An FBI informant in Johnny Doc’s inner circle didn’t violate his right to fair trial, judge says

The FBI’s use of an informant to secretly record John J. Dougherty in the run-up to and during his 2021 bribery trial did not violate the former labor leader’s rights and doesn’t warrant the overturning of his conviction or dismissal of the remaining cases he faces, a federal judge has ruled.

U.S. District Judge Jeffrey L. Schmehl rejected Dougherty’s argument that the mole within his union — Local 98 of the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers — had passed on information central to his defense to the prosecution.

Instead, the judge concluded, much of what the informant recorded in more than 30 conversations between 2019 and 2021 — what Dougherty had flagged as “confidential defense strategy” — was already known to government lawyers and had been openly discussed in union meetings.

“These were union meetings whose purpose was to address union business — not the charges and trials arising from this case,” Schmehl wrote in a 19-page opinion filed this week. “Concluding that these meetings constituted a defense camp would strain the natural and legal understanding of that phrase.”

The judge’s decision undercuts one of the primary arguments Dougherty has advanced in his efforts to overturn the verdict in the bribery case that ended his nearly three-decade career as head of the politically powerful Local 98 of the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers and sent former Philadelphia City Councilmember Bobby Henon to prison.

It also clears the way for Dougherty, 63, to stand trial on the two remaining sets of charges prosecutors have filed against him, including a case alleging he and others embezzled more than $600,000 from their union, which is slated to be argued in front of a jury in October.

Dougherty’s lawyer, Greg Pagano, declined to comment on Schmehl’s decision Tuesday. He is the latest in a string of lawyers who have signed on to represent the labor leader and has spent the last four months attempting to ready himself for the fall trial date.

Prosecutors, meanwhile, have closely guarded the informant’s identity both from Dougherty and the public but have maintained that the ex-union chief’s assumptions about what their inside man was up to are off base.

Assistant U.S. Attorney Frank Costello told Schmehl that prosecutors took appropriate steps to ensure the informant steered clear of any conversation that might relate to Dougherty’s trial defense and set up what’s known as a “filter team” of agents and lawyers unaffiliated with the case to screen out any confidential information that the mole might have accidentally recorded.

At a court hearing last year, Jason Blake, the FBI’s lead investigator, testified that the informant approached agents in the summer of 2020 out of concern over Dougherty’s rhetoric after his 2019 indictment and handed over several recordings he’d made on his own of the union chief addressing Local 98 leaders.

Those included one of a November 2019 meeting in which Dougherty had urged any Local 98 member who might be considering betraying him and cooperating with the feds to kill themselves.

“I’m going to make sure everybody, everywhere — everybody at your kids’ school — knows that you’re a punk and a rat and a creep,” Dougherty said on the tape. “Your kids don’t want to grow up knowing your daddy’s a rat, daddy’s a punk.”

Dougherty continued, warning that death might be a better option than waiting to incur his wrath: “Go right to the bridge. Jump right off the bridge. Make it easy.”

» READ MORE: An FBI informant recorded Johnny Doc threatening ‘rats.’ His lawyers say that violated his rights.

Though recording someone outside of a law enforcement investigation without their consent is a crime in Pennsylvania, the FBI, based on those tapes, enlisted the cooperator to begin working as an official confidential informant out of concern that statements such as those were an attempt by Dougherty to intimidate witnesses in the case against him, Blake said.

And for the next several months, the informant continued to record Dougherty at union meetings up to and throughout his 2021 trial. The labor leader learned of the mole’s existence only after his conviction and as he prepared for a second trial on extortion charges related to threats he allegedly made to a union contractor who tried to fire his nephew.

Dougherty’s lawyers at the time contended that secretly recording a defendant preparing to present his case to a jury was not just unusual, it was downright illegal, constituting a violation of Dougherty’s right to a fair trial.

In his ruling this week, Schmehl disagreed.

The judge, who reviewed transcripts of all the recordings, concluded that the filter team set up by prosecutors had worked as designed. And while Dougherty had flagged several recorded conversations in which he claimed he was discussing his defense, Schmehl concluded the examples he flagged hardly amounted to trial strategy.

For instance, in an October 2019 tape, Dougherty balks at the government’s accusation that he and other union leaders misspent more than a half-million dollars of union money on themselves and their friends and family. He flagged one example in which he bought tickets to the Philadelphia Flower Show for a Democratic committeeperson — a move he described at the meeting as an attempt to build social relationships that could benefit his union and its members.

“They say, ‘Well, why are you paying union resources to go pick up flower show tickets?’” Dougherty said during the meeting. “They don’t understand that. I’m in trouble for Flower Show tickets.”

Dougherty insisted in another meeting in November 2021 that any personal purchases he made with union funds were far outweighed by the money he routinely spent on union business but forgot to expense.

“The union will owe me money,” he said, “when they realize all the pay I didn’t take.”

While Dougherty might be planning to present a similar argument to a jury — that any Local 98 money he may have misspent was unintentional — broad mentions of that claim don’t constitute a confidential discussion of trial strategy, Schmehl concluded in his ruling this week.

“The statements by Mr. Dougherty merely reflect that he was busy, felt underpaid and was occasionally frustrated by [Local 98′s] informal reimbursement process,” the judge wrote. “Not that the centerpiece of his defense to embezzlement charges would be lack of criminal intent.”

Dougherty is set to stand trial on the embezzlement charges along with former Local 98 President Brian Burrows in October. No date has been scheduled for his extortion trial.

He faces up to 20 years in prison on the most serious count on which he was convicted in the bribery case. Schmehl has said he intends to schedule a sentencing hearing after the two other sets of charges are resolved.