Nancy Solomon
speaker
45 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Mar 2025
last heard Mar 2025
Nancy Solomon’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
One morning in June of 2024, during the trial of Bob Menendez, I was sitting in the hallway finishing a cup of coffee outside the courtroom. There was only one other person there, standing next to the bench, looking out at the spectacular Manhattan view from the 23rd floor. Bob Menendez. He was singing, and it was killing me that I couldn't record it.
This is Tracy Tully. She's a reporter for The New York Times, and she was in court almost every day.
Bob Menendez grew up in Union City. His parents had come from Cuba. His father was a carpenter and a gambler, and his mother a factory seamstress. He's often told the story about how he qualified for an honors program when he was a senior in high school, but he couldn't afford the books.
This is from a public TV interview in 2012.
It wasn't long before Menendez developed a brand.
The fighter you don't want to mess with. And this stuck with him, from the Union City School Board in 1974 to his time as top Democrat on the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, nearly 50 years later.
This is Nicholas Charavalati.
It was a long time ago. Charavalati was working for the city of Bayonne. the small working-class town was in a fight over a piece of land that had been an old army installation.
And Char Velotti ended up in a meeting with Menendez, who was then the local congressman.
I mean, when he was young, Menendez stood up to his political mentor, a popular mayor, who ended up getting convicted for allowing town contracts to go to a business with connections to the mob. Menendez even had to wear a bulletproof vest into the courthouse. Chara Velotti was impressed with Menendez, and he ended up going to work for him.
A representative for Senator Menendez said that story is not true. And what would you say, like, some of the elements that make up his success?
Menendez opposed the confirmation of Samuel Alito to the Supreme Court, despite the large number of Italians in his district that supported the New Jersey native. And he voted against the Iraq war.
But there is a subset of people, a large one, who believe Menendez has been corrupt from the beginning. They don't buy the hero testifying against the machine narrative. Jay Booth used to be a political operative in Hudson County who opposed Menendez from the start. Booth says, look at the charges in the current case where Menendez tried to pressure state and federal prosecutors.
He says that's part of a long pattern.
Booth says he witnessed Menendez in action many years ago. He happened to walk into the kitchen of Puccini's, a legendary restaurant on Jersey City's west side that was a hangout for politicos. And there, at the stainless steel prep counter, was a meeting happening, presumably on the down low.
Elected officials are not supposed to hold back-channel meetings with prosecutors. A representative for Menendez says that one didn't happen. But either way, meals in a restaurant kitchen didn't seem to help Menendez the first time the feds came after him in 2015.
Private jets, weekend getaways in the Dominican Republic, and hundreds of thousands of dollars in... This case involved a wealthy Florida eye doctor who had been under investigation for Medicare fraud. The doctor had given Menendez expensive gifts and trips to the Dominican Republic and Paris. Menendez allegedly reached out to help the doctor's Medicare problems go away.
He insisted the charges were unfair.
Was it corruption or business as usual in Washington? It depends who you ask.
This is Brad Lawrence. He creates messaging for political candidates.
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