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Key witness against Evans weeps
By JEFF TESTERMAN © St. Petersburg Times, published February 9, 2001 TAMPA -- The defense sought to undermine the credibility of a key government witness in the Tampa Housing Authority bribery scandal Thursday with questions about his cash kickbacks and lengthy criminal record. Orlando contractor Bill Williams Jr., who has pleaded guilty to paying bribes to former Tampa Housing Authority Executive Director Audley Evans and agreed to cooperate with federal prosecutors, broke down and wept at one point during cross-examination by Evans' attorney, Arnold Levine. Williams, 54, removed his glasses to wipe away tears as Levine questioned him about being charged with stealing from his daughter's trust account in Cleveland in 1988. Williams admitted being found guilty in the case and removed as trustee of an account set up for his daughter after the death of his first wife. Prodded by Levine, Williams testified he had been arrested about a dozen times in three states from 1969 to 1995. Asked initially Thursday how many times he had been arrested, Williams answered, "Five or six." Williams also backtracked from testimony given a day earlier concerning cash kickbacks he paid Evans. Williams said Wednesday that he had paid a total of 14 bribes to Evans totaling more than $79,000 in return for $1.6-million in Housing Authority contracts. But later that day, Williams said every time he had cashed a check in Tampa for less than $10,000, the threshold for currency reporting to the government, he had delivered the cash to Evans. "Audley Evans got a lot of money from me," Williams concluded Wednesday. "Hundreds of thousands of dollars." Thursday, Levine used an overhead projector to display checks for $5,000, $5,000, $2,000, $2,000 and $500 that were cashed in Tampa by Williams in 1995. Williams acknowledged that the cash from the five checks had not been paid to Evans after all, but actually kept by himself or another employee. Evans, 48, won awards for his work as executive director of the Housing Authority from 1988 to 1996. He was charged with bribery, wire fraud, conspiracy and money laundering in a 125-count indictment last April. Co-defendants Dr. Patrick Watson, a Tampa physician, and C. Hayward Chapman, a local developer, are accused of paying kickbacks to Evans. Asked by Levine this week about his criminal past, Williams frequently replied that he had "accepted responsibility" for his crimes and paid his "debt to society." A pastor of a Pentecostal church in Orlando and father of five, Williams has state convictions for receiving stolen property, writing worthless checks and misappropriating trust funds. He also was sentenced to prison three times from 1991 to 1995 on federal convictions stemming from defrauding an Orlando bank, Bethune-Cookman College and a group of Ohio investors of a total of $475,000.
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From the Times |
