A life of crime part one — The Eye
After The Eye first revealed Howard Williams is a convicted criminal who had had his legs broken when a drug deal soured and we disclosed the length of his prison sentences, yet he now poses as a successful South Wales property ‘expert’ and vulnerable people are taken in, here his father Bill Williams tells heartbreakingly of the family’s suffering.
I want to show the other side of Howard Williams.
Everything I write is tempered by emotion; love, frustration — and truth.
Howard was always a wheeler-dealer, even from a very young age.
I think the three loves of his life were money, his mum and me, his dad.
Things went very wrong from around 1996 ~ I had a shop in Cardiff, where Howard and I worked, but at the same time, my wife Sonja developed breast cancer.
Howard Williams likes to tell people he is a ‘leader’ but doesn’t tell them he had his legs broken when a drug deal went wrong
This took me away from the shop, giving Howard a free rein over the business.
I estimate that he stole stock and money to the value of approximately £250,000.
Of course I would often catch him and then sack him but I always took him back.
Howard became a Special Constable with South Wales Police, earning two commendations — after which he eventually left the police force, because, he claimed, there had been a clash of personalities.
He did try to rejoin later, but I spoke to a police officer friend of mine and explained that since Howard was dishonest it might be better if this application was rejected.
Just after this, Howard was arrested and sent to prison for the first time — I think it was for about four months.
We were always worried about the sort of people he would associate with in prison.
For his first jail term he was sentenced two days before Christmas and the following day, Christmas Eve, his solicitor had arranged an appeal.
I attended court with a pocketful of money, hoping to pay back the people he had defrauded and get him out, but unfortunately this was not to be.
That Christmas was awful.
How could we possibly have a nice time when our beautiful son was in prison?
On Christmas Day, we parked outside Cardiff Prison, just to be close to him.
Eventually, Howard and I parted and he left to become an estate agent in Barry.
One day, after a frantic phone call from Howard, saying he needed money to keep his business afloat, I helped him out again.
I later found out that he was driving around in a new Mercedes sports car — yes, I’d been duped AGAIN!
A life of crime part two is tomorrow, where Bill Williams details some of the money his son stole from him and how he stopped him jumping from a bridge.
Originally published at www.the-eye-investigates.uk on January 24, 2017.
