Lefebvre sips his tea for a bit. Then the five officers escort him up the stairs of his house. The FBI agents and U.S. federal marshals make sure the house is locked. They escort their captured quarry to a squad car. Lefebvre informs the agents, “I need to talk to my assistant in Canada who’s going to make arrangements for my legal counsel and whatnot.” Lefebvre calls Geoff Savage, his business manager, “the CEO of John.” Savage doesn’t answer. Now he has to make a third call. He tries for Marian Bankes, Savage’s assistant.
“Hi Marian, it’s John. I’m in the back of a black squad car that’s being piloted by U.S. federal marshals. I’m sitting beside an officer for the FBI. I’m under arrest and they’re taking me downtown. I need you to let Geoff know that I’ll be needing some assistance and I’m not going to be home tomorrow.”
Bankes is stunned. Unable to comprehend what her insouciant, hippie hedonist, environmental philanthropist, multi- multi- multi-millionaire employer has just mouthed into the receiver. Lefebvre is the nicest guy in the world, the sweetest boss—he gives all his money away to people who need help, to worthy causes large and small—there’s got to be some mistake! She’s got to find Geoff and get him on the case ASAP.
Lefebvre looks at the federal marshal. “Is that right—I’m not going to be home tomorrow?”
“No.”
• • •
While the FBI visits Lefebvre, Stephen Lawrence is being brought into a U.S. Virgin Islands courtroom in ankle chains. An AP news report says he has been arrested on St. John Island on a “warrant from the U.S. Attorney’s office in New York,” accused of “funneling billions of dollars in illegal gambling proceeds to overseas betting operations” and charged with “money laundering.”
A rumor will spread that Lawrence has been duped. The FBI needs both Lawrence and Lefebvre to be on American soil at the same time to execute the bust. If only one is on U.S. soil, the other naturally will bolt. Lawrence is with his family on a cruise ship next door, so to speak, in the British Virgin Islands. Lefebvre’s already in Malibu, and now Lawrence is so tantalizingly close. So the rumor goes, the skipper of the ship is an American and the FBI orders him to feign engine trouble and head for U.S. waters. When Lawrence and his family disembark in St. John, the Neteller cofounder is nabbed and chained. Not a great image for the FBI to imprint on the guy’s daughter.
• • •
On January 15, 2007, Geoffrey Savage sends out an emergency email:
BAD NEWS—John is just now riding into downtown L.A. with an FBI agent to be processed on “money laundering charges.” I can only assume it’s got to be Neteller. I will let you know when I have something definitive.
I had been informed by John that there was a legal opinion that travel to the U.S. was safe for Neteller PLC officers, directors, employees, and shareholders. I would like partics on that from anyone ASAP and the contact partics for any lawyer or firm you might care to recommend for John’s defense.
• • •
“Bend and separate.”
“What?”
“COME ON, BEND OVER AND SEPARATE YOUR CHEEKS.”
“Okay.”
Lefebvre bends over a little. Then, in a half-assed kind of way he starts to pull his ass cheeks apart.
“I SAID BEND AND SEPARATE! ARE YOU LOOKING FOR SOME TROUBLE HERE? DO WE HAVE SOME KIND OF PROBLEM?”
The five officers drive Lefebvre into downtown L.A. They get off the Hollywood Freeway (Highway 101) and head to an ominously tall structure shaped like half a cross with huge bay-window-like wheels jutting from a few floors. The Metropolitan Detention Center (MDC), Los Angeles, is part of the Federal Bureau of Prisons (BOP), in the judicial district of Central California, and is located on the corner of Aliso and Alameda Streets. Here, Lefebvre will be officially booked on charges of money laundering, racketeering, and conspiracy. So far, they’ve been the perfect gentlemen and gentlewoman during the entire proceedings, but here, at MDC, well, there’s really no other way to describe them: the people who work here for a living—they’re fuckheads of the highest order. Miriam Goldman, the woman in charge of these professional dinks, doesn’t care whether you’re a gentleman. This may be a point of order for Lefebvre, a way of looking at the world, a way of comporting oneself with dignity, but to her it doesn’t matter if you’ve just offed your grandmother or are a case of mistaken identity. No accommodation. None whatsofuckingever. All the same to her and her band of pricks. Guess what? You’re in our realm now, and you belong to us. That means you must be a fucking asshole—so bend and separate.
