Feds allege ‘payback’ in union strongarm

Mayor Martin Walsh — now spotlighted by feds at the center of a City Hall extortion trial — has been good to the unions and they’ve paid him back, showering him with hundreds of thousands of dollars in campaign contributions throughout his political career.

Prosecutors in the extortion trial of two top Walsh aides have sought to portray the mayor as beholden to unions, saying that’s the reason the aides muscled the Boston Calling music festival into hiring union stage hands.

And there’s no question the mayor has been on the receiving end of union largess — both personally and politically.

Walsh, both as a state rep. and mayor, has raked in more than $300,000 from union political action committees, and much of that came during Walsh’s 2013 run for the top City Hall job.

The union contributions — including a huge infusion of money from a super PAC secretly funded by a teachers union — helped fuel Walsh’s campaign at a critical time in his race against City Councilor John Connolly.

But the contributions have continued to pour in during Walsh’s second term. Just in the past few months, Walsh has received $1,000 contributions from IBEW Local 104, the United Food and Commercial Workers’ International, and the North America’s Building Trades Union.

Walsh also pocketed a $168,000 salary from the Boston Building Trades Union and got an SUV as part of the deal, while earning a full-time salary as a state rep. As a state rep, Walsh filed bills to aid union workers in state construction jobs.

Walsh’s deep ties to unions are now central to the Boston Calling case, with prosecutors mentioning the mayor’s name within the first two minutes of opening statements in the trial of Kenneth Brissette and Timothy Sullivan — though there are no records indicating that the union in the trial, the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees, gave money directly to Walsh.

The City Hall aides, who are still receiving their city taxpayer funded salaries, are accused of threatening to withhold permits for the music festival, forcing Crash Line Productions “to hire workers it did not need or want … as payback to a union that was a political supporter and ally of their boss, Mayor Martin J. Walsh,” Assistant U.S. Attorney Kristina Barclay told the jury on Tuesday. Walsh, Brissette and Sullivan have denied that. But Walsh himself may get called to the stand in the trial of Brissette and Sullivan, a spectacle that would draw even more attention to his ties to unions.