Florida political insiders have long chuckled that the state is the only one in the nation with three senators: Marco Rubio for the Republicans, Bill Nelson for the Democrats, and Bob Menendez for wealthy donors.

Robert Menendez, New Jersey’s senior senator, has deep ties to South Florida’s Cuban-exile community and has emerged as a leading Democratic opponent of President Barack Obama’s efforts to normalize relations with Cuba. Menendez is also a regular visitor to the Sunshine State, and he has strong backing among Latin-American businessmen and many politicians.


But Menendez’s support for Floridians went beyond advocating for their political causes: In recent years, he pushed the personal agendas of two unrelated sets of contributors from South Florida so vociferously that it put him in the cross hairs of the FBI, which opened up separate federal corruption investigations of him.

On Wednesday afternoon, Menendez was indicted along with one of those donors — his close friend Salomon E. Melgen — on multiple counts of bribery, honest-services fraud and conspiracy. Menendez and Melgen, a West Palm Beach ophthalmologist, pleaded not guilty.

With a private jet and homes that stretched from the Palm Beach area to the exclusive Casa de Campo enclave in the Dominican Republic, Melgen is well-known in South Florida as an almost miracle-working eye doctor. U.S. taxpayers helped him; in 2012, he billed Medicare for more money than any other physician in the nation — $21 million. Auditors have claimed that Melgen has overbilled the program, especially when it comes to the anti-macular degeneration drug called Lucentis.

Menendez allegedly pressured federal health officials to drop an $8.9 million fine against the eye doctor for overbilling Medicare, used his influence to advance a lucrative port-security deal in the Dominican Republic for a firm owned by Melgen, and threw his weight around to help three of Melgen’s foreign girlfriends get help entering the United States.

In the meantime, Melgen showered Menendez with hundreds of thousands of dollars in campaign donations; free luxury hotel and resort stays from the Dominican Republic to Paris; and free first-class and chartered air trips between South Florida, the Dominican Republic, New Jersey, New York and Washington, the indictment said. Menendez allegedly reported none of the illegal gifts.

“The appearance with Menendez has always been that he’s someone you can go to if you’re in trouble and you have a whole lot of money,” said Ken Boehm, chairman of the National Legal and Policy Center, a conservative-leaning nonprofit that has aided media investigations into the New Jersey senator for years.

Boehm said the pattern of Menendez’s advocacy for his donor friend stood out because of the huge sums of money Melgen steered toward the senator, at least $700,000. What also made the case different was that Melgen’s U.S. residency was in South Florida — not in New Jersey.

Unlike Menendez, both Rubio’s and Nelson’s offices said they did almost nothing to help Melgen.

Boehm points out that Menendez’s help for Florida-based supporters also extended to the Isaias family, who live in the city of Coral Gables, which borders the city of West Miami, where Rubio lives. Menendez’s advocacy for the Isaias brothers is under separate federal investigation, according to NBC’s New York affiliate. A source familiar with the investigation said investigators have determined the Isaias family has done nothing wrong, but investigators are still examining whether Menendez did anything inappropriate in aiding them.

“The cases [involving Melgen and the Isaias family] aren’t related, but they have this in common: They involve people from Florida who happen to have money,” Boehm said. “I guarantee you, if you ask any congressional office if they have all the time and resources to handle all their constituent cases, they’ll say no. But a senator from New Jersey has all this time for donors from Florida?”

In the Isaias matter, bothers Roberto and William Isaias are wanted in their native Ecuador, where they were convicted in absentia for financial crimes. The family’s attorney could not be reached for comment. But in previous interviews with media outlets, the Isaias brothers and their lawyers have denied wrongdoing and blamed the socialist government of Ecuador for the country’s financial woes.

The United States has refused to deport the men, a point of contention because Ecuador harbors Wikileaks founder Julian Assange — who is wanted by U.S. authorities — in its London embassy. Menendez had been a leading Washington voice in preventing the deportation of the Isaiases and in questioning the validity of the charges. The brothers can’t contribute money because they’re still foreign nationals, but family members contributed $30,000 to Menendez’s campaign funds and about $100,000 to the Obama Victory Fund in 2012, according to federal campaign records and a New York Times analysis.

