Lefebvre was pensive, mulling things over, and he began to write songs about his predicament. The days were solitary and uneventful on the outside, which masked the turmoil inside his head. He says, “I was mostly alone, probably on my own every Monday morning to Friday afternoon. I’d get up. I wouldn’t say I was depressed. I was anxious. Sleep wasn’t going as well as it had. I’d wake up in the middle of the night with my heart racing, thinking, What the fuck? This whole room, my bedroom with thirty-foot-high ceilings and Tuscan-beamed woodwork and 165-year-old French white oak floors and $40,000 nineteenth-century Turkish mother-of-pearl inlaid dresser—it all kind of looked like it wasn’t mine anymore.”
Speaking about his new reality, he says, “I would get up in the morning, and I was into this cereal, Nature’s Path Spelt Flakes, these Cheerios made out of spelt. You could leave them in milk all day long and they were still hard as rocks. I’d eat those and a basket of blueberries for breakfast and sit out on the porch and watch the surf and drink tea and think about shit.”
Friends started to come down to keep him company, hang out on the deck and listen to the surf blast away at the shoreline—laid-back, almost. Mike Greene came down. Jeff Proudfoot came down. Kyle Blocksom—who in 2008 would become the contractor on Lefebvre’s ambitious redesign of a resort property on Salt Spring Island, a place he would rename Stonehouse—came down with his wife. His musician and producer buddy Danny Patton came down a couple of times, and they played tennis every day. Lefebvre was taking lessons at Tennis Malibu, behind his house, further up in the hills. They went to some concerts together, too, but mostly they sat with a glass of high-end red and looked at the ocean. “That’s what everyone thinks the movie stars are doing, except you’re the only one there,” says Patton. After both trips he experienced something he called Cinderella Syndrome: “At a certain point you’re back in your minivan, drinking your Tim Hortons, going, What happened? Somebody waves the wand and you go back home.”
Lefebvre had more than enough company, actually. There were acquaintances from Malibu and L.A. who would come over and hang out with him, people with whom he could go to Nobu. He didn’t dine out every night, but many. He couldn’t smoke pot, but he drank a bottle of wine every day. He cherished what solitude he did have: “I really did appreciate the time alone. A lot.”
He knew he had a recording date ahead of him, and he forced himself to practice his guitar work and singing. “I’ve been to jail before,” he told Patton, “I know it’s not the Hollywood version.” He stayed cool; he was productive. He wrote fifteen tunes between the bust and June 1. When the DOJ hounded you, he reasoned, it might be a good idea to keep going with that little dream project. Forget about dropping another five million on another environmental cause you love—that could wait—how about dropping a little something on yourself right about now?
Lefebvre recalls, “For the first two or three weeks, I was beside myself, and it was probably in that first week that I phoned Brian Ahern and said to him, ‘You know the plans we had to build a nice studio out in Salt Spring Island to do this recording project? I wonder if there are any nice studios in Los Angeles?’”
Ahern, Patton, and Lefebvre had batted around various locales for doing the recording proper, including Calgary, Nashville (Ahern’s hometown), Salt Spring Island, and Vancouver. Ahern leaned toward the coast: the original plan was, according to Patton, was to ship all the gear to Salt Spring around May.
Ahern listened to Lefebvre’s idea about getting it done in L.A. and told him it was probably for the best. Originally he had met Lefebvre through Patton. Ahern had produced a record by Beautiful Joe, a Calgary rock group Patton played in, which was a local success. Then Patton produced a Lefebvre demo tape at his own place, Airwaves Recording Studio, located in the converted garage in his backyard. It was just the two of them and drum programming, with a live drummer replacing those tracks at the end. It took all of two weeks to bang out before Lefebvre said, “Now what?” Patton sent a copy to Ahern. “He was the only famous guy I kind of knew that I had a phone number for.”
Lefebvre thought Patton was a bit nuts to believe a producer as credentialed as Ahern would be interested, but about six weeks later, in May 2006, Ahern phoned Patton back and said in his low rasp: “Danny. B.A. I think I can work with this guy.”
