The Madness of Joe Francis: "I thought we were all just having fun. I was wrong." (15 page)

“I’m surprised you remember it, being so long ago.”

“You never forget your first three.”

I invited him to come fishing some time – the same thing I told him at the end of every conversation – and we promised to stay in touch.

Soon after leaving this case, Dyer, the devote Catholic and family man told me he had “the opportunity to take on clients that were similarly situated” as Joe Francis. “I wasn’t willing to take on those kinds of cases.”

It took me a second to figure out what he was talking about. But then it hit me: “You poor man. Are you saying, you became the porn lawyer?”

“No!” Dyer shot back. “What I’m saying is I declined to become the porn lawyer.”

He said he would never have taken Francis’ case if it wasn’t for the First Amendment issues, as well as what seemed to him to be heavy handed tactics on the part of Bay County law enforcement.

I talked to Larry Simpson shortly after finishing my conversation with Dyer. We talked about his time on the case.

“Four years, you make it sound like a lifetime,” he said.

“Didn’t it seem like one?”

“I’ll let you answer that.”

.

Chapter 15

Misconduct

J
oe Francis is usually fully charged, but this time he couldn’t contain himself.

“What would you say if I told you Steve Meadows’ career was over? On a scale of one to ten, how likely would you be to believe me?”

Tough question, especially since I had no idea what he was talking about. No need to worry though, Francis plowed ahead with the answer.

“Steve Meadows is fucked! His career is over. By this time next year, he’s going to be in jail,” Francis said, practically squealing the last line.

A soft female voice interrupted the conversation, The Washoe County Jail’s recording system, telling Francis that the call was being recorded and he had three minutes left.

When the recording abruptly ended, Francis picked right back up again. He wouldn’t tell me what was going to be Panama City State Attorney Steve Meadows’ undoing. All he would say was something big was going to be filed the next day.

It turned out to be a motion to dismiss the charges for prosecutorial misconduct as well as letters to the governor, attorney general and Florida Bar asking for criminal investigations.

Francis was accusing Meadows of disseminating child pornography.

“It’s incredible. The same fucking thing he’s accused me of,” Francis said.

In September, Meadows gave Nightline reporter Martin Bashir an interview, during which Meadows and prosecutor Mark Graham showed Bashir the tape of the shower scene. The story aired on November 9 and showed Bashir standing with Meadows while the two looked up at a monitor. Both men were trying to look professional and serious in a decidedly awkward situation.

Audio from a segment of the tape played in the background.

Roy Black wrote in his motion that it was incredible for Meadows to show another person something he had labeled as child pornography. Francis had always maintained that he didn’t know how old the girls were when the video was shot, mainly because the girls had lied about their ages.

But Meadows knew they were underage and he still played the tape for Bashir. Black sounded convincingly shocked.

Black asked Circuit Judge Dedee Costello for a range of remedies. If she wasn’t inclined to dismiss the charges, Black wanted her to take the case away from Meadows’ office and give it to another prosecutor. He also asked her to take custody of the evidence since Meadows seemed incapable of maintaining it properly.

Meadows, who hadn’t spoken to me in more than a year, again refused to answer the charges directly. He sent out a bland email complaining that Black took his allegations to the press before they went to the judge.

The motion made some ripples in the community, but nobody thought the allegations would take off. It was unimaginable that a State Attorney could be charged with crimes. No one thought that a judge would even justify the motion by granting any part of it.

Roy Black finally accepted a phone call from me. We talked like people who shared a common ailment, the Joe Francis flu.

“Joe anxious to get out of jail?” It was an obvious, easy question, but I wanted to set an easy tone.

“You figured that out?” He asked back. I could deal with a smartass.

What I wanted to know, and knew he wouldn’t answer is how risky was it to file motions accusing Meadows of prosecutorial misconduct, while at the same time Francis’ other lawyers were asking for criminal investigations.

“I’m not involved in that,” Black insisted. “I don’t have any part in the requests for criminal investigations.”

His job, he said, was to point out problems in the process as they occur, even if it meant accusing the prosecutor of committing a crime.

He admitted that there wasn’t much of a chance that Meadows would be charged, but he did hope that the case would go to another prosecutor – one that wasn’t invested in the case and wasn’t up for reelection.

Costello scheduled a hearing for January, then changed it to February. She gave Meadows until January to file a written response, which didn’t sit well with Francis because it meant he would stay in jail through the holidays.

The State Attorney’s Office missed the January 4 deadline. Prosecutor Joe Grammer filed a request for 10 more days, which Costello granted.

Black also moved for Costello to enforce an interstate compact and require Bashir to testify at the hearing. The motion sat on Costello’s desk for more than a week. I ran into her in the courthouse parking lot on January 11 and asked her if it was something she needed to rule on before the February 8 hearing. She said it was, but it wasn’t anything that needed her immediate attention.

Other defense attorneys sometimes complained of the same treatment from Costello. One lawyer said Costello likes it when a defendant is in jail, especially in jail outside the county so the local taxpayers don’t have to pay.

If a defendant is incarcerated, Costello routinely took her time making rulings, he said. If they’re out on bond, she’d crack the whip and get the case moving as quickly as possible.

Meadows, meanwhile, was under pressure from several directions. Sitting Circuit Judge Glenn Hess took his first step on January 2 to begin his campaign for Meadows’ seat. He wouldn’t admit on the record that he would challenge Meadows, but it was the worst kept secret in Bay County.

Hess would be a candidate and Meadows knew it. Meadows called the News Herald several times the week of Hess’s resignation, complaining about how many stories there were on the judge.

