Anchorage resident Lisa Moore says she traded sex with then-Veco boss Bill Allen in 1996 for an apartment, money and jewelry. He was 59; she was 19.
She also says she introduced him to a 15-year-old girl who became his sex partner.
But the next year, an ex-boyfriend of Moore's got into legal trouble and threatened to blow the whistle on Allen's relationship with Moore and other teens, including the 15-year-old, Moore said, triggering a string of alleged cover-ups that now threaten to undermine the Alaska political corruption investigation.
Allen's conduct with that underage girl and at least one other has been the subject of an active Anchorage police investigation since 2008. That inquiry developed more urgency last spring when a prosecutor with the Justice Department's Child Exploitation and Obscenity Section joined local detectives in the case and began traveling to Anchorage to interview witnesses, including a visit just last week.
But long before the authorities got involved, Allen reportedly went to great lengths to keep his sexual activities secret. When Moore told Allen she expected to be called as a witness at her ex-boyfriend's trial and forced to reveal Allen's seamy and possibly criminal private life, Allen immediately sent her, her brother and her fiance on the lam to California to prevent her from being subpoenaed, Moore told an Anchorage police detective and elaborated in recent interviews with the Daily News.
That trip, characterized as a "potential obstruction of justice" when first made public in a federal court filing last month, are among the issues cited by former state House Speaker Pete Kott in his effort to throw out his conviction on corruption charges. Allen was a key witness in Kott's case, but Kott's lawyers weren't told by prosecutors about the California trip, which could have undermined Allen's credibility under cross-examination by a defense attorney.
Kott's lawyer has also said Allen's credibility could have been challenged by other allegations that were known by the government at the time of Kott's trial but only recently revealed to the defense. Among them: new details about assertions by the underaged girl, Bambi Tyree, now 28, that she lied under oath about her relationship with Allen at Allen's request, and that Moore was asked by Allen's attorney to swear that Allen did not have sex with Tyree when she was 15, even though she said she observed it.
Allen has told FBI agents he never asked anyone to lie under oath or tried to hide witnesses to avoid subpoenas. Messages left with his attorney in Anchorage this week weren't returned.
Allen, after pleading guilty in 2007 to bribery and other corruption charges, was also the key witness in the trials of former state Rep. Vic Kohring and U.S. Sen. Ted Stevens. Stevens' charges were thrown out in April after his conviction. Kott and Kohring are saying they were likewise unfairly tried, and have been released from prison while their cases are sorted out. All said that prosecutors failed to provide them with discrediting information they knew about Allen and other witnesses as required by law.
For instance, in a letter to Stevens' defense team on the eve of his trial in 2008, prosecutors asserted "the government is aware of no evidence to support any suggestion that Allen asked the 'other female' (Tyree) to make a false statement under oath." But in 2004, Tyree told a federal prosecutor and an FBI agent from Alaska precisely that, and Allen's attorney admitted in a 2004 letter to the U.S. Attorney's Office in Anchorage that he had the statement in his files, though he refused to turn it over.
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