During that time, on April 2, 2012, Menendez wrote Deputy Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas and asked that the department “expedite its review” of the case of the Isaias brothers, who should get “full consideration,” NBC’s New York affiliate reported in 2014.

Menendez also petitioned then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and her chief of staff on behalf of yet another member of the Isaias family, Estefanía Isaías, while her father and uncle fought their extradition, the Times reported. Menendez and his staff also emailed and called officials with Homeland Security and the consulate in Ecuador.

Estefanía Isaías wanted to work for Miami political and media consultant Freddy Balsera, an Obama campaign consultant, but U.S. officials blocked her entry into the country because she was accused of “alien smuggling” for allegedly bringing two maids into the U.S. under false pretenses. The family says that was a misunderstanding.

FBI investigators wanted to know whether Menendez was acting on the Isaias family’s behalf in return for campaign contributions.

One of the New Jersey FBI agents who investigated Menendez, former Special Agent in Charge David Velázquez, said the agency found the New Jersey senator’s interest in the Isaias brothers suspicious.

“Anytime a politician does something like this, especially for donors who aren’t his constituents, that gets our attention,” Velázquez said.

The Obama administration ultimately allowed Estefanía Isaías entry into the U.S. and has allowed her father and uncle to stay in the country as well.

Rubio’s office said he did little regarding the Isaías family, other than make “routine constituent inquiries” after the office was petitioned. Nelson’s chief of staff, Dan McLaughlin, said Nelson did even less. He said that, when the office was petitioned, it made a routine inquiry into the State Department and was “waved off. … There were red flags.”

The Isaías family, which has contributed more than $300,000 to various federal candidates and causes, also turned to U.S. Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen (R-Fla.) and former U.S. Rep. Joe Garcia for help.

Ros-Lehtinen received some campaign contributions from Melgen as well and, as chairwoman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee in 2012, had inquired about port security in the Dominican Republic. Her office described the inquiry as routine.

At the same time, Melgen was laying the groundwork for a multimillion-dollar contract to X-ray Dominican Republic port cargo by way of his private company, ICSSI. He also owned a Hispanic-centric website called VOXXI that played up the threats of drug shipments in the Dominican Republic. VOXXI quoted Menendez fretting about the threat. Menendez, in a Senate Foreign Relations subcommittee hearing, then put pressure on Dominican Republic officials to uphold the port-security contract that Melgen sought.

But despite Menendez’s public statements about stopping drug shipments, his office sought to stop Customs and Border Patrol from donating free surveillance equipment to the Dominican Republic, the indictment said. The free equipment allegedly would have undercut Melgen’s business arrangement and profits.

Months later, Melgen and Menendez’s worlds started to unravel. The conservative Daily Caller website published allegations from Dominican prostitutes who claimed Menendez used their services. The FBI and media organizations could never substantiate the claims.

In January 2013, Melgen’s West Palm Beach office was raided by federal officials in the separate Medicare-fraud case. Both he and Menendez claimed they did nothing wrong.

The indictment released Wednesday laid bare the allegations that the two conspired to repeatedly break the law, and former Southern District of Florida prosecutor David S. Weinstein, who has monitored the case, said it’s going to be tough for the two men to defend.

Weinstein said the New Jersey senator’s involvement in so many South Florida matters isn’t criminal, but it raises questions. He said he wouldn’t be surprised if Menendez tried to get the case, based in New Jersey, transferred to South Florida in the hopes of getting a jury sympathetic to Menendez’s Cuban-American roots.

“If I’m the prosecution, I don’t want the trial in Miami. And I don’t want it in Fort Lauderdale or even West Palm Beach,” Weinstein said. “Menendez is known here and probably liked. And that influence is going to spread up the district in South Florida.”