Taxes funded campaign, jury told as first Bonusgate trial opens

HARRISBURG - Sean Ramaley was a fresh-faced law school graduate eager to learn politics when he landed a job in 2004 as a legislative aide to then-Democratic power broker Rep. Mike Veon.

He showed up to work every day and, on his own time, successfully campaigned for a seat in the state House from Beaver County, Ramaley's attorney told a jury yesterday as the first trial in the Bonusgate public corruption scandal got under way.

"Nobody was slighted. Your tax dollars weren't taken from you," defense lawyer Philip Ignelzi said. "He didn't win with taxpayer dollars. He won with hard work and determination and support."

It was a vastly different portrait of Ramaley, 34, than one painted only moments earlier by a state prosecutor.

"He was paid by tax dollars to run for office. You know what? It worked," Senior Deputy Attorney General Anthony Krastek said. "He didn't have to pay for that election. The people paid for it."

At the heart of the theft and conflict-of-interest case against Ramaley, who left office a year ago, are allegations that taxpayers bankrolled his campaign.

First, he was provided with a no-work, $2,500-a-month job in Veon's Beaver Falls district office, and then he was supplied with state aides who worked on his campaign but were actually paid by taxpayers, the government alleges.

Ramaley and Veon, who also has left office, were among a dozen people with ties to the House Democratic caucus charged last year by Attorney General Tom Corbett.

This year, Dauphin County Court President Judge Richard Lewis agreed to allow Ramaley to be tried separately from the other defendants because the facts of his cases are different. The others are charged with carrying out a scheme to award government bonuses to legislative staffers as rewards for working on political campaigns.

At least five of the defendants have agreed to plead guilty in deals with prosecutors. Trials for the others, including Veon, are set for January.

Ramaley worked for Veon as an aide from July until November 2004. That's when Ramaley won the 16th District House seat, adjacent to the 14th then held by Veon.

Yesterday, two former aides to Veon took the stand as government witnesses and said they never saw Ramaley do any state-related work.

One, Stephen Webb, testified about how Ramaley, while purportedly working as an aide to Veon on labor relations matters, spent his work hours knocking on doors or on other campaign efforts.

He also told the jury that he was assigned by Veon to serve as a top campaign aide to Ramaley while remaining on the state payroll.

"It was understood that I wasn't to do any commonwealth work but to work on the campaign," Webb said. "I wasn't comfortable with it, but I didn't feel I was in a position to say no."

Webb, who has not been charged, testified although he did not have a grant of immunity from prosecutors.

On cross-examination, Ignelzi attacked Webb's credibility.

Webb, who still holds a position in the House as a top legislative researcher, had testified on the stand that he lied to the Bonusgate grand jury in 2007 when he denied ever performing campaign work on state time.

Yesterday, he said he had lied because he feared getting in a legal jam and called the move "pretty much the biggest mistake of my life." Also, he acknowledged that he tried to destroy computer records during the probe.

"So, we have a perjurer, a thief and an obstructor of justice," said Ignelzi.

Last month, 10 people with ties to the House Republican caucus were charged in the second round of Bonusgate counts. Rep. John M. Perzel (R., Phila.) and nine others are accused of using $10 million in public funds to build sophisticated computer databases that helped GOP members win elections.

At the outset of yesterday's court session, Ignelzi renewed his motion to move the trial out of Dauphin County.

He suggested that the timing of the GOP arrests and Friday news reports about prosecutors inviting former House Democratic Leader Bill DeWeese and his successor, Todd Eachus, to testify before a grand jury was engineered to promote an impression of "more corruption at the Capitol."

Krastek shrugged off the accusation. "We can't just shut down our office for the rest of this trial," he said.

After he was charged last year, Ramaley abandoned his bid for the state Senate. He left the House after his second term.

Ramaley's trial is expected to last another week.