A & A Trucking and Excavating, also known as the Art of Destruction, has become well known for its creative recycling of materials, which turn into something new.

Buildings that have stood the tests of time don’t stand a chance when Tommy Amodeo gets into the seat of his excavator and begins to take “bites” out of them. In doing that, however, he is not just tearing down an edifice, he is building up a legacy.
Tommy and his wife Lisa are the owners of A & A Trucking and Excavating, better known as The Art of Destruction. The high school sweethearts started their business in 1994, with one truck. They now manage a thriving operation that includes nearly a dozen employees, numerous pieces of heavy equipment and other machinery, and a massive “yard” in which an amazing amount of recycling takes place.

The firm provides services ranging from complete building demolition to selective demolition as well as excavation services and tank removals. The end result is the recycling of materials such as concrete, steel, copper wire, asphalt and more. Those byproducts then can be used to create new roads, parking lots, gravel bases for garden pavers and many other uses.
The couple and their sons, Wyatt, 20, and Garrett, 18, are avid baseball fans and the young men have long been involved with local teams. The family has traveled extensively for events such as youth baseball camps and taking in major league games in locales such as Atlanta and Los Angeles.
Garrett plans to attend Kentucky Christian University, where he will play baseball while he studies for a degree in business sports management. His ultimate goal is to play for the LA Dodgers. Wyatt is currently attending the University of Northwestern Ohio to earn a degree in medium- and heavy-duty diesel technology, where he also plays baseball. After he graduates, he plans to return to Ocala to work in the family business.
“Wyatt loves everything we do, from fixing a bolt on a machine to tear down the biggest building,” Lisa offers. “He took a home down in kindergarten by himself. The homeowner signed a waiver and said, ‘If you guys believe he can do it, I’m gonna believe he can do it.’ She sat in her car on the outside of the property and watched him tear it down.”
“They are both hard-working about their passions,” she adds. “Garrett gives baseball 950% and Wyatt gives this business 950%.”
As the Amodeo’s celebrate 30 years of being in business and look to continue growing with Wyatt coming on board, we’d say that qualifies as a home run.
THE BEGINNING
Tommy and Lisa are graduates of the Class of 1990 at Vanguard High School, where they began dating in late 1989.
“Tommy was an operator and CDL truck driver for his older brother’s excavating business back then,” Lisa shares. “In my senior year of high school, I was employed by the local John Deere Ag dealer, Marion Tractor. Under the leadership of Ernie Mayne, I grew to understand the mechanical side of the parts industry. He taught me the functions of machinery one part at a time.”
Tommy also had “some incredible mentors, and we give credit where credit is due,” Lisa notes. “Chuck Large was a fantastic teacher at Vanguard who took Tommy under his wing and then he had Jerry Sauls, who taught Tommy a lot about blueprints and drawings.”
As Tommy’s experience grew, he became an operator for Hayward Baker, “a Keller company, which is accredited as the largest geotechnical specialist contractor in the world,” she says.
“His years of employment led Tommy to multiple commercial projects, such as the Savanna River Nuclear site, Denver Colorado Airport and KUA Cane Island Power Plant,” she recalls. “He worked for and was mentored by an incredible project manager, Ron Short, who allowed him to grow in the heavy industrial industry.”
Tommy and Lisa purchased their first truck, a 1974 tandem Mack, and opened their business together on June 26th, 1994, with a bit of a rocky start.
“Tommy headed out with a load of fill dirt for our first customer and their check bounced,” she explains. “We share that small setback with everyone who asks about the pros and cons of being self-employed. You must have a love for what you do and the desire to persevere when you face adversity.”
The two were married in October of 1994, surrounded by “precious family, friends, co-workers and customers at the family home.”
She explains that Tommy took the lead in the field, maintaining the job sites and employees, while she covered the office duties and worked with customers. Along the way, she became a licensed general contractor and became adept at working with the logistics of challenges such as asbestos mitigation at job sites.
“Together, we grew our fleet of Mack trucks and Cat machinery to transform from a trucking and excavating company into a specialized demolition contractor,” Lisa notes. “Tommy’s expertise with a Caterpillar excavator allowed him to dismantle commercial and industrial structures while continuing to provide professional service to the local homeowners with residential projects.”
She says their first commercial demolition project came after there was a major industrial fire at Florida Seed & Feed in 1995.
“Jerry Cullison gave us the opportunity to haul off and finish the cleanup of the 75,000 square foot facility that burned for well over three days. This project placed our firm in a position to showcase Tommy’s natural talent for precise and accurate removal of delicate structures,” she recalls. “His love for dismantling structures continued with many other iconic projects throughout Marion County and surrounding areas within the State of Florida.”
On all jobs, safety is paramount, and all of their employees are highly trained. Among the more challenging projects were removing a 160-foot-tall water tower and a giant brick smokestack, which was crumbling. The latter site was near two major roadways.
“It was pretty intense,” Tommy says.
He offers that being accurate in such extremes is a mixture of mathematical deductions, basic knowledge of engineering and a lot of common sense.
“Well, you need to know how a building goes together in order to take it apart,” he says with a grin.

