September 17, 2024
Bill Oxford/Unsplash
Greg Fiocca, 32, pleaded guilty Monday to charges in an extortion case that ended in a mistrial in April. Fiocca is the nephew of former IBEW Local 98 business manager John Dougherty, who is serving a six-year prison term in two other cases. The charges against Dougherty in the extortion case were dropped.
Gregory Fiocca, the nephew of former labor union boss John Dougherty, pleaded guilty Monday to charges that he threatened a contractor during a payment dispute at a construction site in South Philadelphia four years ago.
The case ended in a mistrial in April, prompting prosecutors to drop similar charges against Dougherty after he was convicted and sentenced in two other cases. But prosecutors signaled they were going to retry Fiocca, and they worked out a deal before going to trial.
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Fiocca, 32, violently confronted the contractor in August 2020 during the construction of Live! Casino in the Sports Complex. He had been on the job as part of the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers Local 98, the powerful union where Dougherty long served as business manager before he was indicted in 2019.
Prosecutors said Fiocca confronted the contractor in South Philly after claiming he had not been paid in full for his work. The contractor said Fiocca was absent from the job and that the paycheck he was given reflected the hours he was there. Fiocca then grabbed the contractor by the throat and threw him onto a desk, investigators said.
Dougherty later intervened on behalf of Fiocca, threatened to pull all Local 98 workers from the job and claimed he would use his influence to prevent the contractor from getting future work, according to prosecutors.
Dougherty and Fiocca each had faced 19 counts of conspiracy and extortion. In April, the six-day trial in Reading included testimony from two dozen witnesses. It ended in a mistrial with the jury deadlocked.
Last month, prosecutors dropped the case against Dougherty, who had previously been convicted of bribery and embezzlements in two cases that were part of a wide-ranging investigation into how he used his position to influence city politics, punish rivals and raid union bank accounts. He was sentenced to six years in federal prison in July and required to pay restitution to IBEW Local 98.
In court documents, the U.S. attorney's office requested that the extortion charges against Dougherty be dropped "in the interests of justice." Prosecutors didn't say why they intended to only retry Fiocca.
Fiocca pleaded guilty to unlawfully demanding money as a union representative from a union employee. He is scheduled to be sentenced Jan. 7. Fiocca faces a maximum sentence of one year in prison, one year of supervised release and a $10,000 fine.
