Their Relationship Often Has Been Icy

John Henry Williams didn’t surprise some members of his family by whisking away the body of his deceased Hall of Fame father and having it delivered to a cryonics laboratory for freezing.

Sherri Mosley, granddaughter of baseball great Ted Williams, said Wednesday that John Henry first mentioned his controversial plan to family members 17 months ago, following a tour of Scottsdale, Ariz.-based Alcor Life Extension Foundation while his father was still in a San Diego hospital recovering from open-heart surgery.

With his abrasive, dominating style, John Henry had offended his relatives before. But the idea of freezing his father’s remains and perhaps someday selling his DNA for the purposes of cloning put an unprecedented strain on family ties.

Mosley said her mother, Bobby-Jo Ferrell, “absolutely didn’t agree” and “wouldn’t even speak” about it to her half brother.

The family didn’t go public with John Henry’s plan, she added, because they weren’t convinced he would follow through. Now that he has, they are talking.

“[Ferrell] told him she would go to the press, but he didn’t believe her,” Mosley said in a telephone interview from her White House, Tenn., home. “We wanted everyone to understand how crazy and immoral this is, especially because it’s not what [Ted Williams] wanted. He would never agree to this.”

John Henry, 33, has not conducted an interview since his father’s death at age 83 Friday. He was a no-show at a pregame ceremony honoring “Teddy Ballgame,” baseball’s last .400 hitter, before Tuesday’s All-Star game in Milwaukee.

Mosley said John Henry is with his sister, Claudia, but has disconnected the phone at the Inverness, Fla., home he used to share with his father.

Mosley, 33, contends John Henry’s decision to disobey his father’s wish to be cremated--Ferrell contends the request is written in the former Boston Red Sox great’s will--continues his pattern of manipulation and dominance.

John Henry is one of two children Ted Williams had with Dolores Wettach, a former Vogue model and one of his three wives. He studied business at the University of Maine and began conducting his father’s business affairs in the early 1990s after a failed venture in which Ted Williams lost nearly $40,000 in cash in a memorabilia deal with a convicted felon.

Most recently, John Henry was signed--as a favor to his father--by the Red Sox, who assigned him to their lowest-level minor league team, in Fort Myers, Fla. He’d failed in two previous tries to catch on with professional baseball teams.

John Henry was mending a broken rib--sustained when he awkwardly crashed into a railing--when his father died of heart failure.

John Henry’s parents split when he was 6. His mother relocated to a spread in Vermont. John Henry told Sports Illustrated in a 1996 article that he was able to visit his father once a year until he reached high school, when he’d spend summers with “The Splendid Splinter.”

Despite John Henry’s business education, some of his strategies failed.

In 1992, after Williams had struck a $2-million deal with Upper Deck Authenticated, John Henry, who had created a clearinghouse company of his father’s photos, autographs and jerseys called Grand Slam Marketing, started a company that competed with Upper Deck.

Instead of encouraging his father to sign memorabilia for Upper Deck, John Henry arranged for him to autograph products associated with his own venture, Ted Williams Card Company. A 1995 court settlement dissolved the company.

The Ted Williams Museum and Hitters Hall of Fame opened in Hernando, Fla., in February 1994. A month later, following his father’s third stroke, John Henry closed the Ted Williams Store he owned in Chestnut Hill, Mass., and moved into his father’s home.

“John Henry obviously handles Ted Williams’ affairs, everything goes through him, and he’s a tough businessman, but I say that in a complimentary way,” said Bill Williams (no relation), the executive director of the six-year-old Louisville Slugger Museum.

“When we opened our museum, we were scheduled to have 18 Hall of Famers. When I asked John Henry if Ted could come, he said no, that ‘Dad doesn’t travel after that last stroke.’ But then he called back and said, ‘Dad said he’ll be there, that he’ll do anything for [Louisville Slugger founders] Hillerich and Bradsby.’ ”

Bill Williams said he is in the process of negotiating a deal with John Henry that will allow for full-size replicas of Ted Williams’ Louisville Sluggers to be sold in the museum’s gift store.

“Usually, these deals we’ve done with [Mickey] Mantle’s family and [Roger] Maris’ family have taken a couple weeks,” Bill Williams said. “This one with John Henry is working on six months. He’s stronger than a rope. I think John Henry feels his family has been ripped off, so he has clamped down. He’s very, very strict.”

John Henry prides himself as a supreme identifier of forged autographs and fake memorabilia, especially of those items affiliated with his father. He even sued his sister Claudia earlier this year for $1.3 million over the sale of autographed bats to a collector.

One of John Henry’s fiercest critics is Phil Castinetti, owner of the Everett, Mass.-based Sportsworld, a sports memorabilia shop Castinetti identifies as New England’s largest. It formerly competed for business with the Ted Williams Store.

John Henry, Castinetti said, “will do anything for a buck, and you’re seeing that again right now. He has had so much power over his father. The more money he made, the more he wanted. He didn’t care about his father as much as he cared about wanting to make money off of him.”

Castinetti and two others were arrested by Boston police in a December 1997 sting operation and charged with possession of stolen property--Ted Williams’ ring from the 1946 World Series and an honorary 1986 World Series ring given to him by the Red Sox. They were later acquitted. Rodney Nichols, an acquaintance of John Henry’s, was sentenced to six months of house arrest for transporting stolen property over state lines. The rings were eventually returned to John Henry.

“For a time, I thought I was John Henry’s best friend, but he turned on me, and I’ve always wondered where he’d stop when it came to money or friendship,” Nichols said. “Obviously, with what’s going on now, you wonder if he’ll ever stop.”

Grand Slam Marketing and another John Henry business creation, www.hitters.net, have failed, but all accounts indicate John Henry is living comfortably.

Dr. David Pressman, who says he was a longtime friend of Ted Williams, said John Henry blocked several friends from visiting his father at home. Castinetti also said there is suspicion in the memorabilia industry that John Henry has forged some of his father’s signatures. In the Sports Illustrated article, John Henry said, “Plenty of people think [that].”

“John Henry needs a good Irish kick in the [rear],” Pressman said. “He’s not what you’d expect from Ted Williams, whose word was golden.”

Mosley’s chief concern is winning a court fight to remove her grandfather from the cryonics laboratory. Attorneys for Williams’ estate plan to file Williams’ will with the Florida courts this week, said John Heer, a lawyer for Ferrell.

Heer said Williams wanted to be cremated and have his ashes scattered in the Florida Keys, where he often fished.

Mosley said John Henry had a restraining order in place barring her from visiting Ted Williams before his death, but Citrus County (Fla.) Sheriff’s Lt. Joe Eckstein said, “There are no records of an existing restraining order and no history of a trespassing warning, either.”

Friday, shortly after 10 a.m., Ferrell received a phone call from the local hospital saying her father had died. She and Mosley, getting reports from a friend at the hospital, had an inkling of what would happen next.

“Forty-seven minutes later, [Ferrell] called back and was told that he was already packed in ice,” Mosley said. “Forty-seven minutes.”

Mosley said she knows John Henry, who has been heavily criticized in Boston and elsewhere, is under intense scrutiny. “But he brought it on himself,” she added. “He should have known it was going to cause him a great deal of grief.

“It’s been outrageous. We haven’t had time to grieve.”