Johnny Doc’s nephew is sentenced to probation for violently confronting his boss over a pay dispute
Greg Fiocca, 32, had faced the prospect of a lengthy prison sentence when he was indicted in 2021 and charged with extortion alongside his powerful uncle.

READING — The nephew of former Philadelphia labor leader John Dougherty was sentenced Tuesday to two years of probation for violently berating one of his bosses over a 2020 pay dispute at a construction site in South Philadelphia.
Gregory Fiocca, 32, had faced the prospect of prison time when he was indicted in 2021 and charged with a host of felonies, including extortion, alongside his powerful uncle, the onetime head of Local 98 of the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers.
But after a mistrial last year — and after Dougherty was sentenced to six years in prison for two unrelated convictions — prosecutors agreed to allow Fiocca to plead guilty to a single misdemeanor count of unlawfully demanding money from a union employee.
Fiocca declined to address U.S. District Judge Jeffrey L. Schmehl during his sentencing hearing Tuesday. But his lawyer, Rocco C. Cipparone Jr., said Fiocca has matured substantially over the last four years, undergoing anger management counseling and serving as a caring and invested father to his two children.
“He’s stepped up and matured a lot,” Cipparone said.
The case centered on an incident in August 2020, when Fiocca’s manager at the construction site of the Live! Casino and Hotel, near the stadium complex, docked Fiocca’s pay under the belief that he hadn’t been working. Fiocca showed up to the job site enraged, prosecutors said, choked the man, threw him on a desk, then threatened to “break his [expletive] face” if he didn’t restore Fiocca’s full pay — an exchange that was secretly audio recorded on the project manager’s cell phone.
Afterward, prosecutors said, Dougherty took his nephew’s side in the dispute and suggested that he might pull all Local 98 electricians from the project. That threat, prosecutors said, was meant to bully the project manager, Rich Gibson, into keeping Fiocca on his payroll.
Last year, after a dayslong trial before Schmehl, jurors said they were unable to reach a unanimous verdict in the case, and Schmehl declared a mistrial. One of the jurors later told The Inquirer that 11 of the 12 panel members had been ready to acquit both Dougherty and Fiocca, who had insisted that the episode was nothing more than a routine pay dispute.
Against that backdrop, prosecutors last summer went on to drop all charges against Dougherty, who by then had already been sentenced to six years in prison for his other convictions. And in September, they agreed to let Fiocca plead guilty to the misdemeanor count — cutting his potential prison time by decades.
Assistant U.S. Attorney Jason Grenell said Tuesday that Fiocca’s behavior was still “egregious,” adding: “He wasn’t just a bad employee — he was a menace.”
Schmehl, the judge, said he believed probation would be enough to help deter Fiocca from committing similar crimes again.