In a state with a colorful history, it takes a lot for a New Jersey politician to cross the line into political toxicity. 
 
 Democratic Sen. Robert Menendez has found himself at the center of a growing controversy, with accusations swirling of a questionable friendship with a Florida eye surgeon being investigated for Medicare fraud, improper flights to the Dominican Republic and alleged patronizing of prostitutes — including underage girls — while in the Caribbean nation. 
 
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 In some states, these allegations — and the fact the Senate Ethics Committee has joined federal investigators in looking into the explosive claims — would be enough to sink Menendez. But in New Jersey, that may not be enough to topple the Hudson County political boss, who runs the political machine for a part of Jersey known for being rough and tumble and who easily won reelection last year. 
 
 (Also on POLITICO: Reid: 'Confidence' in Menendez) 
 
 “Six years is a long time,” said Democratic former Sen. Robert Torricelli , who left the Senate a decade ago under his own ethics cloud. “I think Bob Menendez is a very tenacious person, and he has the advantage of six long years and a fairly forgiving political environment in New Jersey. 
 
 “I wouldn’t be wasting time on a Bob Menendez political obituary,” he added. 
 
 The prostitution allegations surrounding Menendez partially came to light before last November’s election, when he won with 58 percent of the vote. Menendez has fervently denied the allegations, and the Justice Department wasn’t publicly investigating the case at that time. 
 
 Otherwise, Menendez has had a few good months: He was pictured with President Barack Obama and New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie as they toured the Jersey Shore after Hurricane Sandy; helped push through the Sandy relief spending package; and took over as chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee when Sen. John Kerry left to become secretary of state. 
 
 He’s also the lead Democratic Hispanic voice on immigration reform in the Senate. 
 
 Top Senate Democrats, including Majority Leader Harry Reid, are backing Menendez. 
 
 “He was a leader in the House. He’s been a leader in the Senate. He’s chairman of that committee. He’ll do a wonderful job. And he’s also an integral part of what we do with immigration reform. So I have the utmost confidence in him,” Reid said on ABC’s “This Week” on Sunday. 
 
 “I have confidence he did nothing wrong, but that’s what investigations are all about,” Reid added. 
 
 (PHOTOS: Top congressional scandals) 
 
 Senior Democratic aides said that with Ethics Committee investigating the matter, party leaders like Reid have cover not to take any action against Menendez until that panel completes its review of the case. The Ethics Committee would step out of the way if Menendez becomes formally involved in a criminal probe by the Justice Department. 
 
 Menendez’s aides would not comment on whether the senator has hired a defense attorney at this time or will set up a legal defense fund to help cover the costs of any ethics or criminal investigation. Marc Elias, a well-known Democratic lawyer, is advising Menendez on ethics issues but is not involved in the broader criminal case, multiple sources said. 
 
 Menendez, who divorced his wife in 2005 and is still single, isn’t personally wealthy. He last week repaid the company of the Florida eye surgeon, Salomon Melgen, $58,500 to cover the cost of two 2010 flights that the senator now acknowledges were personal jaunts to the Dominican Republic. 
 
 Meanwhile, The New York Times reported that Menendez intervened with state and Commerce Department officials on behalf of a Melgen-owned company trying to enforce a lucrative port-security contract with the Dominican government. ||||| The Spanish-language news channel Univision has located one of the women from the Dominican Republic who was allegedly hired by a doctor with ties to Sen. Bob Menendez (D-N.J.) to work as a prostitute. 
 
 The 21-year-old woman and her family deny that she ever participated in prostitution. The woman, Yaneisi Fernandez, said she has never seen Menendez before, not even on television. 
 
 (PHOTOS: Top congressional scandals) 
 
 
 
 "I’ve never been to Casa de Campo, I’ve never participated in those activities, don’t know those people or that man," Fernandez said, according to a translation provided by Univision. 
 
 
 
 Menendez came under fire last week when the office of Dr. Salomon Melgen, a Florida eye doctor with ties to the senator, was raided by the FBI. It was later learned that in January Menendez reimbursed Melgen for flights on his private jet to the Dominican Republic. 
 
