Celebrity Mound

After more than nine months, Girls Gone Wild founder Joe Francis is leaving a Nevada jail to face off in longstanding legal battle with the state officials in Florida.

“Today I posted my bond in Reno so that I can immediately return to Florida to face the charges against me,” Francis said in a statement.

Francis, 34, has been stuck in a legal tug of war between federal authorities in Nevada and state attorneys in Florida. He has been unable to leave the Nevada jail, where he faces federal tax evasion charges without the prospect of returning to Florida. The charges in Florida stem from an alleged filming of underage girls in there Panama City. Francis claims that the girls in question lied about their age.

His lawyer, who presented the court in Reno with a $1.5 million cashier’s check to cover Francis’ bail, told a federal judge that Francis will appear in a Panama City, Fla., courtroom on Wednesday try to resolve the charges there.

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Your first look at the Girls Gone Wild magazine — if you can call it that. The publication, retailing for $9.99 and hitting newsstands on April 15, features no outside advertisers and boasts only 14 pages cover to cover. How wild can it be?

Riveting content like “The Search for the Wildest Bar” and “The Insane Life of a Girls Gone Wild Camera Man” is run opposite plugs for the scandalous DVDs. Creator Joe Francis doesn’t need those pesky sponsor pages!

Circulation, however, is necessary to get the book in the grubby hands of Wild consumers, and industry insiders are suspicious of whether Joe can move copies of the mag.

“You need an entire publishing infrastructure,” an expert tells us, “someone to put it on a truck and take it to 7-Eleven.”

Joe is known to get excitable over different ventures in branding, and might not have the right hold on the operation, though sources say he has been making decisions from inside his Reno, Nev., jail cell.

“Joe does stuff like this,” the spy said, “but if you’re going to do something, do it right.”

Attempts to be legit were indeed made: Staff reached out to publicists to try to get some stars on the pages of GGW. The only ones to bite? Kim Kardashian and sisters, who posed in Ashley Paige bathing suits designed specifically for the spring-break romping beauties.

So far, the mag is presumed to be quarterly (the first issue is marked spring 2008), lest circulation skyrocket. Then again, that might not happen until Joe can drive the truck to 7-Eleven himself.

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“GIRLS Gone Wild” crybaby Joe Francis continues his torture tour of America, now whining about how he supposedly suffered in an Oklahoma jail and revealing what went on behind bars in Panama City, Fla.

Francis – who’s now in relative comfort in a third jail in Reno, Nev. – told Page Six, “I fear for my life if I have to go back there [Florida]. These are the same people that killed a 14-year-old boy,” a reference to a February 2006 incident in which a teen died while being restrained by guards.
A Bay County medical examiner later said the boy died from internal bleeding due to sickle cell anemia.

“These are scary people down there. If I get sent back, they will retaliate. They killed that kid . . . I think I would have been dead or I’d be drooling in a cup,” added Francis, who must return to the Florida jail if he posts bail in Nevada.

He said guards at the Florida jail, in addition to not giving him toilet paper or meals, forced him to wear ankle shackles that cut his skin and made him bleed in the shower.

“They treated me like I was a terrorist,” he said. “They’d put my food just out of reach and laugh with each other, ‘Oh, I guess Joe wasn’t hungry today.’ ”

He said that he “hysterically cried” and screamed in his cell but that no one cared: “They had me next to a cop killer and Herman Harmon, who shot a guy in the head with a .38 then escaped from his cell.”

He also said he was “tortured” in Oklahoma’s Grady County Jail, where he stayed for three weeks while being transferred to a prison in Nevada. He claims guards threatened to strap him naked to a chair for 48 hours and refused to give him a blanket.

Francis is awaiting trial in Reno for federal tax evasion. In Florida, he faces charges for using minors in a sexual performance when two girls, then 17, were videotaped by his company in 2003 in a motel shower. It was later revealed the girls lied about their age.

He was jailed for contempt in Florida, and his bail was revoked when contraband was found in his cell. He has since elected to stay in jail in Reno rather than post bail there and be sent back to custody in Florida.

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JOE Francis, the “Girls Gone Wild” gazillionaire, has sent out a mass e-mail from his Nevada jail touting a new Web site, meetjoefrancis.com, where he outlines how he ended up behind bars six months ago. “I’m sure that once you learn the story . . . you’ll be as outraged as I am,” wrote Francis, who’s in for a tax rap. “The scariest thing [is] . . . that it could just as easily happen to you. I never expected my life to be a cautionary tale, but if revealing the truth behind my circumstances can help one other person avoid being grievously mishandled by the justice system, then it is worth telling.”

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