Lefebvre’s being transferred to another facility, but he’s not sure which one. Finally, they tell him, “You’re going to New York by way of Oklahoma City. You need to be in New York next week.”
Lefebvre is crestfallen. Will anyone even fucking know he’s being put on Con Air to Oklahoma City? Will this new place be even worse, with even bigger pricks? How will Vince ever find him, for fuck’s sake? Shit, will they even tell him what’s going on?
The guards suit everyone up in shackles and leg irons. For each already handcuffed prisoner, the chain attached to the foot shackles is methodically pulled up and wrapped around the chest. This cannot be good. The guards tell everyone to just sit tight and wait. At eight o’clock they start loading a bunch of guys, including Lefebvre, onto a bus. Oh man, this cannot be happening. There are about twenty prisoners shuffled up onto the bus, three of them are women. The bus is not full but feels crowded because there are bars separating each of the seats. The prisoners are driven to the municipal airport. When they arrive, the bus sits on the tarmac. They sit in shackles and wait. Lefebvre looks out the window and sees other prisoners in other buses arriving on the tarmac. They’re being transferred from other detention centers, district jails, and city jails. It’s a prisoner-transfer-bus reunion. He sees about 240 people—mostly guys, maybe fifteen or twenty women—incarcerated humans every one of them, charged with some crime and heading for a date with a judge somewhere in the United States, all in shackles and leg irons in the middle of the high desert. They’re all waiting.
Now it’s around one o’clock in the afternoon. Eight hours into day four, and Lefebvre is sitting on a tarmac. Still no one’s been granted permission to use the toilet. The word searing into his mind right now is grotesque.
Finally, the marshals begin the laborious process of loading each shackled prisoner onto Con Air. Once they’re all on they meet their flight attendant, who is one tough-looking lady. She starts her routine from the middle of the plane. She yells into her mic. There will be a bag lunch! This is how the urinal is going to work! Pay attention! One at a time! In order! Up to the washroom and back! Next prisoner! If for whatever reason there is an emergency, just stay calm!
A plane full of shackled people, Lefebvre thinks, Oh help me please, please, let there be no emergency. Right there, on the spot, he almost reconverts to Catholicism. Almost.
At least there is comic relief. Lefebvre spots a guy wearing a Halloween mask. That is to say, his head is one big skull tattoo: the cranium with all the different bones, the nose holes, the teeth marks—the works. Lefebvre examines the man’s full head tattoo carefully, wondering if the guy’s saying to himself, “Fuck was I on last night?!” No question, it takes a while to get past a face like that, but eventually he stops noticing it. Lefebvre starts talking to him. Turns out he’s an okay dude. Acts like the skull tat is passé for him.
Marella arrives back at MDC L.A. in the afternoon. He’s got the document in hand. He’s got the money in hand. “I’m here for Lefebvre.”
“We got no Lefebvre here.”
“Well, where is he then?”
“We only know what we’re told so don’t ask us, ask the federal marshals.”
Marella starts to freak out. Holy shit, where is the guy?
V (1979–89)
The Hippie Lawyer
Lefebvre never finished his B.A. in English. He wrote the LSAT exam, was admitted to law school, and graduated in 1983. The short, glib version he sticks to is, “I’d knocked up Katharine; I needed a job,” yet he had in fact committed himself to law school before that. However many reservations Lefebvre had about the profession, finishing law school took on an outsized priority once a child was on the way. “I never wanted to be a lawyer—EVER,” he says, just to be clear. It is possible that the party after a grueling exam, in February 1980, is where he sealed his fate, as Emily was born on November 18 of that year. Louise Lefebvre was certainly happy. In a twelve-month stretch, she found herself with three grandchildren.
On the first day of law school, Mike Greene, another longhair, met Lefebvre. Or, more accurately, in two of his classes Greene encountered a force of nature that caused him to think, Who is this bombastic guy who wants to be noticed? They became lifelong buddies, and decades later, when Lefebvre decided he wanted to indulge in the pleasure of giving it all away, he tapped Greene for the board of the Lefebvre Foundation. Greene the law student had just come back from India wearing a beard, George Harrison–style. Lefebvre usually sat at the back and waited for the professor to solicit comments. He was never shy about offering his opinions, which were invariably entertaining and sometimes about the law.
