Selfless advocate or selfish thief? In ex-labor leader John Dougherty’s second trial, a jury will now decide
U.S. District Judge Jeffrey Schmehl is expected to deliver instructions to the panel Tuesday before handing the case over to the seven women and five men set to decide the ex-union chief’s fate.
In their final pitches to jurors Monday, lawyers in John Dougherty’s federal embezzlement trial fought to cement two vastly different portraits of the ex-labor leader with the jury charged with rendering a verdict in the case.
As Assistant U.S. Attorney Frank Costello told it, Dougherty was little more than a hypocrite and a thief — a man who publicly boasted of working tirelessly on behalf of his union, Local 98 of the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers, while secretly stealing hundreds of thousands of dollars from its members.
“He lied,” the prosecutor said as he urged the panel to convict. “He stole. You know it.”
The defense shot back, questioning why members of Local 98 would have reelected him to lead them again and again if they felt they’d were being ripped off. They did it, said lawyer Greg Pagano, because Dougherty, an indefatigable advocate, “built their union up from nothing.”
“Every union member knows what this man did for them,” he said. “He put food on the table for their families. He created man-hours for them. They wouldn’t be where they are today if not for them.”
That back-and-forth came as jurors prepared to begin their deliberations in Dougherty’s second federal felony trial in as many years. He sat silently next to his lawyers throughout much of the day, his back to a gallery packed with supporters, as his character once again became fodder for courtroom debate.
U.S. District Judge Jeffrey L. Schmehl is expected to deliver instructions to the panel Tuesday morning before handing the case over to the seven women and five men set to decide the ex-union chief’s fate.
Their discussions will follow a monthlong government effort to prove that Dougherty and his codefendant, former Local 98 president Brian Burrows, skimmed hundreds of thousands of dollars from union coffers between 2010 and 2016.
Prosecutors have presented jurors with hours of wiretapped phone calls and reams upon reams of receipts cataloging what they described as a “routine pattern” of misspending on pricey dinners, home renovations and personal purchases, ranging from horse racing trips to Honeybaked hams — all paid for on Local 98′s dime.
They’ve accused Dougherty of putting friends and family on Local 98′s payroll for work they did not do and paying other union employees for carrying out personal chores like driving his wife to yoga or taking his father on outings.
“None of this was a mistake,” Costello told jurors. “None of this was negligent. It was intentional theft.”
Both men face dozens of charges including conspiracy, embezzlement, and wire and tax fraud that could send them to prison for up to 20 years on the most serious counts. For Dougherty, a conviction would only add to the prison time he’s facing from his 2021 bribery conviction alongside former Philadelphia City Councilmember Bobby Henon.
But throughout the trial, the defense has countered that prosecutors, in their zeal to score a conviction, have made too much out of what amounted to a series of honest mistakes.
Pagano insisted Monday that Dougherty wasn’t aware of many of the purchases that were billed to Local 98 in his name. Other charges, they maintained, had inadvertently ended up on Local 98′s expense reports because the labor leader was working so hard for the union that he had little time to focus on small details.
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“This man … ran from task to task to task to task,” Pagano said. “He was doing multiple things, multiple days, in multiple different places. He didn’t know what was billed, where it was being billed and who was being billed.
“Bottom line,” he added. “He did the best that he could.”
That was true, Pagano said, of tens of thousands of dollars in union-paid home repairs that Dougherty and his family members are accused of receiving from contractor Anthony Massa, one of the government’s key witnesses and the only codefendant of Dougherty and Burrows to testify against them during the trial.
Massa kept copious notes on the work he said he did at the union leaders’ homes and told jurors he billed it to Local 98 following Burrows’ instructions.
The defense dismissed the contractor’s testimony Monday as a collection of “half-truths and complete lies.”
“Mr. Massa led [Dougherty] to believe that he wasn’t charging him — that he was doing this work for free,” Pagano said. “That’s the type of person we’re dealing with.”
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Lawyers for Burrows also challenged Massa’s account and sought to distance their client from most of the other allegations in the case — noting they all involved money spent on Dougherty.
“The point is,” his lawyer Thomas A. Bergstrom said, “Burrows wasn’t there.”
But with their final words, prosecutors urged jurors to see those protestations of innocence for what they were.
“When [Local 98′s members] were hanging off those buildings and doing all that work,” Assistant U.S. Attorney Jason Grenell said, “these men were reaching into their pockets and taking their money.”