The Madness of Joe Francis: "I thought we were all just having fun. I was wrong." (12 page)

“You need to do something for me.”

I leaned back, put my hand over the pad and looked at him. This was dangerous territory; I didn’t like having to do anything for anyone.

“You spoke to Ronn Torossian and quoted him saying that I had no intention of honoring the judge’s order. That quote is the reason I’m here.”

“That’s not the only reason,” Barbour said, laughing in a way to show me that Francis didn’t mean to offend. Francis held up his hand.

“I didn’t mean that was the only reason. It’s just that I would never not honor a judge’s order.”

He said the only reason he didn’t fly out the Thursday he was supposed to turn himself in was because he couldn’t find a pilot. And because it was Easter weekend, he couldn’t line up a commercial flight.

He wanted to make sure I noted that. I scribbled it into my notebook.

I asked him if this was a particularly difficult case for him to settle. He’d been sued before, several times since starting Girls Gone Wild, and had settled those cases without much incident.

He’d also taken a lawsuit to trial in Texas in 2006 and won in an area that was more conservative than Bay County. Jurors weren’t overly sympathetic to girls who willingly exposed themselves to a clearly marked Girls Gone Wild camera and then sued for emotional damages.

“Absolutely,” he said, “this case destroyed my life. I was a guy, who, in 2003, I was a cocky 29-year-old, I was on top of the world. Prior to these incidents I was happy. This case has caused me to lose friends, family, a large part of my business. It’s caused me the most pain and suffering of anything in my life.”

He put his hands over his face.

“Before this happened, I’d often thought about faking my own demise,” he muttered through his hands. “Not faking my own death, but my own demise. Just to see who my real friends were. But I didn’t have to fake it. This case did that for me. It made me realize who my friends were and what my life was all about.

“Now I know who has the real power in this world: the judges, the police, the press.”

He wouldn’t talk about the money that had ended this case. The settlement had a provision to keep the girls’ identities secret along with the amount they received.

“It was a lot,” Francis said. “It hurt me a lot and it was hard to get, I can say that.”

Barbour spoke up, saying it would put a dent in Mantra’s operating funds for some time to come. That’s big money for a company that made $43 million – $29 million in profit – in 2005.

“It was not an inconsequential amount in any shape or form,” he said. “But it was a fair resolution to this case.”

“Let’s not say fair,” Francis broke in. “Let’s just say it was a resolution.”

Hours after my interview with Joe Francis at the Bay County Jail, guards returned him to cell pod B, which had been cleared of all other inmates.

Some time in the evening, Francis asked a guard for a bottled water. The guard refused. Francis offered to buy the water for $100, then made it $500 and showed the guard the money.

It is against the law for inmates to possess cash in the jail. It is considered contraband. Having it was a felony.

When the guard reported Francis to his superiors, they searched Francis’ cell and found sixteen prescription pills. They were Francis’ anti-anxiety medicine and sleeping pills.

The search resulted in two felony charges, a maximum of 10 years in prison if he was convicted as charged. The State Attorney’s Office immediately drew up a motion to have Francis’ bond in the still-pending 2003 criminal case revoked upon his release from federal custody.

Francis, who was truly suffering in jail and had settled the civil case hoping it would facilitate his release, had done the unthinkable. He had bought himself weeks, months or years behind bars.

.

Chapter 13

Insanity

O
n April 12, the day after the pills were found, Francis returned to federal court for what was supposed to be a bond hearing in the criminal contempt case. Record producer Quincy Jones was in the audience, ready to testify as a character witness. Francis’ parents, Ray and Maria Francis, also came to support their son.

Francis walked in looking haggard, bags under his eyes, hair disheveled. He scanned the crowd as he shuffled in with chains jingling from his wrists and ankles.

Mantra President Scott Barbour, numerous lawyers, court personnel who’d taken a break to watch the proceedings, three state prosecutors including Mark Graham who was spearheading the 2003 case, and three Bay County Sheriff’s Office investigators had turned out to watch.

State prosecutor Larry Basford sat near the back of the room with a file folder containing the contraband warrants on his lap and the motion to revoke bond. If U.S. Magistrate Larry Bodiford gave Francis a bond, Basford would file the paperwork to keep him in jail.

Francis blew a kiss to his mother as she entered the room. Maria Francis, a tiny woman with wavy blonde hair and nervous, fluttering hands, blew back two quick kisses. Francis sat with his back to the audience and his mother sat nearby. She changed seats, moving in a crouch between pews, trying to get a look at his face. She sat next to Jones, then moved closer to me and got up again to find another seat.

Bodiford entered the room and attorneys Jan Handzlik and Jim White asked him for a short recess before starting the hearing. They took Francis aside. When they returned, they waived the hearing. Handzlik said later that considering the new charges, there was no point in going forward.

Francis stood and with Marshals reaching to take him back into custody he turned to his mother. He was crying.

“I didn’t do anything,” he said in a high, strained voice. “You know I didn’t do anything.”

When officers led him out the courthouse’s back door, he couldn’t face the cameras as he’d done so many times before. The last time he’d gone in the courthouse by these stairs, he’d done a stiff-legged hop for the cameras’ benefit. He’d once danced down the federal courthouse stairs.

This time he hid his face behind an empty file folder.