First year was no joke for many students. There were sixty admitted, and the group became close-knit through the school year. Ten percent were axed, which affected everyone’s morale because they had all become friends through their shared struggle. The average age was twenty-nine, and they were an eclectic bunch, including a couple of Ph.D. students and some master’s students. The old adage—the first year they scare you to death, the second year they work you to death, the third year they bore you to death—was in effect. While they watched fellow students worry themselves sick, over-study, and end up sleep-deprived and performing poorly, Lefebvre and Greene weren’t about to let the intensity destroy them. “John and I both had a minimalist approach,” Greene says. “Life is short and we should enjoy it. Some were stressing out while we were playing Frisbee in the field beside the law school.” By third year they were playing an awful lot of disc.
Greene remembers his first major exam, in constitutional law and held in February. The course was demanding, and everyone was exhausted from studying. The test was held in the morning, and it was agreed that there would be a blowout party right afterward, at Lefebvre’s place, to celebrate. “By three o’clock half the party was asleep.” But not Lefebvre. “He and his wife Kathy went down and were using the pool table.” Later, up in the loft, Lefebvre played piano while another guy sang “Helpless.” Greene was quite moved and became a huge fan of Lefebvre’s musical ability.
There were other memorable moments. In articling class, the man who once saved a piece of Lefebvre’s teenaged bacon, Milt Harradence, now a judge at the Alberta Court of Appeal, came to speak. It’s just that Harradence, a man licensed to pack a concealed weapon, a lifelong redneck, and damn proud of it, didn’t come to talk about articles—he came to warn them about communists. He started ranting about certain political situations that by the early eighties needed jumper cables (Gorbachev, glasnost, and perestroika being only three years off).
Lefebvre remembers,
He posited that we had a responsibility as freedom-loving people to fight communism anywhere and in any way we could. There was some nervousness in the room when he said that but when question period came I rose to the occasion and asked, “Mr. Justice, you made some remarks earlier about communism.” He said, “Indeed I did.”
I said, “Does that include in the court of appeal?”
These guys that articled at the court of appeal, they’d heard a discussion between a couple of judges about a case before the courts where a couple of black guys were charged. I don’t exactly remember what the offense was; it wasn’t a sexual offense. Milt was heard to crack off in the background, “Hang the rapin’ niggers.” And then he turned around and looked at the guy I knew and said, “If I ever, ever hear this coming back to me it will be your career.” And then he carried on.
“Maybe we should wait till Milt’s dead to tell that one?” Lefebvre asks. Harradence died in 2008.
Greene shared a house with Lefebvre and Armitage near Holy Cross Hospital. He articled at the court of appeal then took a position at Burnett, Duckworth & Palmer, a large corporate outfit. It was a mistake. “The economy tanked so there were a lot of realizations and bankruptcies. The litigation was people trying to collect money or people trying not to pay money because they didn�
��t have it anymore. That’s how my litigation career was developing, and it was a killer. I thought, ‘What have I done with my life?’”
Greene later came into contact with Sheldon Chumir—a lawyer and human rights lecturer at U of C, and, later, that rarity, a successful provincial Liberal MLA in Alberta, who became a mentor. Under Chumir’s direction, he moved into civil liberties and would eventually find his true calling in immigration law. But at this point, 1984–85, he was so disillusioned he postponed his career and traveled for a year.
• • •
In the summer of 1983, Lefebvre was called to the Bar. He’d made it through the exams, and the next step was, well, was he of sufficiently good character to be called? He walked into a hearing of the Discipline Committee of the Law Society, strode toward the principal, Robert Boyden, and held out his hand. It was refused. Boyden believed he needed to maintain an impartial posture. Uh-oh. The chair said that while this was “an informal hearing,” he hoped Lefebvre had brought counsel with him. Lefebvre started freaking out. A discussion of the candidate’s work at the student union ensued.
