Ex-Comcast executive’s testimony about Dougherty’s secret meeting differs with former Henon staffer’s account
Differing accounts of a secret 2015 meeting between Comcast executives and labor leader John Dougherty have emerged in his bribery trial.
The federal corruption trial of John Dougherty, a labor leader known widely as “Johnny Doc,” and City Councilmember Bobby Henon continues Wednesday, the eleventh day of the trial.
Prosecutors claim that Dougherty essentially bought himself a councilmember by continuing to pay Henon for a Local 98 job after his election, and in exchange, Henon allowed Dougherty to control his vote. Dougherty and Henon have denied the charges, which include conspiracy and honest services fraud.
On Wednesday, a former Comcast executive testified about a secret meeting involving Dougherty. But her account differed sharply from the testimony offered Tuesday by a former top staffer to Henon.
Learn more about the case and the Philly political players and groups likely to come up during the trial, or catch up with day-by-day recaps of what’s happened so far.
The federal corruption trial of John Dougherty, a labor leader known widely as “Johnny Doc,” and City Councilmember Bobby Henon continues Wednesday, the eleventh day of the trial.
Prosecutors claim that Dougherty essentially bought himself a councilmember by continuing to pay Henon for a Local 98 job after his election, and in exchange, Henon allowed Dougherty to control his vote. Dougherty and Henon have denied the charges, which include conspiracy and honest services fraud.
On Wednesday, a former Comcast executive testified about a secret meeting involving Dougherty. But her account differed sharply from the testimony offered Tuesday by a former top staffer to Henon.
Learn more about the case and the Philly political players and groups likely to come up during the trial, or catch up with day-by-day recaps of what’s happened so far.
Recap: John Dougherty was ‘cordial,’ an ex-Comcast VP testified. But wiretaps reveal his harsh words for the ‘greedy’ cable giant.
A day after a former City Council aide told a federal jury about a tense meeting in which labor leader John Dougherty pressured Comcast executives into a secret side deal amid the city’s 2015 franchise renegotiation with the cable giant, a former vice president for the company offered a vastly different account of those talks.
Testifying for the prosecution Wednesday, Kathleen Sullivan, who was then Comcast’s vice president for government affairs, described that closed-door session with Dougherty as “cordial.”
And while she agreed the meeting had occurred outside of the public legislative process and that she left under the impression City Council wouldn’t approve the franchise bill until Dougherty’s requests for more union work had been resolved, she said she did not feel as if she had been delivered an ultimatum.
“It wasn’t like a demand,” she said. “Not ‘we need this, or else.’”
— Jeremy Roebuck and Oona Goodin-Smith
Prosecutors play more wiretapped calls of Dougherty discussing tactics for Comcast negotiations
Before jurors were released for a long weekend, they heard more wiretaps from Dougherty’s phone in the month surrounding City Council’s 2015 vote on the high-stakes Comcast franchise renegotiations, providing insight into the labor leader’s focus on getting the cable giant to agree to using union labor and threatening to delay the Council’s December vote to turn up the heat on the firm as an end-of-year deadline ticked closer.
“People hate Comcast. So if they’re not going to give us anything that we want, I’m not going to deal with them,” Dougherty told Henon in a call on the eve of a committee hearing on the deal.
In multiple phone conversations played in court, Dougherty boasted about Philadelphia’s 1999 Comcast negotiations, when he said he won a 10-4 vote for a franchise agreement favorable to the Building Trades Council after months of delay.
Earlier in the day, current and former Comcast employees testified about a “handshake” agreement Dougherty had with Comcast in 1999, which required the firm to use union contractors that paid prevailing wages on commercial trade buildings and public right-of-way work in a portion of Center City.
Comcast’s lead negotiator in 1999, Dougherty said in a call with a Local 98 employee, “went from not acknowledging I even existed to coming to [union headquarters at] 17th and Spring Garden … asking ‘how do we have a sidebar?’”
He repeated the story in a call with Henon as the two discussed an impending committee hearing. “I don’t even know what the legislative process is,” Dougherty said, suggesting the councilmember end the scheduled hearing early without a vote, saying “there are way too many loose ends,” and providing Dougherty more time to lobby.
“We held them up and the last time and they gave right up — after they were arrogant as can be,” Dougherty said. “They can’t afford to be held up in their own town.”
