JOHNS CREEK, GA – If the first few days of the new year are any indication, 2007 is going to bear close resemblance to 2006 for John Cornetta, owner of the embattled Love Shack chain of stores.U.S. Federal District Court Judge Thomas Thrash ruled Wednesday that Cornetta is in contempt of court and fined him for continuing to sell a “significant amount” of adult material in defiance of a previous court order. Thrash also suspended enforcement of a $1,000 per day penalty that extends back to the December 22nd ruling, however, and declined to close the Johns Creek Love Shack location.

For officials in Fulton County and the new City of Johns Creek, Judge Thrash’s ruling was a mixed bag.

“The judge gave with one hand and took away with the other,” said Fulton County Senior Attorney Steven Rosenberg, according to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution.

Cornetta saw the ruling as a victory – at least by his own definition.

“We’re still open and I’m not in jail,” Cornetta said after the hearing in Atlanta. “I’ll be selling something and I’ll use the most adult words I can. They’re not getting rid of me.”

Fulton County officials maintain that when Cornetta opened the Love Shack in what is now Johns Creek, but was at the time legally part of Fulton County, he did so in violation of the law, because he lacked the proper permits to open. The county has sought to close the store on that basis, arguing that Cornetta opened the store without the required adult business license.

One of Cornetta’s attorneys, Alan Begner, told YNOT Friday that his client attempted to get a license for the store starting back in July, when Begner applied for a non-adult business license on behalf of the store, noting that because less than 25-percent of the store’s inventory was “adult merchandise,” the store did not qualify as an “adult business” under Fulton County zoning law.

“(Love Shack) didn’t need an adult license,” Begner said, “we just wanted a regular business license, but they wouldn’t give us that.”

Begner asserts that the county had no basis to decline the store a regular business license as “a matter of law,” and declining his client’s license request was a form of “political theater.”

In Begner’s view, the county merely denied the license on the basis that if the store sold any adult material at all, it was an “adult business,” rather than sticking to the 25-percent threshold proscribed by the county’s zoning laws.

“They never did anything but continue that pretense” that the sale of any adult material made Love Shack an adult store, Begner said. “We believe that we were entitled to the regular license under the law and we would be ‘grandfathered’ in by Johns Creek.”

Instead, Cornetta and Love Shack found themselves in Judge Thrash’s court on December 20th, when the judge told Cornetta that he could be found in contempt of court if he continued to operate his store with a “significant” amount of adult material.

“When the order came down, instead of giving a number or a percentage, the judge just said we could not have a ‘significant’ amount of adult material,” Begner said Friday. “We asked what constituted a ‘significant’ amount of material and the judge declined to be more specific.”

Subsequently, Cornetta reduced the amount of adult inventory at the store to the point where such materials constituted approximately five-percent of the store’s merchandise, well below the 25-percent threshold that leads a business in Fulton County to be considered an “adult business” and “an insignificant amount by any measure,” in Begner’s words.

At Wednesday’s hearing, however, Judge Thrash ruled that the 2,000 or so adult videos and approximately 1,650 sex toys still constituted a “significant” amount, regardless of the store’s total inventory.

“Now they say that five-percent is too much,” Begner said, noting that while the judge and local officials point at the total number of adult items, the Love Shack “is a very large store,” and hitherto the zoning standards in the area have been based on a percentage of a store’s stock that is considered adult material and not the total amount of that material.

Undeterred, Cornetta says he’s lacing up his gloves for an all-out legal battle with the City of Johns Creek, which entered the fray as of its incorporation last week.

“It’s going to change because Johns Creek is going to get it now,” Cornetta said, according to 11alive.com, the website for Atlanta-based NBC TV affiliate WXIA.

“Now, it’s on between me and them [Johns Creek],” Cornetta continued. “Because they don’t have Fulton County to stand in my way, they don’t have a contract that they think they have with me, which they don’t… If Johns Creek makes one false move, they step over one line, I’ll nail them.”

Cornetta compared his showdown with the town to a shootout in the Old West, saying “It’s like the gunfight and I’m the fastest gun in the west.”

The Journal-Constitution reports that some in Johns Creek may not want to see the impending court battle through, due to the potential high cost to the city. Although Johns Creek Mayor Mike Bodker has said the store is in an inappropriate location near residential subdivisions and school bus stops, he also said the city hasn’t come up with a strategy to deal with the Love Shack at this point.

Mayor Bodker told the Journal-Constitution that someone from the city would visit Love Shack Friday to determine what action should be taken.

Whatever action the city chooses, Cornetta is indeed well-armed for the fight, in terms of legal representation.

According to Begner, the Love Shack’s legal interests are also seen to by Atlanta-based attorney Cary Wiggins and noted free speech specialist Louis Sirkin out of Cincinnati.

Wiggins successfully challenged Georgia’s state obscenity law in the case This That and the Other Gift v. Cobb County, persuading the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals that the State’s ban on advertising of sex toys was unconstitutional.

Sirkin, among other things, has represented Hustler’s Larry Flynt, and defended Dennis Barrie, director of the Contemporary Arts Center in Cincinnati, when Barrie was charged with obscenity in connection to the Arts Center’s display of the works of controversial photographer Robert Mapplethorpe. Barrie was acquitted on all charges in the case.