JACK KEROUAC WAS A LEGEND AND HIS ESTATE WAS STOLEN   

In 1966, Gabrielle Kerouac, Jack's mother, had a stroke and Stella Sampas took advantage of his desperation to care for his mom to trap him and become his third wife. When Jack died in 1969 he left everything to his mother and purposely left Stella out of his will. By marriage, she was supposed to get 1/3 of his estate and the rest was to go to his family. Gabrielle was paralyzed when she died so it was obvious to anybody that knew  HER WILL SIGNED AFTER JACK'S DEATH COULDN'T POSSIBLY BE LEGIT. Stella began what was to become an epic legal battle with his daughter, Jan Kerouac, for control of his estate which now has an estimated value around $40 million. The Sampas’ immediately started liquidating assets.

In 2009, Judge George W. Greer of Florida ruled Gabrielle Kerouac’s will was forged. That’s how long the people who stole the estate had to use the money to keep it.   

40 YEARS OF SAMPAS LIES if you start counting when Jack died.      

JACK DIDN'T WANT TO BE MARRIED    

First, he begged his dear Aunt Doris Kerouac to take care of Memere but her house was already full, and she couldn't help him. Then he asked Mary Carney to marry him, but she was already married, and Jack had never quit drinking like she asked of him. He was out of options, but STELLA WAS DESPERATE TO MARRY JACK way before that.  She wrote a letter to Gabrielle and Jack begging him to marry her, but his response was emphatically No!  She was thought of as a "Sister" and nothing more.  

Jack and Stella didn’t wait the mandatory 3 days required in MA for the marriage license. Instead, Judge Philip Boudreau was pulled from the court on his day off, filled out the paperwork in tennis shorts and Town Clerk and Justice of the Peace Howard Sears performed the spontaneous ceremony with Gabrielle as the only witness. Jack was probably so drunk he didn’t remember.     

JACK AND STELLA HAD A TERRIBLE MARRIAGE  

That's putting it mildly. According to Gerald Nicosia in Memory Babe, Stella hid Jack’s money so he couldn’t go out, get drunk and have sex with other people anymore so instead he brought Bill Shotwell to his bedroom where Stella walked in on them on the floor naked. She hid his money again and this time hid his shoes too which led to marital rape and because she was a virgin, it put her in the hospital. Then, he accused her of poisoning him.    

JACK FILED FOR DIVORCE

According to Judge Fred Bryson in Florida that had previously been his lawyer, Jack wrote a new will leaving everything to his mother, and her will left everything to his nephew, Paul Blake, Jr. and filled out the paperwork to file for divorce. Gabrielle laughed at Stella and revealed he was signing the divorce papers that he’d prepared the previous month.  JACK DIED SHORTLY AFTER STELLA WAS SERVED DIVORCE PAPERS. At the hospital, Stella never notified Jack's family of his death but had time to start sharing the cover-up story with reporters.  In Lowell, the night Jack was buried, the Sampas' partied at Nick's Bar with top shelf liquor, pimps and hookers until the sun came up followed by a celebratory breakfast.    

DEATH STORIES ARE NOT SUPPOSED TO CHANGE   

The official story is, “On the morning of October 20, 1969, in St. Petersburg, Florida, Kerouac was working on a book about his father's print shop when he suddenly felt nauseated and went to the bathroom where he began to vomit blood. Kerouac was taken to St. Anthony's Hospital, suffering from an esophageal hemorrhage." The original story was cirrhosis of the liver. Stella's said he was eating tuna and for the second time ever Jack said "I love you" and he dropped dead. Allen Ginsberg wrote he just started puking and there’s Tampa Bay lore about him getting beat up by “some black guys.”     

The most recent version in Kerouac: A Definitive Biography, Paul Maher, Jr. wrote the “vicious beating at the Cactus Bar had been the final blow" and since John Sampas graced the cover with the quote, “Finally, a nonfiction biography on Jack Kerouac” we should give some credibility to this version, right? Or, maybe it’s a story Sampas created to cover his lies? Here's the problem with that version: the fight was 6 weeks before his death and he was getting better. At first Stella had to type his letters but he was clearly healing as he had returned to typing his own letters. And in his last interview by St. Petersburg Times reporter Jack McClintock his only complaint was a hernia. McClintock didn't say he was ill from his liver failing and had jaundice but instead reported A WEEK BEFORE HIS DEATH JACK WAS WALKING AROUND JOKING UP A STORM, LISTENING TO HANDEL'S MESSIAH AND DRINKING BOILERMKAERS.  

