The Madness of Joe Francis: "I thought we were all just having fun. I was wrong." (8 page)

So when Bagwell applied for a search warrant alleging Girls Gone Wild was involved in racketeering by selling videotapes that included underage girls – basically they were selling child pornography – he was telling the judge he had allegations of at least two incidents where cameramen had taped underage girls in sexual situations.

Problem was, he didn’t have two. He had one – the shower scene. The other allegation, that Francis had paid two girls to masturbate him, was never videotaped.

The judge was saying if Bagwell knew there was only one tape and told the signing judge – her – there were two, he was intentionally misleading the court. If Bagwell had mistakenly told her there were two tapes, she said, he was being reckless with the facts.

Either way, one tape was not enough to justify a search of the condos for evidence of racketeering. Therefore anything that came out of that search was inadmissible.

There went the evidence.

When Dyer called me at the office he was just fishing for my take on the story. He called back a few hours later in full quote mode, meaning he had planned out a series of useless statements that would do nothing to illuminate the issues. He started off with a bland, monotone, obviously rehearsed explanation of where the case would go from this point forward.

“You’re talking like I’m looking for a quote. You think I’m quoting you, right?” I asked.

“Did you already put your story to bed?” he asked. “Good. That’s what I was hoping for.”

I was actually out walking my dog, Hiaasen, a 5-year-old, 95-pound German shepherd who was trudging through the late afternoon heat.

“He smells like cats,” a 10-year-old boy said, coming up to pet the dog.

“He smells like cats?” I asked, moving the cell phone away from my mouth. “He should smell like dirty dog, because that’s what he is.”

I got back into my conversation with Dyer.

“Sorry,” I said, “my dog gets a lot of attention when we take walks.”

“Now I can tell you what’s really going to happen next,” Dyer said. He thought there were going to be some charges that would survive the motion, but probably none of the felonies.

As Hiaasen sniffed around the base of a telephone pole, I told Dyer that Meadows thought the felony charges of promoting the sexual performance of a child could be proved through testimony only.

Dyer said he was going to look at that next, but thought that charge would go away too. The only counts that might survive, he said, were the ones dealing with the two girls who Francis had paid to masturbate him. They’d always been based solely on testimony.

The girls, though, were killing their own case by changing their testimony to improve their standing in the lawsuit. But the more they tried to boost the suit the more damage they did to both the criminal and civil cases.

I finally pried Hiaasen away from the telephone pole and we continued walking through the waves of late afternoon heat. We both kept our heads down as we moved, both eager to return to the air conditioning.

A few months later, and a few degrees cooler, on December 4, prosecutor Mark Graham filed his answer to Aaron Dyer’s and Larry Simpson’s motion to dismiss the charges.

He admitted he didn’t have the evidence to go forward with 32 of the 42 criminal charges. But said there were four charges of using minors in sexual performances and four charges of promoting the use of minors in sexual performances, eight felonies, all dealing with the shower scene, he thought he could take to trial.

The first four, the use of minors charges, Graham said, were his strongest.

He said the promoting charge had a stronger definition of sexual performance and he might have to call cameraman Mark Schmitz, who was charged along with Francis, and an unnamed photographer to testify that they witnessed the shower scene. He argued that an audience of two or three could support the elements of a performance.

Larry Simpson fired back two weeks later with his own written reply. He again argued that all the charges should be tossed. He then said that Graham’s desire to convince Schmitz, who had not resolved his own case and was, at that point, not in a position to testify without incriminating himself, and the photographer to testify wasn’t a good enough reason for the judge to let Graham keep those charges.

Simpson said the girls shouldn’t even be allowed to testify now because they’d been shown the tape to refresh their memories, and their testimony would now be tainted by illegally obtained evidence.

The sides returned again to the issue of strict liability – whether ignorance of age was a defense against these remaining charges. Graham cited three cases which, in no uncertain language, supported his claims that ignorance was not a defense.

Simpson, however, said Graham’s cases preceded a 2004 Florida Supreme Court ruling that said all strict liability crimes must be stated as such in the statute. If use or promotion of a minor in a sexual performance doesn’t specifically classify itself as strict liability, then it wasn’t.

Right before Christmas, I got word that Judge Costello was planning to issue a written order on the dismissals.

I stopped by her chambers to see her. She was doing a small, understated salsa dance in front of a tiny CD player on a table behind her desk and singing quietly in Spanish. She was in a festive mood from the prospect of a weeklong winter’s break.

“I just stopped by to see how my favorite judge was doing,” I said.

“Fine,” she said without hesitation. “What do you want?”

“You think you might have an order for me this week?”

“You’ve got spies everywhere,” she said. “Who told you I was going to have an order.”

I just shrugged

“Was it across the street?” she asked, pointing to the State Attorney’s Office. “I know it didn’t come from (Simpson in) Tallahassee. Or did it?”

“You got a 50/50 chance of getting it right.”

“Hmph,” she uttered, giving me a sideways glance. “If I get something done today, you’ll be the first to know.”

“I doubt that, but I wouldn’t mind being one of the first to know.”

“We’ll call you.”

Even while the criminal case was falling apart, the man who started it all – Panama City Beach Mayor Lee Sullivan – was running for state representative and his supporters were circulating a flier touting Sullivan’s famous 2003 verbal battle with Francis.

