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DAN DeWITTThe construction magnate who built his father's business from the ashes is now facing bankruptcy himself. But some say, don't count him out yet.
BROOKSVILLE - A generation ago, John D. Grubbs ran Hernando County's most prominent construction company and then ran it into the ground.
His son, John G. "Gary" Grubbs, took over the business and made good on the company's bad bills. By the late 1990s, Gary Grubbs had built the company into an operation larger than his father's ever was.
And though the younger Grubbs enjoyed some good luck - including the windfall of disaster cleanup jobs - the company's success was due mostly to his own, nearly superhuman efforts.
"Eighty hours a week was nothing," said Steve Zink, who worked for Grubbs and his father before starting an independent trucking company.
"If it was 100 degrees, he would get out there and shovel asphalt with everybody else, and keep on shoveling until the job was done."
Though people who have dealt with Grubbs Construction vary widely on their opinion of the current owner, they almost all have two things in common: They agree on the basic story of how he built his business, and he now owes them money.
Grubbs and his company have filed for Chapter 11 protection in the federal bankruptcy court in Tampa. The list of his 20 largest creditors includes banks, insurance companies and nationally known equipment suppliers.
Beyond this, Grubbs owes dozens of others - sod, trucking and erosion control companies, firms that provided rock and day labor, auto parts stores and vehicle repair shops. The number of creditors shows the weight of a company as large as Grubbs Construction in a market as small as Brooksville, and, when it begins to go under, its force in pulling others down with it.
Some business people remain loyal. Gary Grubbs, who did not agree to be interviewed for this story, is failing only because he was stiffed on multimillion-dollar contracts and because of the slowing economy, they say.
They think, given his past success, he may rebound from bankruptcy protection - an outcome that is possible, experts say, partly because Grubbs is well-placed to take advantage of highly lucrative disaster cleanup jobs.
"He owes me more than he owes any other trucking company," Zink said. "But I'm pretty confident that if it takes years for him to pay me, he will pay me."
Others say Grubbs' ego drove him to build the company. It then led him to make exactly the same kind of decisions that ruined his father's business.
Grubbs bought asphalt, block and concrete companies and applied his name to them in large letters. He acquired a helicopter, plane, race cars and speedboats. He threw parties, with guests that included celebrities, at his homes in Aripeka and his 9,000-square-foot mansion in Tarpon Springs.
"That's so he can be a big shot in front of his friends like Bubba the Love Sponge," said Lowell Barden, vice president of National Erosion Control in Lakeland.
Randy Perkins, one of Grubbs' competitors for disaster cleanup contracts, agreed:
"This kind of thing comes full circle when you spend other people's money on toys."
When Gary Grubbs started his first construction company in 1983, he seemed perfectly suited to succeed physically, psychologically, and - coming from a family that had been prominent in the county for generations - politically.
He had the experience of working for his father's company since high school. Though his education ended with his graduation from Hernando High, most people interviewed agreed he had excellent insight into business.
He stands 6 feet 3 and often dressed in new boots and a cowboy hat.
His aura helped him win jobs, said Charlie Williamson, owner of CFE Trucking Inc.
"He's an impressive figure. He is a handsome gentleman and young and powerful and arrogant."
It has also helped him apply pressure to employees to keep jobs on track.
"He can be very intimidating," said Kendra Sittig, who managed the company's offices for more than a decade.
He needed all these qualities in 1988, when John D. Grubbs' business began to fail. Though the elder Grubbs had contracts to build most of the county's schools, he had accumulated about $100,000 in debts to suppliers and subcontractors. The Hernando County Construction Licensing Board suspended Grubbs' right to pull building permits. He left his wife and business and moved to Georgia.
Though Sittig now has pending sexual discrimination and disability discrimination complaints against Grubbs Construction with the federal Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, she has great respect for what Gary Grubbs did during this time.
She and Grubbs both made sacrifices to complete the elder Grubbs' jobs and pay his bills, she said. During 1991 and 1992, she personally loaned the company money several times to cover payroll, she wrote in a time line she prepared for her complaint.
During those years, the company began winning more jobs to build roads and parks in Hernando County, and, in 1993, the county paid it to clean up after the infamous no-name storm.
But the profit margin on these jobs was extremely thin because of the high cost the firm paid for bonding. Any mistakes could turn these assets into liabilities.
Grubbs made sure this didn't happen.
"He took a lot of pride in his name," she said.
"Every job had to be the best it could be because it was a Grubbs job . . . I've seen him staying up all night, paving - running the paver himself - to get the job done."
But even those who stand by Grubbs say this fervor was always more about money than honor.
"I think you could say that Gary is just driven to be successful. To do that you need to have a good name," said Terry Hunt, owner of T.L. Hunt Development Inc. and a longtime friend and business associate.
A good reputation meant cheaper credit and more jobs. That meant more money, which meant more trucks, cars and boats, which meant leaving a bigger impression with his friends.
"He likes to put on a show, and it costs money to put on a show," Williamson said.
Grubbs' attraction to powerful, expensive vehicles has been with him at least since high school, said one of his contemporaries, Cedric Bechtelheimer, co-owner of Beck's Radiator.
"He had all the toys you could imagine," he said. "He would go out in the woods with a brand-new, four-wheel-drive truck. If he got it stuck, he'd leave it there and go get another one."
By the late 1990s he could indulge his tastes like never before.
Grubbs, who was in North Carolina in 1996 to lay pipe for a sewer job, was in position to offer his services after the state was hit by two hurricanes that year. The cleanup from the second alone generated $14-million.
