Extreme Akim comes home

HOLLYWOOD — The Bat of Justice measures about 30 inches, the equivalent of a Little League model. But in the hands of "Extreme" Akim Anastopoulo, it has inflicted more punishment than any pint-size ballplayer.

The Charleston attorney wields the bat - "JUSTICE" engraved into the sweet spot - on his syndicated courtroom television show, "Eye for an Eye." The symbolization is obvious: Fairness, strength, and comeuppance.

Anastopoulo's show breaks from similar programs with an unusual sentencing structure based on payback. It amounts to a deliciously strange combination of "Night Court," "Jerry Springer" and professional wrestling.

In five years as judge, Anastopoulo once ordered a man to wear a fat suit after getting a girl pregnant. He made a slumlord write a new building policy while sitting in a garbage truck. He asked his trusty bailiff, a former middleweight boxing champ named Big Sugar Ray Phillips, to tar and feather a gentleman and parade him down the street.

Those penalties - more like binding arbitration than actual sentences - Anastopoulo issued from a film and television studio in Dallas. At 160 shows a year, he keeps a harried schedule, the travel separating Anastopoulo from his wife, two children and downtown home.

Until now.

"Eye for an Eye" began filming this week in Anastopoulo's new 16,000 square foot studio on S.C. Highway 162. The facility, a converted Piggly Wiggly, sits a few doors down from a storefront church, a florist shop and Morrison's Burger Hut, which beckons patrons to stop by, ketch-up and relish the flavor.

Only in Hollywood, South Carolina.

Read more in tomorrow's editions of The Post and Courier.