STELLA FORGED GABRIELLE'S WILL AND STOLE THE ESTATE  

According to Mick Brown's article in the Telegraph UK called The Battle for Jack Kerouac's Estate, STELLA FORGED GABRIELLES WILL LEAVING EVERYTHING TO HERSELF. A handwriting expert testified "Stella often signed her mother-in-laws name on legal documents and those signatures were consistent with the signature on the will."    

JACK WANTED TO BE BURIED WITH HIS FAMILY   

Not only was Jack's body buried surprisingly quick, but it's also not in the Kerouac family plot with his brother, his parents and later Jan like he wanted. Instead it's directly across the street from the old Sampas family house. It takes a special kind of person to not respect the wishes of the dead when it comes to their final resting place. Jan tried and was denied the right to move his body but maybe it's time for fresh eyes reviewing the information.   

Vivian Gornick wrote this incredibly insightful outsider's perspective about the funeral. https://www.villagevoice.com/2020/02/04/jack-kerouac-the-night-and-what-it-does-to-you/    

JACK WAS WORTH MORE THAN $100.   

The official narrative that he was worth less than a hundred dollars is suspicious AF and makes me want to puke. When Jack, Gabrielle and Stella left Hyannis they didn’t immediately sell that house to buy the one in Lowell and instead rented it out. He sold one set of letters from Allen Ginsberg to put a down payment on the St. Petersburg house, published 6 books in his last 6 years, was selling articles and meeting with his Italian publisher. And he saved everything! His letters had value.  Also, On The Road and Dharma Bums were back in print.  Before his mother's stroke he was going global. 3 YEARS WITH STELLA AND HE WAS DEAD.   

BEING GOOD AT GROWING AN ESTATE DOESN’T JUSTIFY THEFT   

The Sampas’ wanted people to believe because they did a great job growing the estate, they deserve to keep all the money. I think that is fundamentally backwards and bogus and WHAT THEY DID TO THE ESTATE IS A TRAGEDY.

According to biographer Tom Clark, Jack's last notebook has never been viewed by anyone except his agent and Stella. It's not the only missing piece of the literary estate. One On the Road scroll is accounted for because it's 'on the road' but there were at least three books written on scrolls. In the Berg collection at the New York Public Library there are several items missing that were inventoried in Lowell that never made it to New York. Also, their claims of making new Kerouac material available never reveal the literature was changed at their whim, extremely censored and not the whole story. Anything Kerouac “wrote” but was published posthumously has been edited to support a narrative. One publication had up to 300 unmarked changes. Seriously, wtf?*

John Shen-Sampas, instead of releasing the missing journal, filed a repossession lawsuit against the Northport Public library in 2020 making them prove their donated papers from Jack were a gift.**

JACK WAS A TARGET    

Why? Right. Why would Stella go through all this? She hated them and did it for the money. Let me tell you about the time Jack invited Stella to New York and Gabrielle refused to let her in, slammed the door in her face and sent her immediately back to whatever train or bus station she came from while Jack cowered inside the house and didn't say anything. For a girl that rarely left Lowell, that must have hurt and Stella didn’t forgive him for never choosing her. She spent the rest of her life plotting revenge with her brothers and with Gabrielles's stroke found the perfect opportunity to strike. Stella had literally nothing else to do being a spinster living with her sister her entire life and JACK WAS THE MOST SUCCESSFUL PERSON IN LOWELL.

These are not nice people.  George Sampas, their dad, went to jail for murder. He killed someone over a gambling debt and was sentenced to 30 years.  Murder and forgery were things they discussed often as they were part of the Greek Mafia.

THE SAMPAS’ WERE HIDING SOMETHING.  We only see the tip of the iceberg and I suspect what they did was so much worse.   

The legality of this estate was based on deceptions, loopholes, and lies. Clifford Larkin admitted he LIED about witnessing Gabrielle's will being signed, John Sampas repeatedly LIED to discredit the true inheritors of the estate and Stella LIED to the judge when she said Jack didn’t have any living relatives. Then they took extra precautions making the copyrights for Kerouac literature amongst the most difficult in the world and with the resources from the Kerouac estate ensured nobody could afford to fight them. I'm not saying all Sampas' are bad people, but they certainly didn't all love Jack because of his relationship with Sammy when they were young. Now without John Sampas’ threats to sue and acts of retaliation, IT'S TIME FOR AN OVERDUE AND HONEST CONVERSATION ABOUT THE END OF KEROUAC'S LIFE AND HIS LEGACY.