Brian M. McLaughlin, center, once New York City’s top labor leader, who is under indictment, works on a high-rise on 11th Avenue.
As he walked down West 59th Street yesterday, a burly man in a blue hard hat, he looked like thousands of other electricians in the city.
But this electrician, on lunch break from his $46-an-hour job building a luxury residential high-rise, was in no way a typical union journeyman.
He is Brian M. McLaughlin, once the city’s top labor leader and once an assemblyman from Queens, a man courted by mayors and governors until he was indicted last October, charged with stealing money from his union, from the State Assembly, even from a local Little League.
As he worked yesterday at his new job at 59th Street and 11th Avenue, Mr. McLaughlin wore a red T-shirt and dust-covered blue jeans, having put aside the expensive wool suits and silk ties of old.
Now he has become the rarest of species — an indicted union leader who has gone back to work alongside the rank and file. He works each day next to members of his own union, Local 3, which the indictment accuses him of defrauding.
If anything, though, his fellow electricians seemed protective of him yesterday as he walked around the site, unbothered by any sort of rancor.
All told, Mr. McLaughlin, 55, is charged in a 43-count federal indictment with illegally obtaining $2.2 million through embezzlement, fraud, receiving bribes and other means. He has pleaded not guilty and is free pending trial.
He said he was back at work for a simple reason: He had a family to support and a lawyer to pay — and federal prosecutors were demanding that he disgorge any ill-gotten gains.
“Like anyone else, I’m back at work because I need to work,” he said. “I always liked being an electrician.”
Mr. McLaughlin, a brawny 6-foot-4, said there was also something comforting about returning to work he knows. “This is very serene,” he said, as he paused outside the building on his lunch break.
Mr. McLaughlin said he received unemployment insurance for six months after he was forced to take a leave last summer from his job as president of the New York City Central Labor Council. He is now on unpaid leave. The organization is the nation’s largest municipal labor council, representing more than one million workers.
In March, he said, he went to work for several weeks underground as a sandhog on the gigantic water tunnel that is now under construction beneath the city. He said he decided to take a less grueling job as an electrician as soon as his name came up on the union’s waiting list for jobs.
He said he did not jump ahead of other people on the list. “I didn’t do anything inappropriate” in getting the job, he said. “I waited my turn.”
For the past two weeks, Mr. McLaughlin has been working on the Element Condominium, a 33-story building described on its Web site as an “urbane paradise with breathtaking views.” The electrical contractor on the site is Colony Electric, of Staten Island, and yesterday Mr. McLaughlin wore a Colony decal on his hard hat.
It has been a quarter-century since Mr. McLaughlin, who served seven terms in the State Legislature, last worked with his electrician’s tools. Since then the trade has changed, with the spread of fiber optics, cable television and DSL.
“It’s surprising that he’s working with his tools now,” said Jason Ramos, an electrician in Local 3 who was working at a neighboring construction site. “He was so high-ranking up there.”
In a city with a long history of indictments against labor leaders, Joshua Freeman, a labor historian at the City University Graduate Center, said it was nonetheless rare to encounter one who returns to his rank-and-file job after being charged.
One possible reason Mr. McLaughlin is back at work is the delay he has encountered in selling a large country house he owns in Suffolk County, on the North Shore. Last fall, shortly after the indictment, he put the home, near a nature preserve in Nissequogue, on the market for $1.6 million. But real estate records indicate it has not sold — perhaps because federal officials have sought to seize the property.
The federal indictment accuses Mr. McLaughlin of taking more than $140,000 from his union’s street lights division, for which he was business representative. It also accuses him of taking $185,000 from the Central Labor Council, more than $35,000 from the State Assembly and $95,000 from Little League baseball teams in Queens.
Mr. McLaughlin, who is out on $250,000 bail, is also accused of stealing more than $330,000 from his own re-election committee, using some of that money to pay for personal expenses like a rehearsal dinner for his son’s wedding and a renovation of his Nissequogue home.
In addition, the indictment charges that he illegally received more than $1.4 million from street-lighting contractors and other companies.
Conviction on all 43 counts could send him to prison for decades.
His lawyer, Michael F. Armstrong, declined to comment yesterday, and officials for Local 3 did not return phone calls.
For more than a week, Mr. McLaughlin has eaten lunch by himself at the Olympic Flame Diner, around the block from the construction site, according to a manager there. As he left the diner yesterday, he said he had faced no hostility from the union brothers with whom he now works.
“The people on the job are wonderful,” he said.