After serving his term as student union president, the candidate had chosen to retain his position on the Review Board for a couple of years. Something was mentioned about drugs and character. But gentlemen, pot was ubiquitous—does anyone not remember the Beatles chortling “everybody smokes pot” way back when?
But hold on, Mr. Candidate, when was the last time you smoked pot? The Clintonian “I did not have sex with that woman” answer: “Back in my student union days, sir.” (Of course, that was only yesterday, when he was still officially on the Review Board, but no need for Boyden to hear that detail.) The 1969 trafficking beef was recalled. “But sir, that was 1969; this is 1983.” Tom Hayden participated in the 1968 Chicago riots, sir, and he is now serving in the California State Assembly. Then, an admission: “I am disclosing my propensity to run close to the edge.”
Minor ordeal over, Lefebvre was admitted to the Bar by the sober-minded and straight-laced Chief Justice Ken Moore, an old friend of his mother from her “dating days.” The party was held at Louise’s house in her Roxboro neighborhood. In Alberta, admission is often used as an occasion to roast the candidate, but Moore was far too serious for that.
• • •
Almost three years after Emily entered the world, Lefebvre’s marriage to Armitage imploded. They both found places in the Sunnyside neighborhood and committed themselves to sharing custody. Armitage found a three-bedroom apartment and a roomie, a woman named Janice Beaton, who later started an excellent coffeehouse in lower Mount Royal called Caffe Beano. Beaton was friends with the scion of a Belgian chocolate family, who himself went on to foodie fame with Chocolaterie Bernard Callebaut.
Lefebvre says,
Emily grew up in relatively yuppie circumstances. Her dad may have been a fringe-y guy for a yuppie. I didn’t go out and exercise at Heavens. I wasn’t so much a Club Med lawyer.
We went through a difficult time when we were breaking up. I’ll quote the judge at my careless driving trial—“Something went on here and it wasn’t all that elegant.” Every time Emily came over to my place we’d have great food and lie around on the floor and watch The Simpsons. Katharine had to be the bad cop.
Lefebvre, done with school and marriage again proving to be something beyond him, had his own worries. His marriage had produced Emily—“At least we got that right”—and he needed work. An articling position was available at McCaffery and Company, a firm that specialized in foreclosures, so he took it. Lefebvre was treated like a grunt. Older students weren’t ideal articling candidates, because they had minds of their own and weren’t so malleable. Firms liked young recruits, kids who’ve never lived outside their parents’ home, because they were easy to mold. Lefebvre had never liked anyone telling him what to do—ever—and he chafed. But he did his job, which was to act as a kind of bagman, delivering cases of scotch during the Christmas season, or the foreclosure orders, or the grant. Lefebvre would ask advice of Mike McCaffery, the foreclosure king in Alberta. It was a good time to be in foreclosures, as a recession began to hit Calgary hard by 1982. “Yeah, buying cases of whiskey for witnesses,” Lefebvre says. “I never met a meat packer who didn’t take the whiskey.”
“His hair was cut reasonably short at the time,” Greene recalls. “Johnny was doing his best to do the corporate lawyer shtick while he was in his articles and during the first couple of years. It fit him like a bad suit, but he did try. I remember seeing him wearing suits, and he did not look comfortable.”
One problem for the fledgling lawyer is that senior partners find ways to glue juniors to their ongoing files, essentially getting grunt work for free. During this stretch of servitude there is no time to develop clientele, and a junior might be forgiven for ridiculing the idea that he would ever make partner. Lefebvre got stuck with one such case. “Did John ever mention the pork producers trial?” asks Greene. “The combines investigations prosecution, one of the biggest the feds had ever done, accused pork producers of price-fixing. These poor junior lawyers would have to sit through this drudgery for months and months. It was mind-bendingly boring, the wreck of more than a few legal careers.”
