Things really changed when Tom Stimus came to Bradenton, he showed all the used car dealers how to sell and promote used cars, up until then they had no idea how much money was in used cars, and they had no idea how many cars could be sold in small town Bradenton nor did they know how to promote their cars. Tom had the cleanest cars and had the cleanest car lots in town, his cars were always parked in a straight line, in the beginning, he was obsessed with this, but his lots always looked better than everyone else. All the other dealers just parked them wherever. It may not sound important but Tom was the first car dealer in town to actually use a fax machine to fax papers back and forth to the banks He  had a couple of main people that helped him succeed at what he was doing, one of those people were Richard Cassarino of course he had sales people who thought they where the key to all this,but Richard kept the lot going as far as getting the cars ready to sell, without the cars being Front line ready the sales people would have had nothing to sell. He also had Joe Bolumo, (sorry for the spelling Joe) one of the best car people I've ever known. Tom always treated me with respect, and offered me plenty of work, which of coarse paid a lot of bills over the years. I could go on for a while but I'm sure now that 25 years have passed who really cares, but some great stories need to be told.

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  Tom, who became pretty popular for putting a $100,000 bounty on the head of Muammar Gaddafi and having wrestler Dusty Rhodes in his commercials, filed bankruptcy on most of his properties.

Tom had the drive of 10 men when it came to succeeding in business.

I remember clearly the afternoon that Todd his son was up in a helicopter throwing bags of money out across the car lot

When Tom first came to Bradenton and opened up he would deal in old Cadillacs big Buicks all big cars and fairly used but were cleaned up to look like a new nickel and he sold them as fast as he put them on the lot 

One morning he jumped into a limousine drove around Bradenton given all the secretaries at other car lots roses and a $100 bill wrapped around the stem just to piss everybody off and to show them that he was there to take over Bradenton in the used car business, it was a real laugh.

Seems like after Tom bought the racetrack things started to fall apart and then they fell apart real fast I know I felt bad for Tom when they had the auction and auctioned off all the furniture everything in that new building he built but he stood right there and took it like a man. I felt bad for him I talked to him the last day he was in town he was loading a car hauler well he was having a car hauler  loaded with what few cars he had over on 14th Street