Suit: Kane aide quickly went from ally to outcast

Pennsylvania Attorney General Kathleen G. Kane invited her aide to her home on a Friday night and offered him a beer from the wet bar.

That was the end of the hospitality.

Kane instructed Kevin Wevodau, a former FBI agent and one of her office's top investigative commanders, to leave his cellphone on a table some distance from where they spoke, so nothing could be recorded.

Then, she told him he was a "cancer" on the office, that he was the leaker behind a host of negative stories about her, that she knew he would be a witness against her in court.

She told Wevodau he should resign. If he didn't, she warned, his reputation "could be ruined" and he could "lose his family."

This unusual confrontation last June between boss and subordinate is laid out in a lawsuit newly filed by Wevodau, who refused to quit and has been in professional limbo ever since. The seventh such suit filed against Kane or her agency, the lawsuit is the chronicle of an aide who quickly went from ally to outcast in an office awash in paranoia and ill will.

Chuck Ardo, a spokesman for Kane, said the office had not had a chance to review the suit, filed in Commonwealth Court, and thus had no comment.

When Kane took office in 2013, the first Democrat and the first woman elected attorney general in Pennsylvania, she brought in a new leadership team. She appointed three men to supervise the office's investigative agents, paying each about $140,000 annually.

She named Wevodau to oversee criminal investigations, David Peifer to manage child-predator cases, and Jonathan Duecker to run narcotics investigations.

Now, Wevodau is on unwanted, if paid, administrative leave, and Peifer has been granted immunity from prosecution to testify against Kane at her upcoming criminal trial. Only Duecker remains a Kane confidant, serving as acting chief of staff as well as narcotics chief.

Kane promoted Duecker despite a recommendation from her Human Resources unit that he be fired for allegedly sexually harassing an agent and a prosecutor. Soon after, Kane fired that official. He, too, is suing her.

At the time of Duecker's promotion, a critic of the move said Kane told him: "He's loyal. I don't have anyone left who is loyal to me."

Wevodau, 58, joined Kane after working for three decades as an FBI agent, including a final stint commanding the agents who broke the "kids for cash" judicial scandal in Luzerne County.

Fairly early on, Wevodau says, he complained to Kane that she seemed to prefer to pass orders to him through her driver, rather than directly.

Kane did not take the criticism well, the suit says. She replied by accusing Wevodau of being a "mole for the FBI."

But, as with so many former and current staffers with the Attorney General's Office, it was his involvement with a controversial sting investigation inherited by Kane and later disavowed by her that ended up casting him most deeply into disfavor.

Kane shut down the undercover investigation in 2013 without bringing charges, although the sting had caught six elected officials from Philadelphia on tape pocketing money.

She later gave confidential documents to a newspaper in a bid to embarrass a former state prosecutor whom she blamed for leaking the news that she had aborted the sting case. That leak and what prosecutors say were her subsequent lies under oath about her actions are the basis of her pending criminal trial.

Kane, who faces charges of perjury, conspiracy, and other crimes, has denied any wrongdoing.

Pressed to explain why she shuttered the sting, Kane said Wevodau had written up notes in 2013 reporting that the operation's case agent had told him he had been instructed to target only African Americans.

Kane's statement turned out to be half-true.

While Wevodau did make such a charge in a memo, he produced the memo in 2014 - four days after Kane told the public she already had it.

In the memo, released several months ago as pretrial evidence in Kane's criminal case, Wevodau is critical of the sting. But Wevodau's suit downplays that, wrongly suggesting it had raised doubts about the racial-targeting claims.

Dismissing any suggestion that race played a role in the sting, he writes instead that Kane killed the probe "to maintain or gain political allies and serve her own political career goals."

The case agent, Claude Thomas, has denied telling Wevodau that race played any role in the sting. He sued Kane and Wevodau last year, but Wevodau was granted immunity from the suit.

In the aftermath of the sting controversy, Wevodau testified in grand jury investigations focused on Kane's leaking and on her handling of the sting.

In December 2014, he says, one of Kane's closest allies, Renee Martin, who for a time served as a Kane's spokeswoman, questioned him about the matter, demanding to know whether he had become a witness against the attorney general. Martin declined comment Monday.

Judges overseeing both grand jury probes issued protective orders barring Kane from taking retaliatory action against witnesses. This may help explain why Kane pressed for Wevodau to resign, but did not fire him.

On the Monday after the Friday meeting at Kane's home north of Scranton in June 2015, Wevodau applied for medical leave.

By last fall, he was ready to turn to work. But he says Kane has refused to let him come back, leaving him on paid administrative leave.

cmccoy@phillynews.com

215-854-4821 @CraigRMcCoy