NOTABLE ENDEAVORS
Some of the more significant A & A projects have included the removal of structures such as White’s Meat Packing Plant, the Wild Waters Water Park, the College of Central Florida swimming pool, the Goldman Peek building in downtown Ocala, former car dealerships including Bo Williams Buick Cadillac and Lincoln-Mercury, a city of Ocala sewer plant, the former Royal Oak Charcoal facility, the historic Camp House, the old Reddick School and Mt. Moriah AME Church, also in downtown Ocala, where a new city of Ocala parking garage will be erected.
Some of those projects elicited opposition, such as with the Wild Waters attraction and the Reddick School, both of which were deemed unsafe, but also elation, such as when the controversial charcoal plant removal further cemented the resolve of the west Ocala coalition that had long lobbied for an end to pollution and health-adverse living conditions.
Tommy says when he secures a job to remove iconic buildings, it is not just a business engagement, such as with the old Camp house, for example, and Lisa concurs.
“It was kind of sad. It had potential, but nobody really had the money. It wasn’t viable to remodel it,” Lisa shares. “Tommy and I go to a lot of these properties alone and we’ll have conversations like, ‘Can you imagine what this dining room looked like?’ and sometimes we see the amount of intricate work that was done to make a room incredible. And we just have to stand there. If money was an endless resource, we would probably never tear anything down.”
Gerald Ergle is a local businessman, civic leader and former mayor of Ocala. He came to know Tommy and Lisa when they did some work for him.
“I had them demolish a building or two a long time ago,” he shares, adding that he recently was visiting Ocala Tire near downtown Ocala and saw the A & A team working on the former Lincoln-Mercury property across the street and was intrigued by a sign that noted they were recycling the materials.
“They are really recycling a lot of stuff out of all of the buildings now,” he says. “I remember when you’d see a building being demolished and they’d just load up the material and take it to the dump.”
Ergle also notes that he was standing across the street talking with the owner of the historic Goldman Peek building, which is where the Mellow Mushroom restaurant is now, when the A & A crew found that just touching some of the blocks during their work there caused them to crumble into dust.
“Sometimes, buildings we consider to be historic are to the point that you can’t save them,” Ergle explains. “They had plans to use the building that was there, but it was falling down. They had to build a new building.”

SCOPE OF WORK
At the old Lincoln-Mercury property, A & A recycled the asphalt parking lot along with the concrete from the venue. They brought all of the detritus to their “yard,” where the process began, for example, to remove bits of metal and wire before the huge chunks of concrete was fed into the maw of a giant and powerful crushing machine.
“We screen it out and make rocks of different sizes,” Tommy explains about the concrete. Easily sifting a handful of pebble-size concrete pellets between his gnarled fingers, he says, “These are fines that can be used in patios underneath brick pavers.”
Pointing to a large pile of black asphalt granules, he offers that “it’s completely reusable and some of it goes into road work. Before, it was all chunky, nasty asphalt, and now it’s a reusable parking lot.”
Among the recycled materials are many kinds of metal, such as rebar.
“We will recycle semi loads of rebar. It gets processed and becomes new rebar,” he outlines. “The process on our end is time-consuming, but everything has its place, plus we’re not putting it in the ground, which is good, because it would never break down once it’s buried.”
At Mt. Moriah Church, the team took great care in saving the steeple, a stained-glass window and the cornerstone, some of which will be used by the city in a monument to the history of the church. When A &A found a number of Bibles inside the building they were set to tear down, they even “recycled” those to an outreach ministry.
The A & A team travels outside of Florida to do some jobs, such as the removal of numerous McDonald’s eateries. The bulk of their work, however, is close to home and much of it is generated through word of mouth. Some work is secured through a bidding process, such as with the city of Ocala to remove the historic church downtown to make way for the new parking garage. They always try to maintain a strict schedule for completion, but sometimes things crop up that cause delays, such as surprises with underground infrastructure.
“With the Lincoln-Mercury job, we had to reconfigure and reroute some water,” Tommy reveals. “It took a little bit longer, but it was done right. We didn’t try to cover something up and leave, because that’s not our reputation.”
As for A &A’s 30 years in business, Ergle says he feels them achieving that milestone “attests to the type of businesspeople they are and the service they give their customers.”
As for how they came up with the name The Art of Destruction, Lisa smiles when she says: “People don’t realize that this really is an art. It’s not just tearing something down. What we’ve tried to do is make a difference and build something up. The business and our marriage has continued to grow through many hours of dedication to making each new day successful together.”