‘We weren’t down there to make kumbaya’: Jurors in Dougherty extortion trial hear secret recording from a mole within his ranks

READING — Five days after John Dougherty’s nephew assaulted a supervisor on a construction site prompting his bosses to demand he be booted from the job, the union leader was still seething about that request.

“I heard a little jabber-jaw down at the Shore this weekend,” Dougherty said during a meeting with roughly 30 business agents and other personnel of his union, Local 98 of the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers, in which he expressed frustration over gossip he’d heard about the dustup.

He defended his decision to keep nephew Greg Fiocca in his post as the union’s appointed steward on the then-under-construction Live! Casino and Hotel in South Philadelphia and maintained that it had nothing to do with their familial relation.

Most of all, Dougherty said, he was peeved by those who were now second guessing that choice.

“We weren’t down there to make kumbaya,” he continued. “F — kumbaya. You’re f — business agents representing the stewards who we appoint — right, wrong, or indifferent.”

Prosecutors played a secretly made recording of that Aug. 24, 2020, conversation for jurors in Dougherty’s federal extortion trial Tuesday, airing publicly for the first time what has become one of the most controversial pieces of evidence they collected in their case.

But like much in the trial so far, the import of that tape — and what Dougherty meant in his recorded statements — depended on who you asked.

» READ MORE: As it happened: Local 98 business agent details calls with John Dougherty over complaints about his nephew

Prosecutors say it shows the union chief’s willingness to defend his nephew at all costs. They’ve accused Dougherty of threatening economic repercussions for the contractor overseeing Fiocca’s work if his nephew didn’t remain on the job.

The defense, however, maintains Dougherty’s statements on the recording prove what they’ve said since the trial’s start last week: Any pressure Dougherty may have applied stemmed from his belief that the contractor was retaliating against his nephew because of his role as the union’s steward.

“If a steward is being harassed on a job site,” defense lawyer Greg Pagano mused at one point during Tuesday’s proceedings, “shouldn’t the membership back that steward up, regardless of whether it’s John’s nephew?”

But arguments over the recording, what it means, and whether it should have been played for jurors at all stretch back years.

Prosecutors have not publicly identified who made it, except to say a member of Dougherty’s inner circle secretly taped that Aug. 24, 2020, meeting and handed it over to the FBI.

Dougherty insists it’s how investigators first learned of Fiocca’s Aug. 19, 2020, assault on his casino-site boss — the conflict at the heart of the current extortion case.

More importantly, he’s maintained, the FBI’s use of an informant close to him well after he’d been indicted in 2019 on bribery and embezzlement charges constitutes a violation of his rights so severe that all of the charges against him should be thrown out.

U.S. District Judge Jeffrey Schmehl, who has presided over all three of Dougherty’s trials, settled that argument last year with his ruling that the government had not overstepped and a decision that prosecutors could play the recording during the union chief’s extortion case.

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

They did so Tuesday during testimony from Local 98 business agent Robert Thompson, whose jurisdiction included the Live! Casino site.

“He was emotional and upset,” Thompson told jurors after listening to a playback of the tape in court. “I took it for what it was. I’ve worked for him long enough to know that.”

Dougherty dispatched Thompson to the casino site shortly after learning that Fiocca had assaulted a supervisor there amid a long-running argument over frequent absences from work and the contractor’s decision to dock Fiocca’s pay.

It wasn’t the first time, Thompson said, he’d been called upon to mediate disputes between Fiocca and his bosses on various construction projects.

In fact, Thompson called Dougherty in March 2016 after Fiocca was laid off from another construction site after cursing out his supervisor on that job.

Prosecutors also played tape of that conversation, caught on an FBI wiretap, in court Tuesday.

“F— you, you f— jerkoff,” the business agent recounted Fiocca saying to his supervisor in his conversation describing the incident to Dougherty.

Eventually, the union chief vowed to look into it. In a separate call earlier that day, he’d urged Fiocca to “keep your mouth shut until the job is done.”

“Greg, you’re talking like a nitwit,” Dougherty told his nephew, as Fiocca continued to gripe about the conditions that prompted his blow-up with the supervisor. “Stop acting like the world owes us a living.”

In another phone call played Tuesday for jurors in court, Dougherty groused to others that Fiocca’s continued bad behavior was “handcuff[ing him] for no reason.”

Despite that acknowledgment of his nephew’s antics, prosecutors say Dougherty came to Fiocca’s defense and found him work somewhere else to ensure he would stay employed — just as he fought to keep him on the job after the 2020 fight at the casino construction site.

But in defense questioning of Thompson Tuesday, Dougherty’s attorneys noted that Fiocca was laid off from that 2016 job and Dougherty hadn’t stood in the way.

They’ve balked at the notion that Dougherty in 2020 would, as the government contends, have threatened to pull all union electricians from the casino construction site just to keep his nephew employed.

Due to scheduling conflicts, Schmehl, the judge, allowed the defense Tuesday to call some of its witnesses out of order while the government is still presenting its case.

They included Jack O’Neill, a former Local 98 lawyer, and Ryan Boyer, Dougherty’s successor as the head of the Philadelphia Building Trades Council, an umbrella organization of the city’s labor unions.

Both men testified that the casino project — undertaken in 2020 during the height of the coronavirus pandemic — was incredibly important to Dougherty.

The pandemic had forced a halt to construction across the state and the project was one of the first to restart — thanks in large part, Boyer said, to safety protocols that Dougherty and other heads of the building trades developed to ensure workers could do their jobs safely with minimal risk of contracting the virus.

Pulling Local 98′s members from the job site after Fiocca’s fight with his bosses would have brought all that progress to a screeching halt once again.

“It should go to John’s legacy,” Boyer told jurors, “not only all the things we did to keep our members safe but to keep construction work going. There was a lot of goodwill and a lot of coordination, and that was all led by John.

“We made it work,” he continued, “and I was proud to be part of it.”