So it’s one of those days. After proving he has no baggie with a knife or dope stashed up his asshole, Lefebvre has to sit in a large cell for a couple of hours, awaiting processing so he can be assigned his own cell. It’s around noon of the first day of what is fast becoming his all-time worst nightmare, easily eclipsing his teenage drug bust thirty-eight years ago. It’s only been a few hours since the doorbell rang, but in these circumstances time has a way of being elastic. Every humiliation lasts an eternity. Be cool.
Now it’s Monday afternoon, and Lefebvre is in his cell block. He’s the new guy, the odd man out, the only guy dressed differently. Everyone else is wearing cheap baggy blue jeans and baggy green shirts, but he’s in a white jumpsuit. At dinnertime a guy comes over, passes him a green shirt and blue jeans and asks him if he wants to change so he won’t stand out. The clothes, they’re the ones the con was just wearing. They’re dirty. Lefebvre thinks, well, they’re a bit clammy but what the fuck, it’s a nice gesture. He accepts the clothes and puts them on.
There’s a table with eight seats in the middle of the room. Seven white guys are there, and they’re minding their own goddamn business, chowing down. One guy gives Lefebvre a head tilt, you know—C’mon, over here, siddown, last spot’s for you, buddy. There are a couple of other tables for white guys, but either pachucos or black guys occupy the rest. No one mixes. Not one. Lefebvre figures he ought not to buck tradition, at least on the first day, so he slides in with the white guys. Nobody asks him much, and no one’s in the mood for small talk. Lefebvre gets a familiar feeling. He’s been in this headspace before. His 1970 experience of being a prisoner floods back: This is a time to adopt a demeanor of quiet respect for everybody around you. This is not a time to whine, so don’t. He quickly adopts the demeanor of the others and wins their respect.
All prisoners are locked down at eight at night, and it’s lights out at ten. Lefebvre sits in his new home for those two hours—two hours to contemplate in stark light, before he contemplates in the dark, wondering what’s next. His cell doesn’t have a barred door; it’s solid steel, which soon makes him feel claustrophobic. His cellmate is a German guy who tells Lefebvre he’s in for a stolen-cigarettes beef. Apparently, he was walking down a street, across from a school, and spotted two unopened cartons of cigarettes in the front seat of an unlocked parked car. He did a little reasoning with himself—listen, the guy’s obviously an idiot for leaving his car unlocked, and if I don’t grab them some high school kids will get ’em first. So he entered and took them. His reasoning might have been sound, but he got caught. In California, if someone gets caught pilfering Lucky Strikes three times it’s life in prison. The three strikes rule.
The German has a couple of idiosyncrasies, as Lefebvre finds out soon enough. One is that whenever he gets served his food he hightails it back to his cell. He likes to eat there rather than hang with others. The other weird trait also concerns food. Whenever salad is on the menu, he’ll gladly take everyone else’s vinegar packets off their hands before heading back to his cell. Once there, he’ll put about ten packs of vinegar on his salad. The room reeks of vinegar and lettuce. He also bargains with people for their mini-cartons of milk. Each carton contains a half-pint, and he keeps the tiny containers unopened for ten days, maybe two weeks, until they contain a square of solid material with a little bit of clear liquid around. Every day
the German opens one up and eats it like it’s yogurt.
So thanks to his German cellmate, an odor somewhere between standard white vinegar and curdled milk dominates Lefebvre’s olfaction. There are two bunks, upper and lower. Opposite the door are a sink and a toilet. If one guy needs to take a dump, the other guy is expected simply to roll over and face the other way. But when your cellmate buddy shits vinegar and fucking sour milk, it’s something else.
