The shaming of William Guevara began early on a summer morning. At 7:30 a.m., July 9, 2004, Guevara and his wife Judy were awakened by banging on their front door. Judy went to the door in her robe to find officers from the Tampa Police Department waiting to arrest her husband.
Officers gave Guevara little time to dress before handcuffing him behind his back. "They didn't even let me comb his hair," Judy says.
Two years later, Guevara still suffers from the arrest. As he tries to tell his story, he slumps forward, his voice breaking, barely able to utter a word. Tears fall from his eyes onto his guayabera shirt. His wife must speak for him.
Guevara is a small man, 60 years old, neatly dressed, with white hair and a moustache immaculately cared for. He doesn't look like a criminal. But on that July morning, he was treated like a criminal.
His accuser? Pro wrestling icon Hulk Hogan. In the star's eyes, William Guevara — who had cared for years for Hogan's elderly father and mother — was a thief. Police charged Guevara with third-degree grand theft, exploitation of an elderly person and fraudulent use of a credit card.
It was all a mistake.
William Guevara entered Hulk Hogan's world in 1998. He and his sons were working as caregivers for elderly people, running errands, fixing up homes, doing whatever was needed. Hogan's chauffeur, an acquaintance of Guevara, mentioned to him that the Hulk's father, Pete Bollea, needed a caregiver. (Hulk Hogan's real name is Terry Bollea.)
Pete Bollea was in poor health, unable to move without aid, and lived in South Tampa with his wife Ruth. Guevara met them and, with his two sons, began working for the couple. His sons were paid $15 an hour to care for Pete until his death on Dec. 28, 2001; William did not receive any payment for helping Pete, he says.
Guevara began working with the elderly 30 years ago in his native Puerto Rico, carrying on a family tradition that began with his father and continued with William's sisters, who went on to own nursing homes in Tampa. When he came to Tampa to live in 1995 (his second trip to the States after working as a farm laborer in Delaware for four years in the 1970s), he took jobs with his sisters as needed. He remembers one moment in particular that convinced him that he had a calling, a "gift from God"; a favorite patient died of a heart attack in his arms, and the experience reaffirmed his commitment to helping older people. He has usually worked for little or no money.
"The thing that people don't understand is that William is that way," Judy said. "He'll do anything for you without expecting anything in return."
His relationship with Ruth went even further; he not only cared for her, he came to think of her as part of his family. He has pictures of Ruth and Pete with his sons, and today, when he shows photos Ruth gave him of herself, his countenance brightens.
"She was like a mother to me," he says in Spanish. He says he was Ruth's paño de lagrimas, an expression that means that his was the shoulder she cried on. "Most people who do what I do, they let themselves be paid, but I cared. I only did good for her," Guevara said. "I treated her better than my own mother."
From time to time, he says, Ruth would give him $10 or $20 for gas money. He lives in the Lowry Park neighborhood in north Tampa; the drive to Ruth Bollea's home south of Gandy Boulevard is not a short run, but Guevara says he sometimes made the trip three times a day when Ruth would call for assistance. And she called often. Judy Guevara said in a written statement prepared for the lawsuit that her husband took Ruth to doctor's appointments, shopping trips and visits to friends. "He even soaks her feet in Epsom salts when needed," Judy wrote in her statement.
According to Guevara's next door neighboor, Juana Mondragon, his willingness to help without being paid was typical of him. Mondragon, 80, has known him for seven years, and says that Guevara brought her groceries and medicines and took her to the doctor while her son lived out of state.
"Anything I needed he would do for me and never with reproach," Mondragon said. "I would ask him, 'What do I owe you,' and he would say, "No m'am, nothing.' He was such a caring, responsible, honest person, there is no way he could ever have done what they said he did. He is a good man."
Hulk Hogan grew up in his parents' modest, 1,170-square-foot home on 3106 Paul Ave., graduating from Robinson High School. The working-class neighborhood south of Gandy is a far cry from Hogan's $6.4 million Belleair mansion, known to fans of the VHI reality show Hogan Knows Best, or the $12 million estate in Miami he purchased in April.
