But unlike on the other two, Manzo, who was charged with Veon in 2008, got very pointed questions as a defense lawyer spent the day attacking his credibility.
Once considered among the brightest minds in the Capitol, Manzo, 40, acknowledged that if convicted on all 42 counts against him, he could have faced more than 300 years in prison. Now, after pleading guilty to 10 counts, he might avoid jail time.
"To help yourself, you will testify about anything, won't you?" said Dan Raynak, one of Veon's lawyers.
"That's not true," responded Manzo, who moments earlier said he had agreed to cooperate with prosecutors because "I wanted to stop having this engulf my entire life."
As Manzo testified yesterday in the Dauphin County Courthouse, his former boss, DeWeese (D., Greene), was across the state announcing his intentions to seek reelection despite facing criminal charges of his own.
Prosecutors allege that Veon, a former Democratic whip, was the mastermind of a scheme to pay $1.4 million in taxpayer-funded bonuses to legislative aides as rewards for working on political campaigns on state time. His codefendants - former top aides Brett Cott, Annamarie Perretta-Rosepink, and Steve Keefer - are accused of helping Veon carry out the scheme.
The fourth day of the trial got off to a heated start as charges and countercharges flew.
The dispute centered on a memo that prosecutors sent defense attorneys on Jan. 8, saying that in the process of final trial preparations in the last few months they had reinterviewed Manzo, their leadoff witness. In that session, the memo said, Manzo told of several conversations with Veon (D., Beaver) during past years in which, he said, the two men talked specifically about the cash-for-campaigning scheme.
However, Manzo, who had testified before the grand jury four times and met with agents of the state Attorney General's Office at least three times, said yesterday that he had told prosecutors that information much earlier.
