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Tarzan of Loxahatchee Groves

Filed under: Imported

A few years back, when I was living in Lake Worth, Florida, I wrote a story about Loxahatchee Groves, an unincorporated chunk of Palm Beach County that's kind of the last outpost of old-school, undeveloped, anything-goes South Florida. It's got dirt roads and shotgun-wielding bird breeders and a whole slew of oddball characters. If I had the time or talent I'd write a book about the place.

Anyhow, one of the residents I hung out with in Loxahatchee Groves was Steve Sipek, a.k.a. Steve Hawkes, a Croatian-born, one-time B-movie, Spanish-language Tarzan. Sipek was a strange cat. He'd been horribly burned over much of his body when a movie set caught fire and claimed to have only been saved from death by a lion who dragged him out of the flames. After that he devoted himself to caring for very large cats.

On his 5-acre compound were 9 of them: tigers, lions, panthers, and a black leopard. We had to chat outside his razor-wire-enclosed home because the animals had the run of the place. Only Sipek and his girlfriend could go inside. Anyone else might be eaten. 

He was not an easy guy to interview, cautious and seemingly harboring a lot of unspoken emotional baggage. At one point I asked him about feeding the animals and he told me that every two weeks a truck delivered 1500 pounds of turkey legs to the compound. But Sipek was having trouble paying the bills. He mentioned the possibility of killing off the animals--and himself--if he could no longer take care of them. This kind of freaked me out.

All this is a rather roundabout way of mentioning that Sipek's been all over the news recently. One of his Bengal-Siberian tigers, Bobo, escaped from the compound and was shot by a wildlife officer.

Posted by Paul Demko at July 23, 2004 2:15 PM

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