amid the country’s civil war in 1975, eventually settling on Long Island. Arslanian earned two degrees from NYU and moved to New Jersey with her husband and two children. In 2004, she told the New York Post, for a story on the “diet secrets of ladies who lunch,” that she exercised three times a week. She was back in the city eating a salad with chicken and asked the waiter to hold the french fries and dressing. “I think people in Manhattan are a lot more self-conscious,” she said, “and there’s more pressure here to look good and dress well than in the suburbs.” After a divorce the following year, she had difficulty supporting herself and her kids.
“This is a good woman who really wanted to do something with herself,” Anton said. “Like, ‘Doug, give me a job.’” They started a cigar company together that involved importing soil from Cuba and the Dominican Republic. It foundered after travel restrictions to Cuba were eased in early 2015. Arslanian was unemployed in recent years, according to prosecutors, and by 2019, foreclosure proceedings on her home had begun.
Anton recalled one idea for money that Arslanian had during their relationship. She had been helping him with some of his meetings in the sports and entertainment worlds, and she proposed that she go out and find him clients in exchange for a cut of his fee. Anton told her it would be an ethical breach and he couldn’t allow it. “‘But you benefit a million other ways,’” he remembered himself saying. “‘You’re driving my car. You don’t have to pay me rent on the damn Mercedes—enjoy it.’”
In 2012, a debate played out in the auto press over whether one of Daibes’s Mercedes had belonged to Adolf Hitler. While he doubted it, Daibes told CBS, “From a financial point of view, the car is worth more money than when I paid for it, so that’s the only way I look at it.” His profile was continuing to grow; his sway and self-assurance were increasingly rankling Edgewater’s residents. He claimed to have been New Jersey’s biggest victim of Bernie Madoff’s Ponzi scheme, but described his $17 million losses as a fraction of his fortune.
Three men and one woman broke into Daibes’s penthouse at the St. Moritz in 2013. The rumor in town was that he’d had a fascination with gold since he was a kid—looking at it, touching it. The assailants broke his ribs, dislocated his shoulder, and left with more than $2 million in cash, jewelry, and gold. (Some of the gold bars, which were eventually returned to Daibes, were later found during the 2022 search of Menendez and Arslanian’s home.) Upon their arrest, it turned out that two of them were a couple who lived in the building. Anton represented them.
“As a Lebanese gentleman, I support Freddie Daibes and think he’s a great guy and wonderful,” Anton said, before adding that he doesn’t believe Daibes as a general rule. “Nobody robbed any gold. That’s like when your car gets broken into: ‘Oh yeah, I had two laptops in the back too.’” A former council member said that when Daibes arrived for the robbery trial, “he went in there like this hero.” The following year, he sold the St. Moritz to a Connecticut real estate firm for about $120 million.
By then, Mariner’s Bank was under federal scrutiny. Daibes served as chairman after founding the bank, which attracted the business of assorted state dignitaries. But prosecutors eventually claimed that he and his CFO used the names of friends and relatives to circumvent lending limits and funnel money from the bank to Daibes. (“We will be vindicated,” Daibes told The Record in 2019. “I’m being accused of trying to defraud the bank I owned over 90% of.”)
He was also fighting off local pushback. A park atop the former Alcoa aluminum-manufacturing site closed in 2011 after town officials became aware of the contents of its soil. Environmental-remediation efforts focused on removing polychlorinated biphenyl chemicals, which cause cancer. The process hit a snag in 2013 when officials learned that a Daibes-owned construction company, after winning a $7.1 million contract to clean up the work, had filled the area with concrete contaminated with PCBs on a Saturday when no work was scheduled. Expenses ballooned and the park remained unusable.
“Fred always said this was going to be his gift to Edgewater, and his legacy,” Mary Hogan, a former council member, said. “The upsetting thing was that he lived in town. His kids lived in town, and this was the place they were going to play.”
Then mayor James Delaney, an electrician, led an effort to sue Daibes over the botched remediation. He had a long history with the developer—his wife had worked at Le Jardin for 14 years—but they split over the field. At parties, Hogan recalled, Daibes’s kids approached Delaney’s: “Why is your daddy picking on our daddy?”
Bridget Delaney was run out of her job, she later testified to a state commission. “The people that I considered my closest friends,” she said, “nobody talks to me.” (Lita, the Le Jardin co-owner, told the commission that Delaney had cited personal problems when leaving her role.)
The mayor resigned, later saying he had quickly lost his political allies, and was replaced by a former Wall Street trader who moved into a Daibes building. The Delaneys moved out of town.