 In reports first published by the Daily Caller, Menendez was accused of patronizing prostitutes -- some underage -- while with Melgen at his private estate in an area known as Casa de Campo in the Dominican Republican. Fernandez 's mother told Univision that she is a college student and any suggestion her daughter was involved with the senator is a misunderstanding. 
 
 Menendez has denied all of the allegations. 
 
 Media outlets have been searching for the women who were identified as prostitutes in records released by the government watchdog group CREW. Fernandez was identified in those records. ||||| FBI removes evidence during raid at West Palm Beach office of doctor tied to U.S. Sen. Bob Menendez. 
 
 The high-profile federal raid on a South Florida ophthalmologist’s office was more about potential Medicare fraud than about U.S. Sen. Bob Menendez, a longtime friend of Dr. Salomon Melgen. 
 
 Joining FBI agents on the two-day raid at the doctor’s West Palm Beach eye center: a team of investigators from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, which investigates Medicare wrongdoing. 
 
 The FBI is separately examining the ties between Menendez, a New Jersey Democrat, and Melgen in a parallel corruption investigation launched last year, The Miami Herald has learned. 
 
 FBI agents are investigating the allegations of a shadowy tipster who claimed the doctor flew Menendez on his plane to the Dominican Republic. 
 
 Earlier this month, Menendez quietly sent a $58,500 personal check to Melgen’s company to reimburse the cost of two flights to and from the Dominican Republic, the senator’s office confirmed Wednesday. 
 
 The tipster’s most explosive charge: that the two allegedly hired underage prostitutes. 
 
 DENIAL 
 
 Menendez strenuously denied the accusation and blamed it on an election-year conspiracy involving the conservative website, the Daily Caller, which stands by its reporting. 
 
 “Any allegations of engaging with prostitutes are manufactured by a politically motivated right-wing blog and are false,” Menendez’s office said in a statement Wednesday, following the raid on Melgen’s clinics in West Palm Beach and two other South Florida locations. 
 
 The ethics watchdog group that brought the tipster to the FBI’s attention also suspected that a partisan, political motive underpinned the allegation about the prostitutes. 
 
 The information was pushed just months before Menendez’s successful reelection in November. 
 
 What has transpired since is a web of political recriminations, big money, sex, hard-ball investigations and a public-relations nightmare for a powerful politician and his longtime friend, Melgen, who couldn’t be reached for comment. 
 
 BOXES AND BOXES 
 
 The raids on Melgen’s eye centers involved dozens of agents with the FBI and HHS’s Office of Inspector General hauling away boxes of financial documents, patient records and other materials that will be used for their joint Medicare fraud investigation into the doctor’s business. 
 
 In South Florida, the two agencies routinely join forces to investigate allegations of fraud, such as false claims submitted by healthcare providers to the taxpayer-funded Medicare program for the elderly and disabled. 
 
 Agents began their raid late Tuesday and continued their search into Wednesday at the doctor’s West Palm Beach office. At one point Wednesday, agents escorted a locksmith onsite. 
 
 BILLING 
 
 Agents conducted the raid primarily to investigate possible fraudulent billing activities by Melgen’s business. But they could use any evidence they find for the parallel corruption investigation concerning the prostitutes, trips Menendez took on the doctor’s private plane and the senator’s gift disclosures. 
 
 Menendez’s office said he flew only three times on Melgen’s plane: two personal trips in August and September of 2010 that did not need to be publicly reported and a May 2010 trip that was reimbursed by the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, which Menendez chaired at the time. 
 
 During Menendez’s tenure, records show, Melgen and his wife contributed $60,400 to the group. 
 
 CONTRIBUTIONS 
 
 Since 1998, Melgen and his family have contributed another $33,200 to Menendez’s various campaigns out of nearly $358,000 in political donations they gave to him and other candidates and causes. Most recipients are Florida Democrats. 
 
 Melgen’s contributions appear typical for a mid-range to large political donor. The FBI is examining whether Melgen gave any unreported or impermissible gifts. 
 
 The FBI also is investigating the allegations involving hiring prostitutes, some of whom the tipster said were minors. Sex with a minor is a U.S. federal crime even if it occurs with a child in another country. Menendez has called the allegations of illicit sex “fallacious.” 
 
