Clearwater police arrested contractor William Botelho on Wednesday and charged him with grand theft over $100,000, accusing the owner of Custom Building Solutions of diverting nearly all of an $832,000 payment meant for a new church building.
Leaders of Unity Church of Clearwater said they hired Botelho for a $4.1 million project on Nursery Road and paid about $832,000 upfront so he could buy materials and bring on subcontractors to begin construction of the new worship facility.
According to detectives with the Clearwater Police Department, bank records from August 2023 through March 2026 show Botelho put only about $95,000 toward the construction work. That leaves roughly $736,000 unaccounted for, investigators said.
An arrest affidavit states the missing money went toward personal spending, including Botelho's condo association, his home mortgage, personal checks written to himself and a Mercedes G-Wagon. Detectives said the only physical work ever completed at the site was a fence around the construction area.
The project dates back to 2022, when the church sold part of its property to developers who built the Discovery Academy of Science charter school. The congregation planned to erect its new facility on the land it kept along Nursery Road, and in 2023 church leadership hired Botelho's company to carry out the build. Within about six months, leaders said they began to grow suspicious.
"And there were a lot of explanations. We asked for verification that the funds were still there," Leddy Hammock, the church's senior minister, said. "We didn't expect that to be fabricated, which is how it seems now. And the talk was encouraging. 'We are ready, we're going to start, we'll get going.'"
Det. Parker Moody said the church repeatedly heard reasons the work could not move forward, even after it cleared the requirements needed to start. "That's when they were told that, 'We actually need more funds to start the project, and we need to renegotiate the contract,'" Moody said. After more than three years with little to no progress, church leaders went to police.
Botelho told detectives the church was at fault, claiming the congregation breached the contract and accumulated fees and penalties, and that he could account for the funds spent on the project. Church leaders rejected that version. "The breach of contract was on his behalf," Hammock said. "We fulfilled our contract. At the end, he demanded an addendum to the contract, of an additional million dollars plus, with no documentation. That was the part we did not enter into."
Pinellas County public records show Botelho is also named in two open civil cases, including one in which a client accuses him of breach of contract over storm repair work. Detectives confirmed this is the only criminal case involving Botelho in the county so far.
Investigators have not said whether any of the roughly $736,000 can be recovered for the congregation, and it remains unclear whether there are additional victims.