When Menendez’s Senate tenure began in 2006, Chris Christie was a federal prosecutor in New Jersey. He began looking into a Union City nonprofit’s nine years of payments to Menendez for office space in a house he owned. The inquiry didn’t go anywhere, and Menendez continued to amass stature, taking over for John Kerry in 2013 when the then chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee was confirmed as secretary of state.
That same year, federal authorities began examining Menendez’s relationship with a Palm Beach ophthalmologist named Salomon Melgen. They claimed that Melgen gave the senator donations, private-jet flights, a stay in a Paris hotel suite, and vacations at his Dominican villa in exchange for favors benefiting the doctor’s companies and visas for his model girlfriends from Ukraine, Brazil, and the Dominican Republic—and one of their sisters. (Among the women Melgen flew to his villa on his jet, prosecutors said, were two whom he met while they were performing at a South Florida strip club. Melgen did not return a request for comment.) Menendez stood trial in the same courthouse where he had testified against Musto. His attorneys argued that the arrangement was only a matter of their 20-year friendship. The nine-week trial ended with a hung jury, and prosecutors ultimately decided not to retry the case.
According to prosecutors, Arslanian and Menendez began dating around February 2018, a few months after his mistrial. The Menendezes said in 2020 that they met at an IHOP in Union City a decade prior and later reconnected at a political event. The following year, they told The New York Times’ Vows column that they had met over pancakes in December 2018. “We were introduced by the owner of the IHOP, and I didn’t know at that time that Bob was a senator,” Arslanian said. “He was very intelligent and had a great sense of humor, and he was very, very hot.”
Early in their courtship, the couple told the Times, they traveled to four continents in five months, spending time in Puerto Rico, Greece, Turks and Caicos, and Colombia. In October 2019, while they were in India, Menendez began singing “Never Enough” from the Hugh Jackman musical The Greatest Showman as Arslanian sat on the Princess Diana bench at the Taj Mahal. She wept as he gave her the ring. They married the following year at an Armenian church in Queens.
The Vows-ready timeline of the couple’s relationship may be somewhat neat. While Anton and Arslanian were still dating, he said, Menendez would invite her to meet up at a steakhouse or cigar bar. The senator had been divorced since 2005. Arslanian asked Anton for permission before going, and sometimes took him along. “‘I’m gonna meet some people there if you and your friend wanna come by and say hi,’” Anton recalled Menendez saying. “He liked to be surrounded by attractive women. I mean, who doesn’t?”
“I know he liked her,” Anton added. “But she wasn’t interested in him because we were together.”
Arslanian and Anton were both divorcés, and he said she wanted to remarry. Toward the end of 2017, he told her that he didn’t. “She never cheated on me,” he said. “We just had this period of time where we’re each seeing other people and we’re also seeing each other. And I’ve never cheated on her either.”
According to Anton, Arslanian told Menendez that she wasn’t seeing him anymore. “We were together for seven years, trying to figure out what we want,” he said, laughing. “But Menendez didn’t know that.”
When the senator saw a dated photo in a local magazine of Arslanian and Anton at an event together, she said they had kept in touch over legal matters. Menendez went through Arslanian’s phone and confronted her; Arslanian told him that Anton wouldn’t stop contacting her. Menendez called the Capitol police, who went to question Anton at his office.
“‘Guys, let me play a couple of things for you,’” Anton said he told the officers. He played a recording of Arslanian calling him that morning. “You gotta just tell the Capitol police that everything’s fine. They’re gonna just come and ask you some questions and just leave. Sorry about this, baby, but I’ll talk to you about it later when we go to the Hamptons next weekend.”
“One of my clients is a mob guy,” Anton said. “He’s like, ‘Doug, he was trying to pull you out of the picture and scare you.’ I said, ‘No, Nadine had to lie to him about that. It’s relationship stuff. What are you gonna do?’”
DePaola’s account was in some ways more combustible.
“Doug got screwed by this,” she said. “He doesn’t want to admit it because he’s a big-time lawyer—he has his pride. But she put him through the wringer.”
DePaola said that Arslanian sat in a salon she goes to and discussed her new relationship. She was “bragging to everybody,” DePaola said. “‘I’m going on the jet; I’m doing this and that.’”
