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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

There are few things about the 2020 job site skirmish that has landed former labor leader John Dougherty back in court on which prosecutors and defense attorneys can agree.

On Aug. 19 of that year, Greg Fiocca — Dougherty’s nephew and a union electrician working on the then-under-construction Live! Casino in South Philadelphia — confronted his supervisor in a dispute over pay. Dougherty took his nephew’s side.

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.