“When the porn peddlers known as ‘Girls Gone Wild’ arrived in Panama City to take advantage of our young women Lee Sullivan told them where they could go … Straight to Jail!” shouted a circular distributed by Panhandle Veterans. “And they got his message. Lee’s tough, swift action got these predators out of our community. There’s no place in our town for immoral pornographers who try to exploit young women. And thanks to Lee Sullivan anyone who participates in this ungodly behavior will find themselves behind bars.”

Sullivan was pictured in a stark white cowboy hat pulled down low over his brow. On the front of the flier was a sad looking little girl clutching a Teddy bear.

“Joe Francis, the founder of the ‘Girls Gone Wild’ empire, is humiliating me. He has my face pressed against the hood of a car, my arms twisted hard behind my back. He’s pushing himself against me shouting: ‘This is what they did to me in Panama City!’”

That was Claire Hoffman’s experience with Joe Francis in the summer of 2006 and the first words of a story she wrote about it in August 2006. At the time, Hoffman was an entertainment reporter for the Los Angeles Times and had traveled with Francis for a short time as he did his thing.

It was pretty obvious that three years after his arrest, Francis was still pretty angry about it. Hoffman’s article was titled “Joe Francis: ‘Baby, give me a kiss’.”

“He snatches at my notebook. He is amped, his broad face sneering as he does a sort of boxer’s skip around me, jabbering, grabbing at my arms and stomach as I try to move away, clutching my notebook to my chest. He stabs a finger in my face, shouting, ‘You don’t care about the First Amendment. I care about the First Amendment, but you are the kind of reporter who doesn’t care.’”

Hoffman caught Francis at the turn of his career, when he was transitioning into mainstream industries. His companies were still being funded by the aggressive distribution of soft-core pornography, but Francis was starting a line of clothing, backing a movie and opening a string of restaurants.

But all the while Francis was still working the nightclubs and traveling with cameramen.

.

Chapter 9

Respect for the law

J
udge Smoak ordered Joe Francis to be at the Panama City federal courthouse for the sentencing of his production company, Mantra Films Inc., in December 2006. The judge said it would instill in him some respect for the law.

The company had agreed to a deal before it had even been indicted on charges that it failed to keep the proper paperwork showing that the girls in its sexually explicit videos were of legal age. The lawyers had been told the indictment was coming, so they worked out a plea as quickly as possible. In the federal system, the faster a defendant admits guilt the lighter the sentence.

Mantra President Scott Barbour had been designated as the company’s representative, but Smoak wanted Francis to be present at the hearing. Mantra lawyer Michael Burke said later that Smoak’s request was improper because Francis wasn’t a defendant in the case. Burke said they could have simply kept Francis at home and the judge wouldn’t have been able to do anything, but they agreed to the judge’s request.

Joe Francis walked into the tiny six-pew courtroom on the second floor of the Panama City federal courthouse and looked for a place to sit. He went to his right and inched past an AP reporter and took an empty spot next to her and in front of me. She slowly turned her head and shot me a grin over her shoulder.

One of Francis’ lawyers spotted him in the audience and motioned him forward. He got up and was passing through the knee-high swinging gate when a bailiff stopped him.

“You can’t sit up there,” the bailiff said. “That area’s just for lawyers and defendants. Are you a defendant?”

“No,” Francis answered.

“Then you can’t sit there. You have to sit out here,” the bailiff said.

Francis inched his way back down the row and returned to his seat, but before he’d settled onto the wooden bench another bailiff came through the gate.

“You have to sit up here,” the second bailiff told Francis, indicating the defendant’s table where Francis had been going seconds before.

“He’s not a lawyer and he’s not a defendant,” the first bailiff said to the second. “He can’t sit up there.”

“He has to. The judge said he wants him sitting at the defendant’s table.”

“But he’s not a lawyer and he’s not a defendant.”

Aaron Dyer, who was preparing some paperwork at a podium, looked around for Francis and cut the bailiffs’ conversation off.

“Where’s Mr. Francis?” he asked. “He has to come up here.”

The second bailiff eyed the first as he held the gate open for Francis to walk through.

“He’s not a lawyer and he’s not a defendant,” the first bailiff said, but the fight had gone out of his voice. He turned and walked to a chair at the back of the room.

Judge Smoak came through a door behind the judge’s bench. He took his seat and called for Dyer, Larry Simpson and the Girls Gone Wild company officers to come to the podium. Smoak never commented on the fact that Francis had shown up 10 minutes late.

Assistant U.S. Attorney Dixie Morrow got things started.

“We’re here, your honor, because the federal law intends to protect sometimes 17-year-olds against their own impulses; requires people like Mantra Films and Mr. Francis to make sure that they are old enough to do what they are being filmed doing,” she told Smoak.

“We ask the court to keep in mind, your honor, that this isn’t just a one-time proverbial big mistake. This is not just an aberration.”

There were others, several others who had been filmed when they were underage. Some had made it into videos that were then sold worldwide.

Morrow told Smoak that he had a statement from one of the 17-year-olds who had been filmed and he could see for himself how her life had been impacted. This girl would file her own lawsuit against Francis a year later, known as the “Plaintiff B” lawsuit.