He got caught and charged.
Via NY Post:
The bribery trial of senior New Jersey Democratic Sen. Bob Menendez has it all.
Menendez is facing charges that he sold his US Senate office to a Palm Beach, Fla., eye doctor, his co-defendant Salomon Melgen, for bribes in the form of private jets stocked with Menendez’s favorite beverages, a private villa at one of the lushest resorts in the Caribbean, and a Paris hotel suite for which Melgen spent 650,000 American Express points.
The two men met in 1993 when Melgen contributed $500 to Menendez’s first House re-election campaign at a South Florida fundraiser — his first political contribution. In the decades since, Melgen became a major high-dollar Democratic donor, and when Menendez was appointed to the Senate in 2006, they already had an extraordinarily close relationship.
That relationship allowed Menendez to enjoy a lifestyle far beyond his legitimate income of $174,000. It was a life of luxury funded by one of the largest Medicare frauds in history, a $105 million scheme for which Melgen has already been convicted on 67 counts of fraud in a separate federal trial in Florida.
In return, Menendez allegedly got Melgen visas for his girlfriends, pressured the State Department to deliver a Dominican port-security contract and pressed the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) to approve the massive Medicare overbilling scheme that kept the good times rolling.[…]
A former Medicare official, Dr. Louis Jacques, testified that a Menendez staff member pressured him to allow Melgen to overbill. Melgen was dividing single-dose vials of an injectable drug called Lucentis to use on multiple patients, then billing Medicare for a full $2,000 dose for each patient.
“The issue is very important to the senator,” Dr. Jacques recalled the staffer telling him. “Bad medicine is not illegal. Medicare should pay these claims.” Dr. Jacques was so shaken that he remembers having to stand up to clear his head.
Former Sen. Tom Harkin, then chairman of the committee that oversees Medicare, testified that he took a meeting with Melgen and Menendez. Harkin staffer Jenelle Krishnamoorthy testified that this was the only time she met with a non-constituent on a Medicare billing dispute in 10 years as a Senate worker. Harkin’s office concluded they should take no action.