Lefebvre’s been assigned the upper bunk. He finds some novels in the common room. He starts reading a really dumb story. He’s feeling it now: Hmmm, this is close. This is really shitty. I don’t know if I’m going to be able to take this. He has to remember to breathe, breathe through the vinegar, through the sour milk, and gather himself. Be cool. Eventually he finds a science-fiction novel, an old Robert Heinlein. He also finds out through the grapevine that there are some decent books to be had in MDC L.A. This other con, he’s holding a stash of books. Shit, he’s got a library, like, forty-five fuckin’ paperbacks! Great! Then Lefebvre finds out the con’s a rat. He’ll let you have one book, sure, but the problem is, sooner or later, he’ll want something back. Everyone warns him off.
• • •
January 16, 2007. Geoffrey Savage writes: “I don’t expect to get any real news until at least noon L.A. time. Will keep you posted. I’m sure we might see some kind of press release from the prosecutor’s office before that.”
• • •
Day Two, Tuesday, January 16, 2007, MDC L.A.: Lefebvre wakes up in jail. Correct that, still in jail. Yes, the nightmare really happened, and it’s still happening. Lockdown is in effect until seven in the morning, at which point the guards come and let everyone out for breakfast. An hour later they lock you down again until ten in the morning. But today brings a glimmer of hope—Lefebvre has his bail hearing. Maybe he’ll get out.
Lefebvre strolls into the mess hall for breakfast. He looks around. He’s carrying a piece of white cake with rock-hard pink icing on it. They call it coffee cake. It’s either that or cardboard puffed-rice-type things. Plus the half-pints of milk his German confederate bargains for every day. There’s nowhere to sit down at the “white” tables, so he joins a table of five black guys. He says, “Can I join you guys for breakfast?”
Guy looks up and says, “Free country.”
Lefebvre thinks, Okay, better just sit down and shut up. He takes one bite out of the white cake with the pink icing and thinks, Oh man. I don’t really, I don’t know if I want this. He says to Free Country guy, “Do you want my cake?”
Free Country says, “Hey, why would I take cake from you when I can go over and get some more of my own.”
Lefebvre says, “Okay. Thank you.”
He gets the hint and gets up from the table. After the eight-to-ten lockdown, the races actually do mix and mingle a bit. During the day, Spanish guys and Chinese guys will hang with white guys. They’ll play card games together, but at mealtime the racial divisions are fucking strict.
Lefebvre approaches another white guy during the mix-and-mingle. “I got a feeling I committed a faux pas this morning.”
“You’re fucking right you did.”
“What? Tell me, I need to know.”
“Yeah, you don’t do that.”
“Who do I offend? Do I offend the white guys or the black guys?”
“You offend everybody.”
“Man, I don’t get it. I really don’t get it. Black guys, white guys—what the fuck? What the fuck’s with you guys? What’s the fucking difference?”
“It’s not to get, it’s to do. You’re lucky it happened in here. If it had been in, you know, any place else, the black guy would have put you down on the floor, you’d have got kicked in the nuts, you’d a tried to get up and get the cereal off your face and a white guy would come over and give you the same thing again.”
“You’re shitting me.”
“Where are you from?”
“Canada.”
Just after lunch, guards take Lefebvre to court for his bail hearing. Another half-dozen guys from his cell block are down for the same thing. Guys stand up and listen about their bail bonds, how much it’s going to cost to get out. No bail, $1,000 bail, $5,000 bail. If you’re in jail charged with a beef, you can you pay ten percent or maybe fifteen percent of a bail bond. A bondsman will pay the rest of it. He goes on the line for it. If you mess up, the bail bondsman comes after you. Free enterprise.
It’s Lefebvre’s turn. He stands up. Devona Gardner, his bail supervisor, is his pretrial interviewer. She asks, “You travel much … how many countries have you been to?”
“You mean this year?”
“No.”
“Really? Fifty? I don’t know. Probably easier for me to tell you the countries I haven’t been to.”
That’s it. “He’s a flight risk,” she says and recommends incarceration.
After Bankes managed to alert Savage, he’d contacted Neteller’s Calgary office. Gord Herman, the company’s president, stepped up. He found Vince Marella, a founding partner of the Century City law firm Bird, Marella, Boxer, Wolpert, Nessim, Drooks & Lincenberg. Marella is a quintessential Beverly Hills lawyer who wears fine-tailored suits and whose focus is white-collar crime.
