‘The only proof you have is your recollection:’ Defense lawyers grill project manager who feuded with Johnny Doc’s nephew

READING — Defense lawyers concede that the tone of a secretly recorded 2020 confrontation between Greg Fiocca, nephew of Philadelphia labor leader John Dougherty, and a supervisor on the site of the then-under-construction Live! Hotel and Casino in South Philadelphia was “horrible.”

The tape, played for a federal jury this week, features Fiocca flying into a profanity-laced rage, muffled sounds of him choking, slapping, and spitting on his boss, and his heated and repeated threats to call his uncle or pull all their union’s workers off the job.

But as attorneys for Fiocca and Dougherty got their first chance Friday to scrutinize that recording in court and grill the man who made it — Rich Gibson, a project manager on the casino job and the target of Fiocca’s ire — they sought to dispel any notion that it amounted to an extortionate threat.

» READ MORE: As it happened: Lawyer grills project manager who recorded fight with Johnny Doc's nephew: Didn't 'stop you from getting beat up'

Fiocca wasn’t a man seeking to intimidate by invoking his uncle’s stature as the state’s most powerful labor leader, defense lawyer Rocco Cipparone Jr. insisted throughout his cross-examination of Gibson Friday. Instead, the attorney maintained, Fiocca simply “blew his stack” after months of harassment by his casino site bosses and repeated instances of his pay ked.

“He was frustrated with how often you were … on his back. That’s what he was saying,” Cipparone challenged Gibson during questioning. “He felt that he was being treated unfairly and was communicating that to you.”

Yet, the project manager stood firm. He felt cowed, he said, into keeping Fiocca on the job.

“I’m not sure you’ve ever had someone’s hand around your throat and a fist in your face and someone telling you you’re going to get pummeled,” he responded during another point in the questioning. “Rocco, it was rough there for a few weeks. Very rough.”

Gibson’s testimony — which capped off the first week of Dougherty’s and Fiocca’s federal extortion trial — could prove crucial as jurors are expected to begin deliberating a verdict in the case next week.

His account is central to prosecutors’ contention that Dougherty and his nephew pressured him and the casino job’s electrical contractor, Ray Palmieri, into paying Fiocca wages he did not earn.

The mild-mannered man in his 50s — a fellow member of Fiocca and Dougherty’s union, Local 98 of the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers — remained mostly calm as he recounted that Aug. 19, 2020, fight throughout his two days on the witness stand.

And yet, he showed brief flashes of frustration as Cipparone grilled him Friday on whether he had any evidence to prove Fiocca was shirking his job responsibilities and disappearing from work — a judgment that prompted Gibson’s decision to dock Fiocca’s pay and set off their job site fight.

“The only proof you have is your recollection,” Cipparone pressed. “You have no records, no videos, no tracking information, no exit or entry data.”

Gibson insisted: “His perspective was [he wanted] to be paid for things we believed he wasn’t there doing.”

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Shortly after the skirmish, Gibson told jurors he called police, but they did not arrest Fiocca and he ultimately decided not to press charges, hoping that the union could handle its business internally.

“I just don’t believe in all this stuff, this going at each other,” he said. “We all hold the same ticket. I was just hoping the [union] hall would do the right thing.”

He did try to have Local 98 toss Fiocca from the casino project, he said, and was disappointed when union representatives informed him the day of the altercation that that would not be happening.

And for the next six months that Fiocca remained on the job, Gibson feared that, if triggered again, Dougherty’s nephew might make good on his threat to have his uncle pull all union electricians off the project, he said.

“That’s major when you’re talking about a casino. We had 70 people on the job,” Gibson testified. “I just didn’t know what was going to happen.”

Still, Gibson acknowledged he never once reached out to Dougherty to try to establish a truce or verify if the threats his nephew was making were real.

» READ MORE: Johnny Doc's extortion case, explained

That point — stressed in questioning by Dougherty’s lawyer Greg Pagano — appeared to bolster the position the ex-union chief has taken throughout the trial. And so far in the trial, prosecutors have produced little evidence or testimony to show that Dougherty backed up the threats Fiocca made.

Dougherty has maintained he had no idea of the seriousness of Fiocca’s blow-up with Gibson when he made the call to keep his nephew on the job site. And as for those threats to stop work on the casino site, the ex-union chief insists that never would have happened.

In fact, Pagano said during opening arguments earlier this week, the fact that the casino construction was happening at all in the spring of 2020 — at the height of the coronavirus pandemic — was largely due to Dougherty’s work.

He and his union had pushed government officials to allow the work to continue, and devised safety protocols to ensure Local 98 members could protect themselves from the virus on the worksite.

Fiocca, who was assigned as the union’s steward on the casino project, contends he spent hours each day making sure members stayed safe, addressing concerns over masks and social distancing, and quieting the fears of a workforce hesitant to return to work.

That stress, combined with a mistaken conclusion by Gibson that he wasn’t doing his job, all played into Fiocca’s explosive reaction in the recorded Aug. 19 fight, Cipparone told jurors earlier this week. Fiocca was also battling stressors at home, including the hospitalization of his son just days before the altercation.

And yet, if Gibson truly felt threatened by Fiocca, he simply could have fired him, Cipparone emphasized in his questioning of the project manager Friday.

“I’ve never fired a steward,” Gibson replied. “To, me it wasn’t an option.”

Still, Cipparone insisted, it could have been done.

From the witness stand, Gibson paused, raised his eyebrows, then eventually responded: “You’re talking about the business manager’s nephew.”