Senator Robert Menendez’s sister testified on Monday about their parents’ journey from Cuba and the family’s practice of storing cash at home, offering justification for a habit he has said explains at least some of the roughly $480,000 F.B.I. agents seized during a search of his New Jersey home.
The sister, Caridad Gonzalez, was 8 years old when her parents fled Cuba in 1951, three years before Mr. Menendez was born in New York City. She told jurors that their father, a tie manufacturer, stored money in a false bottom of a grandfather clock in their home in Havana.
“It’s a Cuban thing,” Ms. Gonzalez, who is in her 80s, testified. “They were afraid of losing what they worked so hard for.”
She explained that her parents and her aunt continued the practice after arriving in the United States, where her father worked both as a carpenter and a clothing manufacturer.
Her mother, a seamstress, stored money in the door frame of a closet; her father kept cash in a shoe box that he stored on a shelf in a closet. After a fire at their aunt’s home, relatives discovered $60,000 in a bag in the basement, Ms. Gonzalez testified.
It was a habit, she said, that Mr. Menendez, 70, adopted after hearing tales of a visit by police officers who pressured their father to shut down a manufacturing facility he had operated in the back of their home.
When she was working as Mr. Menendez’s legal secretary in the 1980s, Ms. Gonzalez said her brother once asked her to retrieve $500 in cash he kept stored in a box in his family’s apartment in Union City, N.J.
Ms. Gonzalez was the first witness called Monday as the senator’s lawyers began to present a defense against charges that Mr. Menendez accepted gold bars, hundreds of thousands of dollars in cash and a Mercedes-Benz in exchange for political favors.
In a June 2022 search of the home where Mr. Menendez lives with his wife, Nadine Menendez, F.B.I. agents found 13 gold bars and more than $480,000 in cash, much of it in envelopes that were stuffed in boots, bags and a duffel bag.