From snow removal to trips to yoga, Johnny Doc kept Local 98 staffers busy working for his family and friends, trial witnesses say
Prosecutors shifted their focus Tuesday to what they describe as another aspect of Dougherty's graft: using union money and manpower to dispense with personal chores.
The blizzard that hit Philadelphia on Jan. 22, 2016 — a punishing storm that dumped more than 20 inches on the city — was brutal.
But for friends of Local 98 of the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers, the cost of removing all that snow was not.
Pennsylvania Supreme Court Justice Kevin Dougherty, then-City Councilmember Bobby Henon, several ward leaders, and John McNesby, head of the city’s police union, all had their sidewalks and driveways professionally shoveled the next day at no cost — courtesy of the Local 98′s longtime leader John Dougherty.
Yet, he didn’t foot the bill either, federal prosecutors said Tuesday. He paid for it, they said, with $1,500 taken from his union’s general fund.
“Just give me the bill,” Dougherty told Brian Eddis, the Local 98 political staffer who organized the snow-shoveling effort, in a phone call caught on an FBI wiretap the night of the storm. “Anybody we gotta take care of.”
Jurors heard that recording as the government closed out the third week of its embezzlement case against Dougherty, who stands accused of skimming, along with others, more than $600,000 from union coffers between 2013 and 2016.
But while most of the testimony so far has focused on pricey dinners, home renovations, and thousands of dollars’ worth of groceries and goods the labor leader purportedly bought on Local 98′s dime, prosecutors shifted their focus Tuesday to what they describe as another aspect of his graft: using union money and manpower to dispense with personal chores.
“Did John Dougherty have Local 98 employees running personal errands for him while they were on the clock?” Assistant U.S. Attorney Bea Witzleben asked as she questioned Special Agent Jason Blake, the FBI’s lead investigator on the case.
Blake responded with a resounding yes.
From picking up groceries and dropping off dry cleaning to gassing up his father’s car or driving his wife, Cecelia, to yoga, the agent said, seemingly no task was too small for Dougherty to hesitate before delegating it to Local 98 staffers.
The bulk of those chores, the agent told jurors, was carried out by three Local 98 employees in their 20s known within the union as “the kids.”
Dougherty’s nephew Brian Fiocca, Niko Rodriguez, and Tommy Rodriguez — who is not related to Niko but is the son of Local 98′s former political director Marita Crawford — all had official titles in the union office and, collectively, took home more salaries totaling more than $494,600 between 2015 and 2016, according to U.S. Department of Labor records.
» READ MORE: Who’s who in former labor leader John Dougherty’s second trial
But phone calls and text messages shown in court Tuesday demonstrated that Dougherty ate up most of their working hours with his near constant personal requests.
“1 pm Celie needs a pickup,” the union chief texted Niko Rodriguez in July 2015, after his wife called to tell him she needed a ride.
After the 2016 Mummers Parade in January, Dougherty called on Tommy Rodriguez to clean up around Doc’s Union Pub, the Pennsport bar in which he held a financial stake.
But first, the labor leader directed the young staffer, make a pit stop at Dougherty’s home to take down and dispose of his Christmas tree.
“He had them doing shopping for personal goods … had them driv[ing] family members to personal appointments. There was snow removal,” Blake told jurors. “He had them cleaning yards[,] doing maintenance work[, and] removing trash on a weekly basis from his personal home.”
He called on “the kids” during vacations, Blake continued, instructing them one year to cart flat-screen TVs from his home in Pennsport to replace clunkier models at a Shore house his family was renting in Ocean City.
Dougherty even instructed Niko Rodriguez to place near daily sports bets on his behalf with a South Philly bookie they referred to in phone calls and texts as “the guy on Passyunk.”
Defense lawyer Greg Pagano sought to justify those demands on “the kids” by noting that leading his union kept Dougherty extremely busy.
“He was out working on all of those days, correct?” he challenged Blake, during cross-examination. “Even when he was at the Shore, he was working.”
As for the cleanup after the January 2016 blizzard, Pagano stressed that no government witnesses could rule out that Local 98 employees hadn’t benefited from the union-paid snow shoveling services, too.
Michael Monteleone, the then-high school student whom the union paid to clear those sidewalks and driveways, testified he didn’t know who lived at most of the homes in Northeast Philadelphia that he worked on that morning.
However, he did recognize the first driveway he cleared as that of Kevin Dougherty, the state Supreme Court justice who is also John Dougherty’s brother.
Monteleone told jurors that he’d volunteered on Kevin Dougherty’s campaign for the court the year before — an electoral victory won, in large part, through Local 98 support.
“Did any of those people pay you?” Assistant U.S. Attorney Jason Grenell asked the snow shoveler Tuesday. “Did any of those people ask for a bill.”
Monteleone said they hadn’t, adding that he wasn’t even sure Kevin Dougherty was awake when he finished his house at 4 a.m. that morning.
For his own part, the justice — through his lawyer, Courtney Saleski — has denied ever knowingly accepting any union-paid perks from his brother.
“The justice and his neighbors,” she said in a statement sent to The Inquirer at the start of the start of the trial, “shovel their own snow.”
Testimony in the case is expected to resume Monday.