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Stepdaughter says she
cashed checks, got credit
cards for Kahapea

By Debra Barayuga
Star-Bulletin

The stepdaughter of fired city housing official Michael Kahapea said she never questioned him when he asked her to type up bid proposals for companies to do moving and relocation work at Ewa Villages or cash thousands of dollars in checks for him.

"I helped him out because he was my father," said Hoang Williams, referring to the man who had raised her since the age of 5.

Kahapea, formerly in charge of relocations, is on trial for allegedly stealing about $5.6 million from the Ewa Village Relocation project between 1993 and 1997. Prosecutors say relatives, friends and commercial tenants at Ewa Villages got caught up in the scheme in which Kahapea received kickbacks for securing moving and relocation work.

Williams said she typed up three or four bid proposals a month between 1993 and 1995 at the dining table of Kahapea's Kaneohe home.

Kahapea made her type the proposals on blank letterhead for American Hauling and Titan Moving -- which allegedly submitted fake bids and was paid for doing relocation work at Ewa Villages. She said she just copied the language for the proposals that her father had written on yellow legal sheets.

Sometimes, the signatures and dollar amounts of the bids were already on the letterhead so she spaced the text around them, she said.

Cashed checks in her name

Williams also testified she didn't question her father at first when he asked her during the same period to cash at least 10 cashier's checks with amounts ranging from $7,000 to $9,000 made out in her name and turn over to him.

"I assumed he was so busy he made it out in my name so I could cash it for him," she said.

At least three of the checks were given to her by Russ Williams, a very close friend and associate of her father, to be cashed. She would turn over the cash to her father or Williams.

On a couple of occasions, Kahapea instructed her to make cashier's checks out to her mother, Lisa Wong Kahapea, and to Bob Oriskovich, a partner of her father in two mainland ventures.

Williams said she stopped the practice of cashing the checks in March 1995 after she met her husband-to-be who advised her not to do it again.

Under questioning by Deputy Prosecutor Randal Lee, Williams said she never did any work at Ewa Villages to be paid the checks. Williams also testified that her father ran up a balance of $20,000 on three credit cards she helped him obtain because he had filed for bankruptcy and couldn't get them on his own.

"He assured me he would pay them off," Williams said.

She ended up having to work a lot of overtime at Queen's Hospital, sell her entire coin collection, bonds and all the assets she had before she got married to pay off the credit card bill.

When asked by defense attorney Don Wilkerson whether she was still bitter about it, she replied, "I'm upset I got stuck with his charges."

Kahapea covered his face with his hands as Williams testified.

Cash in a plain envelope

Earlier, Shirley Hall, vice president of A-1 Hawaii Trucking and Equipment, testified that she cashed numerous city checks as payment for clearing lots, hauling away debris and cleanup in Ewa Villages -- work offered by Kahapea.

But she would be instructed to cash the checks, withdraw a portion -- once as much as $50,000 to $60,000 -- place it in a plain white envelope and turn it over to her husband, Donald, president of the trucking company. Her husband and Kahapea would disappear into another room or go outside and when she would get the envelope back, sometimes 20 percent or up to half of the original amount would be missing.

She and her husband began fighting after she began questioning him about the missing cash. "We still fighting about this -- it's never ending," Hall said.

Hall reached an agreement with the state in September 1998 to plead guilty to first-degree theft and cooperate with the Ewa Village investigation.

Under questioning by Wilkerson, Hall said she agreed to plead guilty to theft, "Because I knew Mr. Kahapea was getting kickbacks for every job we did in that village."

She said while she never saw her husband give Kahapea the money, her husband told her he did.