Patton thought there might have been some calculation: “He might have caught wind that John had some money.” But lucre wasn’t everything to Ahern, and he warned Patton, “If it’s horrible I’m not doing it.” But there was no need to worry. “It’s not like John quit lawyering and decided to learn how to play guitar,” says Patton.
In August, well before the bust, the two of them had flown to Toronto to meet Ahern, who had some work scheduled there at that point. That’s when they started to discuss studios, musicians, and locations.
Ahern had an unorthodox idea about how to record Lefebvre. He figured the guy might get spooked playing with all these fabulous name musicians, and so to ensure tranquility he lobbied to record at either the Salt Spring house or Malibu 2. It was the home birth versus hospital birth idea. That was before Judge Gorenstein in New York made the decision for them.
Patton recalls, “Then we all met in Salt Spring in January 2007, just before John got busted.” Actually, Patton and Lefebvre flew down to L.A. in the first week to meet Ahern and then they all flew back to Salt Spring. Lefebvre was aware that the heat had been turned up and was worried about getting popped as soon as he got off a plane. But nothing happened. Only later did it become clear why the FBI was waiting.
After the bust, Ahern phoned Patton to kvetch. “Well, of course I heard from Brian right away. I don’t know if he was more worried about his gig or John. ‘Ooooowwww, he’s in jail. Danny, what’s going on?’ I said I just knew as much as what he knew,” says Patton.
Ahern’s self-interest was understandable. He didn’t know Lefebvre from The Dude, but a lucrative gig he’d lined up now looked like it had vaporized. He probably wasn’t familiar enough with Lefebvre at this point to know the truth: once the guy got an idea in his head, he was not easily deterred. Confined to the central region of California, the bail terms severely reduced Lefebvre’s options, of course, but a guy who’d always been a free spirit put on his bravest face. Being hemmed in by a sprawling L.A. still equaled freedom of movement, to a degree. For instance, it would not be okay to head north and cross the border to see his mom in Calgary, but it would be okay to jump on the Ducati and ride east to Joshua Tree National Park. So he tried to keep himself in a stoic, glass-half-full kind of equilibrium, thinking, Well, I’ve been meaning to see the desert anyway.
And Lefebvre’s thoughts about the upcoming recording sessions were analogous. His choices were limited to L.A., L.A., or L.A. Yeah, so, what’s your point? There was no stopping him—the recording sessions were happening. So they looked all around L.A. before Lefebvre finally asked, “Well, Brian, what’s the best studio in town?” Ahern said, “Oh, the best—the best is the Village Recorder in West L.A.”
That suited Patton. He’d always thought Ahern’s idea of bringing the studio to the musician—whether it was building one on Salt Spring or setting up the foam on Malibu Road—was nuts. The best studios and the best musicians in the world are in L.A., so why reinvent? He’d never said a word to Ahern about it, but he was relieved when they settled on the Village. Not squawking was probably a good move on Patton’s part, because when Lefebvre wanted Patton to be there at the sessions as his confidant, Ahern agreed.
Ahern chose the Village because of a tip. He was friendly with T Bone Burnett, who mentioned to him in passing, “Yeah, I’m finishing up in Studio D, so it’s open.” Ahern phoned in March and secured the booking—Studio D, Monday to Friday, four weeks, June 2007. Lefebvre had his studio and his advisor, so he told Ahern to invite whomever else he wanted. “I called the best in the country,” said Ahern. Big names accepted Ahern’s offer to play with Lefebv
re, pop and rock musicians of considerable pedigree, people such as Al Kooper and Glen D. Hardin.
And so Lefebvre’s new plan—to spend an entire month recording at the Village—started to come into focus about a month before he emailed me with his “living the dream!” line. By then he was in full-glass mode. When Monday, June 4, rolled around, his first day on the job, Lefebvre reveled in the How-Crazy-Is-This opportunity he had created for himself. He was as ready as could be. He had hired Elvis’s old piano player, Hardin, to transcribe and chart all the tunes for the band. He had taken singing lessons. Ahern had set him up with a microphone and headphones in Malibu 2 to simulate the studio setup so he wouldn’t tense up when the actual recording started. There were plenty of times during that first day, during the entire month, when he forgot that his liberty had been compromised.