Hogan is one of those uniquely American success stories, falling into professional wrestling just as it was getting ready to explode from cult oddity to international entertainment spectacle. He started wrestling in the late 1970s, but a meeting with the legendary promoter Vince McMahon Sr. a few years later led to his famous moniker and a spot on the ground floor of the World Wrestling Federation. He worked his way up as both a good guy and bad guy in wrestling's soap opera-inspired story lines until his blond mustache, doo-rag, tight T-shirts and 6-foot-8 frame inspired a following of "Hulkamaniacs" and spots in movies (most memorably in Rocky III) and television shows. He is a well-known Tampa Bay fixture and a frequent draw at charitable events. He could not be reached for comment for this story.
Hogan moved his mother from the house on Paul Avenue into a high-rise assisted living facility, Grand Court, on Bayshore Boulevard in 2004. Later that year, he sold his parents' house for $149,000. He signed the warranty deed as Terry Bollea.
Guevara says he never had much of a relationship with Hulk Hogan, seeing him only occasionally when he would visit Pete in the hospital or Ruth at her home or in Grand Court. He says he got the impression that Hogan didn't like him.
Still, Guevara remained devoted to Ruth Bollea. For all of the favors he did over the years, Judy Guevara recalls only one instance in which Ruth gave her husband more than just a few bucks for gas: a $420 check after he helped enclose her carport.
Nevertheless, when Hulk Hogan discovered money was missing from his mother's bank account, he suspected William Guevara and took his suspicions to the police. An arrest report relates that the wrestler-turned-reality-TV-star approached police on July 8, 2004, with Ruth Bollea's bank statements and snapshots of William Guevara.
Hogan told police that, according to his mother, the only person with access to her bank ATM card was Guevara. When detectives interviewed Ruth Bollea, she told them the same thing and confirmed that her ATM card was missing. It is easy to see, from Hogan's perspective, why he thought Guevara might be the culprit.
The day after Hogan made his accusations, the police arrested Guevara, and he found himself in the Orient Road Jail facing felony charges.
In the end, what cleared Guevara was a simple check of the bank ATM surveillance photos. It was only after he was arrested and forced to post bail that detectives obtained the photos from the bank, photos that showed a young man bearing no resemblance to Guevara. Police reports say Hogan identified a member of his extended family as the person in the bank photographs. Within a few weeks of Guevara's arrest, Ruth Bollea signed a form stating that she did not want the case prosecuted.
By this time, Guevara had spent thousands of dollars in bail and attorney's fees, but he'd finally been released from suspicion. For most people, that might have been enough. But Guevara felt that his name had been stained, that his friendship with Ruth had been ripped apart and his world turned upside down for no good reason.
So he got a new lawyer, and he sued the city of Tampa for false arrest and wrongful prosecution.
It is not clear from police reports just how much Ruth Bollea realized what was going on in the investigation. Guevara says she would go in and out of remembering that he had been arrested. Recordings of numerous voicemails Ruth left after the arrest bear out Guevara's assessment, portraying a clearly confused and forgetful 84-year-old woman. Even as the Guevaras were pursuing the lawsuit, Ruth left dozens of messages on William's answering machine. "William, where in the hell are you?" Ruth said on one message that the Guevaras kept. "You and Judy were supposed to be over here helping me. I need your help, guys; I hope that you come. I know you all think I'm nuts, and I am unless I hear from you. Bye."
The Guevaras turned to David Farash, a Tampa lawyer with experience both as a prosecutor and as a criminal defender. Farash had also served for 10 years as legal counsel to the Hillsborough County Sheriff's Office, defending officers from exactly the kind of false arrest charges that the Guevaras wanted to file.
He said the police investigation was shoddy. What's worse, the arrest of Guevara just made no sense given his longtime devotion to Ruth Hogan.
"Guevara is the longtime caregiver," Farash said. "So then they just bag him for a huge felony, way more than the evidence they have and without any real investigation. They assigned someone who did a real superficial investigation in this."
Supporting Farash's conclusion is the fact that detectives alleged that Guevara stole more than $25,000 from Hogan, even though there was no evidence that amount had been removed from her bank account. In a police report dated July 15, 2004, detectives wrote that Hogan told them he found $10,745 worth of unauthorized withdrawals from his mother's bank account earlier in that month. In one account of Guevara's arrest, however, detectives upped that amount, writing it "could be a sum of $25,000 that had been removed over a period of time." The arrest report signed by Detective Peter Olinski likewise was fuzzy about the exact amount allegedly stolen, putting it at "as much as $25,000."
