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

Roughly three hours into their marathon day of deliberations last week, 11 of the 12 jurors in John Dougherty’s federal extortion trial were ready to acquit the beleaguered labor leader and his nephew.

But for nearly eight hours more, in a cramped Reading conference room, a lone holdout stood her ground, grinding the panel’s discussions to a standstill and eventually forcing a mistrial in the case, according to a member of the jury who spoke to The Inquirer.

“We kind of had a sense pretty early on that we didn’t think we were going to change [the holdout’s] mind,” said the juror, who described himself as an early “not guilty” vote. “It was a little unsatisfying not having an actual verdict in the end.”

That juror — who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the panel’s closed-door deliberations — offered the first glimpse inside the derailed efforts to reach a verdict in Dougherty’s third felony trial and the fruitless negotiations that prompted U.S. District Judge Jeffrey Schmehl to end the proceedings on an inconclusive note.

The juror’s account also provided new insights into how the jury of six men and six women viewed the government’s evidence as prosecutors weigh whether to retry Dougherty, the twice-convicted former head of Local 98 of the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers, and his nephew Greg Fiocca.

“Several of us thought it … didn’t feel like a strong case,” the juror said, adding that some members of the panel described it as “government overreach.”

“A lot of the prosecution’s case seemed to be about Fiocca being a terrible worker,” he continued, “and we were all, like, ‘Well, it’s not illegal to be a bad worker.’”

» READ MORE: 'Inside Johnny Doc's Trial' newsletter: Mistrial madness edition

That conclusion came after six days of testimony in which government lawyers had accused Dougherty and Fiocca of threatening a contractor involved in a pay dispute with the union leader’s nephew.

The jurors heard secret recordings of Fiocca in August 2020 assaulting one of his supervisors during construction of the Live! Casino and Hotel complex in South Philadelphia and of Dougherty, days later, discussing the incident with other members of his union.

But what prosecutors described as extortion, defense lawyers dismissed as a fistfight blown up into a meritless federal case. Eventually, those arguments held sway with most of the panel, the juror who spoke to The Inquirer said.

Yet that wasn’t how the day began.

As deliberations got underway just after 11 a.m. on April 25, seven members of the panel were leaning toward finding Dougherty and Fiocca guilty — though most of those jurors acknowledged they were open to being swayed. And after an exhaustive review of the evidence over the next several hours, all but the holdout had moved to the “not guilty” side, the juror said.

Speaking for the panel, he noted several points that proved persuasive.

Chief among them was a legal defense — first recognized in a 1973 U.S. Supreme Court decision — that grants labor leaders some leeway to make threats of economic harm or force to achieve legitimate union goals.

Dougherty maintained that when he raised the possibility in 2020 of pulling Local 98 electricians from the casino worksite if Fiocca was not kept on the job and paid in full, he was merely doing what he would have done for any other member of his union involved in a pay dispute.

That argument appeared to be bolstered, the juror said, by a recording played by prosecutors in which the labor leader admonished Local 98 business agents for gossiping about Fiocca’s fight with his bosses and defended his decision to keep his nephew, the union’s appointed steward on the casino project, on the job after the scuffle.

“We weren’t down there to make kumbaya,” Dougherty said on the tape. “F— kumbaya!”

The call — recorded by an FBI informant from within Dougherty’s ranks — helped tip the scales in Dougherty’s favor, despite the union chief’s salty language, the juror said.

“We kind of saw that as … just more evidence that maybe [Dougherty] was viewing this, in his mind, as protecting the union more than he was protecting [Fiocca] specifically,” he said.

» READ MORE: A judge has declared a mistrial in John Dougherty’s extortion trial. What happens now?

Several on the panel, the juror said, questioned the sincerity of Dougherty’s threats, noting that he never followed through and that the contractor overseeing the work seemed to express little concern that Local 98′s workers would actually be pulled from the site.

Others, according to the juror, were convinced that Fiocca’s Aug. 19, 2020, blowup — in which he choked, slapped, and spit on one of his supervisors before throwing him across a desk — was “a onetime incident” and not the start of a six-month extortion scheme.

While the contractor continued to pay Fiocca after the scuffle, the 18 paychecks that followed, each tied to a single extortion count, were for varying amounts of hours worked — a sign, according to the juror, that it “seemed like they were [just] paying him for the hours he was there.”

The panel concluded if Dougherty and Fiocca had truly extorted the contractor out of pay he had not earned, Fiocca’s paychecks would likely have been more consistent and for a full 40-hour workweek.

“We didn’t have proof either way,” the juror said.

But while the deliberations dragged on and the consensus to acquit grew, one member of the jury remained unconvinced.

That holdout, according to the juror who spoke to The Inquirer, appeared firm in the belief that anyone else who assaulted their boss at work would have been fired, and that Fiocca had acted as if he were “entitled to a job.”

“It really just came down to [the holdout’s] personal feelings toward Greg and John — they weren’t good people,” the juror said. “They couldn’t separate that from the more factual information the rest of us were looking at.”

Ultimately, that resistance brought the jury’s discussions to a standstill.

“People were starting to realize we might be in here longer than anticipated, like we’ll be here all night,” the juror said. “People were definitely getting frustrated.”

But despite the long hours and ultimately unsuccessful negotiations, the juror described the deliberation process as mostly civil. Two or three members at a time would talk to the holdout, in hopes of changing their view.

“If anyone got too worked up, we told them, ‘You’re getting too passionate,’” the juror said.

Attempts to reach the other members of the panel, who were escorted out of the courtroom by security staff following the mistrial last week, were unsuccessful. But the juror who agreed to be interviewed afterward said he was pleasantly surprised by how seriously all of them took their duties.

Drawn from Philadelphia and its eight surrounding counties, they differed in race and background, and ranged in age from their 20s to mid-60s. Some had ties to law enforcement, government jobs, or unions. Throughout the trial, about half of them stayed in the same downtown Reading hotel as the lawyers, court staff and reporters covering the case.

Only one, according to the juror, had ever heard of Dougherty — once the state’s most powerful union and a political kingmaker in Pennsylvania politics — before the trial began.

Still, they all had the sense that there was “something more” to the labor leader’s history than what they were being shown in court, the juror said.

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

Though none of the panel members was aware of Dougherty’s two previous convictions — from his 2021 bribery case alongside former Philadelphia City Councilmember Bobby Henon and his trial last year on charges he and others embezzled hundreds of thousands of dollars from Local 98 — they questioned why prosecutors had wiretapped recordings from Dougherty’s phone dating back to 2016, when the events at the center of the extortion case occurred in 2020.

At least one member of the panel, the juror added, questioned whether the extortion case would have been brought at all if Dougherty were not already under investigation for something else.

“We were like, this feels like they’re just trying to get Johnny Doc, and this just happened to be one angle to do it,” the juror said.

Prosecutors have not yet indicated whether they intend to retry the extortion case, though the judge has set a June trial date if they do.

Before they make that decision, the juror said, he thought it was important to peel back the curtain on his jury’s deliberations.

“Hopefully,” he said, “this will save some people some time.”