Lawyer grills project manager who recorded fight with Johnny Doc's nephew: Didn't 'stop you from getting beat up'

Defense lawyers concede that the tone of a secretly recorded 2020 confrontation between Greg Fiocca, nephew of Philadelphia labor leader John Dougherty, and a supervisor on the site of the then-under-construction Live! Hotel and Casino in South Philadelphia was “horrible.”

The tape, played for a federal jury this week, features Fiocca flying into a profanity-laced rage, muffled sounds of him choking, slapping, and spitting on his boss, and his heated and repeated threats to call his uncle or pull all their union’s workers off the job.

With that, court has recessed for the weekend, and the jury has been sent home. Testimony is expected to resume Monday morning, as prosecutors continue to question Fran Rothwein on the stand.

Before breaking for the day, U.S. District Judge Jeffrey L. Schmehl indicated that there’s a “possibility” that things could wrap Tuesday — or “sometime next week.”

Prosecutors next called Fran Rothwein, a longtime Local 98 electrician, and one of Greg Fiocca’s foremen at the Live! Casino construction project.

Rothwein, whose name and text messages have been peppered throughout the trial thus far, recounted for the jury Fiocca’s patchy attendance record at the construction site, beginning in 2019. And he recalled “a number” of meetings between the site’s supervisors and the Local 98 business agent over discrepancies in Fiocca’s hours.

Next on the stand: Philadelphia Police Officer Guillermo Torres, an 18-year veteran of the force, and the officer who responded to Rich Gibson’s 911 call.

Reflecting back to the morning of Aug. 19, 2020, Torres recounted his recollection of events. He received a radio call for a disturbance at the casino construction site, he said, where a verbal altercation between two men had “gotten physical.”

With Rich Gibson still on the stand, jurors heard the 911 call he made in the aftermath of the altercation with Greg Fiocca.

“I wanted to see if an officer could come down. I was assaulted,” Gibson told the dispatcher around 9 a.m. on Aug. 19, 2020.

Greg Fiocca’s attorney, Rocco Cipparone Jr., spent the rest of the morning cross-examining Rich Gibson, suggesting the project manager had unfairly singled out and scrutinized his client on the job, seeking to bolster his argument that Fiocca’s recorded outburst in August 2020 was the result of months of unfair treatment and previously slashed wages.

The project manager conceded he used an “eyeball system,” as Cipparone put it, to see who was on the job at the site of the casino construction, rather than a time clock or formal tracking measure. That was standard procedure, Gibson said, for the electricians to check in with their foreman at work, and that supervisor to report to Gibson whether they had shown up.

As questioning by prosecutors continued, Rich Gibson told jurors he was so unnerved by the heated Aug. 19, 2020 altercation he had with Greg Fiocca that he called police, largely avoided the man in the months that followed, and worried Fiocca’s threats to pull all union electricians from construction of the Live! Casino would significantly delay completion of the job.

“That’s major when you’re talking about a casino – we have 70 people on the job,” he testified. “You just didn’t know what was going to happen.”

The jury is in the box, government witness Rich Gibson – the Live! Casino project manager who testified Greg Fiocca assaulted him during a pay dispute – is back on the witness stand, and the judge has taken the bench.

We'll start the day with prosecutors wrapping up their questioning of Gibson and the defense preparing for what should be an important cross-examination to follow.

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.

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.

Greg Fiocca, 31, is John Dougherty’s nephew and a former member of Local 98 who grew up in in Pennsport in the house next door to his uncle.

But despite Fiocca’s troubled work history, including altercations with former supervisors, Dougherty appointed him in 2020 to the plum posting as Local 98′s steward on Live! Casino’s project.

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.

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.