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No Jail for Founder of 'Girls Gone Wild' Video Business
The National Law Journal
November 11, 2009
After years of hiring and firing his attorneys, Joe Francis, founder of Girls Gone Wild, has resolved the federal government's tax case against him.
Francis, who served 10 months in jail before being released on bail, was sentenced on Friday to time served after pleading guilty to two counts of filing false tax returns and one count of bribing jail guards. He agreed to pay a $10,000 fine and $250,000 in back taxes to the Internal Revenue Service. Federal prosecutors agreed to drop two felony charges of tax evasion.
"We took on Joe's case because we believed he had gotten a raw deal from the Justice Department," Brad Brian, a partner at Munger, Tolles & Olson in Los Angeles and lead attorney for Francis, said in a prepared statement. "It took us seven months, but in the end we demonstrated that the felony tax charges never should have been brought in the first place."
Brian did not return a call for comment.
Francis originally was indicted in Reno in 2007 for falsely declaring about $20 million in deductions on his 2002 and 2003 corporate tax returns. He was charged with two counts of tax evasion and faced up to 10 years in federal prison.
The case was transferred to Los Angeles last year.
Over the years, Francis rotated through a prominent list of defense counsel including Jan Handzlik, a former federal prosecutor who recently moved from the Los Angeles office of Washington's Howrey to Greenberg Traurig in Los Angeles; Janet Levine and John Vandevelde, both partners in the Los Angeles office of Washington's Crowell & Moring; and Robert Barnes and Robert Bernhoft of the Bernhoft Law Firm in Milwaukee, a tax boutique that previously represented actor Wesley Snipes.
Since taking over Francis' case in March, Munger's attorneys filed more than 100 legal briefs, arguing against the felony charges and the credibility of government witnesses. In recent months, the government's case began to unravel after it emerged that prosecutors failed to turn over thousands of e-mails, some of which created credibility problems for one of their key witnesses, a former accountant at one of Francis' companies.
Lead prosecutor Caryn Mark, an Assistant U.S. Attorney in the Department of Justice's tax division in Washington, did not return a call for comment. Thom Mrozek, a spokesman for the U.S. Attorney's Office in Los Angeles, declined comment.
