There’s a strange tale of wealth and greed, friendship and betrayal, wild parties and beautiful women winding its way through the courts in Seminole County. It involves two former friends, a legendary local watering hole and allegations of everything from extortion to tax evasion to Colombian drug rings, all set against the backdrop of sunny Costa Rica. And it all started right here in Central Florida.

The story centers around two former buddies living the good life: Jim Adamczyk, 51; and James L. “Jack” Hutchings, 70. Adamczyk is a native of Wisconsin who landed here in the 1980s as the manager of a once-popular nightclub on Orange Blossom Trail, the 8.5-acre Park Avenue. Hutchings is a self-made millionaire who earned his fortune by building and selling a company that supplied parts to General Motors.

The two joined forces around 1989 via a mutual friendship with Wendy’s founder Dave Thomas, and they became partners Park Avenue’s successor, a bar and restaurant called Shooters Waterfront Café. The restaurant closed not long after, but their relationship lived on.

So began 18 years of otherworldly extravagance – megayachts, Costa Rican mansions, celebrities, helicopters, private jets – with few itemized receipts and even fewer regrets. In the process, Adamczyk says he signed over his share of Shooters to Hutchings, accepting a gentlemen’s agreement that the money – an estimated $1 million – would be returned upon request. He says he never got it back and now puts the figure at $2.5 million, with interest.

As these things do, it went bad. Hutchings grew suspicious of Adamczyk’s handling of his finances, Adamczyk left Costa Rica in April of 2007, and large sums of money were left hanging in the balance.

On May 22, citing Hutchings’ unwillingness to resolve the matter, Adamczyk sat down at a desk and created a YouTube video addressing his old buddy, pleading for his money back. “Hey, Jack. Good morning,” it started. “Your old friend Jim Adamczyk. Jack, I’m making this tape today because numerous people have said to me, ‘Why don’t you sit down with Jack and just talk to him?’ Well, I don’t see that happening.…”

“You know, Jack, I feel I’ve done a good job for you. We had a great time together, but I knew it was a job. Now, was I 100 percent all the time working? Hell, no. But 90 percent of the time my effort and my focus was to make sure that you were taken care of wherever you walked into a room. When you were in a restaurant, you always had, you know, nobody harassed you or anything like that. My job was to have your back. I think I did a pretty good job. … Now, let’s just clean up the mess and let’s move on. Thanks, Jack.”

A week later, Hutchings’ lawyers filed a lawsuit to have the YouTube video removed, claiming it violated a November 2007 settlement agreement. (Adamczyk denies the agreement’s validity.) Since then, Adamczyk, through court appearances, countersuits and his website (www.ladycolumbo.com), has been on a mission to lift the veil on a multimillionaire’s lifestyle gone too far, while Hutchings’ attorneys have been diligently trying to silence and discredit him in a legal war of attrition.

The party is over.

Sitting at a corner table at the Celt, a downtown Irish pub, Adamczyk is everything you would expect from a weathered survivor of recreational enterprise. His hair is gray and cropped; his eyes grow big with excitement when spinning out a nostalgic yarn; his short-sleeved, collared shirt is open low to reveal a gold chain. Sometimes his stories race along at a fever pitch, only to stop in midsentence.

“I’m done with Costa Rica,” he says. “I’ve seen more shit than I want to see. You know, fantasy has become reality. I was ready to check back into reality.”

His story picks up with his arrival in Orlando in 1982, when he was sent here by his Cincinnati-based employer, American Avents Corp., to take over a bustling disco called Park Avenue. Park Avenue had grown to popularity during the disco era, often filling its 2,000-person capacity with Orlando nightlife denizens; as the ’80s waned, the club adjusted by launching its famed Monday and Wednesday “Spit” nights, which catered to scruffy punks.

In 1986 Adamczyk and some business partners opened another bar in Altamonte Springs called Splash, which he describes as “a big outdoor bar with a swimming pool right on I-4.”

But he began butting heads with American Avents around 1985, and by 1987 he was out of the Park Avenue business in all but his stock holdings in the company. When American Avents refused to buy back his shares, Adamczyk fought them in an Ohio court for three years, finally winning a ruling that allowed him to purchase their stake in the $2.3 million Orlando business for $1.2 million in 1989.