In her travels with Menendez, Arslanian attended an event honoring Hillary Clinton and a state dinner at the White House for India prime minister Narendra Modi. She wore jeans with a crochet interlay and Hermès sandals to Italy’s Cernobbio Forum, an annual gathering of world leaders and economic thinkers. She said in a podcast interview that 13 of her family members died in the 1915 Armenian genocide. After Menendez successfully pushed for a Senate resolution recognizing the history, he texted her that he hoped her father was watching.
“What else can the love of my life do for you?” Arslanian asked Egyptian officials at a steakhouse dinner in May 2019, according to prosecutors, with Menendez sitting nearby.
“She started seeing Bob,” Anton said. “And then obviously they knew that she had access to Bob. So they started putting all kinds of crazy shit in her head, I’m sure.”
According to prosecutors, Arslanian informed her friend Hana that she was dating Menendez. At one point, the senator texted her that he was about to sign off on a $99 million weapons sale to Egypt. She forwarded the message to Hana, who sent it to an Egyptian official, who replied with a thumbs-up emoji. Hana was working to secure exclusive rights from the Egyptian government for his company to certify halal imports from the US.
“What else can the love of my life do for you?” Arslanian asked Egyptian officials at a steakhouse dinner in May 2019, according to prosecutors, with Menendez sitting nearby. They ate with Hana and a group that the Times later reported had included General Ahmed Helmy, Egypt’s top spy in Washington. A few days later, Helmy texted Hana. Members of Congress had objected to awarding aid to Egypt due to an American citizen having been injured in a 2015 air strike by the country’s military. If Menendez helped resolve the matter, Helmy wrote, “he will sit very comfortably.”
“Orders, consider it done,” Hana replied. Menendez, prosecutors said, called a Department of Agriculture official around the same time to insist that the agency stop opposing IS EG Halal’s pending monopoly. The next month, Hana moved into a Daibes-owned building on River Road with indoor and outdoor pools and a stained glass ceiling in the lobby.
In September of that year, according to the indictment, Arslanian texted Daibes to complain that Hana hadn’t paid her what he owed. “Nadine I personally gave Bob a check for September,” the developer replied. Two years later, Daibes’s driver picked the couple up from the airport when they got back from a trip to Egypt and Qatar. The next day, Menendez looked up online: “how much is one kilo of gold worth.” Arslanian later told a jeweler that she had gotten the bars from her mother.
After the Menendezes were indicted last year, Arslanian became an easy tabloid subject on account of her clothes and spending habits. One purchase came under particular scrutiny.
Prosecutors said that she bought a new Mercedes with funds raised in connection with the alleged bribery scheme; news outlets began to report that she needed the car because she had wrecked her previous one when she hit and killed a man who was crossing the street at night.
At the site of the December 2019 crash, police quickly ruled that Arslanian was not at fault for the man’s death. A witness told the Times that officers appeared to know who she was and treat her with deference. (A lawyer for Arslanian told the paper the crash was a “tragic accident” unrelated to the charges she is facing.) In dashcam footage from the aftermath, one of them told her, chuckling a bit, “If we can clear you from any wrongdoing, I wanna get you home and comfortable and not here anymore.”
Arslanian, wearing a fur coat, asked, “Why was the guy in the middle of the street?”
Tina Macia, an associate vice president of design and construction for a hospital system, bought a condo in Edgewater in 2016. She had lived in Hoboken before moving to California and returned to New Jersey after seeing what was “starting to be an up-and-coming area.” The building she bought into was right on the waterfront—nobody could ever build in front of her. But she had complaints about late-night noise at a nearby restaurant, owned by one of Daibes’s friends, and other concerns about Superfund sites and zoning for tall buildings. She made herself a more regular presence at council meetings.
“There’s a lot of people who are afraid,” Macia said, “and they’re like, ‘Well, aren’t you afraid? You’re gonna get killed by him.’ And I’m like, ‘I’m not gonna get killed by him. He’s being watched by the feds.’”
The Christmas before last, she went to Villa Amalfi, an Italian restaurant with a grand piano in a bordering town. The federal investigation of Menendez and Daibes was well underway. They were both at the restaurant, as was Demetrakis, who had been sentenced to two years’ probation after admitting to a role in the Mariner’s Bank scheme. But they each sat at different tables and didn’t speak to one another. Daibes was in a separate room.
Some kind of end-time has seemed to arrive, in one way or another, for this general orbit. The nature of the alleged bribes was analog, even quaint, and the methods of alleged cover-up were scattered. Prosecutors claimed that the Menendezes tried to delete incriminating texts and repay bribes after the investigation began; they wrote in a court filing that Menendez placed calls to what the couple referred to as Arslanian’s “007” phone. Last year, Caddle, Menendez’s go-to fixer in the early 2000s, was sentenced to 24 years in prison for murder for hire. He had pleaded guilty in 2022 to arranging the assassination of a Jersey City politician whom he had previously employed.