Testimony — including cross-examination on the calls from Dougherty and Henon’s defense attorneys — is expected to resume Monday morning.
WHY IT MATTERS: Prosecutors have alleged Dougherty had Henon threaten to hold up the Council vote on the renegotiation of Comcast’s franchise agreement in December 2015 unless the firm agreed to hire one of Dougherty’s favored union contractors for electrical work.
— Oona Goodin-Smith
In wiretapped recording, Dougherty called Comcast execs ‘greedy’ and ‘no good’
Earlier in the day, Kathleen Sullivan, a former vice president for Comcast, described her side negotiations with Dougherty amid the 2015 public debate over the cable giant’s franchise agreement with the city as “cordial.” She and Dougherty, she said, were on “friendly” terms.
But wiretap recordings played for jurors this afternoon revealed what Dougherty really thought of Sullivan and her colleagues.
“I think they’re greedy no-good motherf—s. I think they f—the s— out of everybody,” he said of Comcast on a call with Henon in the days before meeting with company executives.
Of Sullivan, specifically, Dougherty described her as “a nice girl” but ultimately dismissed her as “worthless” in a separate call with the councilmember from a few weeks earlier. But throughout his phone conversations spanning the month leading up to City Council’s vote on the final franchise bill, Dougherty’s intentions were made abundantly clear — forcing the cable giant to live up to its previous commitments to pay union wages for work within commercial buildings in Center City and send more work to union contractors.
He hoped to maneuver the company into agreeing to stop using a non-union contractor that he believed was encroaching on unionized territory. And, as Dougherty said again and again in the wiretap recordings Wednesday, he saw Henon as his opportunity to get what he wanted. As the chair of City Council’s Public Property Committee, Henon was overseeing the franchise renegotiation process and introduced the bill codifying the city’s final agreement with the company.
“We’ve got to send a message across the bow,” Dougherty told Henon in a call in early October 2015, as negotiations were heating up. Comcast’s executive vice president David L. Cohen, Dougherty said, “is already feeling the heat.” A month into the talks, Dougherty further pressed his case, urging Henon to take a firmer stance. “You’re dealing with a f—g machine and they’ll f—g kill us,” he said. “You got them by the balls here. [I] wouldn’t give them everything. Everything you want, I’d get.”
But privately, Dougherty groused to others that he worried Henon wasn’t pushing his union’s interests hard enough in the negotiations. “I told Bobby … that the only thing I needed was [him] on [the] Public Property [committee] and the only thing I needed was to hold up Comcast,” he told a Local 98 lobbyist in the days before a key committee vote on the franchise bill. “It’s the only time I ever called him for anything I wanted.”
— Jeremy Roebuck
Defense pushes back on contractor hiring assertion
Prosecutors have alleged John Dougherty had Bobby Henon threaten to hold up the down-to-the-wire Council vote on the renegotiation of Comcast’s franchise agreement in December 2015 unless the firm agreed to hire MJK for electrical work. During cross-examination Wednesday, Dougherty’s attorney, Henry E. Hockeimer, Jr., pushed back against the assertions.
”So none of your bosses said, ‘You must hire MJK?’” he asked Patrick Moser. Moser, the former senior director of construction for Comcast, said, “No sir.”
“Mr. Henon never said, ‘You must hire MJK?’” Hockeimer pressed, which Moser again refuted.
”Mr. Dougherty never said, ‘You must hire MJK?’” Hockeimer asked.
”Never spoke with Mr. Dougherty,” Moser said.
“How’s their work, do they do a good job?” the lawyer asked.
“Average,” Moser shrugged.
— Oona Goodin-Smith
Former Comcast construction director testifies about hiring contractor to ‘cut off’ union issues
Jurors next heard from Patrick Moser, who worked as the senior director of construction at Comcast cable in 2015, when the city and Comcast were in the height of franchise deal renegotiations.
Moser said he was not involved in the 2015 high-stakes franchise renegotiations with Philadelphia, but that his responsibilities, in part, centered on lining up contractors for Comcast construction projects in the city. He said he had told his superiors that bringing on George Peltz — Dougherty’s friend and ally — and his New Jersey-based union shop, MJK Electrical Corp, would help smooth over the city’s ongoing franchise negotiations.