On January 17, Meadows filed his written response to Black’s allegations, denying any misconduct, and signed it himself. It was the only remarkable issue in the document – that Meadows hadn’t had another attorney file it which would have insulated him from perjury.

My phone rang shortly after 4 p.m.

“You ready?” Joe Francis asked.

“Sure,” I said. I was walking my dog. Francis wanted to give me a quote.

I had my laptop in a messenger bag over my shoulder, which in Panama City meant I was carrying a man purse, and my German shepherd Hiaasen was straining his leash. I was ready.

“It’s interesting,” he began in a slow tone, “that Steve Meadows and Mark Graham have decided to add perjury to their list of offenses in this case.”

“Perjury? In what way?”

“What Meadows doesn’t know, because we intentionally kept it out of the motion, was that we have a videotape of Martin Bashir describing, in detail, everything he saw on that tape including a tattoo on one of the girl’s asses. We left it out because we knew Meadows would deny it. We set the trap and he walked right in.”

I let him talk. He went on for several minutes, growing more excited, his voice getting higher and the words coming faster.

“I’m curious to see if they leave the hearing in handcuffs,” he finished, breathlessly. “Now I want to talk off the record. Can we go off the record?”

“Sure,” I said. Hiaasen had paused at a particularly appealing spot on the ground. My 95-pound German shepherd doesn’t just sniff, he sets his paws and dares you to pull him away. I was distracted, so he gained a few extra seconds before I dragged him on. He still craned his neck back for as long as possible to catch every nuance.

“He’s so screwed!” Francis squealed into the phone. “He,” of course, was Steve Meadows.

I finished walking to my girlfriend’s house and called Will Glover, one of my editors, to pass along the quotes. Will chuckled a few times as he typed Francis’ words. Sitting on the back patio, I lit a cigar as I finished talking, and now sat back and took a draw. It was one of my favorites, a La Gloria Cubana.

I let the smoke drift out of my mouth and swirl around my nose before blowing it away. I let myself contemplate for a minute what I’d heard.

I’d spent the morning writing about State Meadows’ response, naturally focusing on the child porn allegations.

When the allegations first came out, Meadows put out a press release saying he’d given an edited version of the tape to ABC in response to a public records request. He said nothing about the private viewing Bashir had shown in his story.

In his written motion, Meadows “categorically” denied showing child pornography to Bashir, but he hedged the wording to make it somewhat unclear as to what he was saying. He said Black had referred to the full video in his motion, “not the abridged version as shown.”

Meadows wrote that the video he gave to ABC News in November 2007 was edited to remove the visual portion as the girls began to undress, leaving only the audio.

“The attempted bargaining on the part of the camera crew may also be heard, but not seen,” he wrote.

He doesn’t go into specifics about what he showed Bashir on the day of the interview. That was the issue, not what his office had given ABC as a part of a public records request.

Meadows said that the media has special access, even to view child pornography during court cases, and emphasized that the press had even seen the whole tape in court. Essentially, his argument was that he didn’t show Bashir pornography, but if he did it would have been perfectly fine.

Meadows concentrated most of his argument on the allegations that his media interviews were intended to taint the jury pool. He wrote, basically, that Francis started the media war and all Meadows was doing was trying to set the record straight.

Meadows said he gave two interviews, compared to dozens that Francis had given.

Meadows wrote that Francis started it all with his website,
meetjoefrancis.com
, and advertising in newspapers across the region that readers could get the real story there. Francis took out a big ad with The News Herald and paid for a banner to run across the paper’s website with a link. When the bill came in, more than $100,000, Francis refused to pay and The News Herald had to sue.

Meadows said he was well within his rights to refute claims that he felt could influence potential jurors.

Michael Burke was amazed that Meadows had signed it.

“You never write the response yourself. You always have another lawyer in your office write it so you have some insulation from it.”

Meadows had left himself exposed. If Bashir came forward and disputed any part of the response, Meadows could be in trouble.

I believed Francis, to a point, about having Bashir on video describing what he’d seen. And it was that point that was starting to worry me. I texted Burke, seeking confirmation. A few minutes later, he called me.

“So, does he have a video?”

“Yes.”

“Of Bashir describing sexual activity that he saw in the video that Meadows showed him?”

“To be completely factual, I would take the words ‘sexual activity’ out of any report you might be writing.”

“He didn’t see sexual activity?”

“He didn’t describe sexual activity.”

“Joe says Bashir described the girls’ bodies, even a tattoo on one of their backsides.”

“That’s right. He described nudity, not sexual activity.”

“But as soon as there’s nudity there’s sexual activity.”

“I’m not saying he didn’t see sexual activity. I’m saying to be completely accurate in any story that you’re putting out you would be better served by leaving the words ‘sexual activity’ out of anything pertaining to what Martin Bashir described.”

I found out later that the real issue had been what Meadows
said
in his interviews with Bashir and on VH-1, not necessarily what he
showed
Bashir.

Meadows had talked a lot about the evidence that Judge Costello had thrown out and a jury would never see. He also misstated the girls’ ages, saying they were 16. Black argued that all these things that would never get to a jury in court were getting to a jury panel through the interviews.

Meadows might have lost the evidence, but that didn’t stop him from trying to inform potential jurors. Even the tape was no longer evidence in Francis’ case.

“That was the real winner,” Burke said months later. “There wasn’t going to be any argument over what was shown to Bashir and what he saw and didn’t see. All we had to do was play the interviews.”