Prosecutors seek nearly 6 years in prison for ex-Local 98 president, want him to pay $1.6 million with Johnny Doc

The former president of Local 98 of the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers could spend nearly six years in federal prison if prosecutors get their way at his sentencing hearing on union embezzlement charges next week.

In a court memo filed Thursday, government lawyers described Brian Burrows, the second-highest-ranking official at Local 98, as a leader who betrayed union members by stealing tens of thousands of dollars of their money to renovate his Mount Laurel home as well as a bar and residential building in Philadelphia’s Pennsport he co-owned.

Even worse, they added, he turned a blind eye to rampant misspending by others, including the union’s longtime head John “Johnny Doc” Dougherty, allowing, in total, more than $600,000 to evaporate from union coffers over seven years.

“At every turn, Burrows consciously disregarded responsibilities that might have revealed to union membership that Dougherty was taking and using union funds for nonbusiness purposes,” Assistant U.S. Attorney Frank Costello Jr. wrote in the filing seeking a sentence of anywhere from 57 to 71 months behind bars.

“The position of power and authority that [Burrows] held, as president of Local 98,” the prosecutor added, “allowed him and Dougherty to steal undetected from the union for years.”

That proposed punishment for Burrows — who will learn his fate Wednesday during a federal court hearing in Reading — is the stiffest prosecutors have sought yet for any of the six Local 98 officials and members convicted in an embezzlement scandal that has prompted the ouster of much of the politically powerful union’s top leadership since 2019.

And that could spell trouble for Dougherty. Government lawyers are all but certain to seek even more prison time when he faces sentencing next month for his role in the thefts as well as on separate bribery charges involving former Philadelphia City Councilmember Bobby Henon — and as the potential for a retrial on a separate set of extortion charges still looms.

In addition to the time behind bars, prosecutors maintain Burrows and Dougherty, both 64, should be jointly ordered to repay their former union more than $1.6 million for the money they stole plus the legal costs Local 98 incurred dealing with their prosecution.

But Burrows’ lawyers are preparing for a fight and are arguing their client shouldn’t be held responsible for Dougherty’s misspending.

“One would need to be clairvoyant,” defense attorney Thomas A. Bergstrom wrote in a letter filed with the court last week, “to foresee Dougherty stealing” tens of thousands of dollars on personal expenses ranging from the extravagant to the mundane.

That list included, Bergstrom continued: “$66,000 from petty cash [for] clothing for himself and his brother [Pennsylvania Supreme Court Justice] Kevin [Dougherty;] … thousands of dollars at Lowes, Target, IKEA, [and] C&D Appliance … for personal items from condoms to baby wipes and toothpaste; an extravagant birthday dinner for [former Local 98 political director Marita] Crawford; [and] $15,698 for concert tickets purchased with a credit card in Burrows’ name, which he never used.”

Bergstrom has suggested a sentence of roughly two years or lower.

» READ MORE: Johnny Doc is accused of spending thousands on his friends and family with Local 98 money. Here’s what prosecutors say he bought.

Where U.S. District Judge Jeffrey L. Schmehl will ultimately fall remains to be seen. But so far, the sentences he’s imposed against other Local 98 defendants have been significantly shorter than what prosecutors recommended.

In February, he gave Local 98′s former head of apprentice training, Michael Neill, 13 months behind bars, when the government had asked for up to two years.

Crawford, the former political director, got two weeks in prison plus three months’ house arrest. Prosecutors had pushed the court for up to six months’ incarceration.

Two other codefendants — Niko Rodriguez and Dougherty’s nephew Brian Fiocca, both low-level Local 98 employees who prosecutors said had largely acted as gofers for the union chief — each received sentences of probation.

But all four of them pleaded guilty. Burrows and Dougherty took their chances at trial — and lost.

It took a jury roughly 14 hours in December to convict the union leaders on more than 60 counts including embezzlement, conspiracy, and tax and wire fraud, concluding they allowed Local 98 money to be spent on everything from home renovations, horse-racing and gambling trips, pricey dinners and tickets to see Nicki Minaj, Taylor Swift and Bruce Springsteen in concert to thousands of dollars worth of groceries and home goods.

» READ MORE: John Dougherty and Brian Burrows union embezzlement case: Day-by-day updates

As the union’s primary fiscal overseer and one of two people whose signature was required on every check drawn from Local 98′s general fund account, Burrows was in a unique position to see where its money was going.

Costello balked in his memo at Burrows’ contention that misspending by others was “unforeseeable.”

Witnesses testified at the trial that union auditors had previously raised questions about Dougherty’s spending of petty cash and free use of Local 98 credit cards. Though they urged the implementation of antifraud measures, Burrows did nothing.

Instead, he warned Henon in a call caught on an FBI wiretap that Dougherty needed to be cautious when selecting a new member for the union’s executive board — which has financial oversight of the union. He shouldn’t pick someone, Burrows said, who “want[ed] to see all of the things,” including financial records and payroll.

Burrows himself signed off on paychecks for some of Dougherty’s relatives and other Local 98 employees, while complaining they did little to no work for the union.

In another wiretapped call, Burrows groused that he didn’t know why the union was paying Rodriguez, Fiocca, and another employee who prosecutors say largely spent his time running personal errands for Dougherty.

“It’s all smoke and mirrors with them kids,” he said, adding later in the conversation: “What do they do all day?”

But “particularly egregiously,” Costello noted, Burrows cooked up a scheme to bury the cost of more than $380,000 in renovations to his home and businesses — as well as those of Neill, Dougherty, and several of Dougherty’s relatives — in invoices for other legitimate construction work billed to Local 98.

Contractor Anthony Massa — who was charged alongside the union leaders, then pleaded guilty and agreed to testify against them — told jurors that as far as he knew Dougherty wasn’t aware of the fraudulent bills he submitted for that work.

It was Burrows, he said, who instructed him to bill it that way.

“The fact that Burrows was one of the few people who had both the ability and authority to detect and stop the thefts committed by his codefendants, especially John ‘Johnny Doc’ Dougherty and Michael Neill, make his crimes even more serious,” Costello wrote.

In addition, prosecutors have urged the judge to consider Burrows’ role in other misspending that was not included in the case they presented against him at trial.

After a union contractor — and childhood friend of Dougherty’s — was sentenced in 2008 for failing to pay required benefit payments for union members and ordered to pay $673,000 into Local 98′s health and welfare fund, Burrows voted in favor of a settlement deal to reduce that sum to $200,000.

» READ MORE: Contractor tied to labor chief Johnny Doc sentenced to two years for tax fraud, theft from union fund

He then secretly, prosecutors said, approved of a plan to give the man $170,000 from a separate pot of Local 98 money meant to help contractors offset the higher cost of employing union workers. The contractor used the funds to pay off all but $30,000 of his debt to the union, prosecutors said.

When Dougherty in 2011 unilaterally announced pay cuts for all Local 98′s business agents and officers — including him and Burrows — citing a slowdown in business, Burrows secretly restored his salary and Dougherty’s within months to their pay rates before the cuts and kept Local 98′s members in the dark.

The reduced wages for the union’s business agents and other officers remained in effect.

But Bergstrom noted in his brief to the court that most Local 98 employees weren’t complaining. By and large, Local 98′s finances were in great shape during Burrows’ 13 years as the union’s second-in-command, he said, and members received profit sharing checks from a pot of funds that ran into the millions.

“Over the course of years that Brian Burrows was president of Local 98 he was responsible for the extraordinary financial growth of [the union],” he said, “the ultimate beneficiaries of which are the 5,000 members of Local 98.”