MANHATTAN (CN) - A federal judge on Thursday sentenced Jose Uribe, the star witness in the prosecution's corruption case against former New Jersey Senator Bob Menendez, to time served on seven guilty pleas over his role in a scheme to purchase official influence from the Garden State politician.
"There's nothing to be gained by incarcerating you, sir," U.S. District Judge Sidney Stein said Thursday morning, ordering Uribe to serve three years of supervised release in light of his extensive cooperation with federal prosecutors.
Uribe, a Dominican-American insurance businessman who sat for two days of direct questioning by prosecutors at trial, requested a lenient, non-custodial sentencing in exchange for providing what his lawyers described as "absolutely devastating proof of a corrupt quid pro quo and Menendez's culpability."
During his direct testimony, Uribe repeatedly explained that he paid bribes through Menendez's then-girlfriend Nadine because he wanted the senator's official intervention to extinguish a string of looming criminal insurance fraud investigations by state prosecutors that threatened to bring unwanted exposure to the trucking insurance companies he ran with his brother and daughter.
"That was my best hope to get out of these investigations," he said at trial, describing the bribe payments to an intermediary to disrupt a criminal investigation undertaken by the Office of the New Jersey Attorney General related to Uribe and his associates.
Uribe testified he paid the $15,000 down payment for Nadine Menendez's 2019 Mercedes-Benz convertible and then handled the subsequent monthly car payments from May 2019 until June 2022, when FBI agents showed up at his home and seized his cellphones as part of a federal investigation.
The monthly amount of those car payments was approximately "high 800s, low 900s," he said.
Uribe referred to this arrangement as the second phase of a broader deal he reached with Wael Hana, a longtime close friend of the senator's then-girlfriend. The earlier component of the agreement hinged on then-Senator Menendez pressing for a more favorable outcome in the prosecution of Uribe's associate, Elvis Parra, a trucking company owner who had been indicted for insurance fraud.
At trial, Uribe explained that Hana offered a deal in 2018 to help squeeze the brakes on both Parra's case and the other ongoing New Jersey state investigations into his trucking and insurance companies for a payment of between $200,000 and $250,000.
According to Uribe, Hana planned to purchase Nadine Menendez the new luxury convertible once he got paid for that deal, but Uribe stepped up to get it done after learning she had grown frustrated with how long Hana had taken to follow through on his promise to her of the new car.
Uribe's lawyers argued that a sentence of time served and three years of supervised release would be "sufficient, but not greater than necessary, to fulfill all of the statutory goals of sentencing" in light of his "platinum cooperation" with investigators.
U.S. District Judge Sidney Stein sentenced Bob Menendez in January to 11 years in prison for his essential role in the public corruption scheme, imposing on the former senator the lengthiest sentence of any of the co-defendants convicted in the case.
He surrendered to a federal prison in Pennsylvania in June to begin his sentence.
Convicted co-defendant Fred Daibes, a prominent New Jersey real estate tycoon, was sentenced to seven years in prison and ordered to pay a $1.75 million fine, while Hana, Nadine Menendez's longtime friend, was sentenced to eight years and one month and ordered to pay a $1.25 million fine.
Nadine Menendez, who was convicted separately in a severed trial due to health issues, was sentenced to four and a half years in prison over her role as the bribery scheme's back channel for communications and payments.
Source: Courthouse News Service
