Nephew’s behavior at work focus of testimony in John Dougherty extortion trial

As soon as the phone rang, Rich Gibson feared there’d 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.

By the time he reached Rich Gibson’s trailer across from the casino on August 19, Greg Fiocca was seething over his docked pay.

“Where’s the rest of my check at? I’m, I’m, where the f—‘s the rest of my check at? Before I break your glasses. Sit the f— down,” he roared as Gibson’s secret audio recording played for jurors over the court’s sound system, clattering noises in the background.

“Greg, Greg,” Gibson pleaded. “Greg. Don’t touch me.”“I’m going to break your f— face,” Fiocca screamed. “I’ve got two f— kids at home. You owe me 36 hours.”

Rich Gibson, the job site manager who Fiocca is accused of assaulting, kicked off the afternoon session in court.

And the longtime Local 98 member told jurors he’d worked dozens of jobs with various union stewards over the years without incident. Then, he met Greg Fiocca.

“I’ve always had a good relationship with stewards,” Gibson testified. “Sometimes you might bicker over things. But at the end of the day, we’re all Local 98 guys.”

Prosecutors next took the jury back to 2016 — four years before the incident at Live! Casino — when Greg Fiocca was a union apprentice assigned to help on the FMC Tower in University City.

There, part of Fiocca’s job entailed passing materials up from the ground to journeymen working in scaffolding, testified Thomas Gahagan, a longtime Local 98 electrician and the government’s next witness. But Fiocca, Gahagan said, was often missing in action, and there were times when the journeymen were forced to climb down from the towers to procure the materials themselves.

When they complained to Fiocca about his behavior, Gahagan said, it was the journeymen who were reprimanded at the union hall, and made to apologize to Fiocca for the way they talked to him.

Greg Fiocca’s bosses at the Live! Casino job appeared to take an inordinate interest in monitoring his whereabouts at all times during the workday, said James Gordon, a longtime Local 98 electrician who worked alongside John Dougherty’s nephew during the project.

Under cross-examination from Fiocca’s attorney Rocco Cipparone, Gorman acknowledged that level of scrutiny was unusual — and started from the day he and Fiocca were assigned to work together on security systems and lighting in the casino’s garage.

They were “definitely checking up to see when he was there and when he wasn’t,” Gorman said as Cipparone walked him through several text messages Gorman received from site bosses asking whether Fiocca was with him during various points in the project.

The jury’s back in the box, and the trial’s third day has officially begun.

On the witness stand is James Gorman, a longtime Local 98 electrician who worked with Greg Fiocca at the Live! Casino project in 2020 that is at the center of the case. He described Fiocca as frequently absent and increasingly upset when he learned his bosses were going to start docking his pay.

Fiocca’s attorney, Rocco Cipparone Jr., will start off the day by cross-examining Gorman.

Unlike John Dougherty’s two earlier trials — both of which played out at the federal courthouse in Center City — his third will take place in Reading, starting with opening arguments there Wednesday, once jury selection in Philadelphia is done.

U.S. District Judge Jeffrey L. Schmehl, who has presided over all of Dougherty’s recent legal matters, is normally stationed at the small federal courthouse in downtown Reading.

He was randomly assigned to the case when Dougherty was indicted on bribery and embezzlement charges in 2019, and has traveled to Philadelphia for both of Dougherty’s weeks-long trials on those charges.

John Dougherty, widely known as “Johnny Doc,” was once considered the most powerful union leader in the state, transforming Local 98 in his three decades at its helm into a powerhouse in the arenas of politics and organized labor.

Under his oversight, union money and manpower helped elect governors, members of Congress, mayors, judges, and members of City Council, and his once sleepy electrician’s union became a force capable of extracting significant labor concessions from some of the largest companies in the region.

But in recent years, Dougherty’s legacy has suffered a series of significant blows. He was forced to resign his post — as well as his leadership of the Philadelphia Building Trades Council, an umbrella group of building trades unions — after his 2021 conviction on bribery charges involving City Councilmember Bobby Henon. A separate jury convicted Dougherty last year on charges that he and six others stole more than $600,000 from their union.

For a third time in as many years, John Dougherty is facing a federal felony trial — this time on conspiracy and extortion charges.

The former labor leader and his nephew, Greg Fiocca, are accused of threatening a contractor and a job site manager amid a dispute over Fiocca’s poor job performance and pay. Prosecutors say that while working on construction of the Live! Casino in South Philadelphia in 2020, Fiocca assaulted his supervisor and that Dougherty later threatened the block the contractor’s ability to land future work in Philadelphia.

But defense attorneys maintain the government has blown the argument out of proportion, turning what amounted to little more than a fistfight during a heated moment into a federal case. Dougherty, they contend, was simply doing his job: advocating on behalf of a member of Local 98 of the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers, the union he led for nearly 30 years.