Life Real Loud

by Bill Reynolds

  There’s another Neteller connection here. Doug Rigby, Steve’s buddy from the Fusion Media days, as well as Neteller, lives in Atenas, about twenty miles west of San José. Atenas was once described in National Geographic as having the most livable climate in the world. Of course, Doug likes to tell people this, says Travis. Doug still works in the industry, building web properties for businesses. Lately, Travis says, he’s been working on something similar to YouTube.

  Hearing about Atenas and Doug reminds me of a conversation between Steve Glavine, Bob, and John about day-to-day existence. Around an outdoor table set for twelve, they talked about what it meant in practical terms to not be a slave to the daily grind.

  Bob: “Do you ever not know what day it is?”

  John: “I know when it’s Wednesday because I have shit to do.”

  Bob: “Lesley and I have to get the kids to school.”

  Steve: “Wednesday, it’s just a name. It’s so arbitrary. When I was sailing I forgot what month it was.”

  • • •

  I start to feel that way about staying here, outside Dominical, where the ocean seems to lull time to sleep. Around dinnertime, a strapping Maori named Whaka, pronounced like Walker but without the r, is hanging out on the patio, along with a couple of families with young children. Whaka hails from Christchurch, New Zealand, but lives in L.A. most of the time. He greets me and says his date got food poisoning from a Subway snack and so I’m now his date and he hopes that’s okay. Sure. Travis joins our table. Two big, beefy, laid back dudes. Whaka is not that laid-back, actually. His rasta cap signals an alternative lifestyle, but he’s got swagger and talks boldly, whereas Travis’s tranquility is the opposite of his linebacker appearance.

  Whaka says he’s a yoga instructor, but not your usual ashtanga, vinyasa, hatha type. His specialty is flying yoga. He says it’s not entirely his idea but he’s put his own twist on it. “Really? I started going to yoga recently—only been three times. What’s the difference between regular yoga and flying yoga?”

  “Here, I’ll show you.”

  “Here?”

  “Sure.”

  We get up and move to an open space in the restaurant, about ten feet away. A family at the table beside us looks on. Whaka lies down on the tiling and asks me to fall into him. “Two orders,” he says. “Remember to breathe, and remember to listen.” He tells me to let go of my neck. “Hang your head!” I’m having a tough time, and he knows it. I keep forgetting to spread my legs out and let them hang when not in the actual flying yoga position. I don’t open up my body. “Breathe!” he barks. I fall into him. He’s supporting me the whole time, whether I’m close to him or up high with his feet balancing my entire body with legs extended and looking up and arms stretched forward.

  That’s flying yoga.

  Whaka is a strong guy, but much of it has to do with coordination and balance, he says, as opposed to raw strength. “I’ve done this with some big guys. They can’t believe it.” Still, his strength has to help. The demo lasts about ten minutes. Everyone in the restaurant is staring at two grown men on the floor swooping close to each other and then one being pushed way up into the sky. It’s exhilarating when someone else is doing most of your plank work.

  “You live in your head,” he assesses afterward, “but now you need to now live in your body too.” Maybe I should try meditating? “No—what you need is physical movement and physical contact. People need to be touched.”

  I find out Whaka and Travis are heading into Dominical to the Envision music and arts festival, which has been going for two days already and will end Sunday—that is, tomorrow. Whaka is part of the deal. His flying yoga program is right in there with holistic hooping, belly dancing, and fire spinning. They went last night and had a blast. “Come with us,” Whaka says. “It’ll be good for your soul, a little rave dancing on the beach, maybe some LSD.”

  “Wow.” I waver. “It’s been about forty years.”

  Well, it might be good to get out of the head, like totally, and into the body, on the beach, with lots of people. Might change my mental direction. I know Whaka is right, but the ocean hasn’t quite lulled me to sleep, and tomorrow is my last full day in Costa Rica. I hang back, in the head, writing. The night passes uneventfully.

  Should have done a half-tab—like John did after his fifty-ninth. Chicken.