• • •
Like Screaming Lord Sutch, the fake English earl who hobnobbed with famous rock musicians such as Jimmy Page and John Bonham in the late sixties, Lefebvre set himself up to play with the best. He might have been internet royalty, a rich man who could afford to hire a Svengali and a bunch of hot musicians to play with him in a famous studio, but, unlike Sutch, he was a half-decent musician who wrote a batch of half-decent songs. The challenge was, except for his work with Karen Fowlie a decade earlier, Lefebvre was a studio neophyte. Yet he played the good pupil, applied himself, and learned under Ahern’s guidance—but not always without protest. During one of the last sessions, in late June, Ahern suggested a specific change in direction on a tune. “Okay,” Lefebvre pouted. “After all, it is your album, Brian!”
“Hey, it’s my reputation on the line here,” parried the man with the music industry bona fides and enviable address book.
The relationship between Lefebvre and Ahern drove the sessions—not quite master-slave and not quite employer-employee, somewhere in between. Lefebvre told Ahern he wanted candles to create a spooky twilight atmosphere while singing: “It’s way cooler that way, Brian.” That was okay with Ahern—anything to make the guy feel more comfortable.
Ahern hired a Nashville-based photographer and musician named Rick Clark to shoot the sessions, and he was in the candlelit room adjusting an old RCA microphone for a shot. Lefebvre stood, hands on headphone cans, emoting and looking like an old Waterbed Warehouse ad that ran for years on Calgary television. “Brian,” Lefebvre said, while Clark set up the tripod, “stay here for the shot, will you? You make me look less fat.”
Ahern couldn’t let that go. He came back to this dig a few times during my stay. “John, do I really look fat?”
“Well, okay Brian, let’s say you make me look normal.”
The comment wasn’t tactful, but it was accurate. Ahern was one Everest of a man. Beside it, Lefebvre’s gut was a bunny hill.
• • •
My hanging-out-with-the-rich-guy time was over, and Patton’s Cinderella Syndrome was about to kick in. On Friday, June 29, 10:50 a.m. PST, I was in the air flying back to Toronto. When I was about three-quarters of the way home, Lawrence entered Judge P. Kevin Castel’s courtroom, 12C, in Manhattan, this time for a 3:45 p.m. EST appointment for his plea. Peter Neiman, his lawyer, and two WilmerHale colleagues, Shane Stansbury and Steve Bero, were with him. U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York Michael J. Garcia was there for the government, along with Assistant Attorneys Timothy Treanor and Chris Conniff. FBI Special Agent Tim Dinnen was on hand. Lawrence was about “to enter a plea to an information.” At one point the judge asked Lawrence to describe in his own words what he did that he now believed set him afoul of the U.S. government.
The defendant told Castel his story:
In 1999, I agreed with others to found a group of companies that were eventually called the Neteller Group. The Neteller Group provided an online money transfer service, using, among other things, bank wires that enabled users to transfer funds worldwide to and from merchants that registered to use the Neteller online payment system.
In 2004, there were more than six hundred thousand members with Neteller accounts, a significant number of whom were residents of the United States, and there were more than one thousand merchants registered to use the Neteller system. The Neteller Group focused its growth on the online gaming segment and achieved widespread adoption in that market.
In 2004, approximately ninety-five percent of the Neteller Group’s revenue derived from processing money transfers pertaining to the online gambling market and a significant portion of the Neteller Group’s revenues derived from persons in the United States, including Manhattan.
By March 1, 2004, the Neteller Group had 163 full- and part-time employees. I held a position of chief executive officer of the Neteller Group until approximately the end of 2002, and held a position on the board of Neteller PLC and predecessor entities until October of 2006. I remained a shareholder of Neteller PLC through the time of my arrest in January 2007. During the time that I was directly involved in the operation of the Neteller Group, I, among other things, entered into contracts with merchants and payment processing companies and managed the internal operations of the Neteller Group.
