“That’s what I was wondering.”
“Come to think of it,” he remembers, “when I was sitting in handcuffs at my own kitchen table, negotiating with them for the right to have my hands cuffed in front of me instead of behind my back, so I could drink my tea, I did receive a call on my cell. And it was Steve, I think. But the lady from the FBI said, ‘I’ll take that call.’ I presume Steve hung up.”
• • •
On Monday, October 24, 2011, we meet up at the Mark, a swank hotel on Madison and East Seventy-Seventh (they’re all swank around here). Lefebvre seems to be in a playful mood. Just rolling with it. He’s got his friends and daughter here for his Last Supper. “Hey,” he shouts, “can you guys just turn around and face the wall when the judge starts to speak? That’ll send a message. Or I could go over to Zuccotti Park and give everybody a hundred bucks and a pack of smokes to heckle the judge. He’s already decided: proceeds of crime, deduct the amount given to charity. What’s the sense in that? You mean those weren’t proceeds of crime? I gave forty million to the biggest charity of all, the government.”
Still joking around. The Mark’s female clientele sport leathery faces, gold jewelry, and poufy hair. The male clientele are senior and middle-aged guys with small bodies and big heads, like Picasso. A few of them have striking, imperial looks, like they screw each other relentlessly and mechanically to no effect—kind of like Duchamp’s Bride Stripped Bare contraption. Regardless of gender, the look of the rich emanates from colonically irrigated, collagen-enhanced, massaged and pedicured bodies. (Or so I think.) And then there’s the older man who looks like the Law & Order guy with the froggy face.
Lefebvre orders magnums of Margaux 2000, which sell online for anywhere from $1,500 to $3,500 a bottle. He orders two, plus two other high-end reds. When the waiter returns, Lefebvre smells the Margaux cork. “Oh!” And smells the bowl. “Ooh!” And smells the bowl again. “Whoa!” he tells the waiter, “I’m from Calgary and I know horseshit when I smell it.”
Lefebvre passes it over to his pal. Hoggan has taught Lefebvre a lot of what he knows about wine. He sees his friend’s excitement and sticks his snout into the glass. “Oh yeah, John. That’s amazing.” Lefebvre, always affable, says to his waiter, “Hey Joey, you should pour yourself a little taste of that.”
Lefebvre still can’t get enough. As his sings, “It’s no use / I can’t quit the juice.” Red, red, red. It is not clear whether he has ever been spotted holding a glass of white.
When asked about his acquisitiveness, he says,
I have a couple of Sub-Zero fridges. Sometimes they’re full; sometimes they’re empty. I do have some wines in there that I keep. I have three or four bottles of 1990 premier class grand cru. I’ve got six of the 2000 Château Broughton Rothschild, which is a premier class grand cru. They say 2000 is maybe the best year in French history. I paid $1,100 each for those bottles. When I drink them there will probably be $3,000 or $4,000 worth of wine in each bottle. The greatness of those wines derives from the fact that they will be greater in twenty years. You just hang on to them and in twenty years you get the treat.
He also says he will probably drink those bottles alone, despite being an amiable host, a master of the kibitz, and a lover of company. Those are wines to be savored in private moments. He’ll make an exception for Hoggan, if he’s in town. But right now, while Lefebvre and Hoggan are the true oenophiles, everyone at the table must drink from the cup.
Lefebvre won’t know which jail he’ll get until tomorrow, either the Metropolitan Correctional Center (MCC) holding pen for pretrial and holdover inmates across the street from 500 Pearl Street, or the one in Brooklyn. Lawrence is “staying” five miles south of the Moynihan building, in the Metropolitan Detention Center (MDC) in Brooklyn, on Twenty-Ninth Street at Second Avenue, near Gowanus Bay. Maybe the FBI will separate them; maybe they won’t.
Whatever amount of time Castel decides is necessary for redemption, Lefebvre’s way of getting through bad times has always been to read books, lots of books. This time, although he’d like to, he won’t be able to take any inside with him. Those are the rules. The authorities want to be sure friends or associates don’t sneak in an iron file or, in Lefebvre’s case, stamp LSD onto a page or two. No, to receive books an order must be placed to Amazon, which apparently has a contract with the government to supply prisoners in jail. Now there’s a tidy racket. Lefebvre wants Haruki Murakami’s 1Q84 and Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick. My wife suggests George Eliot’s Middlemarch. I suggest DFW’s Infinite Jest and Murakami’s The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle. Hey, listen, he’s going to be doing at least forty-five days, so he might as well cogitate with some big-ass books. If he does more time because of his prior, well, someone will circumnavigate the bureaucratic waters. Hoggan’s going to be in Manhattan until Friday and will try to get him the books he wants.
The Mark is the final supper of three nights of Last Suppers. On Saturday night, Lefebvre and company made reservations at the Surrey dining room. He and his party are staying at the Surrey hotel, one block south of the Mark. On Sunday afternoon, everyone headed downtown to Zuccotti Park to hang out at Occupy Wall Street, ask questions, and get a feel for the scene before walking north to the High Line, where they caught up with us.