”I told them having George Peltz and MJK on board would help with any problems we were having,” Moser said, adding that it was known that Dougherty and Peltz were friendly. “Just another avenue to cut off the issues we would have with the union.”
With Comcast expecting a large upcoming project in Center City bounds, including laying fiber optic cable, Moser said he reached out to MJK among other union groups for request for proposals.
MJK, he said, was hired after presenting the lowest bid — prices that were still “200-1,000% higher” than Comcast usually shelled out — and because Moser knew the firm could handle the specialty work required.
“They seemed high, but I had dealt with them in the past so I was used to those prices,” he said.
From July 2016 through April 2018, Comcast contracted MJK for more than $9.4 million in work — mainly on tasks related to the Democratic National Convention and connecting Center City offices on a fiber-based network.
Separately, in May 2019, Peltz was sentenced to 18 months in prison after admitting to providing Dougherty nearly $57,000 in home and office improvements free-of-charge between 2012 and 2015. Peltz did not agree to cooperate with investigator to testify against any Dougherty or other Local 98 officials when he pleaded guilty in his case.
U.S. District Judge Jeffrey L. Schmehl, the judge in the current trial, also oversaw Peltz’s case.
— Oona Goodin-Smith
Ex-Comcast executive testifies about secret meeting involving Dougherty
A former Comcast executive testified Wednesday about the secret meeting between labor leader John Dougherty and representatives of the cable giant during the renegotiation of its franchise agreement with the city in 2015.
But the meeting described by Kathleen Sullivan, Comcast’s former vice president for government affairs, differed sharply from the account of that same summit offered in court Tuesday by Tom Holroyd, a former staffer for Philadelphia City Councilmember Bobby Henon.
Holroyd described Dougherty running the meeting in Henon’s council office. As he told it, the labor leader opened with an ominous anecdote about how he had exerted his clout in the past to delay legislation when he felt City Council wasn’t taking his and his union’s concerns seriously enough.
The legislative aide told jurors Tuesday that he interpreted it as the union chief threatening to hold up the franchise agreement unless he got what he wanted — work for members of his union.
But Sullivan, testifying Wednesday for the prosecution, described the meeting as cordial and her relationship with Dougherty, whom she’d previously met in her prior job of deputy mayor in the Ed Rendell administration, as “friendly.”
The meeting, she said, “just started off with small talk — like a lot of it — and then we just got into what the issue was.”
As Sullivan recalled it, Dougherty wanted to ensure that Comcast would use union contractors in certain work in Center City — something that Comcast had agreed to in a handshake deal as part of the expiring 1999 franchise agreement.
While the meeting took place outside of the public debate on the franchise bill, Sullivan said she understood passage of the agreement was contingent upon satisfying Dougherty’s request.
But, she added: “It wasn’t like a demand [like,] ‘We need this, or else.”
One thing Dougherty said, however, stuck out in Sullivan’s mind six years after the meeting.
In friendly small talk, another member of the Comcast team told Dougherty he couldn’t afford to retire yet because he still needed to pay for his daughters’ weddings.
According to Sullivan, Dougherty responded: “My guys have to pay for their daughters’ weddings, too.”
WHY IT MATTERS: Sullivan’s more friendly description of the December 2015 meeting works in favor of the defense, a day after Holroyd described Dougherty as a menacing figure in the session.
But Sullivan’s and Holroyd’s accounts did coincide on one key point. Both said they understood the success or failure of the Comcast franchise agreement hinged upon how they responded to Dougherty’s request.
This is a key piece of the government’s argument that Henon inappropriately injected Dougherty into the proceedings and linked the labor leader’s demands to the official legislative process determining whether the franchise bill would pass.
— Jeremy Roebuck
Trial resumes as former Comcast VP takes the stand
Court has resumed for the day, and prosecutors have called their next witness: Kathleen Sullivan, the former vice president for government affairs at Comcast.
She was one of the lead negotiators on the city’s franchise agreement with the cable giant in 2015.
She would have had an inside view of the discussions described yesterday by former Bobby Henon staffer Tom Holroyd, who testified that in addition to Comcast’s public deal with the city the cable company negotiated a private side deal with John Dougherty on behalf of the building trades unions.
