Former Local 98 leader John Dougherty’s facing his third felony trial this week. Will this time be different?

By all accounts, Greg Fiocca, a union electrician and nephew of labor leader John Dougherty, was less than a model employee.

He rarely showed up for work, was once caught sleeping on the job, and had a history across multiple postings of mouthing off to his bosses. He was laid off from a Market East construction site in 2016 after he spit on a supervisor. And by spring of that year, even his uncle — then the most powerful union leader in the state — had had enough.

“I am so sick and f— tired of it. It makes me ill,” Dougherty groused in a phone conversation caught on an FBI wiretap. “He’s got to learn. He’s got to grow up. But … I don’t want him living in a box under the bridge.”

Then came a job site skirmish that has now landed them both in federal court.

In a trial set to get underway this week, Fiocca and Dougherty, the former head of Local 98 of the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers, stand accused of extorting a union contractor who in 2020 attempted to dock Fiocca’s pay over his poor job performance.

» READ MORE: The U.S. vs. Dougherty, round three edition | Inside Johnny Doc’s Trial

The decision, prosecutors say, so enraged Fiocca, he grabbed his boss by the throat, threw him across a desk and threatened to break his jaw. Dougherty, despite his earlier frustrations, came to his nephew’s defense and, according to authorities, vowed to box the contractor out of future work in Philadelphia unless he paid Fiocca in full.

Dougherty has dismissed that incident, which occurred during the 2020 construction of the Live! Casino in South Philadelphia, as nothing more than a “garden-variety pay dispute” that the government is blowing out of proportion in an attempt to secure yet another conviction against him.

And after two felony trials in as many years — which resulted in his convictions on bribery and embezzlement charges — Dougherty’s latest attempt to clear his name will play out on familiar, if not previously successful, terrain.

» READ MORE: Ex-labor leader Johnny Doc is on trial again — this time on extortion charges. Here’s what you need to know.

Those earlier proceedings, which featured dozens of witnesses over weeks of testimony, delivered blockbuster moments that cast doubt on Dougherty’s legacy as a one-man force of nature in politics and organized labor in the city.

The first exposed the influence he wielded at City Hall as bought, in part, through base favor trading and regular bribes to his codefendant, then-City Councilmember Bobby Henon. The second, in which a jury found him guilty of embezzling hundreds of thousands of dollars from his union, laid bare his routine and seemingly cavalier cheating of the union electricians he’d represented during his nearly 30 years at the helm of Local 98.

» READ MORE: Johnny Doc has been convicted on federal charges for a second time. What’s next for the former labor leader?

This third trial — in which Dougherty, 63, and Fiocca, 31, face 19 counts of conspiracy and extortion — promises to be a much smaller affair focused on an isolated incident and events that played out over a single day. Prosecutors say they intend to call only a handful of witnesses and could wrap up their case in a week.

Still, the proceedings could deliver some of the most compelling testimony yet.

As in the previous trials, much of the evidence jurors will hear is expected to come in the form of recordings, including dozens of phone calls from FBI wiretaps of Dougherty’s phone in which the ex-union chief groused to others about Fiocca’s earlier workplace antics.

“He handcuffs us for no reason,” the labor leader complained to Fiocca’s brother during one 2016 conversation.

This time the government’s also coming armed with conversations secretly taped by others — including some recorded by a mole in Dougherty’s ranks, who became a confidential informant for the FBI after the union chief’s first indictment in 2019 and who covertly recorded Dougherty discussing Fiocca’s tussle with his bosses at the Live! Casino site in the days after it occurred.

“We weren’t down there to make kumbaya,” Dougherty told an audience of nearly three dozen Local 98 business agents and employees during the August 2020 conference call. “F— kumbaya.”

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

The government witness list includes Raymond Palmieri, the electrical contractor, whom Dougherty allegedly pressured after his dispute with Fiocca, and Rich Gibson, the Palmieri employee and fellow Local 98 member whom Fiocca is accused of assaulting. Gibson secretly recorded his Aug. 19, 2020, altercation with Dougherty’s nephew.

“There’s nothing you can do to me … I’m calling my uncle already,” Fiocca shouted at him during the confrontation, according to transcripts of the conversation. “We’re pulling everyone off the job.”

Prosecutors contend all of it should be enough to convince the jury lawyers will begin picking Monday that Dougherty had a history of protecting his nephew despite his obvious deficiencies at work. Together, they say, the men extorted Palmieri out of five months’ wages to which Fiocca wasn’t entitled.

“Fiocca knew,” Assistant U.S. Attorney Frank R. Costello Jr. wrote in court filings, “that Dougherty would make sure he remained employed, no matter how poorly he performed, how often he showed up to work, or how badly, or violently he acted.”

If convicted, Dougherty and Fiocca could both be sentenced to up to 20 years on the most serious count. Dougherty’s already facing up to two decades in prison at a sentencing hearing next month for the most serious charges on which he was convicted in his earlier trials.

But Dougherty and his attorneys like their odds.

The labor leader has been investigated for — and dodged — allegations of intimidation before, including a 2016 state grand jury probe that arose after a nonunion electrician accused Dougherty of breaking his nose and punching him in the face during an altercation that broke out at a South Philadelphia job site. That probe did not result in any charges.

As for Fiocca’s 2020 fight with Gibson, Dougherty’s lawyers maintain it has no business in federal court.

Philadelphia police responded to the fracas and ultimately decided not to press assault charges — a fact that prompted skeptical questioning for prosecutors from U.S. District Judge Jeffrey L. Schmehl, who will preside over the trial, during an earlier hearing in the case.

Any threats Dougherty may have made afterward to hinder Palmieri’s future work prospects in the city were nothing more than the labor leader doing his job and protecting a union member who felt he’d been cheated out of pay, defense lawyers contend.

“The government seeks to criminalize legitimate labor activity,” they wrote in court filings seeking to dismiss the case in 2022. “The entire foundation of the indictment is not an extortionate scheme between Mr. Dougherty and Mr. Fiocca but rather a pay dispute between Mr. Fiocca and his employer.

“Mr. Dougherty’s crime?” they continued. “He took his union member’s side in that dispute.”