“Your Honor,” says Marella, rising. “We’ve reached an accommodation with the Department of Justice. My friend will assist me here, but we’ve come to terms of release. My friend agrees that there will be a bail bond.”
His Honor says, “What are the terms?”
Marella replies, “Five million dollars cash bail.”
By the time Lefebvre gets back to his cell, everybody in the joint, not just his floor, knows there’s this guy in the cell block who’s just paid five million cash bail. Suddenly, everything is different. Suddenly, he gets to sit at the middle table in the lunchroom—the table where the biggest white guys sit. Everybody treats him with respect. They come up to him at the big white table and ask him questions about what they should do about this, what should they do about that.
• • •
January 16, 2007, Geoffrey Savage writes: “Word is John’s bail is set at $5 mil. Conditions: turn in passport, travel restricted to Central District of California and New York, daily reporting to pretrial coordinator and appear in New York Jan 29. Jane’s trying madly to get the money there ASAP so that he’ll be released sometime late tomorrow.”
• • •
January 16, 2007, 5:37 p.m., Emily Lefebvre writes: “Hi Geoff, Here are both of my phone numbers, in case they get lost, or Dad can’t get his BlackBerry back or whatever. 011-353-85148-XXXX. 011-353-1202-XXXX. Thanks for the info.”
• • •
January 16, 2007, 6:40 p.m., Jane McMullen (née Bergman) writes: “Hi Emily: I am told I will have enough CAD$ in my account first thing in the morning from the bank! I then need to convert to USD and wire to the lawyer in U.S.! I am planning on getting up at 6 a.m. Calgary time which is when the foreign exchange branch of Toronto Dominion opens to arrange in advance the contract to do the foreign exchange. That way the minute funds show up in the account I can wire the funds to the U.S. lawyer—at least it’s California and they are one hour behind us. Hopefully the funds will get there early enough for them to be able to do their thing to get your dad released tomorrow!! I will send you an email and let you know when I have wired the funds to the U.S. or if I run into any complications. Love you!!—Jane”
• • •
Day Three, Wednesday, January 17, 2007, MDC L.A.: Marella goes to see Lefebvre in the morning:
“John, we’ve got a problem.”
“What’s that?”
“They won’t give Jane the money.”
McMullen has been working on the Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce in Calgary to get it to release some of Lefebvre’s assets—at least enough to pay the $5-million bail. The CIBC perso
nnel aren’t so sure they should be releasing funds to a guy the U.S. DOJ has identified as a money launderer. Lefebvre puts his head between his knees. He sits in this position for thirty seconds. Finally, he sits up. He looks at Marella and smiles. “You know, Vince, it was a great run.”
“They haven’t actually frozen your accounts,” says Marella, “but your bank is reluctant because your name is all over the Canadian newspapers as a money launderer. Jane has gone into the bank and said, ‘Show me the document by which you withhold those funds. You have a contractual obligation to give me those funds.’”
“That’s my Jane right there,” Lefebvre says.
That’s his Jane, indeed. McMullen has guts. She fights the bank hard, demanding proof that it can withhold Lefebvre’s funds, but the encounter takes a toll as TD Canada Trust personnel enrage and upset her. By the time the meeting is over she is beside herself. She breaks down, crying, shaking. “If you don’t have a check for me this afternoon,” she warns them, “I’ll have a statement of claim on your desk suing you for breach of your obligations under the Bank Act. What do you think of that?”
• • •
January 17, 2007, 12:34 a.m., Geoffrey Savage writes: “Hi Emily. John will be able to talk to you from home in Malibu when he’s out. He’ll probably need some sleep so let him call you. Don’t know if the FBI took his computers or not so don’t count on that working soon.”
• • •
Day Four, Thursday, January 18, 2007, MDC L.A.: A guard knocks on Lefebvre’s cell at five in the morning, waking him up two hours earlier than usual. Great, he thinks, bail’s finally come through. “Have your breakfast,” the guard says, “we’re shipping you out.
“Only thing I know is bail hasn’t come through,” the guard continues. “Only thing I know is what comes to my desk. No money, no document.”
Life Real Loud Page 11