Former Alaska House Speaker Pete Kott says his 2007 trial on corruption charges was so tainted with prosecutorial misconduct that his guilty verdict should be thrown out and his charges dismissed.

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Pete Kott

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In a 59-page motion filed Thursday in U.S. District Court, Kott's lawyer said the government deliberately hid information from Kott's trial team, including stunning details of lead prosecution witness Bill Allen's sexual activity with underage girls and Allen's efforts to get at least one to perjure herself to protect him.

Kott's Seattle lawyer, Sheryl Gordon McCloud, said in the motion that the material casts sharp doubts on Allen's credibility, including his explanations of videotaped and eavesdropped conversations about alleged bribes that were played to Kott's jury.

The new information, provided over the last several months to Kott and former Rep. Vic Kohring, who also was tried and convicted on corruption charges in 2007, also casts doubt on other key parts of the government's case against Kott, McCloud wrote. Some of the new material corroborates assertions made by Kott on the witness stand that money and favors he got from Allen were not evidence of bribery or extortion, but rather loans or other more innocuous transactions.

"Certainly there were recordings," McCloud wrote. "But the witnesses differed as to the meaning of those recordings. The government's witnesses -- testifying pursuant to plea agreements -- testified that those recordings showed bribery and extortion, that is, payments in exchange for favors."

The new evidence suggests otherwise, she wrote.

The material also shows how Allen and his vice president, Rick Smith, were coached prior to the trials when prosecutors feared their testimony wouldn't be strong enough, McCloud wrote. And on several occasions, the lead FBI agent on the Alaska corruption investigation didn't include information in interview reports that would have weakened her case even though other agents writing about the same interviews did include the unfavorable statements.

The material that was delivered to Kott and Kohring is part of the fallout from the trial of U.S. Sen. Ted Stevens of Alaska on charges that he failed to report hundreds of thousands of dollars of gifts and benefits from Allen, once the chief executive of the oil field service company Veco Corp.

Allen, 72, was the chief witness in the Stevens case, as well as in the trials of Kott and Kohring. As Veco boss, he was one of the most politically active players in Alaska, contributing big and often to campaigns and maintaining a formidable lobbying presence in Juneau during legislative sessions.

Allen helped renovate Stevens' Girdwood home starting in 2000, but Stevens never reported the big-money favors as gifts.

A Washington, D.C., jury found Stevens guilty on all counts in October, but the case began to unravel when an FBI agent said the investigation and trial were tainted by government misconduct. By April, with investigations into the allegations under way, the Justice Department admitted it failed to give Stevens favorable evidence he was entitled to, including information that might have discredited Allen before the jury.

Attorney General Eric Holder asked that all charges against Stevens be dismissed.

At the same time, the Justice Department began a review of the convictions of Kott and Kohring, then serving time in federal prisons, and in June said similar problems were found in their cases. At the government's request, Kott and Kohring were freed on their own recognizance pending resolution of the matter by U.S. District Judge John Sedwick, the Anchorage judge who presided over their trials.

Lawyers for the two men were originally supposed to file motions by Monday, with the government response due in October and oral arguments, if necessary, in November. But Kohring's lawyer won a one-month delay because of other trials the attorney has in the Seattle area.

Sedwick hasn't said when he'll make a ruling. He could dismiss the charges or order new trials. He also could rule the new evidence wasn't significant and send Kott and Kohring back to prison, but given the weight and questions posed by the material, that possibility appears to be receding.

Allegations about Allen's sexual activity with a minor arose briefly in a closed hearing in Kott's trial. In her motion, McCloud said the disclosure by prosecutors caught Kott's trial attorney, Jim Wendt, by surprise. When prosecutors assured the judge the information was irrelevant to Kott's trial, the matter didn't go further.

The issue played out similarly in Kohring trial.

Several months later, in early 2008, the Daily News and the Anchorage Press reported that an Anchorage police detective uncovered evidence in an unrelated 2003 case that Allen had sexual relations with a 14- or 15-year-old girl in the mid-1990s. The detective, Kevin Vandegriff, originally suspended his investigation in 2004 at the request of federal prosecutors, but by 2008 had reopened it.

