An Update on the Ted Stevens Trial

The Hill reports:

A subcontractor who worked on Sen. Ted Stevens’s home testified Wednesday that he risked “business suicide” if he crossed the Alaska Republican’s powerful friend and tried to collect an outstanding debt from the senator.

Augie Paone, who used to co-own a contracting firm called Christensen Builders, said he would have pushed to collect the nearly $20,000 directly from the senator, but he worried about retaliation from Bill Allen, the senator’s former close friend and owner of the influential Veco oil-services firm.

“I thought about sending a bill to the senator [but that would be] business suicide on my side if I did that,” Paone said, speaking of Allen’s political influence and the power of his 5,000-employee company over Paone’s five-person contracting firm.

“I knew I was in between a rock and a hard place — rather than to supersede his authority, I thought it was better business sense on my side to just leave it alone,” Paone said.

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