  XVIII (April–October 2011)

  The Last Suppers

  On a day of infamy in the gaming world known as “Black Friday,” April 15, 2011, the DOJ announced it had arrested eleven executives from the three largest online gambling companies operating in the U.S.—PokerStars, Full Tilt Poker, and Absolute Poker—on bank fraud, money laundering, and illegal gambling offenses. The men who ran these companies were accused of going way beyond anything Neteller had practiced—actual, direct money laundering of gambling revenues through intermediary companies, and gaining access to smaller banks via kickbacks to move illegal gambling transactions. It was just like the chauffeur had called it back in February, about online flower shops and the hair-care stores. Of course, illegal online gambling in the U.S. was still going on—it just wasn’t out in the open as in the halcyon days. The only problem for guys like Isai Scheinberg and Paul Tate of PokerStars, Raymond Bitar and Nelson Burtnick of Full Tilt Poker, and Scott Tom and Brent Beckley of Absolute Poker was that Preet Bharara, U.S. attorney of the Southern District of New York, and Janice Fedarcyk, assistant director of the New York Field Office of the FBI, knew about it, too. As with Lefebvre, they’d go before Judge Gabriel W. Gorenstein.

  • • •

  On Wednesday, April 27, Lefebvre sounded worried, if not paranoid, on the phone. His lawyers had told him the DOJ wanted to “wrap up within the next six months.” One of them, Benjamin Gluck, believed the government simply wanted to clear case number 07-CR-597, now over four years old, off the books. Lefebvre wasn’t so sure—he thought the multiple Black Friday busts and his case kicking into gear were related: “There’s nothing to stop them from coming down hard on me.” Judge P. Kevin Castel, he figured, was going to hand him three years, not between thirteen and sixteen months as expected. Castel would make a trophy of him in front of the eleven newest arrestees. Look at what happened to Lefebvre. Better start talking, guys.

  Lefebvre gave Gluck and Marella copies of his screed about the King and His subjects. They were impressed. Not only was it eloquent, they thought every word was true. They told him they were going to have the words engraved and mounted on a brass plaque and have the plaque hung in their Century City office. But that was where the words were going to stay—on the wall. Lefebvre was under no circumstances going to say them to Castel.

  On Tuesday, May 10, Lefebvre left a voicemail: “It’s a date. September 28. New York City. Sentencing. So the last chapter is being written.”

  On Sunday, July 31, Lefebvre phoned. His annual motorcycle trip with Jeff Proudfoot and Bruce Ramsay had gone off without incident. This time they toured around Nova Scotia and New Brunswick. Lefebvre happened to visit his first wife, Janice Pridham, who lives near Moncton. He said her house is falling apart and the paint has chipped off—and she didn’t care. No doubt he visited haunts he would only vaguely remember, if at all, from 1954–55, places like Chatham (now Miramichi), his dad’s last station. He told me his upcoming birthday party—for his sixtieth, August 6—would be a low-key affair, just friends and family. “The real party will be in September,” he said. Or whenever he got out of jail.

  Then the sentencing date changed, again, this time moving up five days. On Friday, September 23, Lawrence would go before Judge Castel in the morning, and Lefebvre would follow in the afternoon. It was like the Calgary boys had been twinned. Busted within minutes of each other, hit with the same $5-million bail, entered the same guilty plea, offered the same deal, up to five years in prison and $100 million forfeiture. There were just the two differences: Lefebvre, having bee
n arrested for illegal drugs once before, got nailed with urine testing while Lawrence didn’t; and Lawrence, the senior officer of Neteller, had to scrape up sixty million to Lefebvre’s forty. But otherwise, why stop the parallel prosecutions now? Logically, the conclusion had to be that whatever time Castel deemed was necessary to sit in a cell and meditate on crimes against America, almost certainly it would be the same for both.

  Marella and Gluck had met with the FBI parole officer a few weeks earlier. Their suggestions for the government were noncustodial release for Lefebvre, five years’ probation, including time served, and no additional fines. “They didn’t see a problem with that,” said Lefebvre. Now he was ninety percent sure it would happen that way. The paranoia that had seeped inside of him over the spring, influencing his thoughts in a negative direction, had receded.