 The Senate Ethics Committee chairwoman, Barbara Boxer, said her committee couldn’t comment on any pending complaint and said it wouldn’t act in the short term. 
 
 “If you go back to the way we’ve handled it in prior cases, if there is a Justice Department investigation going on, then there’s normally a deferral until they’ve completed that investigation,” said Boxer, D-Calif.. 
 
 Sen. Charles Schumer of New York, the No. 3 Senate Democrat, responded angrily when asked about the Menendez matter. 
 
 “I am not going to comment,” Schumer snapped at a reporter. 
 
 Neither would Florida Sen. Marco Rubio, a Republican and member of the bipartisan immigration-reform group that includes Schumer and Menendez. 
 
 SHOCKWAVES 
 
 News of the two-day raid sent shockwaves from the Dominican Republic to Washington to New Jersey. The search and seizure at Melgen’s office happened just as Menendez becomes a national figure for his leadership in the immigration debate and as he assumes the chairmanship of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. 
 
 Just before Menendez took over the chairmanship, anonymous sources began circulating a batch of emails between the FBI and the tipster discussing allegations that Menendez had sex with Dominican Republic prostitutes at Melgen’s Casa de Campo estate. 
 
 The emails between the FBI and the tipster, who went by the name “Peter Williams” and used a Yahoo! email account, indicated that an FBI agent became frustrated with his elusiveness in recent months. 
 
 He refused to call the lead FBI investigator, Miami-based agent Regino Chavez, or meet with him personally. All correspondence was by email. 
 
 Early on, Chavez told the tipster that “we have been able to confirm most” of the information he provided. But it’s not clear what that information was at the time. And over the months, the tipster kept dodging him and failing to provide information, according to a dossier of the emails sent to reporters anonymously. 
 
 Chavez was given the tipster’s email account in August by the group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, called CREW. 
 
 SKEPTICAL 
 
 CREW’s executive director, Melanie Sloan, said the group made sure the FBI investigated the case after the FBI failed to follow up on another inquiry years before involving then-Congressman Mark Foley, a Republican from West Palm Beach. 
 
 Still, Sloan had concerns. 
 
 “It didn’t seem credible,” she said. The tipster “said he wanted justice done but also suggested he knew about this activity since 2008,” she said. “But he decides to hold off on telling anyone until the spring when Menendez is up for re-election and the control of the Senate is at stake? It doesn’t make sense.” 
 
 But the story was sensational and when the information made it to the Daily Caller, the publication was able to interview two women it identified as the prostitutes. It then ran a story before the November election, which Menendez won anyway. 
 
 Melanio Figueroa, a Dominican lawyer who represented the women, told The Miami Herald in the Dominican Republic on Wednesday that he no longer represents the two alleged prostitutes. 
 
 Figueroa said his former clients had not returned his calls for months. “I’m no longer in contact with those girls,” he said. “That’s what I told the [FBI] investigator, too.” 
 
 Figueroa said he found their interviews with the Daily Caller credible. “I have no reason to believe it was politically motivated,” he said. “It wasn’t like that.” 
 
 Figueroa said he believes the same fear pushed his clients into hiding. “I think they’re afraid,” he said. “That’s why they are not coming forward.” 
 
 Miami Herald staff writer Carli Teproff in West Palm Beach, special correspondent Ezra Fieser in the Dominican Republic and James Rosen of the McClatchy Washington Bureau contributed to this report.
– At least one of the women allegedly involved in the prostitution scandal swirling around Sen. Bob Menendez denies the whole thing, Politico reports. Yaneisi Fernandez was allegedly hired by Dr. Salomon Melgen, who has ties to Menendez, but she says she's never participated in prostitution and she's never seen Menendez in person or on TV, according to Univision. Menendez and Melgen have been accused of patronizing prostitutes, some underage, in the Dominican Republic. Despite the fact that the controversy continues to grow, Politico reports that Menendez could weather the storm. First of all, it takes a lot to sink a New Jersey politician, the site points out, particularly in Menendez's neck of the woods. Plus, he was easily re-elected last year. "I think Bob Menendez is a very tenacious person, and he has the advantage of six long years and a fairly forgiving political environment in New Jersey," a former senator says. "I wouldn’t be wasting time on a Bob Menendez political obituary."