Robert Menendez, New Jersey’s disgraced former senator who was once one of the most powerful Democrats in Washington, was sentenced on Wednesday to 11 years in prison after being convicted of being at the center of an audacious and yearslong international bribery scheme.
The courtroom in Lower Manhattan was packed but silent as the judge imposed one of the longest sentences ever issued for a federal official in the United States.
“You were successful, powerful,” the judge, Sidney H. Stein of Federal District Court, said before announcing the penalty. “You stood at the apex of our political system.”
“Somewhere along the way — I don’t know where it was — you lost your way,” he added. “Working for the public good became working for your good.”
Mr. Menendez, a skilled orator known for holding forth on the Senate floor, wept intermittently as he addressed the court before the sentence was announced. He has said that he planned to appeal the jury’s guilty verdict, but told Judge Stein that he stood before him a “chastened man” who had suffered the ignominy of a guilty verdict and the resignation of his Senate seat.
“Every day I’m awake is a punishment,” Mr. Menendez, 71, said.
“I ask you to temper your sword of justice with the mercy of a lifetime of duty,” he added.
His sister and both of his children — Alicia Menendez, an anchor on the news network MSNBC, and Representative Rob Menendez, a Democrat serving his second term in Congress — sat directly behind him, in the first row of a courtroom gallery filled to capacity.
Mr. Menendez’s fall from grace has been steep and swift.
He resigned from the Senate in August after a Manhattan jury convicted him of trading his political clout for stacks of $100 bills, bricks of gold and a Mercedes-Benz convertible.
When he was indicted 16 months ago, Mr. Menendez served as chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, one of the most powerful perches in Washington.
The role gave him outsize influence over foreign military aid and international policy. And prosecutors with the U.S. attorney’s office for the Southern District of New York emphasized the many ways in which Mr. Menendez used that power during a nine-week trial last summer.
Paul Monteleoni, one of the prosecutors, said that a lengthy prison term was warranted in response to crimes that constituted a “truly grave breach of trust.”
“He let his offenses overshadow the good that he did,” Mr. Monteleoni said.
“He believed that the power that he wielded belonged to him,” Mr. Monteleoni added. “The power of a Senate office is not something he owns and has the power to liquidate.”
Mr. Menendez was found guilty in July on all 16 counts he faced, including bribery, extortion, honest services wire fraud, obstruction of justice, conspiracy and acting as an agent for Egypt.
When the jury announced its verdict, Mr. Menendez, the son of immigrants from Cuba, became the first U.S. senator ever convicted of acting as an agent of a foreign power.
Federal prosecutors in Manhattan, who described Mr. Menendez’s conduct as possibly “the most serious for which a U.S. senator has been convicted in the history of the republic,” had asked Judge Stein to impose a sentence of at least 15 years in prison.
Lawyers for Mr. Menendez, citing his hardscrabble upbringing, life of service and devotion to his family, originally sought a term of no more than 27 months, with “at least two years’ rigorous community service.”
On Wednesday, however, Adam Fee, one of his lawyers, adjusted that recommendation and instead urged Judge Stein to impose a sentence of no more than eight years in prison.
“If our worst moments defined us and overshadowed whatever other light we had put out into the world, many of us, including me, would not be here today,” Mr. Fee said, noting what he called Mr. Menendez’s “lifetime of extraordinary public service.”
Mr. Fee ticked off categories of criminals convicted of serious violent crimes, describing them as “heartless, hardened individuals for whom a 10-plus-year sentence maybe fits the crimes.”
“Bob,” Mr. Fee said, “is at the far opposite end of the spectrum.”
A sentence of 10 years or more, Mr. Fee said, would preclude Mr. Menendez from serving his sentence at a minimum-security prison and “would expose him to a dramatically higher risk of danger, intimidation, threats, harassment and violence.”
Testimony and evidence presented at trial presented Mr. Menendez and his wife, Nadine Menendez, as conspiring during furtive dinners and on encrypted calls in a scheme that was largely aimed at increasing U.S. assistance to Egypt and helping three New Jersey businessmen, who were also charged in the case.
“The defendants’ crimes amount to an extraordinary attempt, at the highest levels of the legislative branch, to corrupt the nation’s core sovereign powers over foreign relations and law enforcement,” the government wrote to Judge Stein.
This week, the former senator’s lawyers, saying the case presented difficult appellate questions, asked Judge Stein to allow Mr. Menendez to remain free on bond pending his appeal.
Two of Mr. Menendez’s co-defendants — the businessmen Wael Hana and Fred Daibes — were also sentenced on Wednesday. Mr. Daibes received a seven-year prison sentence and a fine of $1.75 million. Mr. Hana was sentenced to slightly more than eight years in prison and fined $1.3 million.
A fourth defendant, the businessman Jose Uribe, pleaded guilty last year and became a star witness against the senator at trial. He is to be sentenced in April.
Ms. Menendez, 57, was to be tried with her husband, but her trial was postponed by the judge after her lawyers said she would be undergoing treatment for breast cancer. Ms. Menendez, who has pleaded not guilty and did not appear in court on Wednesday, is now scheduled for trial on March 18.
Maia Coleman contributed reporting.