The court battle left him financially drained, so he turned to acquaintances he had made while serving on the board of directors for the Florida Entertainment and Dining Association, including the president of Fort Lauderdale-based Shooters International. Wendy’s founder Dave Thomas was also a partner in Shooters, and when he heard about Adamczyk’s plight, he introduced him to Jack Hutchings.

In 1989, Adamczyk signed a deal to open Shooters Orlando on the former Park Avenue property. Hutchings would control a 45 percent stake, Shooters International signed on for another 45 percent, and “because I had the property,” Adamczyk reluctantly took a 10 percent stake. And while Adamczyk reports that early earnings on the 600-seat restaurant were strong – an estimated $1.2 million for its opening month in 1990 – they trickled off in following months. Shooters was a giant company opening retail outlets throughout the country and didn’t pay enough attention to its Orlando outlet, Adamczyk says. When the business started to lose money, Adamczyk says Hutchings offered him a deal in 1990, sealed by a handshake on the steps outside Hutchings’ Fort Lauderdale home.

“He came to me and said, ‘I don’t know about these guys. If I have your 10 percent, I’ll have control. So can I have proxy for your shares?’” says Adamczyk. “So we did the deal where I gave him my 10 percent.”

“The biggest mistake I ever made,” he adds.

Adamczyk’s version of the story has Hutchings buying out the Shooters International shares, Hutchings’ Canadian company buying the rights to Shooters Orlando for $5 million, and a management company brought in to run the restaurant. The restaurant closed in 1993.

Adamczyk says he got repeated assurances from Hutchings that he would still get his money. “I was basically just traveling with him,” says Adamczyk. “He would always say, ‘Hey, Jimmy, if you ever want your money to go back and open a bar, let’s do it.’?”

Hutchings – who could not be reached for this story – began his career in 1964 with a job at a tube vending company in Pontiac, Mich. He spent his evenings creating his own business in his garage, an entrepreneurial move that saw him skirting bankruptcy, suffering a costly divorce and losing the storm windows on his home to repossession.

According to an Orlando Sentinel profile in 1990, he founded his own company in 1968, S&H Fabricating and Engineering Inc.; he took the moniker from the green stamps of the same name. The company grew quickly and soon became a major supplier of air-conditioning parts to General Motors.

But Hutchings couldn’t see his own success. A congenital disorder left him legally blind by 16 and sightless in his mid-30s. He met his second wife, Barbara Jean, in 1966. She helped him raise his three children from his first marriage; he adopted her two. “He just wanted to be like one of the guys,” Barbara Jean Hutchings told the Sentinel. “But he knew he could never be like them.”

By 1979, he had built the first of his five plants in Sanford (he had 13 across the nation); his plants employed 500 people locally, 1,500 nationally. In 1990, when he became a partner in Shooters Waterfront Café, Hutchings owned yachts, a Rolls-Royce, a mansion and a $500,000 touring bus. He had never even gone to college.

That same year, Dave Thomas nominated Hutchings for the prestigious Horatio Alger Award, given for success in the face of adversity.

“He was very skeptical” of the award, Thomas told the Sentinel. “I told him, ‘You can be so inspirational to other people by what you have done.’ He might have lost it in one area, but he has made it up in others, and I think he can be a role model.”

In 1998, Hutchings sold S&H Fabricating and Engineering for $350 million. The windfall led to a lifestyle ramp-up, including a mega-yacht – the Barbara Jean – that featured 19th-century statues of Poseidon and Amphitrite, a private jet, an 80-foot sport-fishing boat, a charter helicopter business and a 22,000-square-foot Costa Rican mansion.

“So he bought the big yacht, we got a new jet, there was no sense in going rushing back to work,” says Adamczyk.

But work he did. Adamczyk says he toiled 24/7 as a personal assistant, driver and security guard for Hutchings. He claims to have handled bank transfers in excess of $10 million during that time. According to court documents, Hutchings never questioned anything his buddy did in regard to finances.