  In fact, Lefebvre’s first impression of this proposed denouement was to act like Mickey Rourke aping Charles Bukowski in Barfly. After Rourke gets beaten up in the back alley behind the Golden Horn tavern, he says, “Oh hey, is that the best you can do? Ya betta phone fa help,” to the beefy bartender who’s stomped him twice. In other words, Hey, what do you mean? You put me through all this grief for half a decade and take most of my money, and that’s the best you got? You mean you’re not even going to throw me some time? Wusses.

  Lefebvre then made it clear that he did not feel that way. There was a palpable sense of relief that the nightmare might be fading but also a sense of dread about returning to the big house for the third time in his life.

  Lefebvre provided a snapshot of the latest circle of bureaucratic hell that he had lately descended into:

  There are three words here we need to distinguish. One of them is “bail.” At the moment, I’m out on bail, which is administered by an organization called pretrial services [U.S. Probation and Pretrial Services System]. “Probation” is a sentence the court imposes whereby your probation officer supervises—at different levels, depending on the probation order—your behavior. And “parole,” which is, after you’re sentenced, when they release you from jail on good behavior, it’s a parole situation. So we’re not talking about parole. Right now I’m on bail. And if I’m sentenced to a further period of probation, my lawyers are going to make the pitch that I’ve been on bail for four and a half years and by the report of the probation officer I’ve comported myself excellently and that should be taken into consideration, and the probation should be: time served on bail. That’s the argument they’ll make.

  Parole people are different from bail people. I would never have met these guys till now. They’ve got these bureaucratic rules and regulations they make you follow. They want a complete list of all the gifts I’ve given over $500—ever. They want me to list all my vehicles and property, and all my investments. Jane, See-Wing, Geoff, Marian, Nathalie—we had a big army going there for about ten days putting together the package. Not a package—boxes and boxes.

  So how does an overly generous guy like Lefebvre remember all the gifts he’s given? He doesn’t. For years the line has been, more or less, five hundred bucks to him is less than transit fare to you. These rules were never designed for the wealthy white-collar criminal elite or, in Lefebvre’s case, guys in the not-so-wealthy-anymore-but-still-okay snack bracket. Continuing to talk about the parole requisitions, he said,

  It was really annoying. They’re used to asking those questions of every scumbag who never even had a bank account. The impact of it was whether I was able to pay the fine.

  Three cardboard boxes filled with shit. They asked me questions like: “Can you give descriptions of all gifts over $500?” I told him, “There are probably over a thousand gifts and I can probably remember two hundred.” So we gave him a copy of our accounting sheets of all the expenditures paid over the past five years and then just highlighted the ones that said “Gifts.” They don’t even know what they’re asking for. They wanted to know the name of every corporation I was ever a shareholder in, and all the names of the other shareholders. We’re just scratching our heads, going, “What?” You know, who are all the shareholders of Neteller? We gave him all of my credit card receipts and all of my bank shit.

  Out of frustration, this had to be the tactic—inundate. Everyone knew the parole officer couldn’t possibly read it all. “Nor could he make any sense out of it,” said Lefebvre. “There is no reference material there, just raw shit.”

  Lefebvre admitted that at this point in the game, on the tilted playing field during the summer of his sixtieth, he hadn’t been looking over Marella and Gluck’s shoulders. Yet he knew that in addition to the boxes of paperwork, he’d have to be in New York for an interview. Robert Flemen, U.S. probation officer, worked for the probation office, but he also worked directly for Castel. He reviewed everyone the judge was about to sentence and prepared a report for him. Summing up the experience as “really fucking weird,” Lefebvre said:

  “Did your mother have any other relationships?” I was so aghast at that. Fortunately, I had the patience to understand that what he was doing was some Sociology or Psychology 101—he had some checks he had to check in. They were looking to see if there were any disturbing influences in my youth or something like that. I was going to say to him, “You know, my mom didn’t give me permission to discuss that with you—would you like me to ask her?” And then I was going to say to him, “Dude, I’m sixty fucking years old!” Instead, I looked over at Vince, who gave me that “Calm down, John” look, and said, “No, but lots of priests tried.”