— Jeremy Roebuck
John Dougherty struck a secret side deal with Comcast, ex-Council staffer testified
As Philadelphia City Council was renegotiating its franchise agreement with Comcast in 2015 through a series of public hearings and votes, a deal of a separate sort was being hashed out behind closed doors, a top staffer to City Councilmember Bobby Henon told a federal jury Tuesday.
Tom Holroyd, a point person for Henon on the negotiations, testified that he was summoned, along with Comcast’s representatives, to a private meeting in the councilmember’s chambers led by labor leader John Dougherty.
The union chief opened the session, Holroyd recalled, with an ominous anecdote about a time, early in his career, when he and his union — Local 98 of the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers — showed up in force, drowned out opposition, and helped kill a bill when they felt City Council wasn’t taking them seriously.
He laid out a series of demands of the cable company, including that union contractors be hired for subsequent work.
“What exactly did you understand [Dougherty] was communicating in this meeting?” asked Assistant U.S. Attorney Bea Witzleben as Holroyd testified on the 10th day of Dougherty and Henon’s federal bribery trial.
The legislative aide responded: “That it could happen again with [the Comcast] bill.”
That meeting and discussions around the 2015 franchise agreement — which defines the terms under which the city allows Comcast the right to build out and operate its cable network on publicly owned lands — emerged as a central focus as prosecutors continued presenting their case that Henon granted Dougherty special favors in exchange for the more than $70,000-a-year salary he was collecting from the labor leader’s union.
— Jeremy Roebuck and Oona Goodin-Smith
What to know about the case as Dougherty-Henon trial enters eleventh day
Federal prosecutors charged Dougherty, Henon, and six other Local 98 officials and allies in a 116-count indictment alleging bribery, embezzlement and a host of other crimes in January 2019. But last year, U.S. District Judge Jeffrey L. Schmehl granted a defense request to split that case into two trials.
The first, which began last week, is focused solely on charges tied to the relationship between Dougherty and Henon. Each man faces 13 counts including conspiracy and honest services fraud. Henon faces an additional seven counts of honest services fraud and bribery.
In essence, the government is arguing that Dougherty bought himself a City Councilmember by continuing to pay Henon for a no-show, no-responsibility job with Local 98, even after he was in elected office. In exchange, prosecutors say, Henon allowed Dougherty to control his vote and the powers of his office on issues that mattered to Dougherty.
Both men have denied the charges. Their lawyers describe the case as a “feeble attempt at criminalizing the legislative process.” They argue that what the government describes as a criminal conspiracy is nothing more than the “normal and lawful lobbying of a City Councilmember” and that Henon was acting in order to advance the interests of his constituents.
Get up to speed on the case here:
— Staff reports
Who are John Dougherty and Bobby Henon?
John Dougherty — known widely as “Johnny Doc” — is the longtime business manager of the politically influential Local 98 of the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers and head of the Building and Construction Trades Council. He’s a kingmaker of Philadelphia City Hall, and a Pennsylvania political heavyweight.
In his nearly three decades leading Local 98, Dougherty, 61, has transformed the 4,700-member organization into a political powerhouse and the largest independent source of campaign money in the state. Union fund-raising and manpower have helped elect mayors — including Jim Kenney — as well as City Council members, county commissioners, members of Congress, state legislators, governors and more than 60 judges, including the union leader’s brother, Pennsylvania Supreme Court Justice Kevin Dougherty.
He’s been an outspoken champion for organized labor in Philadelphia. His union is known for pitching inflatable rats at non-union picket lines and parking its “Rat-mobile” at worksites during labor disputes.
But he’s also found himself in the government’s crosshairs several times over the years — a state grand jury investigation, probes by the Philadelphia Board of Ethics, a 2006 investigation by the FBI — only to emerge unscathed.
Bobby Henon, 52, a three-term incumbent on City Council and its former majority leader, represents his native Northeast Philadelphia.
A former electrician who served as political director of Local 98 for more than a decade, he was elected to Council in 2011 on a wave of union money and support. Since then, the councilmember has also remained on the union’s payroll — earning a more than $70,000-per-year salary — in an untitled position reporting directly to Dougherty, while also collecting his $140,000 annual paycheck from City Hall.
— Oona Goodin-Smith and Jeremy Roebuck