Print

Email story

Comment

Email editor

How vast was his web of deceit?

Attorneys for the man set to be sentenced for fraud in Tampa this week say talk of local victims is just speculation.

By COLLEEN JENKINS
Published July 29, 2006

TAMPA — Two years before William Hillman III bilked computer companies of more than $600,000, he posed for a photo alongside  Temple Terrace fire Chief Ernie Hiers to promote an invention Hillman said would make residents safer.

He had created large, reflective signs designed to make street numbers on homes and businesses visible to emergency service workers at night. Hillman promised some of the proceeds would be donated to local fire, police and rescue squads.

The Fire Department never saw any money.

Hillman will be sentenced on Friday for obtaining computer equipment from Dell, Hewlett-Packard and Toshiba under the guise of bogus mad cow disease research. But authorities believe those charges only scratch the surface of Hillman’s deceit, which likely ensnared local victims as well.

He “is one of the most sophisticated con artists I have ever seen,” prosecutor Thomas Palermo said at an April court hearing.
“The more we dig, the more we find,” he added in June.

Defense attorneys denounce the state’s accusations about local victims as mere speculation. They say Hillman, 61, has mental illnesses and substance dependencies that require inpatient treatment, not prison.

Either way, one needs to look no further than Hillman’s court file to see the work of a master manipulator.

He arrived in Florida around 2000, said Tampa police Detective Robert Baxter. Soon after, he was charged in Manatee County with check fraud.

Then he got going on a venture known both as Emergency Marker Manufacturing Co. and Project Home I.D.

In the late 1990s, Hillman had peddled an invention he called 911 NightVision Numbers to residents in New Jersey towns. For $20, plus free installation, Hillman told people they could get peace of mind knowing emergency workers would be able to locate their homes in the dark.

But three times in 1998, buyers complained to the Better Business Bureau that after Hillman collected their payment for the address markers, he never returned to install the product.

The following year, according to Hillman’s own notes, he apologized to five customers about delays in filling orders, offered to refund their money and said the business had bankrupted him. One customer said, “Tell it to the judge.”

Baxter said New Jersey authorities never charged Hillman criminally.

Hillman tried again in Florida, registering Project Home I.D. as a corporation with the state.

On Oct. 13, 2002, he set up a promotional display at the Temple Terrace Fire Department’s fire safety open house. Interviewed by the Temple Terrace/University Beacon, Hillman pledged to donate some of his sales money to area rescue squads.

A press release that billed itself as coming from division Chief Dave Becker of the Temple Terrace Fire Department also urged residents to make a $25 donation to the department in exchange for the reflective numbers.

Becker said the idea was a good one, but he doesn’t think he wrote the release.

“The Fire Department never received any money from this gentleman,” Becker said last month. “I don’t think his program really got off the ground here.”

It did, however, attract the attention of one generous patron. Not long after 87-year-old Dorothy Birdsong purchased what Hillman then called “911 NightSafety House Numbers,” she gave him access to several of her credit cards, Palermo said.

Several financial institutions questioned the arrangement.

“Mr. Hillman has just recovered from a two-year battle with cancer, and I am contributing my financial strength to the partnership to insure success,” Birdsong wrote in letters responding to concerns from her creditors. “Possibly I have to make it obviously clear to you that I trust (Hillman) completely.”

Birdsong’s family did not. They thought Hillman was exploiting Birdsong and called Temple Terrace police.

That investigation didn’t move fast enough for prosecutors to charge Hillman specifically for his interaction with Birdsong. But they included Project Home I.D. as part of Hillman’s racketeering enterprise; investigators think Hillman bilked Birdsong of more than $63,000.

“She is definitely one of the victims in the case,” Palermo said.

On Aug. 5, 2005, Hillman joined his wife, Simone Hillman, and son at their new home in Ashland, Ore. The same day he left town, Baxter, the Tampa detective, got a call from Hewlett-Packard.

A private investigation by the Fortune 500 company indicated it was the victim of fraud.

From his Tampa Palms apartment, Hillman had concocted his grandest scheme yet. He called it the Federal BioResearch Academy, an organization dedicated to curing mad cow disease.

The academy’s Web site was registered to a Baron Thor Vandenburgh IV, one of Hillman’s aliases. Hillman also registered the academy with Dun & Bradstreet, which keeps tabs on companies’ credit ratings. The academy is still listed in the online database.

“Everything looked exactly the way it should have looked for a legitimate company,” Baxter said.

From August 2004 to July 2005, investigators found, Hillman placed orders for computers and equipment that he said would be covered by federal grant money. His take: $317,715 worth of equipment from Dell, $59,433 from Toshiba and $243,616 from Hewlett-Packard.

Hillman dispersed the equipment to storage sheds in Wesley Chapel and New Jersey and to a man who resold dozens of the stolen laptops from his Iselin, N.J., shop.

Ultimately, Baxter traced Hillman across the country through a UPS shipping label he left behind on a box outside his vacated Tampa Palms apartment.

Hillman had recently sent multiple boxes under that shipping number to his wife in Oregon.

In April, Hillman pleaded guilty to racketeering, grand theft and organized fraud for more than $50,000.

Prosecutors want him to spend eight years in prison and the rest of his life on probation in hopes of getting restitution for his victims.

Hillman’s attorneys would prefer to send him to a 63-day dual diagnosis inpatient program in Avon Park.

“Obviously, this is a person who needs a lot of help,” said Valerie R. McClain, a licensed psychologist who evaluated Hillman.

Hillsborough Circuit Judge Debra Behnke will decide his fate  Friday. So far, she doesn’t seem inclined to believe many of Hillman’s claims.

“If anybody has come close to proving he’s a compulsive liar,” Behnke said at a June hearing, it was Hillman.

Behnke delayed Hillman’s sentencing to give his new private attorney more time to produce records that prove Hillman actually was in foster care as a child and graduated from Drew University.

Foster care records are not available to the public. But a spokesman for the college in Madison, N.J., said Hillman did in fact graduate in 1968.

Prosecutors said a New Jersey woman who acknowledges losing $100,000 to Hillman now is paying for his private attorney.

In a call recorded by the jail, Hillman promised to pay her back.

Colleen Jenkins can be reached at (813) 226-3337 or cjenkins@sptimes.com.

[Last modified July 29, 2006, 22:28:23]