The pair lived a mutually beneficial routine of globe-trotting, hosting United States business execs at Costa Rican blowouts. In court filings, Adamczyk’s description of the pair’s lifestyle reads like an espionage thriller.

“Unfortunately, the next day Adamczyk accompanied Hutchings to the United States embassy and watched Hutchings give a false testimony to the Department of Homeland Security to have his Colombian girlfriend granted a United States visa,” states one filing. “The female was in Costa Rica on a refugee status because she stated she would be killed if she went back to Colombia. Her husband was killed in Colombia because he worked for Pablo Escobar, head of the Medellín cocaine cartel.”

Adamczyk claims that he was asked to do “illegal and immoral work acts as part of his job duties,” according to the record, including routing non-cash profits from Hutchings’ helicopter and boat chartering businesses through one of Adamczyk’s companies. Hutchings assured him that the taxes would be paid. Adamczyk claims that they never were.

Another filing describes a celebrity-studded four-day party on Hutchings’ tab:

“On or about March 28, [2007], Adamczyk flew Morgan Stanley employees Tom Cleary and Bob Wittington to Costa Rica on Hutchings’ private Gulfstream IV jet with celebrities Dan Marino, Tony Siragusa and Darius Rucker, lead singer from Hootie and the Blowfish. Adamczyk provided free airfare, free lodging in a $2.5 million condo and also free parties every night for four days straight, including unlimited alcohol, food and many young beautiful women.”

After the party, Adamczyk says the Morgan Stanley guys offered to help him with some investments. He wired them $10,000, and the trouble with Hutchings began.

According to Adamczyk, his friend was upset about the deal and began to suspect he was clandestinely chipping away at his bottom line. Adamczyk alleges that Hutchings interfered in the transaction, and as a result the stocks only netted him $463.

In late April 2007, Hutchings called a meeting with his chief financial officer, Bill Hood, and Adamczyk. According to Adamczyk, the three went through the checks and he was forced to defend himself on every payment. “He goes, ‘Here’s a check for $51,000. Oh, wait, didn’t we buy that car for $51,000?’ You see what I mean?”

Adamczyk believed Hutchings was still accusing him of stealing $10,000 so, heeding the advice of his lawyer, he got in a taxi and left.

“It’s like leaving the mob,” he says.

Hutchings’ lawyer, David Simmons – the former state representative and counsel to Lou Pearlman – refused to comment on the record for this story. He would only confirm the $350 million sale in 1997 and vouch for the upstanding nature of Hutchings as a citizen and international businessman. (He does point to testimony in the court file that has Adamczyk telling the judge he is on painkillers.)

Hutchings and Simmons are fighting back in court, though. Simmons filed a complaint in May, asking the judge to force Adamczyk to take down the YouTube video because it breaches a settlement agreement the two allegedly reached in November 2007. Now that settlement agreement – which had remained sealed until Jan. 20 – is at the center of the case. In it, Adamczyk agreed to a non-disparagement clause in return for a $125,000 payoff. But according to Adamczyk and his then- lawyer (he is currently representing himself) Ron Gilbert, that deal was never legal; they say neither Hutchings nor his proxy showed up on the given date and they were late to wire the money. Adamczyk even offered to return the cash.

A litigious back-and-forth has followed, with suits and countersuits, motions for summary judgments on both sides, Morgan Stanley attorneys stepping in and acrimony all around. Simmons’ motion for summary judgment is scheduled to be heard in court Feb. 17. Adamczyk, characteristically, thinks he’ll be victorious and the case will go to a jury so he can finally collect his money.

As the beer continues to flow at the Celt, Adamczyk’s face lights and fades. His voice keeps rising as layers of defiance unravel. He throws around the phrase “the audacity of wealth” liberally. “I’m no angel,” he admits. But Adamczyk claims at least to have the truth on his side.

“They can’t beat me. So for me, it’s just a question of time,” he says. “If they want to go to court, I told Ron [Gilbert, his ex-attorney], ‘I tell you what, this guy’s going to come in with $300 million.’ If we get a jury trial, I’ll have them in fucking tears. This is what this guy did to me. I mean, the guy did do this to me.”

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