Union’s ex-con job
Murderer delivers coffee for $350/day
He’s a killer coffee boy. Convicted murderer Eric Smokes (inset) is one of the pricey union workers the Hudson Yards developer says it was tricked into paying $40 an hour just to deliver coffee and snacks, according to lawsuits and an internal report for the Manhattan megaproject.
Smokes, 50, makes $43.98 an hour — about $350 a day — as a Local 20 concrete worker at 30 Hudson Yards. But he works only as a “coffee boy,” payroll data and the internal report prepared by a private investigator show.
Three decades before he started serving up food and drinks from a shopping cart at the West Side development, the then-20-yearold Smokes was convicted in the fatal beating of a French tourist in Midtown on New Year’s Eve 1986. Smokes served more than 20 years in jail but is now appealing his conviction.
The boondoggle baristas are part of a widespread scheme of “misconduct” and “thuggish tactics of yesteryear” allegedly carried out by a union group at the project, according to a pair of lawsuits recently filed by Related Cos. subsidiary Hudson Yards Construction LLC.LC.
So-called “coffeee boys” like Smokes and other underhanded labor tactics inflated construction costs by more than $100 million, claim the lawsuits filed against the Building and Construction Trades Council of Greater New York, a union umbrella group that includes Local 20 and its president, Gary LaBarbera. The developer also accuses the group of slashing nonunion concrete-truck tires and getting union members to interfere with concrete deliveries to a Hudson Yards construction site. The la- bor council has “vehemently” denied the allegations and said the lawsuits were a “retaliatory” effort against the group for its protests against the use of non-union labor.
According to the labor contract, the West Side job site must have a concrete worker who can pass out water and take coffee and lunch orders. But the “coffee boy” is required to spend the rest of his shift doing cement and concrete work.
The private investigator who spoke to workers and watched Smokes between March 12 and April 21 wrote in the report “it does not appear that Smokes performs any functions other than the Coffee Person.”
The lawsuits seek at least $77 million in damages.