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

Months after he was indicted on federal bribery and embezzlement charges, labor leader John J. Dougherty issued a stern warning to any members of his union who might consider betraying him by cooperating with the FBI.

He announced at a November 2019 gathering of business agents that he was close to figuring out who among them was providing the feds with information.

And despite his public pronouncements at the time that his membership was standing strong together in the face of what he’s characterized as antiunion persecution, behind the closed doors of Local 98 of the International Brotherhood Electrical Workers’ headquarters in Spring Garden he made clear exactly where the limits of that brotherhood lie.

“You going to f— around with that mouth, I’m coming after everything you have and everything you f—ing own,” he warned the room.

He continued: “I’m going to make sure everybody, everywhere — everybody at your kids’ school — knows that you’re a punk and a rat and a creep. Your kids don’t want to grow up knowing your daddy’s a rat, daddy’s a punk.”

And he signed off with a final suggestion that death might be a better option than waiting to incur his wrath. “Go right to the bridge,” he added. “Jump right off the bridge. Make it easy.”

What he didn’t know at the time was that those threats were being recorded, and within months the person taping him would be working as an informant for the FBI.

Now, that recording — along with roughly 30 others that a member of Dougherty’s inner circle made in the run-up to and during his federal bribery trial with former City Councilmember Bobby Henon last year — is at the center of a debate that the ex-union chief’s lawyers say should call his conviction into question and imperil the two remaining trials he faces on additional charges.

Prosecutors have closely guarded the details about their cooperator’s identity both from the public and Dougherty. But they maintain they took the unusual step of encouraging their mole within Local 98 to continue recording while the ex-union chief prepared for and stood trial because they were concerned he was threatening potential witnesses in the case.

Meanwhile, Dougherty’s attorneys maintain any threats he may have made aren’t the issue — he hasn’t been charged with witness intimidation or obstruction of justice. Instead, they’ve questioned the government’s delay in disclosing that they had an informant and expressed concerns that the tapes may contain references to Dougherty’s conversations with his lawyers or the defense strategy he intended to deploy — a potential violation of his rights.

“This is not an issue that Mr. Dougherty created, nor is it one that Mr. Dougherty can ignore,” defense lawyer Henry E. Hockeimer Jr. said in a recent court filing. “Rather, the issue directly impacts his ability to ensure that he faces a fair trial — a trial in which his constitutional rights are protected.”

So far, U.S. District Judge Jeffrey Schmehl has given little indication of how much he intends to let the issue derail the schedule he’s laid out for Dougherty’s coming trials — one of which, involving his alleged extortion of a union contractor who tried to fire his nephew, is set to begin next week. The other — involving more than $600,000 Dougherty and several other Local 98 leaders allegedly stole from the union — is scheduled for October.

But in hearings over the last three months, the judge has at times expressed annoyance at both sides over the issue — at prosecutors for waiting until earlier this year to disclose the informant’s existence, and at the defense for repeated requests for more information about the cooperator’s work with the FBI and time to investigate whether any violation of Dougherty’s rights occurred.

“You may feel that this is a violation of his rights,” the judge told Hockeimer at a hearing in Reading last week. “But [the government] doesn’t feel it’s a violation of his rights.”

Still, the government’s account of the extent of the informant’s cooperation has shifted significantly since prosecutors first acknowledged they’d developed a highly placed source within Local 98′s ranks.

That news came in the form of an excerpt of one of the recordings made by the mole that they shared with Dougherty’s defense as evidence they intended to use in the extortion trial. At the time, they maintained that the informant began supplying information in the summer of 2020 and had only made a handful of recordings.

But after Schmehl ordered the government to let him review those tapes in April, prosecutors handed over dozens of recordings made between January 2019 and late last year, amounting to 35 hours of conversation and enough to fill 300 pages of transcripts. Most of the recordings were of Dougherty’s remarks at meetings with top members of Local 98.

Testifying at the hearing last week, the FBI’s lead investigator — Special Agent Jason Blake — said the cooperator first approached them after Dougherty was indicted in January 2019 with concerns over the threats he was making at those meetings. The person had already made three recordings on their own — including one of the November 2019 confab in which the union chief had urged anyone considering betraying him to kill themselves, Blake said.

Though recording someone outside of a law enforcement investigation without their consent is a crime in Pennsylvania, the FBI enlisted the cooperator to begin working as an official confidential informant.

“The threats and intimidation were continuing and we wanted to continue to document what was being said,” the agent testified. “We wanted to continue to collect evidence for the investigation.”

Over the course of the informant’s work, more threats emerged, according to transcripts of some of the tapes that have been released in recent court filings.

In a July 2020 meeting, Dougherty told his business agents he was now getting access to some of the evidence prosecutors intended to use against him at trial.

“I’ve got every interview,” he said. “I can tell you every word that everyone here said.”

A month later, Dougherty urged an associate during a meeting to “choke” a member of the union he suspected of not supporting him, advising others to “put him under the f—g water.”

“One of you guys gotta choke [a Local 98 member, whom Dougherty believed did not support him.] Put him under the f–ing water, ok?”

“It appeared that discovery materials were being used to bring people who had cooperated with us up on internal charges within the union as a means to punish them,” Blake said in court, adding that during his trial with Henon last fall, Dougherty allegedly spoke of obtaining witness lists and commented on their performance on the stand.

Dougherty has denied that allegation and his lawyers argue the recordings pose a larger problem.

“We believe that there were violations of Mr. Dougherty’s constitutional rights” to a fair trial, Hockeimer said in court last week. “I just don’t understand how they could continue to use this person.”

But investigators balked at the notion that the informant had somehow been used to gain access to Dougherty’s trial strategy. Agents counseled the cooperator in advance to avoid recording any conversations that might involve talk of Dougherty strategizing with his lawyers, the informant’s handler told the court.

And as an extra precaution, each of the recordings was prescreened by lawyers and agents who were not part of the team investigating Dougherty to ensure no confidential attorney-client information made its way to the prosecution team, Assistant U.S. Attorney Frank R. Costello wrote in a recent brief on the issue.

“The defense, after receiving transcripts of more than 30 hours of Dougherty’s statements, has failed to point to a single statement … that could legitimately be described as ‘defense strategy,’” he said.

Schmehl has scheduled another hearing on the issue for Wednesday.