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Lawmakers react to Allen's sentencing

by Ted Land and Rebecca Palsha
Wednesday, October 28, 2009

ANCHORAGE, Alaska - Wednesday the political community weighed in on former VECO Corp. CEO Bill Allen's sentencing, and most agree that Allen caused considerable damage in the state.

"It's hard to judge how much time he should've gotten. To me the Alaska public has benefited the most by the fact that Bill Allen isn't out there trying to corrupt politics anymore," said state Rep. Les Gara of Anchorage.

"He was helping the federal government catch other people that he corrupted, but on the other hand, you wouldn't have had any of this stuff if you hadn't had Bill Allen," Rep Mike Doogan, also of Anchorage, said.

Sen. Lisa Murkowski issued a statement saying "Clearly this has been a dark chapter in our state's history and today's sentencing is a major milestone in putting this sad episode behind us."

Also weighing in is the lawmaker who helped the FBI get in touch with Allen.

Sen. Fred Dyson says he doesn't know if the judge's decision was fair or not, but he does say Allen was extremely helpful to the FBI.

In Juneau, Allen and former VECO Vice President Rick Smith bought and paid for lawmakers in exchange for favorable oil taxes.

Dyson says he could tell something was wrong.

"By that time I knew that some pretty ugly things were going on," Dyson said in an interview Wednesday.

Dyson and Allen were friends, but that changed when the FBI asked Dyson for help.

"I invited Bill out to breakfast and said, ‘Hey, the FBI guys would like to talk to you. If you don't want to talk to them, fine, you and I can go talk about old cars.' He said, ‘Yeah, I'll go talk to them,'" Dyson said.

Allen working with the FBI lead to five state legislators and U.S. Sen. Ted Stevens being charged with crimes relating to their dealings with Allen.

"As Bill has said, his health is marginal. He's 72 years old and he's lost virtually all of his friends and paid a significant penalty. If it was a fair deal or not, I don't know. That's the judge's decision, but I do know that Bill and Rick (Smith) were hugely helpful to putting together the cases that have gone to trial," Dyson said.

For his part, Dyson says he did the right thing working with the feds to expose corruption.

"Quite a few people have said: ‘Hey, glad there's somebody that's straight that helped out rooting out the bad guys.' I got a lot of threatening phone calls. We have a tradition in our country of you never rat out your friends or colleagues and I had to do some soul searching about that and some of the threats were pretty spooky," Dyson said.

Contact Ted Land at tland@ktuu.com and Rebecca Palsha at rpalsha@ktuu.com