A Senator’s Fall From Grace Ends in a Grim Federal Lockup

For decades, Robert Menendez had the ear of presidents and prime ministers. He controlled the flow of military aid as the Democratic leader of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. A son of Cuban refugees, he was a go-to authority on immigration policy.

But on Tuesday, Mr. Menendez is set to become a ward of the same government that he once helped to lead when he enters a federal prison in Pennsylvania to begin serving an 11-year sentence for political corruption.

He will be known as prisoner No. 67277-050 when he enters Federal Correctional Institution Schuylkill in Minersville, Pa., roughly three hours away from the home he has shared in New Jersey with his wife, Nadine Menendez, who is expected to be sentenced in September for her role in the scheme. Federal agents found bribes ranging from kilo bars of gold, a Mercedes-Benz convertible and more than $480,000 in cash during a search of the couple’s modest split-level home in Englewood Cliffs.

After a nine-week trial in Manhattan, Mr. Menendez, a Democrat, became the only U.S. senator ever to be convicted of acting as an agent of a foreign government. Prosecutors have since called the crimes at the heart of a complex, yearslong bribery conspiracy “stunningly venal” and the most serious “in the history of the Republic,” as they argued for a sentence even stiffer than the one imposed.

Lawyers for Mr. Menendez, who is 71, have called it a death sentence.

“It is well-recognized that inmates with a degree of celebrity,” they wrote in a legal filing, “are at increased risk of attention, harassment and violence from their fellow inmates.”

The Schuylkill facility includes a medium-security, 980-person lockup that houses notorious criminals like James Coonan, the onetime head of a Manhattan gang known as the Westies, and Gurmeet Singh Dhinsa, a Brooklyn gas station magnate serving a life sentence for murder.