Monday, Aug 11, 2008    Text size: 

Santa Rosa County Judge Ron Swanson also sentenced McCowen’s co-workers Andrew Craft and Kevin Stevens to 34 and a half months and 40 months in prison, respectively. Both pleaded guilty to one count of racketeering.

“We’re sorry that this happened,” Clinton McCowen’s father, William McCowen, told the Pensacola News Journal outside Santa Rosa County Courthouse. “We thought they were extreme on the punishment.”

According to the paper, McCowen’s mother cried and hugged her husband as her son was being led away in handcuffs. Craft’s fiancée also cried as police incarcerated him.

Global Technologies Inc., doing business as Ray Guhn Productions and Cash Titans, made $10 million in its first five years, prosecutors alleged, while it shot adult Internet content in homes, at hotels, along the interstate and in public in Pensacola and Pace, Fla.

McCowen’s sentencing culminates his two-year-long tangle with Florida’s legal system. Ultimately, he agreed to plead guilty to a lesser charge and avoided a costly trial — and an obscenity conviction.

Escambia County prosecutors initially charged McCowen in June 2006 with racketeering, enterprise prostitution and the production and sale of obscene material. Escambia County then dropped the charges before refilling the racketeering and money laundering charges in neighboring Santa Rosa County in July 2007.