Afterward, he was able to take on bigger state road construction jobs. He laid infrastructure and built a golf course for what was then the busiest private development in the county, Timber Pines, and later received a similar contract for one of the most ambitious developments in the state, the Villages, which covers parts of Sumter, Marion and Lake counties.
Sittig estimates the business' income crested about three years ago at $61-million. The company employed as many as 300 people, said Tom Hogan, its general counsel.
Grubbs' company trucks, most of them new, became a common sight in the county. The boats and heavy equipment he entered in Brooksville's annual Christmas Parade filled the streets like Soviet weapons in Moscow.
Grubbs dominated the action at local race car tracks. When he built a new office on Main Street in Brooksville, it included a landing pad for a helicopter. In 1999, he formed a corporation in North Carolina for the sole purpose of buying a corporate jet, according to Sittig's time line.
"He's had big parties down there on weekends many times," said Evelyn Butts, one of his neighbors on Indian Gulf Lane in Aripeka. Grubbs owns two houses on the street, she said, and rents one to former County Commissioner John Richardson, who worked as his spokesman.
The parties feature loud music, boats large enough to fill the canal, speeding air boats and "girls all over the place," she said.
Grubbs, who was divorced from his first wife and mother of his two oldest children 12 years ago, remarried a hairdresser in 1995. She filed for divorce in 1999, and though they have since reconciled, her complaint said he committed himself to the relationship, "treating marriage as "aggravated dating.' "
Friends said Grubbs' expenses were lavish but not excessive for someone of his income level.
"I hope we're not measured by our toys," Hunt said.
"I happen to have a few toys myself."
But that income started to dwindle in 2000. And expenses began to climb, partly because he applied the spending patterns of his private life to his business, where they were considerably more costly.
He formed a road construction equipment company, Wildcat Equipment, in 1996.
By 2000, it "experienced serious financial problems," Sittig wrote.
Grubbs invested heavily in the stock market starting in 1998; by the end of 2000, he had suffered heavy losses.
Also in 2000, Grubbs replaced a relatively small asphalt plant on land leased from Florida Crushed Stone Co. with a larger one on land he bought at the corner of Yontz and Cobb roads.
"The company took a huge financial hit due to the value of the old plant being substantially less than the payoff of the loan. This, in addition to the costs to construct the facility, were placed on the construction company," she wrote.
The next year, he bought GMP Industries, a concrete maker, and AAA Spec Block, a block-making company in Marion County.
All were paid for with funds taken from Grubbs Construction and one of Grubbs' other companies, Grubbs Emergency Services. All new acquisitions were serviced by fleets of trucks, which Grubbs insisted had to be new.
Hogan, Grubbs Construction's general counsel, insisted the money for the block and the concrete company did not come from the firm.
Along with the mansion in Tarpon - purchased in 2000, they were set up as investments for Grubbs' children and backed by Grubbs personally.
Actually, Sittig said, this is part of a long-term strategy of protecting his assets. Vehicles, for example, were almost always purchased through a trust rather than directly through the company.
"He's always been very careful about that, very smart about it," she said.
This leads to the worries of some creditors - that Grubbs will try to hide his assets and start over in another state, possibly North Carolina, where he already has an office.
His involvement in the emergency disaster business makes this plausible, said competitor Randy Perkins, of AshBritt Inc. in Pompano Beach.
Both companies have vied for what are called prepositioned emergency cleanup contracts, and Grubbs has these agreements with local governments throughout the Southeast, Perkins said.
They bring in no money unless the company's services are required, but when the disasters do strike, the profit margins are high and the payoffs can be enormous, Perkins said.
For that reason, Perkins said, Grubbs may be able to find backers despite filing for bankruptcy protection. He might also be somewhat insulated from the stigma of bankruptcy court because Grubbs has insisted in recent years that the contracts be with Grubbs Emergency Services rather than Grubbs Construction.
"One good hurricane and he could be out of this mess," Perkins said. "It's like waving a magic wand."
Hogan dismissed this as unlikely because of the sporadic nature of the business.
"I'm not sure it's much of a business plan," Hogan said. "That's like saying I'm down to my last $1,000 and my business plan is to go to Las Vegas."
Grubbs also has no plans to relocate to North Carolina, he said.
"His homestead is here in Hernando County, and whatever business rises out of the ashes, he will be here to run it," Hogan said.
One possible reason so many creditors expect Grubbs to move away is that it would so neatly parallel his father's flight to Georgia.
"Like father, like son," said Mike Eberts, of Plug Masters, a Spring Hill sod company, a creditor who has been one of Grubbs' loudest critics.
But Barden of National Erosion in Lakeland sees even richer irony in another figure from Grubbs' past, Michael Cone, owner of Cone Constructors of Tampa.
Grubbs sued Cone for failing to pay him for paving work on a state job in Citrus County. He was among the biggest cheerleaders when Cone was dismissed from a state contract on the Suncoast Parkway and accused of bribing a state road inspector.
"I'm going after his a--," Grubbs said of Cone at the time.
"You will see a picture of him behind bars blown up in my office . . . I've seen him hurt too many people. It's time to bring a halt to it."
Barden's company has filed suit against Grubbs in Pasco County, claiming he has not paid him $170,000 for work on a road improvement project there. The loss, if not fatal, has significantly hamstrung his company, which employs 15 people.
"Grubbs has been paid every penny for every square inch of work he has done there, and he has passed very little of it on," Barden said.
"I just think it's funny that he was one of the biggest voices against Mike Cone, and now he's probably hurt more people than (Cone) ever did."