The Madness of Joe Francis: "I thought we were all just having fun. I was wrong." (11 page)

What Francis had done was add conditions to an unconditional settlement offer he’d made on March 31, the Saturday that he left town. The girls had accepted the unconditional offer, and then Francis said he wanted to pay the amount over time.

Smoak said it was a very, very long payment plan.

Smoak decided that Francis had been insincere when he made the offer. All he was doing, the judge said, was making a false offer so he could get out of town.

“He may have snookered us and gotten out,” Smoak said, “but he’s coming back.”

Ross McCloy cautioned the judge not to overreact. He said it was possible that Francis was just goading him into a rash decision that would result in a viable appeal, a motion for the judge to recuse himself or a change of venue.

Mike Dickey didn’t help much by shrugging his shoulders and saying he was stumped by Francis’ behavior.

The order went out – Francis must surrender himself in less than 24 hours.

The deadline came and went. Francis appeared on the Geraldo Rivera show by phone and said he would certainly honor the judge’s order.

He told the AP that this was a case of “judges gone wild.”

Francis’ spokesman, Ronn Torossian, echoed that. When I asked him if Francis intended to turn himself in that Thursday, Torossian said Francis was “very busy” running a business. I took that as a no.

Burke and Aaron Dyer, in private, were outraged. The judge had denied that he’d ordered Francis to settle the lawsuit or go to jail – “Settle or Jail,” the News Herald’s big headline that the judge had so objected to.

But now, this was exactly what they’d feared. Burke said they made an unconditional monetary offer that was accepted. After that, the terms were negotiated actively over the next few days. When McCloy ran across a term he didn’t like, he went to Smoak and told him Francis wasn’t negotiating in good faith.

Smoak responded by ordering Francis to jail.

The plaintiffs now had a powerful negotiating tool. Scott Barbour, Mantra’s president, said the threat of jail was an issue in future negotiations, which ultimately settled the case.

On April 10, 2007, Francis flew in to the Panama City-Bay County International Airport around 7 a.m. and was promptly arrested by airport police. He was five days late in complying with the judge’s order to turn himself in.

As he was being booked in at the Bay County Jail, Mantra Films Inc. President Scott Barbour and Francis’ personal attorney Bret Saxon waited on metal-and-plastic chairs in a corner of the jail’s basement public area. Barbour stretched his legs in front of the Lance’s peanut, cracker and hot fries snack dispenser. Saxon sat hunched over with elbows on knees.

“Hey Shirley,” I said to Shirley Brown as I walked up to the notched and scarred plastic window. Brown had worked at the jail’s public window for some 20 years.

“Hey David. Long time no see.”

“I know. I don’t get down here as much as I used to. Don’t take this the wrong way, but I don’t really like it here too much.”

“I don’t blame you,” she laughed. “What can I do for you?”

“I need to see if you can get a message to Joe Francis, see if he wants to give me an interview.”

Barbour, who I hadn’t met before, spoke up from his corner seat.

“Are you David from the News Herald?”

He introduced himself and said Francis would almost certainly give me an interview once he’d been booked and had a chance to talk to his lawyers.

A few minutes later, Michael Burke came out of the jail and escorted Barbour and Saxon in to see Joe. I waited.

Barbour had said they had two hearings to attend that day, a 10 a.m. status conference in Judge Smoak’s chambers, and a 1:30 hearing for some unexplained purpose.

After an hour of waiting in which I committed the contents of the junk food dispenser to memory, Barbour came out and said Francis would meet with me after the 10 a.m. hearing.

A few minutes later and a few blocks away at the federal courthouse, Burke and I looked over the criminal contempt complaint that Smoak had filed that morning. This was why Francis was coming back at 1:30, for an arraignment on that charge.

Smoak said Francis committed contempt of court by lying during a March 30 hearing and compounded it by not turning himself in as ordered on April 5.

“It’s interesting that the judge relies on the plaintiffs’ filings to write this out,” Burke said, pointing to the instances where the judge said Francis lied. “He’s got a transcript of the hearing.”

Barbour and Saxon had resumed their positions from the jail waiting area as they sat in the hallway outside the courtroom. Barbour was stretched out and Saxon hunched over, in wooden chairs under group pictures of the sitting federal judges and magistrates.

I stood in the hallway, leaning against a door jamb, and waited for them to ask me a question, to get the conversation started. It didn’t take long.

“Let me ask you something. Have you ever seen anything like this?” Barbour asked, echoing Francis’ question to me from less than a week before. He wanted to know if I’d seen a judge hold someone in criminal contempt of court in a civil case, a charge that carried a six-month jail sentence. What he really wanted to know was if I’d ever seen anyone jailed because they wouldn’t settle a lawsuit.

Smoak’s orders over the last week had amounted to just that.

Luckily, Barbour dove into the real issue, the mediation, without waiting for an answer. He said settlement talks – exactly what Smoak had demanded in their last hearing – had been ongoing for two weeks. Offers and conditions in the offers were flying across desks every day.

“You’ve probably written, what, 20 settlement drafts in the last two weeks?” Barbour said to Burke.

“I wouldn’t say 20.”

Turns out the number was six. And a settlement had been agreed to in principal and was just awaiting final approval.

“The plaintiffs included two conditions just yesterday that if I didn’t accept it would have killed the deal,” Burke said.

