The FBI has an informant in John Dougherty’s inner circle. The ex-union chief wants to know who it is.

For at least three months in the summer of 2020, someone was recording John J. Dougherty’s conversations — and, this time, it wasn’t the FBI.

In a new court filing, Dougherty’s lawyers revealed that federal investigators succeeded in turning a member of the labor leader’s notoriously tight-knit inner circle into a confidential informant who recorded discussions between him and business agents in his union, the politically powerful Local 98 of the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers.

Prosecutors have closely guarded details about the cooperator and the extent of his contact with the FBI. His identity remains unknown to Dougherty, his defense, and his roughly 4,700-member union, his lawyers said.

But Dougherty, who resigned his post as Local 98′s business manager after he was found guilty of federal bribery charges last year, now argues that the government’s secret, highly placed mole may have jeopardized his right to a fair trial.

“Mr. Dougherty was heavily engaged in trial preparations” at the time of the informant was recording him, his attorney Henry E. Hockeimer Jr. wrote in the recent filing. He “was routinely communicating with members of the union, particularly business agents [and their lawyers,] to prepare his defense.”

If any of that talk got back to prosecutors, Hockeimer maintains, his client’s entire trial could have been tainted.

But the fact that federal agents have cultivated an inside source in Local 98′s upper echelons is striking.

Despite pursuing Dougherty in various federal investigations stretching back more than a decade, investigators have routinely described his core group of trusted union leaders and advisers as nearly impossible to penetrate.

In a 2015 court application to tap Dougherty’s phones, FBI agents detailed a series of other investigative efforts they’d undertaken over the years — including attempts to insinuate an undercover agent into Local 98′s ranks or to turn high-ranking members. In each case, their efforts were stymied by the union chief’s cautiousness.

Even efforts to covertly dig through Dougherty’s trash proved unsuccessful, the affidavit said, noting that Dougherty has his waste removed from his South Philadelphia home on a near-daily basis and taken to a Dumpster at Local 98′s Spring Garden headquarters — one locked behind a fence and monitored by security cameras.

Prosecutors have not disclosed how their new informant began sharing information with the FBI. His existence was publicly revealed for the first time earlier this month in motions filed in advance of Dougherty’s second trial, scheduled to begin May 5.

In that case, the former union chief is accused of threatening a union contractor mired in a payment dispute with Dougherty’s nephew, Gregory Fiocca.

Prosecutors say Dougherty vowed to prevent the contractor — Raymond Palmieri of R. Palmieri Electrical Contractors Inc. — from getting future electrical work in the city if he refused to continue paying Fiocca, who had assaulted his project manager during an argument over job performance during construction of the Live! Casino Hotel in South Philadelphia in August 2020.

The manager, a fellow member of Local 98 whom prosecutors have not publicly named, has said Fiocca grabbed him by the throat, threw him across a desk and threatened to “break his [expletive] face” if he did not pay him in full for a job he rarely showed up for.

Five days after that incident, Dougherty addressed the situation during an hour-long conference call with Local 98′s business agents and other members of the union’s support staff in which he argued that Fiocca was not to blame for the dispute and said it was an attempt by Palmieri’s company and the project manager to cheat his nephew out of pay he had earned.

The government’s informant was recording the conversation.

“We weren’t down there to make kumbaya,” Dougherty told the others on the Aug. 24 call. “F — kumbaya.”

Prosecutors say they intend to use that recording against Dougherty and Fiocca at trial and have characterized the union chief’s statements as an attempt to discourage anyone inside Local 98 from challenging or even questioning his decision to allow Fiocca to remain on the job site.

“Rather than acknowledge that Fiocca was responsible for assaulting a fellow member of Local 98, whose interests Dougherty was supposed to protect, Dougherty criticized the business agents for not protecting his nephew,” Assistant U.S. Attorneys Jason Grenell and Frank R. Costello Jr. wrote in a court filing earlier this month.

But news of the recording’s existence and the feds’ disclosure of its source — revealed to Dougherty’s defense team in March of this year — has set off a wave of paranoia and second-guessing within the union.

Several union officials contacted by The Inquirer earlier this week said that while they might have their suspicions, they do not know who made the recording.

Prosecutors have revealed that the informant began working with the FBI roughly two months before the Aug. 24, 2020, conference call — but have refused to say much else, including how long that work continued or whether he continues to provide information to investigators.

Earlier this month, Hockeimer asked U.S. District Judge Jeffrey L. Schmehl, the judge overseeing Dougherty’s cases, to compel the government to disclose the informant’s identity and described the timing of his work with the FBI troublesome.

Since Dougherty and five other union officials were indicted on bribery and embezzlement charges in 2019, they and their lawyers have largely worked together on a joint defense strategy and openly shared information among themselves and other members of their inner circle.

But according to the government’s timeline, the informant began sharing information with the FBI more than a year after the first indictment and months before the job site assault that led to the extortion charges against Dougherty and Fiocca.

“It is unclear why a confidential informant would … be necessary at such a belated point in the government’s investigation,” Hockeimer wrote in a motion filed earlier this month. “The timing and only recent disclosure of the confidential informant’s existence render the government’s decision to utilize such an investigatory tool even more concerning.”

Prosecutors say they’re not inclined to say any more.

They are not planning to call the informant as a witness at Dougherty and Fiocca’s trial and took precautions to ensure that even if the informant was privy to information about Dougherty’s trial defense strategy, prosecutors wouldn’t hear about it, they said in court papers Monday.

All of the informant’s information, they said, was subjected to a process known as “taint review,” in which a prosecutor or agent uninvolved with the case prescreened the evidence to remove confidential information like discussions of legal matters or advice from defense lawyers that would be subject to attorney-client privilege — before it was passed on to those handling the prosecution.

“The prosecution team did not obtain any information concerning confidential defense strategy or conversations between [Dougherty] and his counsel expected to be confidential,” Costello wrote. We “took steps … to make sure that did not happen.”

Dougherty and Fiocca each face 19 counts of conspiracy and extortion, each carrying a prison sentence of up to 20 years.

Dougherty, meanwhile, still awaits sentencing for his earlier conviction on federal bribery charges involving former Philadelphia City Councilman Bobby Henon. He also faces a third trial this fall with his five Local 98 codefendants on charges they embezzled more than $600,000 from Local 98 between 2010 and 2016.