The case remains active, and information provided to Kott contained evidence known by prosecutors at the time of his trial and also new material recently unearthed by Vandegriff. There is no statute of limitations for the state crime of sexual abuse of a minor.

McCloud noted in her motion that authorities recently served a search warrant in connection with that investigation. The search warrant concerned the crimes of sexual abuse, promoting prostitution and the federal sex trafficking charge of coercion and enticement.

The stories focused on Bambi Tyree, who by then was 27. Since then, another woman came forward and said in interviews that she had sex with Allen when she was underage, and that Allen paid her to fly to Anchorage from the Lower 48 to have sex.

But the new material goes much further, identifying two other underage female victims, though McCloud referred to them only by number. Her motion says a fifth woman, also identified only by number, was a 19-year-old prostitute who knew Allen had sex with other underage girls at the time she was seeing him, in 1997.

"Its newly released documents contain allegations and evidence that Bill Allen committed a multitude of primarily sex crimes against children, and that he sought to have them swear that he never committed such acts," McCloud wrote in her motion.

McCloud's motion didn't specifically name Tyree, but her designation as "Child Victim 1" by McCloud is unmistakable.

The motion said Tyree told federal authorities in 2004 that Allen asked her to sign a sworn statement that she never had sex with him. The affidavit was subsequently prepared by one of Allen's attorneys and Tyree signed it "because she cared for Allen and did not want him to get into trouble with the law," McCloud wrote, quoting an Anchorage Police Department report.

"This is evidence that Allen was aware that his prior acts were criminal and that he manipulated his victim into signing a false statement to protect himself," McCloud argued. Kott should have had that information to challenge Allen's credibility at his trial, she said.

Allen also attempted to coerce the 19-year-old prostitute into signing a similar affidavit by offering her $5,000, but she refused, McCloud said.

The Kott motion raises new questions about why Vandegriff halted his investigation in 2004.

Tyree's relationship with Allen emerged from an earlier investigation by Anchorage police and the FBI into the "Joe Millionaire" child sexual exploitation case in 2003. In that case, Josef Boehm, the wealthy owner of Alaska Industrial Hardware, was charged with trading crack cocaine for sex with a series of underage girls. Tyree, then a young adult and a heavy cocaine addict, pleaded guilty in the case and told investigators she provided many of the girls in return for a steady supply of drugs from Boehm.

In the course of giving evidence against Boehm, she also mentioned her relationship with Bill Allen. Her story was corroborated by at least one other woman who talked to federal authorities at the time.

In March 2004, an assistant U.S. attorney, Frank Russo, asked Vandegriff to suspend the Allen investigation. In an interview with the Daily News in 2008, Russo said his request had nothing to do with the Alaska corruption cases and the central role that Allen played in them.

Rather, he asked Vandegriff to suspend the Allen investigation for purely practical reasons: The impending Boehm case was complex, with dozens of witnesses, and Boehm himself had a high-powered, three-attorney defense team that fought at every opportunity.

"We said, 'Hey, why don't we put this aside until later -- we have enough to focus on,' " Russo said in the interview.

But the police department file on the case says Allen was also a consideration, according to the Kott motion.

"In March 2004 I was advised by AUSA Frank Russo to not actively investigate this case as it might interfere with a federal investigation involving Allen and Josef Boehm," Vandegriff wrote in the file, according to McCloud.

At that point, the Alaska corruption investigation had been under way for about nine months, though there was no way then for the FBI to know that Allen would eventually agree to plead guilty and testify for the prosecution. That happened about two years later.

Even after he agreed to testify, Allen hated to talk about the child sex allegations and denied wrongdoing. Lead FBI Agent Mary Beth Kepner once said that Allen would "become unglued" whenever he learned the allegations might become public, according to the Kott motion.

Find Richard Mauer online at adn.com/contact/rmauer or call 257-4345.

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