The police reports confirm that it was only after Guevara was arrested and transported to the jail that "the bank pictures were ordered from the Bank of America where most of the transactions took place." If they had been requested before the arrest, it is doubtful that Guevara would have been thrown in jail.
Farash said the "inadequate" police work described in the lawsuit could have been avoided.
It "was a case that should have been assigned [to] a white-collar detective," with more experience at complicated fraud cases, Farash said. The detective who investigated the case "had no submissible evidence of anything beyond a few small withdrawals."
Tampa Police's media relations specialist, Andrea Davis, said no internal affairs cases have been opened on the detective in charge of Guevara's case and declined to comment further, citing the ongoing lawsuit.
Guevara had acknowledged to police that he withdrew money on a few occasions for the legally blind Ruth Bollea, to get her some cash or to run to the drugstore for her. But it was on two or three occasions, and with her permission and direction, Guevara insists.
Were Tampa police detectives kowtowing to the Hulkster, starstruck and eager to please the pro wrestling icon? Farash said he doubts it.
"I've seen them do terrible investigations with people who were not stars," he said.
There is no doubt, however, that police and prosecutors were acutely aware of who Ruth Bollea's son was. He sent autographed photos of himself to the Tampa police after the arrest (court records show that the city admits Hulk Hogan sent the pictures but maintain they were "unsolicited and un-requested"). A state attorney's office report on the case likewise identifies the celebrity nature of the matter, with "victim son Hulk Hogan" written in marker across the bottom of one case document.
With Farash on board, the Guevaras sued the city of Tampa and Olinski personally on September 14, 2005, for false arrest and malicious prosecution. The Tampa Tribune reported briefly on the suit.
The lawsuit, however, was doomed from the start. As it turned out, Olinski had sought, and received, an arrest warrant from a judge. Judges don't have time to review the whole case and cross-examine the detectives in such instance; "They kind of trust the detectives," Farash explained.
Once the police department obtained the warrant, it gained immunity against being sued for false arrest. That left only the malicious prosecution count, which is harder to prove and win than a false arrest case. What's more, even Farash concluded that the detective "wasn't malicious; he just didn't do a good job."
Hillsborough Circuit Judge Marva Crenshaw dismissed the complaint in January of this year and gave the Guevaras 20 days to amend and re-file their lawsuit. They haven't done that. Farash has withdrawn from the case — court documents cite "irreconcilable differences" — and the Guevaras have not been able to find another attorney.
"I've talked to about 20 lawyers and they all tell us [William] didn't suffer enough, he didn't die," Judy said. "They tell us that there isn't enough money for it to be worth their time."
Though he withdrew from the case, Farash remains puzzled that the city of Tampa didn't at least settle the case on moral grounds, enough to reimburse the Guevaras the thousands of dollars they spent on bail and a criminal attorney. Farash said the Tampa Police Department is the only law enforcement agency in the area that takes the hard-line stance that as long as a warrant was obtained, no settlement will be considered. "They are the only government agency that does this," Farash said. "If this were the Sheriff's Office, I would have agreed that these people get some money."
The city's police department counsel disagrees, attributing Farash's opinion to the wishful thinking of a plaintiff's attorney who has more such cases he will want to settle in the future.
"If a judge issues an arrest warrant, the judge has himself determined that there is probable cause for an arrest," said Assistant State Attorney Kirby Rainsberger. "By definition, the law enforcement agency hasn't done anything wrong. We would never pay a nickel for that."
The Guevaras live a simple life. Their bright yellow home in Lowry Park is a testament to William's handyman skills. He's redoing a utility room, hanging drywall and putting in tiling himself.
But he is still feeling the effects of being wrongly accused. He is angry with police; he is angry with Hulk Hogan. And he's not the same man he used to be.
Judy says, "Mentally and emotionally, he is spent."
The Guevaras' lawsuit expresses the damage to Guevara in terms of a lost ability to work as a caregiver and loss of consortium with his wife. For William, the suit isn't about financial reward; he just wants an apology, a formal vindication.
"After all that has happened," he says in Spanish, "they haven't even had the decency to say they're sorry.
"It makes me emotional. My life, my spirit, feels lower. I'm sick in my nerves, I cry," Guevara said. "I guess this will just be another trago amargo [sour drink] in my life. What can I do now but believe in God and try to live the rest of the life I have left?"