Ex-housing aide cites pressure to lie

His Tampa Housing Authority boss asked him to lie about a cash conversion, he testifies.

By JEFF TESTERMAN

© St. Petersburg Times, published February 13, 2001

TAMPA -- In the midst of a federal investigation into the Tampa Housing Authority, agency boss Audley Evans asked an employee to lie about $3,000 in cash converted to a cashier's check, the employee testified Monday.

Earl Haynes, former deputy executive director at the Housing Authority, said the $3,000 was delivered to him from Evans through another employee in May 1995, with instructions to convert it to a cashier's check payable to Evans.

Evans said the $3,000 represented the proceeds of some bonds he had cashed for his wife. Haynes, who now works for the Lakeland Housing Authority, said he drove to a credit union office, obtained a check and delivered it to Evans.

Then, in the fall of 1998, with a grand jury investigation of the Housing Authority under way, Haynes said Evans asked him over lunch at Applebee's to lie about the $3,000.

"He said if anyone asked about it to say it was the repayment of a loan," Haynes testified. "I replied I'd feel uncomfortable" because there had been no such loan.

A federal prosecutor displayed the check Monday, pointing to a footnote scribbled on the check that said, "repayment of loan." Haynes said he did know how that note ended up on the check.

It isn't clear from testimony where Evans, the executive director of the Tampa Housing Authority from 1988 to 1996, got the $3,000.

He is accused in a 92-count indictment of taking cash bribes, many of them in 1995, to steer lucrative authority contracts to, among others, Bill Williams Jr., an Orlando contractor with a lengthy criminal record.

Haynes also testified Monday that he saw Williams slip an envelope into Evans' pocket in front of Housing Authority offices in 1996, a couple of hours before Williams picked up a $200 bar tab for the three men at Malio's restaurant one Friday night.

Haynes said he did not know what was inside the envelope.

Also testifying Monday was former Tampa Housing Authority Planning Director Angelo DePaul, who spent several hours on the witness stand Friday detailing instances in which Evans pressured him to falsify construction disbursement requests for Williams' company, Unique Construction.

Jurors learned for the first time Monday that DePaul has pleaded guilty to two crimes arising from the Housing Authority investigation.

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