‘We’re pulling everyone off the job:’ Jurors hear recording of the heated exchange at the heart of Johnny Doc’s extortion case

READING — As soon as the phone rang, Rich Gibson feared there would be trouble.

Gibson — a union electrician and, in 2020, a project manager at the then-under-construction Live! Casino in South Philadelphia — had been arguing for months with an employee over his poor job attendance. So much so that Gibson had recently started docking the man’s pay.

But that employee — the man on the other end of the Aug. 19 call that gave Gibson such cause for concern — wasn’t just any worker. It was Greg Fiocca, the nephew of the head of his union, the nephew of John Dougherty, the most powerful labor leader in the state.

“Where the f— are you at?” Gibson, testifying in federal court Thursday, recalled Fiocca shouting into the phone.

» READ MORE: As it happened: Prosecutors play audio recording of fiery altercation central to case

Knowing that Fiocca was coming to find him and fearing that the impending confrontation would be hostile, Gibson set his phone to record.

What happened next — and Gibson’s recording of it — is now a central plank in the government’s extortion case against Fiocca and Dougherty, the twice-convicted former leader of Local 98 of the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers.

Prosecutors played the 40-minute audio recording of Fiocca’s heated altercation with Gibson for jurors Thursday as the trial entered its third day.

» READ MORE: John Dougherty extortion trial: Day-by-day updates

“Where the f— is the rest of my check, before I break your glasses,” Fiocca shouted as soon as he tracked Gibson down to a trailer on the casino job site. “You owe me 36 f— hours before I break your f— jaw.”

He grabbed Gibson by the throat, the project manager testified. He started choking him, slapped his face, spit on him, and threw him onto a table.

“Next time this happens again, it’s not going to be no little f— push,” Fiocca continued. “I don’t give a f—. I’ve been to jail. … There’s no cameras in here. It’s your word against mine.”

He told Gibson to call his uncle, insisted “that’s not how this works.”

“We’re pulling the whole job … right now,” Fiocca said. “I’m calling my uncle already. We’re pulling everyone off the job.”

Prosecutors say that pledge — repeated throughout the exchange and allegedly followed up later by similar threats from Dougherty — amounted to extortion.

They maintain that Gibson and his boss — the casino project’s electrical subcontractor, Ray Palmieri — were so fearful of the delays and cost overruns that would be caused by Local 98′s pulling its electricians from the project that they continued to pay Fiocca for five more months after the altercation, despite continued issues with his work.

“I don’t know why Greg felt threatened by me,” Gibson told the jury Thursday. “But I felt threatened by him.”

As the recording — peppered with Fiocca’s rapid-fire insults and liberal cursing — played out Thursday over the courtroom’s tinny loudspeakers, jurors paid rapt attention. Fiocca sat stoically reading a transcript of the recording from the defense table.

But while the ferocity of Fiocca’s reaction on the tape underscored the fear prosecutors say it struck in Gibson, the recording also appeared to bolster key aspects of Fiocca’s and Dougherty’s defense.

» READ MORE: John Dougherty's extortion case, explained

For instance, defense lawyer Rocco Cipparone Jr., while conceding Fiocca “blew his stack,” has maintained since the start of the trial that his client wasn’t seeking to extort Gibson or Palmieri.

Instead, the attorney has said, Fiocca simply snapped after being pushed to his limits by months of harassment from bosses who seemed to be constantly checking up on him, second-guessing his attendance, and looking for chances to find him screwing up.

“Youse f— harass me nonstop,” Fiocca shouted at one point during the recording. “Youse want me to be this perfect f— guy. It’s not going to happen. I’m going to have down days. I’m going to have good days. I’m normal.”

Near the recording’s end, Palmieri — Gibson’s boss — entered the trailer, learned what had happened and heatedly remarked: “I’m going to pay somebody to watch [Fiocca] all day.”

Cipparone has also argued that Gibson and Palmieri’s decision to dock Fiocca’s pay was based on a mistaken belief that he was shirking his responsibilities and often disappearing from work.

Instead, the defense lawyer contends, Fiocca was actually on the job, just busy elsewhere on the three-block job site fulfilling duties assigned to him as Local 98′s steward on the casino project. Dougherty had appointed his nephew to the role — which serves as the primary liaison between union members and company managers — in 2019.

And during their confrontation, Fiocca repeatedly insisted that during times Gibson assumed he was skipping work he was actually attending to concerns raised by Local 98 electricians. Those issues were only multiplied and took up more time, Fiocca said, because the casino construction project was playing out during the height of the coronavirus pandemic in 2020.

“Seventy guys in the middle of a f— pandemic,” Fiocca shouted at Gibson at one point on the tape, referring to sizable representation of Local 98 members on the construction’s crew. “You’re not factoring that, as much as you should factor.”

But when they get their chance to question Gibson on Friday, defense lawyers are likely to reserve some of their fire for another attack entirely.

During opening statements Wednesday, they noted that the project manager’s secret recording of Fiocca may have violated state law, which requires both parties’ consent to record a conversation. They’ve questioned why Gibson wasn’t being prosecuted instead.

» READ MORE: Extortion or ‘complete and utter nonsense?’ Lawyers offer conflicting accounts as John Dougherty’s latest federal trial begins.

(Federal law only requires one-party consent, allowing for the tape to be used as evidence in federal court. State statutes include exceptions to the two-party requirement for crime victims who are fearful for their safety.)

But as he sat in the witness stand Thursday listening, four years later, to the fight that had made him a central witness in a federal case against Fiocca and his uncle, the man who had led their union for nearly 30 years, Gibson mostly appeared baffled as to how it had all come to this.

He’d always had a good relationship with Dougherty, he said. In fact, as a fellow Local 98 member, he’d voted for Dougherty several times in union elections.

“He’s a great man,” Gibson told Fiocca at one point during the recorded Aug. 19 fight.

And before that confrontation, the project manager told the jury Thursday, he’d never had problems with a union steward before. “I’ve always had good relationships,” he said.

“Sometimes you might bicker over things,” he continued, “but at the end of the day, we’re all Local 98 guys.”