Lawyer grills project manager who recorded fight with Johnny Doc's nephew: Didn't 'stop you from getting beat up'

Defense lawyers concede that the tone of a secretly recorded 2020 confrontation between Greg Fiocca, nephew of Philadelphia labor leader John Dougherty, and a supervisor on the site of the then-under-construction Live! Hotel and Casino in South Philadelphia was “horrible.”

The tape, played for a federal jury this week, features Fiocca flying into a profanity-laced rage, muffled sounds of him choking, slapping, and spitting on his boss, and his heated and repeated threats to call his uncle or pull all their union’s workers off the job.

But as attorneys for Fiocca and Dougherty got their first chance Friday to scrutinize that recording in court and grill the man who made it — Rich Gibson, a project manager on the casino job and the target of Fiocca’s ire — they sought to dispel any notion that it amounted to an extortionate threat.

Prosecutors next called Fran Rothwein, a longtime Local 98 electrician, and one of Greg Fiocca’s foremen at the Live! Casino construction project.

Rothwein, whose name and text messages have been peppered throughout the trial thus far, recounted for the jury Fiocca’s patchy attendance record at the construction site, beginning in 2019. And he recalled “a number” of meetings between the site’s supervisors and the Local 98 business agent over discrepancies in Fiocca’s hours.

By February 2020, he said, there had been multiple issues with Fiocca falling short on his steward duties of assigning overtime hours to the workers at the job. The work would fall to Rothwein, the foreman said.

Next on the stand: Philadelphia Police Officer Guillermo Torres, an 18-year veteran of the force, and the officer who responded to Rich Gibson’s 911 call.

Reflecting back to the morning of Aug. 19, 2020, Torres recounted his recollection of events. He received a radio call for a disturbance at the casino construction site, he said, where a verbal altercation between two men had “gotten physical.”

He was waved down on Packer Avenue, he remembered, and directed to the construction trailer to speak with Gibson.

With Rich Gibson still on the stand, jurors heard the 911 call he made in the aftermath of the altercation with Greg Fiocca.

“I wanted to see if an officer could come down. I was assaulted,” Gibson told the dispatcher around 9 a.m. on Aug. 19, 2020.

But John Dougherty’s attorney, Greg Pagano, questioned the project manager’s actions, and his decision not to pursue criminal charges, file a union complaint about Fiocca, or fire him from his post. 

Greg Fiocca’s attorney, Rocco Cipparone Jr., spent the rest of the morning cross-examining Rich Gibson, suggesting the project manager had unfairly singled out and scrutinized his client on the job, seeking to bolster his argument that Fiocca’s recorded outburst in August 2020 was the result of months of unfair treatment and previously slashed wages.

The project manager conceded he used an “eyeball system,” as Cipparone put it, to see who was on the job at the site of the casino construction, rather than a time clock or formal tracking measure. That was standard procedure, Gibson said, for the electricians to check in with their foreman at work, and that supervisor to report to Gibson whether they had shown up.

But Gibson said, after receiving complaints about Fiocca’s attendance, he began paying more attention to his whereabouts than those of other employees.

As questioning by prosecutors continued, Rich Gibson told jurors he was so unnerved by the heated Aug. 19, 2020 altercation he had with Greg Fiocca that he called police, largely avoided the man in the months that followed, and worried Fiocca’s threats to pull all union electricians from construction of the Live! Casino would significantly delay completion of the job.

“That’s major when you’re talking about a casino – we have 70 people on the job,” he testified. “You just didn’t know what was going to happen.”

But despite Fiocca’s threats to call John Dougherty, his uncle, and shut down the worksite unless he was paid wages he’d felt he’d been shorted, Gibson acknowledged that he never heard from or spoke to Dougherty about the matter.

As soon as the phone rang, Rich Gibson feared there would be trouble.

Gibson — a union electrician and, in 2020, a project manager at the then-under-construction Live! Casino in South Philadelphia — had been arguing for months with an employee over his poor job attendance. So much so that Gibson had recently started docking the man’s pay.

But that employee — the man on the other end of the Aug. 19 call that gave Gibson such cause for concern — wasn’t just any worker. It was Greg Fiocca, the nephew of the head of his union, the nephew of John Dougherty, the most powerful labor leader in the state.

Unlike John Dougherty’s two earlier trials — both of which played out at the federal courthouse in Center City — his third will take place in Reading, starting with opening arguments there Wednesday, once jury selection in Philadelphia is done.

U.S. District Judge Jeffrey L. Schmehl, who has presided over all of Dougherty’s recent legal matters, is normally stationed at the small federal courthouse in downtown Reading.

He was randomly assigned to the case when Dougherty was indicted on bribery and embezzlement charges in 2019, and has traveled to Philadelphia for both of Dougherty’s weeks-long trials on those charges.

John Dougherty, widely known as “Johnny Doc,” was once considered the most powerful union leader in the state, transforming Local 98 in his three decades at its helm into a powerhouse in the arenas of politics and organized labor.

Under his oversight, union money and manpower helped elect governors, members of Congress, mayors, judges, and members of City Council, and his once sleepy electrician’s union became a force capable of extracting significant labor concessions from some of the largest companies in the region.

But in recent years, Dougherty’s legacy has suffered a series of significant blows. He was forced to resign his post — as well as his leadership of the Philadelphia Building Trades Council, an umbrella group of building trades unions — after his 2021 conviction on bribery charges involving City Councilmember Bobby Henon. A separate jury convicted Dougherty last year on charges that he and six others stole more than $600,000 from their union.

For a third time in as many years, John Dougherty is facing a federal felony trial — this time on conspiracy and extortion charges.

The former labor leader and his nephew, Greg Fiocca, are accused of threatening a contractor and a job site manager amid a dispute over Fiocca’s poor job performance and pay. Prosecutors say that while working on construction of the Live! Casino in South Philadelphia in 2020, Fiocca assaulted his supervisor and that Dougherty later threatened the block the contractor’s ability to land future work in Philadelphia.

But defense attorneys maintain the government has blown the argument out of proportion, turning what amounted to little more than a fistfight during a heated moment into a federal case. Dougherty, they contend, was simply doing his job: advocating on behalf of a member of Local 98 of the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers, the union he led for nearly 30 years.