For almost five decades, Ted Stevens was Alaska politics. Many in the north knew him simply as "Uncle Ted," a sobriquet he earned for all the monetary gifts he brought home to the 49th state from Washington, D.C. He was beloved in Alaska, but in the end, gifts and favors from a prominent oilman would tarnish his reputation both here and in D.C.

Stevens, who had been a state legislator before going on to serve 40 years in the U.S. Senate, died Monday in a plane crash on the way to what had become an annual fishing trip to Southwest Alaska. It was an ironic end for a man whose adult life began as a World War II aviator and whose political career was almost cut short by an explosive crash of a small jet on a runway at what is now known as Ted Stevens Anchorage International Airport.

Stevens' first wife, Ann, and four others died in that Dec. 4, 1978 crash. One-time Alaska Commerce Commissioner Tony Motley and Ted Stevens were the only survivors. Motley went on to become U.S. ambassador to Brazil. Stevens went on to become the longest-serving Senate Republican in U.S. history.

"It takes years to get the power he had," recalled Clem Tillion, a former Alaska legislator and longtime friend of Stevens'. The men met in 1962 during campaign season, when Stevens made his first run at the Senate in a failed bid to unseat Ernest Gruening. Tillion, a fisherman, cultivated his own career in the Alaska Legislature while Stevens went on six years later to make his mark in Washington.

When a federal grand jury in 2008 indicted Stevens for failing to report on his Senate disclosure forms more than $200,000 in gifts and a house remodel from Bill Allen and his oil-field services company, VECO Corp., there were those who said the senator could never be convicted in his home state because it would be hard -- if not impossible -- to impanel a jury pool that didn't contain people for whom Stevens had done favors.

Federal prosecutors, obviously aware of that, tried him in the nation's capital and won a conviction. It was later overturned by a judge who found that Stevens had been railroaded by misconduct on the part of FBI agents and Justice Department lawyers.

"To try a white Republican in Washington, D.C., you know Jesus Christ would have been convicted. There wasn't any way he could get out. The deck was stacked," Tillion said.

Tillion and others believe the trial and jury conviction cost Stevens his Senate seat. In November 2008, Stevens narrowly lost his reelection bid to Anchorage Mayor Mark Begich, a Democrat, just one week after the jury's findings of guilt.

Begich -- whose father Rep. Nick Begich, D-Alaska, died in a plane crash in Alaska in 1972 -- headed off for the nation's capital pledging to try to do as good a job for his state as Stevens had done for all those decades. The story of a younger man with eager ambitions toppling an entrenched, institutionalized elder entered a new era, just as it had when Stevens was 38 and first went after Gruening, who was 75 at the time.

Stevens' driving passion was seeing that Alaskans got their fair share, and then some, of federal tax dollars. Citizens Against Government Waste attacked him for bringing home $3.4 billion between 1995 and 2008. The Washington, D.C.-based, self-proclaimed government watchdog called it all pork.