John Dougherty found guilty in union embezzlement trial, his second felony conviction in as many years

A federal jury on Thursday found John Dougherty guilty on embezzlement charges, delivering his second felony conviction in as many years and casting a devastating blow to his legacy as one of the region’s most transformative labor leaders.

The panel of seven women and five men took roughly 14 hours over three days to conclude that even as Dougherty publicly held himself out as a tireless advocate for his union, Local 98 of the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers, he was secretly stealing from its members to enrich himself and his family.

In all, jurors determined, Dougherty and Brian Burrows — the ex-union chief’s codefendant and trusted lieutenant — misspent more than $600,000 on everything from pricey Atlantic City birthday bashes and extensive home repairs to dozens of mundane purchases for groceries and household goods.

“All the members who paid these people’s salaries basically had their pockets picked by them,” Assistant U.S. Attorney Frank Costello said. “We’re glad we can finally hold them accountable.”

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For Dougherty, 63, the verdict means the threat of additional prison time on top of a sentence of as long as 20 years that he was already facing on the most serious counts from his 2021 bribery trial, a case that sent former Philadelphia City Councilmember Bobby Henon to prison earlier this year. U.S. District Judge Jeffrey L. Schmehl has set a March date for Dougherty’s sentencing in both cases.

A third trial on extortion charges, scheduled for spring, could extend Dougherty’s sentence even more.

But as jurors read out one guilty verdict after another Thursday on more than 60 counts including conspiracy, embezzlement, and wire and tax fraud, Dougherty kept his eyes cast downward, his lips pursed, and a palm flat against the defense table. He shook hands with Burrows and his lawyers and thanked the court staff on his way out of the room.

“We respect what happened,” he said afterward, while vowing to appeal. “We’ll move forward. We always do.”

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

Burrows, who was convicted on 21 counts Thursday, slipped out of the courthouse after the verdict, dodging awaiting reporters. His lawyer Mark A. Kasten was not so reticent to speak.

“After 10 years of this and millions of dollars, what did [the government] actually do?” he asked. “They moved off the board a powerful union that fought hard for working people. And if you think the [5,000] members of Local 98 are better off today than they were before, then you’re fooling yourself.”

Still, the jury’s decision further complicated Dougherty’s legacy as a one-man force of nature in politics and organized labor in the city.

Local 98′s current business manager, Mark Lynch, who ran in recent elections on a platform of distancing the union from Dougherty’s influence, declined to comment Thursday. Ryan Boyer — Dougherty’s successor as head of the Philadelphia Building Trades Council, an umbrella group of trade unions — said the trial’s outcome had left him sad for a man he credited with accomplishing so much.

In nearly three decades at Local 98′s helm, Dougherty transformed a once sleepy union local into a 5,000-member electoral powerhouse responsible for propelling dozens of allies into statewide and local office — including Mayor Jim Kenney and Dougherty’s brother, Kevin, a justice on the state Supreme Court.

“He has done so much for the city and the fabric of Philadelphia,” Boyer said. “You cannot undo the great job he’s done for working men and women in Philadelphia.”

» READ MORE: John Dougherty verdict: What the jury decided on each count in ex-Local 98 chief’s union embezzlement trial

But if his first trial exposed John Dougherty’s political kingmaker status as one bought through base favor trading and regular bribes to Henon, his second laid bare his routine and seemingly cavalier cheating of the very union electricians he professed to have done it all for.

“Over and over, again and again,” Assistant U.S. Attorney Bea Witzleben said as the trial began last month, “he stole, he lied, and no one stopped him.”

Throughout the four-week trial, prosecutors played wiretaps of dozens of phone calls on which Dougherty appeared to relish his role as a provider, not just to the men and women of his union but also to the tight-knit circle of friends and relatives who had come to rely on his largesse.

He showered his wife, girlfriend, father, daughter, siblings, nieces, and nephews with union-paid meals, concert tickets, home renovations, and in some cases Local 98 paychecks for work that prosecutors said they never performed.

“There’s things I pay for people around me every week,” he boasted to Kenney in a 2015 phone call played for jurors in court. “Who they gonna go to? They’re gonna come to me.”

That year, the union spent $4,000 to send Dougherty’s niece, who worked part time for Local 98, to a basketball tournament in Costa Rica — and then paid her $1,200 for work she supposedly did while she was gone.

Five months later, Dougherty offered her union-bought tickets to a Nicki Minaj concert.

She asked for two. He responded: “I got four.”

» READ MORE: Johnny Doc spent thousands on his friends and family with Local 98 money. Here’s what he bought.

That same summer, Dougherty feted his wife and his mistress, former Local 98 political director Marita Crawford, at separate Atlantic City birthday dinners within weeks of each other — at a cost of nearly $6,000 to the union.

Even the hams on his family’s Thanksgiving table that year were paid for out of Local 98′s coffers — a $274 expense he explained to the union in 2015 as a donation to St. John Neumann Catholic Church.

Union workers were often dispatched while on the clock for personal chores that benefited Dougherty and his relatives, including driving his wife to yoga, power washing his sister’s front porch, shoveling snow outside Kevin Dougherty’s home, or accompanying his father on trips to bet on horse races in New York and New Jersey.

“It’s great to take your father places,” Costello said during closing arguments to the jury. “But is it that hard to reach into your own pocket to pay for it?”

Despite that evidence of routine graft, Dougherty’s lawyers cast any personal expenses that made their way onto his Local 98 credit cards as oversights from a man often too busy with the work of the union to keep up with routine paperwork.

“The government wants you to believe that this organization should have been run like a Fortune 500 company,” defense lawyer Greg Pagano told the jury. “Well, it wasn’t. These men and women were electricians, and they were doing the best that they could.”

In other instances — including an $80 Famous 4th Street Cookie tray sent to the christening of his nephew’s child in 2016 — they contended gifts Dougherty gave to family had legitimate business purposes.

No one complained at the time, Pagano told jurors during his closing argument this week. And if Local 98′s members believed that Dougherty was ripping them off, he asked, why had they reelected him to lead them again and again?

“The union flourished, and 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. And they wouldn’t be where they are today if not for them.”

» READ MORE: "Inside Johnny Doc's Trial" newsletter: A guilty verdict

Harder to explain were the more than $100,000 in construction and repair costs Dougherty and Burrows billed to the union for work done on their homes and those of several members of Dougherty’s family.

The contractor who oversaw those jobs, Anthony Massa, was initially charged alongside the union leaders, but pleaded guilty in 2020 and agreed to testify against them. Over three days on the witness stand last month, he walked jurors through the copious notes he kept on bathroom remodels, mold remediation, fence installation, and other work he did for Burrows, Dougherty, and his relatives between 2010 and 2016.

None of them ever asked him for a bill. Burrows, the contractor said, told him to bill Local 98 instead.

“I didn’t do this on my own,” he told the jury. “I was instructed to do it this way.”

For his part, Dougherty credited Massa — a man the defense had labeled a “liar and a fraudster” — with sinking his chances with the jury as he left the courthouse Thursday and ducked into a waiting SUV.

“The jury elected to believe Tony Massa and the case was over,” he said with a shrug. “Everything else just fell in line.”

Witzleben, the prosecutor, offered a slightly different take.

The jury, she said, “upheld the principle today that it doesn’t matter how powerful you are, you are subject to being judged by a jury of your peers if you commit a crime.”

Staff writers Ximena Conde and Lizzy McLellan Ravitch contributed to this article.