PHILADELPHIA — Longtime political powerbroker Vincent Fumo earned nearly $100,000 a year as a Pennsylvania state senator, up to $1 million a year as a rainmaking lawyer and millions more from the sale of a family bank.

Yet the Philadelphia Democrat used little of his own money as he took yachting vacations with friends, spent lavishly on a 33-room city brownstone and hired operatives to spy on ex-wives and political foes, prosecutors say.

Fumo, 65, will go on trial in U.S. District Court on charges he used $3.5 million in what he called "OPM" — other people's money — to keep his political machine well-oiled and fund a high life that included three vacation homes and heated sidewalks outside his mansion. Jury selection is expected to last a week, and the trial three months.

Jurors must decide whether Fumo misused nearly $2 million in Senate funds and also raided a neighborhood charity to which he used his political clout to steer $27 million in corporate donations.

He argues that he did nothing illegal and worked tirelessly to serve his constituents in blue-collar, parochial South Philadelphia. He takes credit for securing more than $8 billion in government and corporate benefits for the region.

Fumo served as ranking Democrat on the Senate Appropriations Committee until his 2007 indictment. Over three decades in the Senate, he had come to control 90 state jobs and many more on civic boards. He unabashedly assigned many of those loyalists to carry out his near-manic lists of personal and political chores, the indictment states.

"Fumo made demands on Senate employees regarding everything in his life, from the significant to the trivial," the indictment says.

Co-defendant Leonard Luchko, a state Senate computer technician, has admitted he spent his days packaging "Vincent J. Fumo" bobblehead dolls; driving cars back from Martha's Vineyard after Fumo's vacation; and, as the FBI closed in, destroying e-mail evidence from computers at Fumo's homes and office.