Stories have been central to Tim White's life as long as he can remember—and as an investigative journalist with WPRI he is as adept as deconstructing them as he is crafting them. This week, with the release of his book "The Last Good Heist", co-authored by Randall Richard and Wayne Worcester, he's reaching the end of a story 4 decades in the telling.

You probably know Tim. Maybe you know him as the neighbor over the fence in Bristol, where he lives with his wife Melissa, daughter Eliza, 9, and son Dylan, 8. Maybe you are a policy wonk who gets up early on Sundays to catch him on "Newsmakers"; or you may know him as that guy on TV who got former Rep. Ray Gallison to say "talk to my attorney" a dozen times in a 40-second face-to-face. Maybe you know him from his repeated appearances at the Bristol Warren Education Foundation's Bodacious Bee fundraiser, at which he has served variously as emcee, pronouncer, and judge—a role that has, at times, been nearly as treacherous as digging up dirt on criminal syndicates.

"The competitors are serious, they are all out for that ugly trophy," he says. "But I've gotten really good at shaming people for buzzigans (cash donations that buy a team another chance after a missed word.) I think I've only failed to get a table to open their wallets once. I think it was a table of reporters, people from a local newspaper."

You may also know Tim as the son of Jack White, a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative journalist whose reporting of Richard Nixon's underpayment of taxes led the disgraced president to utter his immortal quote, "I am not a crook."

"I'm in the news because of Dad," Tim says.

Tim gained an incredible wealth of knowledge about story telling, truth telling, crime and government directly and indirectly growing up as Jack White's youngest son. Of all Jack's stories, Tim's favorite was probably the story of the Bonded Vault heist.

On August 14, 1975, thieves broke into 148 safe deposit boxes at the Bonded Vault building, a secret mafia bank in Providence. It remains one of the largest heists in U.S. history, and led to the longest and most expensive trial in Rhode Island history. Co-author Wayne Worcester broke the story in the Providence Journal the following day. But the story was far from told. Jack White and Tim's other co-author, Randall Richard, partners in the ProJo investigative unit, continued to chip away at the story for months, then years. Ultimately, they decided to write a book. They worked on it for many years, but never finished it.

Then, in October, 2005, Jack White died of a heart attack at the age of 63.

The next year, 2006, brought Tim to Providence from the Boston market where he had been working in broadcast journalism for several years. "I knew the news director at 12, and they wanted me to come aboard. But I really didn't want to be the poor sap who tried to fill Jack White's shoes," Tim says. Before long, Tim would fill his shoes in more ways that one. He couldn't get the Bonded Vault story out of his head. So he called Wayne Worcester, now a professor emeritus at the University of Connecticut School of Journalism, and

Randall Richard, Jack's former partner, now retired.

"I want to be Randy when I grow up. He's incredibly frugal—he travels the world on a ProJo pension."

"You would think three authors on one book would be an absolute horror show, but it worked great," says Tim. "Randy and I did most of the research and reporting, while Wayne did most of the writing. And some of the reporting on this was done 40 years ago."

According to Tim, the most difficult part of it was finding Wayne's voice. "Two months before the book was due last June, Wayne became very sick. He's battling cancer. Randy and I had to finish the book without him, and Wayne's an incredible writer. Finding his voice was very challenging. I'm not sure we pulled it off."

For Tim, working on telling the Bonded Vault story became an important part of his own story with his father, something he thought ended in October, 2005.

"I got to bond with Dad again, interviewing, pulling up his old work. He loved working on this story." And Tim got to work with two great journalists from a different generation. "I learned a lot about Dad, interacting with people who knew him from a different time. I felt like I got closer to him."

It was tough shopping a book about a 40 year story as the economy contracted, but sell it they did. Tim has save the voice message he got from Wayne when "The Last Good Heist" found a publisher. "It was a big moment when the case of books came in," says Tim.

Called "An incredibly entertaining true crime saga," by Shelley Murrphey, who co-wrote "Whitey Bulger", and "a page-turning true-crime thriller" by Mike Stanton, author of "Prince of Providence", "The Last Good Heist" will be in bookstores August 1, and is available on Amazon now.

Though Tim is not likely to come across a project with as much personal meaning anytime soon, he would be open to writing another book. There were certainly sacrifices of both money and family time as he jetted around the country following leads—most notably the day he told his wife, Melissa, "Randy and I have to fly to Las Vegas and find a hooker"—but he would do it again for the right project.

"Not me, but someone once said that Rhode Island is a reporter's playground," Tim says.

That's a good thing. There's always room for another great storyteller in the sandbox.