Feds drop extortion charges against labor leader John Dougherty

Federal prosecutors on Thursday said they will not retry former Philadelphia labor leader John Dougherty on extortion charges, ending the last lingering legal threat he faced just weeks before he was set to report to prison.

Lawyers for the government offered little explanation for their decision in a four-page court filing, which came months after a jury failed to reach a verdict in the case and five weeks after a judge sentenced Dougherty to six years behind bars for his separate convictions on bribery and embezzlement charges.

However, prosecutors said, they do intend to retry Dougherty’s nephew Greg Fiocca, who stood trial alongside his uncle earlier this year.

Reached Thursday, Dougherty declined to discuss the decision to drop the case. His attorney, Greg Pagano, responded with a blunt text message.

“John Dougherty should never have been indicted in that case in the first place,” he said.

Rocco Cipparone, a lawyer for Fiocca, said he’d hoped prosecutors would have also reconsidered trying again for a conviction against his client.

But, he added: “The government makes its decisions for its own reasons, and we’re prepared to move forward and try the case.”

The government’s withdrawal of the last remaining case against Dougherty — a once-towering union boss who built Local 98 of the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers into the most powerful force for organized labor in the state — brings to a close a protracted, eight-year legal war between him and the federal government.

By the time his extortion trial began in April, he’d already been convicted in two earlier cases — a bribery trial involving former Philadelphia City Councilmember Bobby Henon and a $600,000 embezzlement case involving six other union officials and allies. He was sentenced to six years in prison on those charges last month and is scheduled to turn himself in Sept. 4.

» READ MORE: ‘I am guilty:’ John Dougherty’s stunning statements at sentencing delivered an about-face few had predicted

Prosecutors contended that Dougherty and Fiocca had also extorted a contractor who’d docked Fiocca’s pay and threatened to fire him for poor job performance amid the 2020 construction of the Xfinity Live! Casino and Resort in South Philadelphia.

Fiocca, they said, flew into a rage, slapping one of his bosses, choking him, throwing him onto a table, and spitting on him twice.

Witnesses testified that when Dougherty found out about the blow-up he took his nephew’s side. They told jurors he floated the idea of pulling all Local 98 workers from the job site and frustrating the contractors’ future efforts to land work in Philadelphia unless Fiocca remained on the job.

But defense lawyers stressed throughout the eight-day trial that Dougherty never followed through on those threats and that it was legal for labor leaders to make certain threats to advance union interests.

That latter argument appeared to hold sway with the jury.

Members of the panel offered no explanation in court for their inability to reach a verdict during 11 hours of deliberations before U.S. District Judge Jeffrey L. Schmehl declared a mistrial in the case. But one juror told The Inquirer afterward that, aside from a lone holdout, the rest of the panel was ready to acquit both men.

» READ MORE: Inside the Johnny Doc jury room: All but one juror voted to acquit the labor leader in extortion case, panel member says

“Several of us thought it … didn’t feel like a strong case,” said the juror, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to shed light on the panel’s confidential discussions. “A lot of the prosecution’s case seemed to be about Fiocca being a terrible worker, and we were all, like, ‘Well, it’s not illegal to be a bad worker.’”

Opposing views on the strength of the case also influenced the government’s deliberations on whether to retry it.

In the aftermath of the mistrial, some believed that having secured two previous convictions against Dougherty — and a six-year prison sentence — the prosecution team had achieved justice and that a retread of the third trial was unnecessary.

» READ MORE: John Dougherty extortion trial: Day-by-day updates

Others, meanwhile, urged to push forward with a retrial, believing the case was still winnable with a different jury, according to three sources familiar with those discussions. Dropping it entirely would mean Fiocca would not be held accountable for his alleged crimes, they said.

Cipparone, Fiocca’s lawyer, said Thursday he doesn’t expect the witnesses or evidence against his client to change drastically before the Sept. 16 date the court has set for the retrial.

“I already know exactly what the witnesses are going to say,” he said. And “as the prior jury saw, there are warts on the government’s case, and we hope to bring those out again.”