The good news at McCaffery was Lefebvre met Geoff Savage, who would become another lifelong friend. After the Neteller geyser went off in 2004, Lefebvre needed people around him that he could trust, and he talked Savage into becoming the overseer of the empire. Savage was a couple of years younger but had graduated earlier and started at McCaffery in 1980. Lefebvre’s friends were generally younger because he had started university so late. Savage and Lefebvre immediately connected. They hung out after work, went cross-country skiing together, and hiked. For laughs they mountain-biked as fast as possible in pitch dark through Calgary’s Weaselhead trails. Two decades later, one of the ulterior reasons Savage had for suggesting to Lefebvre that they resettle on Salt Spring Island was he hoped it might rekindle their youthful mania for the outdoors—sailing, kayaking, riding mountain bikes.
Savage later moved to Wilson Laycraft and focused his practice on the winding down of companies—bankruptcies, insolvencies, receiverships—which generally meant working for the banks. It was complicated work, yet he’d always loved reading the fine print. Savage explains his work:
By the time a bank pulls the pin on a company, you’ve got every damn creditor imaginable doing everything they can and the principals of the company hiding assets hither and yon. Most people don’t understand that there is a lineup of priorities. You go to case management meetings and there’ll be twenty-five or thirty lawyers there and everyone is barking from their client’s position. I’d start by saying, “I don’t understand why twenty-seven of you guys are here.” Just be extremely rude. The next case meeting there would be five fewer lawyers. There’d be two or three more meetings. My client, the bank and government and one or two other players would be the only ones who would have anything to fight about. It’s tough to convince them to stop billing their clients and get out.
Lefebvre stuck it out at McCaffery for a couple of years. He was invited to a Bar admission party for a guy at another firm, Black and Company, in November 1984, and he bumped into a woman named Jane Bergman. She had been two years behind him at U of C law school and was now articling at Black. Lefebvre was larger than life and friendly at school—difficult for a woman not to notice, really—and they had said hi occasionally. At the Bar party, showing panache, he had put on eyeliner for the occasion. She noticed him, again.
“I was eating a cookie and John came up to me and said, ‘Why don’t you just slap that right on your hips?’ Not being particularly large-breasted, I put one on my bosom and said, ‘I’d rather put it here.’ And that was it.”
Six months later, Lefebvre and Bergman were living together at 802-B Memorial Drive, a condo they rented and then bought. They both switched firms, Lefebvre to Burstall, where he continued to cha
fe, this time practicing real estate law, and Bergman to Dome, before deciding to go out on her own. “I was doing part-time in the office and working from the house and it just didn’t feel right, so I was the one that initiated it. ‘I’d like to start a more formal practice.’ John said, ‘I’m coming, let’s do it.’”
That was the beginning of the pair’s adventure in street-level law. They found a great location, a former art gallery space on Tenth Street NW, a storefront located in one of the only Calgary neighborhoods that remotely might be called bohemian. Just outside Calgary’s corporate downtown core, its main drag even today is a laid-back stretch of coffeehouses and restaurants, not quite overrun by yuppie stores, with a family-owned bike shop and one of the longest-running used vinyl shops.
Bergman and Lefebvre had a business plan involving bringing the law to the people, but they had no money. The Bank of Nova Scotia initially agreed to lend them start-up capital before backing out because the couple had no financial history. The project looked stillborn. Even Lefebvre said, “We’re screwed.” Then Bergman’s parents came to their rescue and financed them with a lien on their house. Bergman was sick with worry until the loan was fully repaid. Lefebvre tried to calm her nerves: it will work out, don’t worry.
“John’s always been the pirate,” says Greene. “He gets out there and just goes for it. And sometimes that’s worked for him and sometimes it hasn’t.” Actually, more often than not it hasn’t worked out. And perhaps never worked out until he made one dramatic play when everyone else was staring at the horizon, seeing retirement and wondering what they were going to do with themselves and if they would have enough money saved to do it. Most people who knew Lefebvre and thought he was a great guy probably figured he was just one of those misfits whose plans would continuously misfire.
Life Real Loud Page 12
