The Case of the Developer, the Halal Exporter, US Senator Bob Menendez, and His Wife

“To talk to him, the nicest guy in the world,” Chuck Batch, a fire inspector who clashed with Daibes over sprinkler systems in his buildings, told me. “He takes care of people. But what people don’t get is that you’re also indebted to him.”

“They make it sound like Daibes bailed out this crummy little factory town,” Batch added. “No, he took advantage of these properties, the Gold Coast, and they allowed him to do it. I guess these other developers really knew that he basically ran the town.”

The Posche by Kim D boutique is about a half-hour drive from Edgewater. Its fashion shows have served as the backdrop for some of the more explosive moments of Bravo’s Real Housewives of New Jersey, which, since its 2009 launch, has had its own role in reinforcing some of the ready-made ideas of its home state. In one memorable 2017 scene, cast member Teresa Giudice seemingly ad-libbed an acronym for Posche for the benefit of its owner, Kim DePaola—“piece of shit cokewhore homewrecker everyday”—and pushed a chair to the ground to drive home the point.

Nadine Arslanian came to a few of Posche’s shows and began seeing more of DePaola and her friends. “It’s very important what kind of car they drive, very important what bag they’re carrying. They’re very much into the Botox and the hair being done and the makeup,” DePaola said. “We’re all like that, this whole crowd, the New Jersey crowd. She seemed just maybe a little bit more.” They posed together at the opening of American Cut Bar & Grill in Englewood Cliffs, a nearby town where Arslanian lives, with the British bhangra and R&B singer Jay Sean also in attendance. Arslanian appeared in a photo with Giudice at a Kiefer Sutherland Band show in Teaneck. When DePaola held her birthday party at The Plaza one year, Arslanian was there.

Still, DePaola said, “We didn’t get close to her.” She found Arslanian somewhat distant and enigmatic, or “not a woman’s woman.” (DePaola is not, she has admitted, a scrupulous gossip, having told Giudice during their fight that she claimed that Giudice’s husband cheated “because I feel like it.”)

DePaola said she primarily knew Arslanian as the girlfriend of Doug Anton, a locally famous attorney who specializes in entertainment and sports law, with a focus on criminal defense and trial work. “Some crazy trials that people think there’s no way anybody’s gonna win this,” as he described them in the fall, “and somehow I pull it out.”

Karen Gravano, an Anton client who is the daughter of former Gambino crime family underboss Sammy “The Bull” Gravano and who was a cast member on VH1’s Mob Wives, remembered Arslanian similarly. “Seemed like a nice lady,” Gravano said. “Didn’t know much about her, other than that she was dating Doug.”

Anton represented R. Kelly in the lead-up to the singer’s federal sex trafficking trial in Brooklyn and said he has worked with Kid Rock since law school, helping the singer with a synchronization license, contracts, a divorce. He recently began working with Lil Mav, a Bronx hip-hop producer, and outlined their plans to release music with Lil Mabu, the Upper East Side rapper who graduated from the oldest private school in the country.

“Clients come in for one thing,” Anton said as finished his rapid-fire rundown, “and at least do another thing.”

Anton and Arslanian met at Grissini, an Italian restaurant in Englewood Cliffs. In DePaola’s telling, Arslanian walked up to Anton and gave him her number even though she was seeing someone else at the time. Anton had a different recollection. A mutual friend pointed out that she was Armenian and he was half Armenian: “Maybe you could talk.”

They began dating in 2011, and Anton said he performed some legal work for her, including getting her a restraining order against an ex-boyfriend. They found other points of connection. “She loves Louis Vuitton bags, and she likes wearing it and—‘Look at me, everybody,’” Anton said. “But who doesn’t like that? You know, when I would get my Zegna suit on, I’m like, Yeah, bitches, I look good in this Zegna suit.”

As Anton introduced Arslanian to his network of friends and clients, she also formed her own relationships. DePaola began receiving reports from a friend who was on a similar social schedule as Arslanian and saw her spending days at Daibes’s Le Jardin.

“One of my friends used to bounce around, a wise guy,” DePaola explained. “He bounced around a lot by himself. You know men like that, they’re always in this place, that restaurant.”

Menendez got his first job in New Jersey politics at 20 years old. The child of Cuban immigrants, he had an early mentor in Union City mayor William Musto, sometimes described as a father figure to him, and served as secretary of the school board. Menendez’s father, a carpenter, died by suicide when Menendez was 23. As he worked on the board, Menendez learned that officials at two local high schools were working with a Mafia-run construction company to siphon city funds. In 1982, he testified against his old boss in a federal corruption trial, wearing a bulletproof vest under his trench coat. A local judge had been assassinated a few years prior.

Menendez became Union City mayor himself in 1986 and continued to rise through the State Assembly, the State Senate, and then, in 1992, the US House. He always had ambitions to become a senator, one of his congressional staffers told me, and could be ruthless about it: “If you crossed him once, you’re dead forever.” When there was a problem getting out the vote somewhere, “or suppressing the vote somewhere,” the staffer said, Menendez brought in Sean Caddle, a longtime Democratic political consultant who functioned as “his Ray Donovan.”

Fundraising brought Menendez particular dread, according to the staffer. “‘I just want to win the lottery and say fuck you to everyone,’” they remembered him saying. “He wouldn’t have to kiss anyone’s ass anymore.”

“He wanted to get rich,” they went on, “and he knew he was gonna do it.”

After Menendez made his way to the Senate, he remained a social fixture in North Jersey. He spent time, Anton said, at Edgewater’s River Palm Terrace steakhouse and Jamie’s, a cigar bar and restaurant. “Every place he went, Freddie Daibes was around.”

It was a relatively small scene, and Daibes met an affable but struggling businessman named Wael Hana at Le Jardin. Hana comes from a connected, well-to-do family in Egypt, according to associates. Still, he had trouble finding his footing after moving to the US on a lottery visa as a 22-year-old in 2006. Around 1 a.m. one night in 2014, police arrested him on a DWI charge and said he threatened one of the officers when they took him to the hospital for treatment. He kept losing money even as his family offered further resources. In late 2017, when Hana started a business for certifying halal exports, Daibes provided financing and office space in a building he owned down the road from his restaurant.