  The other questions for Lefebvre weren’t any less invasive or absurd:

  “Did you ever see anybody ingest alcohol or drugs in your home?” I said, “You mean my home?” And he said, “Yes.” And I said, “Yeah, me!” In the probation report, he said I responded to all questions appropriately. On the way out of the meeting, after they made me piss, I was shaking my head and I said, “Man,” and he said, “What?” And I said, “You just seem so unthankful.” And he blushed a little bit and kept on with his plastic gloves. But then on the way out, when he was showing me the elevator, he said, “This is the first interview in my career where anybody quoted The Simpsons.”

  Lefebvre found the episode so weird and distasteful he didn’t want Flemen’s name to appear in the book. “Just call him Homer.”

  • • •

  On Tuesday, August 23, the presentence report was released. Attorney-client privilege would normally apply, but Lefebvre waived it. The document prepared for Castel was sent as correspondence from Thomas Mixon, supervising U.S. probation officer, to Benjamin Gluck in Los Angeles. The judge will cull what he believes are the important parts of Flemen’s report for the sentencing. A quick perusal nets a few proper names that were not double-checked for spelling. Also, some of the facts seem off-kilter. One small slice of Lefebvre’s history that probably won’t come out at sentencing was that “in 1974, he was able to stop smoking LSD on his own.” More seriously, in Section A, “The Offense,” clauses twelve through seventeen recount the role of the cooperating witness (CW) in the double arrest.

  On August 12, 2006, the CW impersonated a gambler and opened a Neteller account and transferred $400 from a Miami bank account. Sitting at a computer in Miami, the CW visited a website in Antigua, transferred her Neteller dough to the website, and made “at least two” bets on NFL games. Two weeks later, the CW pulled the reverse routine, not in Miami but in New York State. She used a computer in Westchester County to access her Antigua account and transferred two hundred back into her Neteller account. Then she placed fifty on an NFL match using funds in the Antigua account. She was discovering the Neteller system’s elegance and ease of use.

  Focusing on the Manhattan transaction, since that was the origin of the arrest, FBI agents realized Neteller’s transactions were going through an American ACH. This was where they claimed a conspiracy took place: Neteller “concealed the nature of the transactions” by pushing them throug
h JSL Systems, Inc., co-owned by Lefebvre and Lawrence. JSL was a U.S. subsidiary whose sole purpose was to move American cash into a National Bank of Canada account called Carload, Inc., a wholly owned subsidiary of Neteller, before moving the money to Neteller PLC. The FBI reviewed the records and said $98 million was transferred in this way in the first three months of 2006.

  The question that popped out was, why did the two cofounders own JSL while Neteller owned Carload? If the company—not its two top executives—had owned JSL then maybe Lawrence and Lefebvre would not have become such easy targets. The other tidbit certain to play a role in the length of the sentence was Lefebvre’s early drug bust. In Part B, “Defendant’s Criminal History,” Sections thirty-four, “Criminal History Computation,” and thirty-five, “Other Arrests,” were germane. First, it said Lefebvre had no known convictions, which was good news for him because it meant his criminal history point total in Castel’s eyes would be zero. So how will the 1969 bust for selling LSD affect sentencing? Not at all. Lefebvre owned up to the arrest and conviction to the court, but the case was sealed “because it is a foreign conviction.” So much for any dark theory about how a decades-old drug prior might quadruple the length of Lefebvre’s sentence.

  • • •

  On Wednesday, August 31, 2011, Lefebvre phoned to talk about the court date: “My last bail piss test was at pretrial services in Los Angeles. They actually didn’t even ask me to piss, but they could have. Thereafter I knew that I would be reporting at any time to the probation officer in New York, so I’m on best behavior. I haven’t made plans yet. I’ll probably go down a couple of days before and just sit quietly—go watch people in Central Park taking pictures of wilderness.”