Francis returned to a different situation at the jail. He was now without his medication, which made sleep and a quiet mind hard enough. But he’d broken jail rules, and that meant 30 days in solitary confinement, what jail personnel call “segregated population.”

He was in a small, bare cell with concrete walls and floor. The bed was a rectangle of cold steel mounted on the wall. Francis was given a towel and a blanket.

Within the cell block’s walls were the worst of Bay County’s offenders, including Robert Bailey, who’d just been convicted of gunning down a police officer. Bailey, a lifelong gang member from Wisconsin, kept chanting “Joe Francis! Girls Gone Wild! Whoo!” He said it over and over and over, sometimes late into the night.

Francis says he was shackled constantly when he was outside his cell, including showers. He would tell people afterwards that guards paraded him naked and chained to and from his showers.

Sleep was impossible.

He was allowed visitors, but kept separated from them by a thick glass window.

Francis called his girlfriend, Christina McLarty, his first day in solitary. McLarty was a TV reporter in Los Angeles, and when Francis called she was on assignment. When she answered the phone she was all business, while Francis was weeping.

“Hello.”

“Oh my god, thank you.” Francis sobbed into the phone.

“Hi hon.” McLarty said, calmly.

“I don’t know what to do.”

“What’s wrong?”

“They put me in the solitary thing. They put me in a solitary cell.”

McLarty told him that attorney Chris Rudd was awaiting approval from Michael Burke to fly to Panama City to offer his help. McLarty, who was clearly frustrated with Burke, said Rudd had been sitting in an airport for hours waiting for the call.

“I’m OKing it,” Francis said, the whine dropping from his voice.

“Can I be rude to Michael? Is that OK?” McLarty asked. “I think I’m gonna be rude to him because he won’t listen to me.”

Francis wanted to know why Burke hadn’t come to see him in jail.

“I’m gonna die. There’s no way I can spend 10 days in solitary confinement.”

“OK. You’re supposed to be there for 21 days,” McLarty responded, not sounding the least bit sympathetic.

Francis wanted to know if that meant he was going to be in jail for 21 days, or in solitary confinement for 21 days.

“If I’m here for 21 days, I’ll die.”

“I know.”

Francis believed he was scheduled to be released from jail the day the pills were found. He asked McLarty what he was supposed to do about that situation.

“You’re supposed to turn it around and say they were trying to extort money,” McLarty told him, repeating what she thought she’d heard from a lawyer.

“This call’s being recorded, so you’re my attorney,” Francis said, believing that just saying she was an attorney would make their conversation confidential.

“Keep a stiff upper lip,” McLarty told him. She was still working and talking to someone else while juggling the call with Francis. “Can you call me back?”

“I only get one phone call a day,” Francis said.

“Can you call me back in like 20 minutes?”

“I’ll try.”

“Keep the faith hon,” McLarty said before ending the call.

Aaron Dyer, the lawyer who had stood with Francis from the beginning of the 2003 criminal case, was sick at home in Los Angeles when Francis flew out for the March 30 hearing. He was still in California on April 12 when Francis got the new charges.

He flew out the next day.

He called me on my cell phone around 10:30 that night.

“For four years I was able to keep him away from you,” Dyer said. “The one time I get sick and you get the interview.”

He wanted to know if I was up for a beer.

“What are you doing in town?” I asked.

“I had to come over and work on some of this stuff. Where you at?”

“I’m playing poker. Come on over, we’ve got plenty of beer. You can finally get in on the game.”

“I’ll come by, but I’ll just watch.”

Burke dropped him off 10 minutes later and I met him at the back gate. We walked to the pool house where the game had been underway for a good two hours.

Dyer sat in a recliner and drank a beer while the game went on. Tacked to the wall on his left was a poster of celebrity arrest photos.

“How much do you have sitting in front of you?” he asked me after an hour.

“Ninety-five dollars.”

“I thought you said this was a low-stakes game.”

“It is,” I said, indicating the rows of chips. “These are all quarters.”

Between hands we talked about the case.

“This is really penny-ante stuff,” he said of the contraband charges. “He asks for a bottle of water so he can take the pills that have been prescribed for him.”

But, I said, the jail didn’t prescribe them and he hid the pills under a mattress and towel, indicating he knew he shouldn’t have had them.

“Don’t forget them arresting Scott Barbour for smuggling them in,” I added.

“I don’t think that happened. I think Joe had them with him.”

“I don’t know. When I went to visit him he had unlimited, private access to Barbour. I think that’s one reason why they’re coming down so hard on him. They gave him all this freedom and he smuggled pills in.”

“Maybe. Do you think they’re intentionally trying to goad him into doing something? I mean, are they making it so bad that he takes a swing at someone?”

“I don’t think so. But they’re definitely enjoying it.”

“The one thing that gets me is this $500 for a bottled water. I know Joe Francis. I could get all the charges dismissed and he wouldn’t pay me $500.”

On April 23, 2007, Joe Francis came into the small, now-familiar courtroom on the federal courthouse’s second floor and, as was his custom, scanned the onlookers in the three rows of wooden pews. He grinned and looked down before looking up again. He seemed torn between acknowledging his audience and embarrassment.

He was dressed in a clean, green jumpsuit with the words “Segregated inmate Bay County Jail” in white letters across the back.