Contractor who testified against Johnny Doc gets probation in Local 98 embezzlement case

READING — The only member of John Dougherty’s inner circle to ever agree to testify against him was spared prison time and granted probation Thursday in recognition, a federal judge said, of the role he played in securing the former labor leader’s conviction.

Contractor Anthony Massa, 70, emerged as a key witness in Dougherty’s 2023 trial on charges that he and others had embezzled more than $600,000 from Local 98 of the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers, the union he led for nearly 30 years.

He walked jurors through detailed records he’d kept on hundreds of thousands of dollars in renovation work he’d done at the homes of Dougherty, his relatives and other union officials — all of it charged to Local 98.

And though defense lawyers sought throughout the trial to paint Massa as a “fraudster and a liar,” the contractor remained resolute in his testimony, insisting that Dougherty’s codefendant and former Local 98 president Brian Burrows had instructed him to bill that way.

“He was unique in this case, where everyone else was tight-lipped in a very tight-knit community,” Assistant U.S. Attorney Jason Grenell said as Massa faced sentencing Thursday. “He was the only one in this case who stood up and did that right thing.”

In the end, U.S. District Judge Jeffrey L. Schmehl agreed.

While federal sentencing guidelines called for a sentence of anywhere from a year to a year and a half behind bars, the judge noted that Massa pleaded guilty relatively quickly after he, Dougherty and six other union officials and allies were indicted in 2019 and made the difficult decision to cooperate with the government.

Schmehl sentenced Massa to three years’ probation and 120 hours of community service. He also ordered the contractor to pay back more than $84,000 to the union as well as a $10,000 fine.

“You cooperated. You testified,” the judge said. “That’s not an easy thing to do.”

Massa’s decision to do so in 2020 came with considerable risk. For the better part of two decades, federal authorities had investigated Dougherty across a number of probes — each time looking for people on the inside who might cooperate against the state’s most powerful union chief.

Until Massa, they’d repeatedly failed.

Though four other union officials and allies pleaded guilty in the embezzlement case, none of them agreed to testify. Nor did other contractors and allies who’d been charged in other cases as far back as 2007 by prosecutors who hoped they might flip.

The significance of Massa’s decision to do what those others would not, Grenell said Thursday, “could not be overstated.”

As prosecutors told it, the contracting work Massa’s company performed on the personal residences of Burrows, Dougherty and Dougherty’s family between 2010 and 2016 was by far the largest expense the union leaders improperly paid for with Local 98 money.

In 2010, for instance, Massa’s firm carried out a complete remodel of Burrows’ primary bathroom and installed a walk-in closet at the union leader’s Mount Laurel home at a cost of more than $30,000.

The contractor told jurors that Burrows told him to hide the charge for that job by padding invoices for other work he was simultaneously overseeing for Local 98.

At Dougherty’s home in Pennsport, Massa said, he performed more than $35,000 of work — jobs that included leak repair, mold remediation, and drywall installation between 2010 and 2016.

Never once, he said, did Dougherty ever ask how much he owed.

In addition, Massa’s company oversaw renovations at homes owned by Dougherty’s father, John Sr.; daughter Erin; sister Maureen Fiocca; and brother, Pennsylvania Supreme Court Justice Kevin Dougherty — all of it covered by Local 98.

For his part, Dougherty insisted he had no idea where Massa was sending the bills. He assumed, his lawyers said, that the contractor was doing the work for free in gratitude for the lucrative work Local 98 had steered his way over the years.

Still, jurors — believing Massa’s word — convicted Dougherty and Burrows, both of whom have since been sentenced to hefty prison terms.

Dougherty is set to surrender next month to begin serving a six-year sentence both for his role in the embezzlement scheme as well as a separate bribery case involving former Philadelphia City Councilmember Bobby Henon.

Burrows was sentenced in June to four years.

Massa, for his own part, declined the opportunity to address the court during his sentencing hearing Thursday. But as he emerged from the Reading courthouse — one of the few charged in the case to avoid a future in prison — the contractor’s lawyer defended his client’s choices.

“All of the defendants in this case are basically good people, who — some by their own admission — just lost their way,” attorney William J. Brennan said, of Dougherty and the others.

Of his client, Brennan added: “He did what he had to do to protect his family and himself.”