Feds haven’t decided whether to retry John Dougherty after his extortion case ends with a hung jury and mistrial

READING — Federal prosecutors on Friday said they had not yet made a decision on whether to retry former labor leader John Dougherty and his nephew on extortion charges, a day after their case ended in a hung jury and mistrial after a single, marathon day of deliberations.

U.S. District Judge Jeffrey L. Schmehl declared the jury hopelessly deadlocked following roughly 11 hours of jury discussion Thursday, two notes from the panel indicating that debate had reached a stalemate, and individual polling of jurors who all said that, despite their disagreements over the case, they could at least concur on one thing: Further deliberations would prove fruitless.

“The court believes that based on these responses that [the jury] cannot agree,” Schmehl said, just before 10 p.m. “This court will have to declare a mistrial by manifest necessity.”

With that note, the third felony trial in as many years for Dougherty, a leader once viewed as a one-man force of nature in Philadelphia politics and organized labor, ended in ambiguity.

» READ MORE: A judge has declared a mistrial in John Dougherty’s extortion trial. What happens now?

Dougherty — who spent his 64th birthday waiting for the jury’s decision — showed little emotion as it became clear that no verdict would be coming. He allowed only a small smile to flash across his face as members of the panel trudged silently out of the courtroom.

“I’m going home to spend the last two hours of my birthday with my wife,” he said, as he left later with his family and his lawyer.

» READ MORE: As it happened: Mistrial for ex-Local 98 leader John Dougherty, nephew as jury deadlocks on extortion charges

It was not immediately clear what issue left jurors mired in deadlock or how the deliberations split. Court security escorted the six women and six men out of the building Thursday night, and they could not be reached for comment later.

Still, defense lawyers were ready to declare victory — or at least a measure of vindication — in the outcome of his latest case.

“We appreciate the jury’s hard work, appreciate the judge’s fair-handed manner,” Dougherty’s attorney Greg Pagano said. “I believe that John acted lawfully … and he did not have any criminal intentions whatsoever.”

Rocco Cipparone, the attorney for Dougherty’s nephew and codefendant, Greg Fiocca, said he’d hoped for an outright acquittal but added: “We’ll take the hung jury at this stage … For now, we’re happy with the result.”

The inconclusive send-off capped an eight-day trial that had threatened to further erode, after two previous losses in court, Dougherty’s legacy of nearly three decades at the helm of the state’s most powerful labor union — Local 98 of the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers — and his tenure as a political kingmaker in the city.

The jury’s indecision also delivered a setback to the U.S. Attorney’s Office, which had secured those earlier guilty verdicts during Dougherty’s 2021 bribery trial alongside then-Philadelphia City Councilmember Bobby Henon and an embezzlement case last year, in which the union leader and five others were convicted of siphoning hundreds of thousands of dollars from the union coffers. A spokesperson for the office declined to comment on the mistrial Friday.

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

Still, Dougherty’s days in a federal courtroom aren’t over just yet. Schmehl on Friday set aside time in late June should prosecutors opt to retry the extortion case, and no matter what they decide, he still faces the likelihood of a significant prison term when he’s scheduled for sentencing in the two previous cases on July 11.

Unlike those earlier trials — which featured dozens of witnesses, involved multiple yearslong criminal schemes, and played out over weeks of testimony — this one proved to be a much more contained affair.

It centered on the events of a single day — Aug. 19, 2020 — and a conflict between Fiocca and a contractor who’d hired him along with roughly six dozen other Local 98 members at the then-under-construction Live! Casino and Hotel in South Philadelphia.

Fiocca’s bosses told jurors he often failed to complete assigned tasks and frequently disappeared during working hours. But Dougherty’s nephew maintained that, as Local 98’s appointed steward on site, he was constantly busy attending to the needs of his union’s members. That role, Fiocca’s lawyer said, became all the more demanding as the casino construction project played out during the early days of the coronavirus pandemic.

So, when contractor Ray Palmieri and project manager Rich Gibson docked Fiocca’s pay under the belief he wasn’t working, their decision sent him into a rage.

Jurors heard secretly recorded audio of an explosive confrontation, in which Fiocca slapped Gibson, choked him, threw him onto a table and spit on him twice after learning his pay had been cut.

“Next time this happens again, it’s not going to be no little f— push,” Fiocca shouted at his supervisor in a tirade caught on tape. “There’s no cameras in here. It’s your word against mine.”

When Dougherty found out about the job site skirmish, he took his nephew’s side.

Palmieri and Gibson demanded Fiocca’s removal from the project. Dougherty, a union foreman testified last week, considered pulling all Local 98 electricians from the construction and said he wouldn’t support efforts by Palmieri to land future work in the city unless his nephew remained on the job.

Though Dougherty never followed through on those threats, prosecutors maintained that the union leader’s words still had an effect.

“Ray Palmieri paid Gregory Fiocca because he was afraid what would happen to his company and his employees if he did not,” Assistant U.S. Attorney Frank Costello said during closing arguments Wednesday.

But throughout the trial, defense lawyers insisted Dougherty never intended to threaten anyone. They accused prosecutors of attempting to turn what amounted to a fistfight into a federal crime.

Cipparone urged jurors this week not to allow his client’s profanity-laced outburst during the 2020 assault to influence their view of the case.

“Just listening to those snippets doesn’t represent the real Greg Fiocca,” he said Thursday night, “and I’m glad that at least some of the jurors were able to look past that.”

Dougherty, meanwhile, maintained that in fighting to protect his nephew’s job, he was doing what he would have done for any other member of his union involved in a pay dispute. What the government described as extortionate threats, his attorney, Pagano, dismissed as “angry words.”

Though it remained unclear Thursday how much sway that argument had during the jurors’ deliberations, a potentially telling question they asked toward the end of the evening might have offered a clue.

Just after 7:30 p.m., jurors pressed the judge to further explain a legal defense, recognized by a 1973 U.S. Supreme Court ruling, that allows union officials to deploy threats of economic harm or force as a negotiating tool to achieve legitimate union objectives.

While Pagano maintained that’s exactly what Dougherty was doing in his efforts to secure Fiocca’s wages from Palmieri — fighting to ensure a member of his union was fairly paid — prosecutors contend he was looking out only for his nephew to the detriment of other members of Local 98 who would have been pulled off the job.

But no matter what Dougherty said in the heat of the moment in his discussions with Palmieri that day, the labor leader insisted he would never have done anything to impede the casino project’s progress. Dougherty, his attorney told jurors, had worked tirelessly to reopen the construction site in the spring of 2020 and get his members back to work after government-ordered pandemic shutdowns had crippled the construction industry.

“There’s no way John Dougherty — not in a million years — would have shut down this job,” Pagano said. “And Ray Palmieri knew that.”