Francis was in jail because he’d made an unconditional settlement offer and when the plaintiffs accepted it, he then added terms which the girls found unacceptable. Smoak said Francis had only made the offer to appease the judge and it wasn’t an honest effort to resolve the case. He demanded that Francis surrender himself to begin a contempt of court jail term.

Smoak’s decision was fueled by Francis’ then-attorney Mike Dickey telling the judge he was “stumped” by Francis’ actions.

“I don’t want you to throw anybody under the bus,” I said to Burke and Barbour, “but do you think if Mike Dickey had come out stronger in the April fourth hearing – told the judge that this was a part of the negotiation process – instead of saying he was stumped – you think this issue wouldn’t have blown up the way it did?”

Burke looked away and didn’t say anything.

Barbour tapped his fingertip against his nose and exaggerated a nod, but said, “I can’t say a word.”

That afternoon, Francis was taken out of an SUV behind the steps leading into the federal courthouse’s holding area. Dressed in Bay County jailhouse blues, his ankles were chained together, allowing him little more than 12-inch strides. His wrists were shackled together and connected to a belly chain.

He smiled at the cameras recording his movements, then hop-skipped up the stairs.

He shuffled into the courtroom and grinned at everyone assembled. There were Bay County Sheriff’s investigators, who came to all of Francis’ court appearances, and lawyers – lots of lawyers.

He sat next to a thickset guy in a jail jumpsuit with a proud mullet and looked around the room. He leaned over, said something to mullet-guy, who snorted a short laugh.

U.S. Magistrate Larry Bodiford took the bench and ordered Francis held in jail until a bond hearing on Thursday. It was a shock to Francis, who had dinner plans for that night.

The next day I called Barbour on his cell phone and asked him if we could set up that interview. Barbour was already at the jail.

“Joe, this is David from the News Herald,” Barbour said to Francis. “Other than the picture, he wrote a very nice story about you in today’s paper. Do you want to meet with him today?”

Francis said something I couldn’t catch.

“He’ll meet with you. What’s your deadline? Can we make it later this afternoon, say around 3?”

I hate working late.

“I was thinking more like right after lunch, say 1:30.”

“How about 2? Can you make it at 2?”

“I’ll be there.”

I was led into a small room on the jail’s first floor. Someone had managed to cram in a couple of shelves, desk and four small chairs.

Joe Francis opened the door and I walked in, moving out of the door’s path and looking for a chair. Scott Barbour was seated behind the simple metal desk. Francis sat down in front of the desk with his back to the mason block wall.

“You want to sit here?” he asked, situating a chair to face him.

“How are you doing?” I asked, sitting down in the offered seat. “Really. How are you getting along?”

“I’m fine,” he said, looking surprised at the question. He had bigger issues to address with a reporter.

“I guess you heard we settled.”

Francis always assumed I knew everything. I hated to let him down and I didn’t like to lie, so I just stayed silent and let him assume.

He tried to cross his legs but the space was too cramped and he kicked the desk instead. He put both feet back on the floor and started talking about the settlement.

“Money has been delivered,” he said.

“You can’t say that,” Barbour interrupted.

“I can say that.”

“You can if you want to have something that you don’t know to be accurate to end up in the paper.”

“I can say that money has been exchanged.”

Most of the interview went on like that, the two men bickering like an old married couple, talking over each other, each holding up a hand to try to hush the other.

I’d learned not to try to follow along too closely. The best thing when talking with Francis was to sit back and listen. Take notes when possible but try to keep a wall up against the barrage of often jumbled information coming in.

Francis’ mood went from jittery to resigned. He’d stand and fidget, then drop back into his seat and put his face in his hands. When he wasn’t focused on one thing, he was all over the board. He might stop a train of thought on a dime, then charge off in a different direction in a flash.

I’m much too Southern in my thought processing. I like a smooth, quiet stream of information, not the splashing, thunderous waterfall that was Joe Francis. But, I very much felt like I was sitting in an imaginary rocking chair on an imaginary wooden porch and watching two bumper cars bang into each other, repeatedly, at high speeds. It was pretty entertaining, so I just sipped my imaginary bourbon and tried to take it all in.

Barbour was in the middle of talking about the settlement when Francis interrupted.

“You comfortable?” he asked me.

If nothing else, the question jarred me off the porch.

“I’m fine.”

“You want a corn dog?”

I stopped for a beat and I can honestly say my mind went blank trying to figure out the question. Then I laughed; a good heartfelt laugh that Francis the entertainer seemed to really appreciate.

“How about a Jello-O? I think they got a few cups of Jello-O around somewhere,” he pressed on, smiling.

“No thanks,” I said, still laughing. “I’m fine.”

He tried to cross his left leg over his right, but kicked the desk again. This time the leg stayed, perched ankle-on-knee-cap. The desk made a rhythmic, hollow thud as Francis repeatedly tapped it with his toe.

He uncrossed the leg and leaned forward.

“I think Bay County needs to be done with Joe Francis,” he said. “I’d like to come back sometime on vacation. Maybe buy a couple condos. I hear there’s plenty available.”

Panama City Beach’s dream of ousting Spring Breakers in exchange for year-round, wealthy residents who enjoyed living in high-rise condominiums, wasn’t moving as quickly as planned. The high-rises were there, but they were practically empty.

Francis turned serious and pointed at my note pad.