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

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.

For Dougherty, 63, the verdict means the threat of additional prison time on top of the up-to-20-year sentence 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.

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

Dougherty cast his eyes downward and kept his lips pursed as jurors read one guilty verdict after another Thursday on counts including conspiracy, embezzlement, and wire and tax fraud.

But beyond that immediate impact, the jury’s decision cemented the damage those recent legal travails have inflicted on Dougherty’s reputation as a one-man force of nature in city politics and organized labor.

In nearly three decades at Local 98′s helm, he 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.

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.”

Prosecutors played dozens of wiretapped phone calls in which Dougherty appeared to relish his role as a provider, not just to the men and women of his union but 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 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.”

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 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 benefitted 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,” Assistant U.S. Attorney Frank 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 Deli cookie tray sent to the christening of his nephew’s child in 2016 — they contended gifts Dougherty gave to family had legitimate business purposes.

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.”

Dougherty and Burrows will likely be ordered to repay those costs — as well as the money spent on personal expenses — at sentencing hearings sometime next year.

But both men have vowed to appeal their convictions.

After all, Pagano asked jurors during his closing argument this week, if Local 98′s members felt they’d been ripped off, why had they reelected Dougherty 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.”

This is a developing story and will be updated.