During an August 2019 meeting at an Italian restaurant in North Jersey, Sen. Bob Menendez appeared to know the details of a prosecution and an investigation he and his wife are alleged to have taken bribes to disrupt, the man who has pleaded guilty to bribing them testified Monday.

Jose Uribe, a trucking and insurance company owner, had by then already held a fundraiser for the senator, met him several times for drinks or dinner, and, he said, bribed Menendez’s now-wife with a car.

Uribe’s goal, going back over a year, had been to get a good deal for one business associate who was being charged with insurance fraud in New Jersey and to stop a related state investigation that could lead to one of his own companies.

But Uribe had yet to talk face-to-face with the senator about the alleged cases or the point of his bribes, which he’d first arranged with a friend of the senator’s girlfriend at the time, Nadine Menendez, and then with Nadine herself.

Finally, on Aug. 7, 2019, Uribe said he sat down with the senator and Nadine in the back of Il Villaggio, an Italian restaurant in North Jersey.

Uribe said that at the dinner the senator seemed to have “complete knowledge” about the prosecution that the senator is accused of trying to disrupt. And, when Uribe asked him to find out about the investigation into his own company, Menendez indicated “he would look into it.”

Uribe faced careful questions by a federal prosecutor and by the judge, who granted a few objections from one of the senator’s defense attorneys and has been occasionally asking his own questions of witnesses during the trial that began in May.

Defense attorneys have yet to cross examine Uribe, who has a criminal record and who said he recalled the substance of but not always the exact words used during the dinner with Menendez. Uribe will continue to testify Monday afternoon. Menendez has denied the allegations against him.

Uribe also gave more details about the car he said he bought Nadine, who will stand trial separately because of a cancer diagnosis.

“If your problem is a car, my problem is saving my family,” Uribe said he told Nadine in March 2019, in the days before he said he handed her $15,000 in cash to make the down payment on a new Mercedes-Benz.

He would eventually also arrange dozens of monthly car payments for her Mercedes or make them himself. The expectation was she would get the senator to help resolve state scrutiny that circled Uribe.

By late summer, his associate facing prosecution had gotten a deal that required no jail time. That was good for Uribe. But a detective from the New Jersey attorney general’s office was still trying to interview one of his employees, someone so close he considered her a daughter. That was bad.

Part of the issue seems to be that Uribe had for months been going through an intermediary: Wael “Will” Hana, who is now one of the co-defendants in Menendez’s corruption trial. And it was unclear if the senator knew Uribe was seeking a two-part deal until months after Uribe thought he and Hana had a deal.

For instance, days before their August 2019 meeting, Nadine had texted Uribe that she’d spoken with the senator and “he said it would’ve been so so easy if we had wrapped both together.”

The former attorney general of New Jersey, Gurbir Grewal, testified last week about two interactions with the senator where Menendez attempted to discuss specific insurance matters affecting Hispanic truckers in 2019. Grewal said he did not know the name of the cases or act based on the conversations with Menendez.