Prosecutors are bringing receipts | Inside Johnny Doc’s Trial

Welcome back, court watchers, to the second edition of the Inside Johnny Doc’s Trial newsletter. Philly held a historic election last week, but for the first time in recent memory John Dougherty — once the state’s most politically influential union leader — sat this one out. Instead, he spent Election Day at the federal courthouse for the first full week of his embezzlement trial.

So far, the testimony has been all about receipts — and, wow, does the government have a lot of them.

Prosecutors have presented dozens of American Express credit card statements, restaurant bills with charges for pasta dishes and Grey Goose martinis, and a whole lot of union expense reports to the jury — all to support their case that Dougherty and others embezzled more than $600,000 from Local 98 of the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers, the union he led for nearly 30 years.

While prosecutors say that paper trail shows Dougherty and his codefendants selfishly dipping into Local 98′s member dues to finance their personal purchases, the defense team — led by attorney Greg Pagano — has chalked up any personal items that made their way onto the union chief’s expense reports to “an honest mistake.”

Let’s get into it.

— Jeremy Roebuck and Oona Goodin-Smith (@jeremyrroebuck, @oonagoodinsmith, insidejohnnydoc@inquirer.com)

If someone forwarded you this email, sign up for free here.

📮Do you have a question about the trial? Email us back and we might answer it in our newsletter.

💳 In their opening statement, prosecutors painted Dougherty as a fraud who routinely fleeced the union members he was elected to represent. “He stole, he lied, and no one stopped him,” Assistant U.S. Attorney Bea Witzleben said.

📝 Dougherty’s attorney pushed back, describing the former labor leader as a hardworking, magnanimous boss — even if he was at times a sloppy record keeper.

🎉 The summer of 2015 was particularly costly for the union as Dougherty hosted separate birthday bashes within weeks of each other for both his wife and his mistress at Atlantic City casinos. The total billed to Local 98 for the two events? Nearly $6,000.

🛒 Local 98′s office manager testified that she often had to hound Dougherty to explain charges on his union-issued Amex card. Sometimes, she said, he’d reimburse the union for items he flagged as personal expenses. But, she told the jury that when he said certain charges — at stores like Target or restaurant’s like South Philly’s Pietro’s — were for union business, she took him “at his word.”

As prosecutors have pursued their campaign of death by a thousand receipts — attempting to bury Dougherty under dozens of meals, shopping trips and expenses whose cost to Local 98 he now must justify — Pagano, his defense lawyer, has pursued an interesting strategy.

Rather than dispute any of the purchases in question (all documented by copious receipts and invoices, sometimes accompanied with video of the union chief at the cash register) Pagano has sought instead to convince jurors that any reimbursement Dougherty received for personal expenses was “inadvertent.”

“This is a case of negligence, not fraud,” he told jurors during his opening statement last week. “Negligence is not a crime.”

In cross-examining several early witnesses, Pagano has highlighted Dougherty’s ever-busy schedule of zipping across the state for meetings with elected and union officials to fight for the interests of Local 98′s members. Dinners, parties and shopping for family and friends were squeezed in between those work obligations, he said, posing a constant challenge for Dougherty to identify which expenses were business and which were personal when he would sit down — often months later — to reconcile the charges on his union-issued Amex.

For instance, the guest list at a nearly $4,000 July 2015 birthday dinner Dougherty hosted for Local 98′s political director Marita Crawford — with whom he’s acknowledged he was having an affair at the time — included several Local 98 officials and members and various political operatives on the union’s payroll. It occurred the same day that Dougherty had also hosted a nearby work-related outing at the Seaview Golf Club in Galloway Township.

Dougherty may have inadvertently confused the birthday dinner with that earlier union function when he billed Local 98 for the cost months later, the defense lawyer appeared to be suggesting.

That argument — that Dougherty didn’t mean to steal from his union — could gain some headway for the defense. To convict the labor leader on the indictment’s lead conspiracy charge, jurors must find that he not only committed the crime in question but also that he intended to do so.

We’ll be watching to see how that defense strategy holds up as testimony continues.

“It boils down in the end to a simple concept: You’re not allowed to take things that don’t belong to you — no matter how powerful you are.” — Assistant U.S. Attorney Bea Witzleben in her opening statement to the jury.

There have been a lot of names thrown around in the trial’s first week — perhaps none more so than a nickname given to a trio of Local 98 employees who primarily served as Dougherty’s personal assistants.

The men — referred to in the union as “the kids” — ran personal and business errands for Dougherty, driving him and other family members to meetings and appointments, dropping off dry cleaning, performing maintenance tasks around their homes, and making many a run to Target.

Prosecutors have charged two of those “kids” — Niko Rodriguez, 32, and Dougherty’s nephew, Brian Fiocca, also 32 — with spending union funds on Dougherty and themselves at the union leader’s request. They’ve also accused Dougherty of defrauding Local 98 by putting “the kids” on the payroll when they rarely did work for the union.

Their employment clearly vexed Brian Burrows, Dougherty’s codefendant and Local 98′s former president, who vented his frustration in a 2015 phone call played for jurors last week.

He called the trio’s third member — Tom Rodriguez, 28, who is not related to Niko but is Crawford’s son — “a deadbeat.”

“It’s all smoke and mirrors with them kids,” Burrows said, wondering later: “What do they do all day?”

To hear prosecutors tell it, they bought a lot of stuff — so much, in fact, that in 2014 Dougherty had the union issue him a second American Express card so they’d stop borrowing his. He handed it off to them, referring to it as “the kids’ card.”

Local 98 office manager Lisa Ketterlinus testified that she often had to badger the low-level union employees for receipts justifying the expenditures they rang up — which included items like baby wipes, pallets of water bottles, and toiletries. Prosecutors say sometimes those purchases were for Dougherty and his family, sometimes they were shopping for themselves.

Dougherty maintains Niko Rodriguez and Fiocca were buying things without his knowledge. And he put the kibosh on “the kids’ card” altogether, 18 months after he gave it to them.

Niko Rodriguez and Fiocca have since pleaded guilty to several counts each of embezzling from a labor union and face sentencing after the trial ends. Prosecutors opted not to charge Tom Rodriguez.

👨‍⚖️ Sidebar: The two Rodriguezes were also involved, along with Dougherty, in a 2014 brawl at Third and Reed Streets that caught the attention of law enforcement. The trio scrapped with nonunion contractors in a job-site dispute. Punches were thrown, but no one was ever charged. Still, during Dougherty’s first trial in 2021, prosecutors cited the caught-on-camera melee to argue that the labor leader is a danger to the community and should be taken into custody. A judge denied that request.

We weren’t the only ones to notice how odd it felt to have an Election Day without John Dougherty rubbing elbows with the usual crowd of Philly politicos at spots like Famous 4th Street Deli, Relish, or South Jazz Kitchen. Philadelphia Magazine features editor Bradford Pearson (@BradfordPearson) captured the moment Dougherty left court Tuesday, just hours before the polls closed.

But last week showed that Dougherty’s legal woes have not weakened the political power of the Philadelphia building trades, our colleague Chris Brennan writes.

We’re back in court after a three-day weekend (thank you to our veterans), and will pick up this morning with IRS investigator Laura Capra on the witness stand. Expect more cash register videos. Expect more talk of Target shopping sprees. And expect a lot more receipts. You can follow along with our live updates and daily coverage.

👋 We’ll see you here again next week.

By submitting your written, visual, and/or audio contributions, you agree to The Inquirer’s Terms of Use, including the grant of rights in Section 10.