During my involvement in the Neteller Group, I learned that the United States had legislation barring certain actions intending to fund online gambling services. With this knowledge I came to understand that providing payments to online gambling businesses serving customers in the United States was wrong.
And so it was that Lawrence was advised to plead guilty, not to money laundering and racketeering, but rather that he came to see that what he was doing so successfully was, in fact, against the law. That’s what the FBI wanted—admit it, Lawrence, you broke the rules. Now he was going pay a lot of dough—up to $100 million—and do some time, up to five years.
Neiman then made a play for the judge to alter his client’s travel restrictions on the bail package. My client pleaded guilty, Your Honor, so could he please travel anywhere in the world with prior notice to the government? There was the fully secured $5-million bond, Your Honor, plus he left the country twice and returned, which means he established precedent twice. Judge Castel said, hey, not so fast, what if I allow just the U.S. and Canada? Then Neiman said, look, Your Honor, that’s great, but my client’s primary residence is actually the Bahamas. “I’m going to grant your application in part,” the judge decided. “I’m going to limit travel to the United States, Canada, and the Bahamas, without prejudice to your right to make an application showing extraordinary circumstances that require further modification.”
Castel then set Lawrence’s next meeting, his bail hearing, in exactly four months’ time. Lawrence got to go home to his wife and kid, and Lefebvre had a good idea what was going to happen in courtroom 12C in eleven days’ time.
XIV (July 2007)
“I Plead Guilty, Your Honor”
Ahern initiated mix-down sessions soon after the recording sessions finished. Lefebvre had put a lot of material into digital memory, so he knew the process might drag on. Whatever, that could wait. Like Lawrence before him, Lefebvre had a reluctant date with Judge Castel, and it was set for July 10 at 1 p.m. When the United States of America v. John David Lefebvre resumed, he had to listen to a judge tell him how his life would work for the foreseeable future. Across the aisle, his new best friends from the FBI, Garcia and Treanor, were there, along with Special Agent Goldman. Marella and Gluck from L.A. were right there with him, along with local counsel Michael Tremonte from Cohen & Gresser.
That was the part Lefebvre had been dreading. He thought it was sort-of, kind-of bullshit, what they were doing to him, but he was powerless, which was the worst part. Other than getting a few good lines off in his songs, he had to sit here in Castel’s fiefdom, 12C, and take it. Castel wasted no time: “I’ve been told that you wish to enter a guilty plea to a charge contained in a criminal information. Is that correct, sir?”
Lefebvre said, “Yes.” He took the oath and a
nswered umpteen questions about his state of health and mind. Castel was only following a set routine designed to establish without doubt that the defendant understood what was happening to him. The first question was about doing drugs and drinking in the past twenty-four hours. Lefebvre admitted to drinking wine with supper the night before. Was that all right? Sure, so long as his mind was now clear. “Yes,” he replied.
Castel then talked about Court Exhibit 1, the waiver of indictment. He advised Lefebvre that he was giving up his opportunity to be tried before a grand jury of twenty-three citizens who would decide by majority vote whether or not he ought to be charged. Marella informed the court that his client waived the public reading of the criminal information. The court told Lefebvre he was giving up his right to presumption of innocence, that the government would no longer have to prove beyond reasonable doubt that he was guilty, and that a jury of twelve would not have to unanimously agree with the government’s argument. Yes, Lefebvre waived it all.
The right to cross-examine the government’s witnesses, the right to take the stand and defend himself, the right to not take the stand and not have it influence the outcome, the right to ask the court to compel witnesses to testify, the right to appeal if found guilty. Yes, yes, Lefebvre waived it all.
They discussed the “information,” S1 07 Crim. 597. Castel wanted to make sure Lefebvre understood that he was being charged in “Count 1 in connection with your participation in the operations of Neteller PLC, a company that provided internet payment services, and its related companies,” and charged with a violation of 18 U.S. Code, Section 371. He understood.
Life Real Loud Page 27
