As trial opens, prosecutors cast Johnny Doc’s spending as a betrayal of his union. His defense calls it ‘an honest mistake.’

If John J. Dougherty’s first felony trial was a tale of the tapes — ending with a 2021 bribery conviction buoyed by dozens of provocative FBI wiretap recordings — his second, a union embezzlement trial that opened Monday, could shape up to be death by a thousand Target receipts.

Prosecutors began presenting their case against the former labor leader with a dizzying array of expense reports, union records, and invoices from retailers that they say back up their claims that he and other union officials misspent more than $600,000 meant to support the members of Local 98 of the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers, the union Dougherty led for nearly 30 years.

» READ MORE: As it happened: Prosecutors open case against ex-union leader John Dougherty in embezzlement trial

And while much of the government evidence will consist of receipts for mundane purchases and video of Dougherty and others buying household goods and groceries with Local 98 funds, Assistant U.S. Attorney Bea Witzleben maintained that those small thefts amounted to a significant betrayal of the union’s members.

“The evidence is going to show he stole money from that union any time he thought he could get away with it,” she said in her opening remarks to the jury Monday. “Over and over, again and again, he stole, he lied, and no one stopped him.”

Dougherty’s lawyers, meanwhile, chalked up the cash he is accused of misspending to “an honest mistake.”

The onetime union chief spent countless hours over nearly three decades building Local 98 into the state’s most influential labor union, defense attorney Gregory Pagano said in his own first salvo to jurors. If he incorrectly logged a few expenses, the attorney maintained, it was negligence, not fraud.

And negligence, Pagano insisted, “is not a crime.”

Those conflicting views of the evidence set the contours of the trial set to play out in federal court over the next five weeks — one that could end in Dougherty’s second conviction on a set of felony charges in as many years.

And while the outcome of the labor leader’s first trial, alongside then-City Councilmember Bobby Henon, forced his resignation from Local 98, the result of his second threatens to recast his legacy as a one-man center of gravity in organized labor, politics, and civic life.

Dougherty has repeatedly painted himself as a tireless advocate for his members who has been persecuted for years by FBI agents and prosecutors eager to take him down.

But as they previewed their case for jurors Monday, prosecutors contended he and codefendant Brian Burrows, who served as Local 98′s president for 15 years, were actively exploiting the union electricians they professed to represent.

“It’s not really that complicated,” Witzleben said. “It boils down in the end to a simple concept: You’re not allowed to take things that don’t belong to you, no matter how powerful you are.”

In addition to the purchases at Target and other big-box retailers, she said, Dougherty and Burrows spent thousands of dollars in Local 98 cash on concert tickets, pricey restaurant meals, and renovations and maintenance for their homes and those of family members.

» READ MORE: Catch-up with what's happened in the trial so far

To prove its case, she promised, the government will rely not only on evidence of those purchases but also on wiretapped phone calls showing Dougherty boasting of how he hid that spending from Local 98′s auditors.

“What I try to do,” Dougherty said in one call prosecutors are expected to play later in the trial, “is keep it within reason so it don’t look too crazy.”

The government also signaled Monday that it may call as witnesses several members of Dougherty’s family — including his daughter, Erin, and brother, state Supreme Court Justice Kevin Dougherty — who it says benefited from the ex-union boss’ largesse.

Burrows’ lawyers, however, directed their fire at another witness expected to play a central role in the prosecutors’ case.

Anthony Massa, a union contractor, performed thousands of dollars of work on the homes of Dougherty and others — all on Local 98′s dime.

He’s the only one of the five union officials and allies who were indicted alongside Dougherty in 2019 and who have since pleaded guilty who has agreed to testify against the ex-union chief at trial.

» READ MORE: What you need to know about the case

“When he got caught, he had to point the finger at someone else to save himself,” Burrows’ attorney Mark A. Kasten said in his opening statement, dismissing Massa as a “liar and a fraudster.”

For his part, Dougherty remained uncharacteristically quiet as the day’s back-and-forth played out.

During his last trial, he routinely joked with reporters outside the courthouse and glad-handed with supporters in the courtroom gallery during breaks in testimony.

He spent most of Monday seated at the defense table, however, silently scribbling notes and only showing a brief flash of irritation as, late in the day, his attorney sparred with the government’s first witness, FBI Special Agent Jason Blake, the bureau’s lead investigator on the case.

Prosecutors, through Blake, sought to show that a typical Local 98 member would have to work 132 hours to yield the union dues needed to cover the drain on union coffers that resulted from just one of Dougherty’s personal shopping sprees — a 2014 receipt from Target for a vacuum cleaner, personal hygiene products, children’s clothing, and other goods that totaled nearly $320.

As his client bristled by his side, Pagano noted that only a small percentage of Local 98 members’ wages — $2.42 per hour, to be exact — goes toward union dues.

The purchase, Pagano noted, wasn’t made by Dougherty but by two union members who prosecutors say acted as the labor leader’s personal gofers but whom the defense has accused of spending union funds without Dougherty’s knowledge.

“Frankly, they were doing the best they could to categorize the expenditures in the right way,” the defense lawyer said earlier in the day. ”This man is not a thief.”