“I actually thought he was a nice guy,” the former Menendez staffer said.
New Jersey’s Commission of Investigation, in a report published last year, aimed to assess a large swath of Daibes’s Edgewater legacy. It found that he wrote more than a dozen personal checks to the son and daughter-in-law of a high-ranking member of the Genovese crime family who had a key role in a North Jersey gambling ring, and that the son had worked for several of Daibes’s businesses. Daibes invoked the Fifth Amendment when asked about the nature of the payments. The commission said that Fischetti, the gambling operative whom Daibes met on the Binghamton, lived rent-free at the St. Moritz for more than a decade and often dined for free at Le Jardin. Fischetti had served two prison terms in the years since, and his connections to the Genovese family had become a matter of public record.
Daibes’s aspirations have been hemmed in, to some degree, by his kingdom’s geography, as well as the size of his audience. “They think they’re New York City,” Hogan, the former council member, said. “But you can’t get around like you can in New York City.” After the developer initially secured a plea deal in his bank-fraud case that would allow him to only serve probation, he took a victory lap down River Road, but hardly anyone seemed to notice.
In October, the defendants, minus the senator, arrived at a Manhattan federal courthouse for a hearing. Menendez successfully petitioned the court to have his appearance rescheduled—he was set to be away on business in the Senate, where he has defied repeated calls to resign. He has decided against pursuing the Democratic nomination for a reelection campaign in November, but has kept open the possibility of running as an independent.
Daibes swaggered out of a Cadillac SUV wearing a gold chain under his polo shirt. In the courtroom, he greeted Hana’s attorney, who is representing Daibes in the bank case, with a loud mwah of a cheek kiss. (The judge in that case has thrown out the plea deal he agreed to prior to the Menendez indictment.) He grinned and slapped backs. Arslanian wore a pink pashmina, a pink turtleneck, and a pink satin scrunchie, carrying a Chanel bag that the Post had previously identified as costing $2,300.
Arslanian’s trial was recently split from Menendez’s and delayed until later this summer. The his-and-hers approach could mark the start of a new phase in their marriage. In court papers unsealed last month, Menendez’s lawyers wrote that, should he take the stand during his trial, his testimony may incriminate Arslanian by showing how she withheld information from him.
Most observers of the overall saga whom I spoke to, in Edgewater and nearby, seemed at least somewhat inured to it. “I know him to say hello,” Antranig Aslanian, an 84-year-old Fort Lee lawyer, said. “‘Hey, Bob, how are you?’ When I see him, I’ll certainly send him a drink.” Aslanian is revered by attorneys in the area for his trial work and his sense of adventure. When he was younger, he flew planes on the side, and he once helped Daibes purchase one. Aslanian and Arslanian met about 15 years ago. “She’s Armenian, I’m Armenian,” he said, “and that’s about it.” At dinner one night, he introduced her to Hana, whom he was mentoring.
When we talked, Aslanian first said he didn’t know any more about the case than I did, and that he hadn’t really been following along. But a few minutes later, he broke into a series of protests. “Wael Hana does not need Menendez to get his business going”; “Daibes built in Edgewater before he really developed a relationship with Bob”; “One of the countries [Menendez] dealt with was Egypt. Wouldn’t it make sense that he would be talking to Egypt?” Hana, Aslanian said, had spent eight hours a day in his office reading about halal.
Anton had a milder defense of Hana to offer. “He’s a decent guy,” he said. “I like talking to him.”
He had texted his friend the other day, in fact, to go get cigars, but Hana said he couldn’t make it. “Nah, with all this shit going on, I’m not going out that much.”
More Great Stories From Vanity Fair
Cover Star Chris Hemsworth on Fear, Love, and Escaping Hollywood
See Every Look From the 2024 Met Gala Red Carpet
The Met Gala’s “Garden of Time” Theme Winners
Meet the Mastermind Behind New York’s Celebrity Playground of Choice
The Vatican’s Secret Role in the Science of IVF
Robert Kraft, a Massage Parlor, and an Unbelievable Story
Stay in the know and subscribe to Vanity Fair for just $2.50 $1 per month.
The post The Case of the Developer, the Halal Exporter, US Senator Bob Menendez, and His Wife appeared first on Vanity Fair.