By all appearances, Ty Williams — the nickel-slick and very sick dude who promised to bring 650 decent-paying jobs in the hemp industry to Glenville — is a sociopath who hides behind Bible scripture. Go to his Facebook page and you’ll be inundated with biblical quotes that he posts on a daily basis. Go to his Cuyahoga County Clerk of Courts page, however, and you’ll be inundated with entries related to his criminal past.
Now I don’t want to be the pot that calls the kettle black, not given my own past as a counterfeiter of credit cards, but there’s a huge difference between Williams and me: My “victims” were corporations like Merrill Lynch and Citibank, whereas this scumbag scammed close to 200 needy residents of Cleveland with his bullshit scheme. Additionally, I didn’t hide behind the Bible as this piece of human offal did. But he didn’t pull off his dirty deeds all alone. He had accomplices and enablers — unwitting accomplices to be sure, but Williams would not have been able to scam so many people if certain members of the community didn’t put their stamp of approval on him and his bullshit project.
The simple fact is, the elected officials and members of the clergy didn’t do their due diligence, as they were too caught up in the over-the-top promises Williams was making. Their greed or arrogance got the better of them. But what I’ve yet to figure out is what the endgame was. Every con has an endgame, a payoff. What’s the sense of doing all of this lying to people without a payoff?
Cleveland City Councilman Kevin Conwell, who refused to be sucked into the scheme, gave me his opinion of what the payoff was, and I believe that he’s right: This bum just wanted to move around town as if he was the Second Coming. People were literally worshipping this dude and he was lapping it up with a spoon. The payoff for Williams was to be “King Shit” for a few months — nothing more. He was living out his drug-addled fantasy of being a savior, and his Facebook page proves it. In his sick mind he was Jesus coming down off the Cross to save his people.
More and more stories of people quitting their jobs to take one at the pie-in-the-sky hemp enterprise that Williams was setting up are starting to surface every day. A man who was a deputy sheriff for years quit the county to work at the enterprise as chief of security; a single father of three quit his supermarket job because he believed in the lies and promises of this sick fuck; a mother of two is about to lose her home — all because of this sick fuck.
Now that a federal lawsuit has been filed by some of the people that were scammed, and the county prosecutor is starting to ask some questions, the scheme is all but over. By the time you read this Williams will ghost — he’ll be long gone from the scene of his crimes against trusting citizens of Cleveland. But what of the enablers?
As stated earlier, Williams would not have been able to bullshit so many people if trusted and supposedly upstanding members of the community had not vouched for him every step of the way. Those folks owe everyone an apology; it will be interesting to see if one is forthcoming.
From CoolCleveland correspondent Mansfield B. Frazier mansfieldfATgmail.com. Frazier’s From Behind The Wall: Commentary on Crime, Punishment, Race and the Underclass by a Prison Inmate is available in hardback. Snag your copy and have it signed by the author at http://NeighborhoodSolutionsInc.