After walking the tracks—and taking in Neil Denari’s ingenious HL23 condominium tower, a retro space-age glass design, shoehorned between existing structures, pushing itself wider as it climbs higher—we dine al fresco at the Standard Grill in the Meatpacking District, near the south entrance to the High Line. Later, we meet up at Les Halles Downtown, Anthony Bourdain’s second location, on John Street, a couple of blocks from both 1 WTC and OWS. This Les Halles is a little too subterranean, without the French bistro atmospherics of the original on Park Avenue South. The next morning, everyone meets again, this time in Morningside Heights, at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine, Amsterdam Avenue and 112th Street. The gothic revival building is apparently the fourth-largest Christian church in the world. It still has not been fully restored since a 2001 fire, and some people now refer to it as St. John the Unfinished. It is still a good enough location for actor James Gandolfini’s funeral. Hilary’s friend Oscar Hansen is aching to tour the building, and the name of the church is not lost on anyone. The John we know, his business remains unfinished as well.
After the sightseeing we jump in a couple of cabs and head south forty blocks to Salumeria Rosi, the “Upper West Side’s slice of Italy,” at Amsterdam and Seventy-Third, for a decadent lunch of rich meats and cheeses and wines. After all the plates have been removed, diners satiated, effusive praise offered in return, the staff, having experienced this most excellent customer in their midst, are ordered to pour forth complementary plates of cheeses and desserts in succession from the kitchen.
A walk through the park and a snooze later, everyone reconnects at the Mark, on the other side of Central Park. My wife cracks, “How many of the apostles were in it for the free food?”
By evening’s end, Lefebvre has a grim visage. Being rich is wonderful, but a great meal and superb wines for people he knows and loves gets him only so far. Basically it kills some time. He looks resigned, a little depressed. Problem is, thinking about it doesn’t matter one way or the other—the dark cloud hangs just the same. On one hand, there will be no miracle intervention. On both hands, there are no stigmata, no marks of the Passion of Christ. He’s not a hero and he’s not a martyr—he’s simply going to jail.
• • •
On Tuesday, October 25, at 2 p.m., it is Lefebvre’s turn in courtroom 12C. Deputy Clerk Florence McAnther sits to the left of Castel’s enormous, elevated desk. The first row is empty. Then there is a bare table. At the next table down from Castel, looking toward the judge, Jonathan S. Abernethy, a New York lawyer affiliated with Marella’s firm, has joined the Century City lawyers and the defendant. He will hold the credit cards and the passport and make sure Lefebvre ge
ts them back on December 8—or whenever he gets out. Beside Abernethy, left to right, looking toward Castel, are Gluck, Lefebvre, and Marella.
Behind the defendant and his lawyers is a show of support. There are benches, one row of five, one row of four. In the first row are Jim Hoggan, Enid Marion, Emily Lefebvre and her husband, Pádraig Ó’Cinnéide, and Hilary Watson. In the second row, on the left, I sit with Laura Lind. Three spaces over is Oscar Hansen.
Presenting the government’s case, from the other side of the aisle, are Assistant U.S. Attorney Niketh Velamoor and his ever-present boss, U.S. Attorney of the Southern District of New York Preet Bharara. Also in attendance, sitting behind them, is Neiman, Lawrence’s lawyer.
Castel announces he has the presentence report, recommendation, and addendum, along with an addendum approved by Probation and dated October 18. He has a submission from Marella dated October 11. He has a second supplemental sentencing submission dated October 24—yesterday. He has a letter from the Aboriginal Mother Centre, Vancouver, dated August 1, 2008. He has the proposed consent-of-forfeiture document—someone found the missing $16 million. And he has the government’s sentencing letter, dated October 20. He says he has read the guideline calculations from the presentence document, which highlights the substantial assistance Lefebvre has given the government.
There is a lot of back and forth between Castel, Velamoor, and Marella. It’s basic routine, to make sure both parties are happy with the number and accuracy of the documents. Now he wants to hear the government’s viewpoint on the level of Lefebvre’s assistance. “Yes, Your Honor.” Like Lawrence, Lefebvre gave “substantial assistance” to the government, and Velamoor is happy to recommend that the defendant be sentenced in accordance with United States Sentencing Guidelines Section 5K1.1. The judge then invites Marella to address the court:
“Your Honor, I’ll try to be brief,” Marella begins, and then proceeds not to be. Comically mangling the pronunciation of his client’s surname to Le-FAY-ver, not Le-Fayve, the normal, French way, Castel begins:
First, in terms of Mr. Lefebvre’s background, Lefebvre was raised by his mother because his father was killed in a traffic mishap, when the defendant was three years old. He has a tight family unit. His mother, who is now eighty-three years old, lives in Calgary and will be moving to live with Mr. Lefebvre. He supports her. He always has done so. He has a sister and brother, and their relationship is good. And he has his daughter, Emily, who is here today, Your Honor. And Emily is, of course, the apple of his eye. He substantially raised her. And it’s a very wonderful success story, Your Honor, and gives some insight into Mr. Lefebvre. Because Emily not only went on to attend Trinity College in Ireland, she, for seven years, has been a lecturer there, after having studied the classics in Latin and Greek, and she’s been teaching there. And of course he’s justifiably proud of her.
Marella moves on to Lefebvre’s law career, highlighting his law degree and the Sunnyside Legal Clinic for its social activism. “This is indicative of who Mr. Lefebvre is. That law practice served a community, and particularly people of low and moderate means who needed legal services, and that was their law practice for several years.”
Marella turns to Neteller, saying, yes, Lefebvre cofounded the firm in 1999, and yes, he was president for a period. And then he pulls the shift: “It’s also important to understand exactly what his role was at the company. No question, he had the title of president; no question, he was a founder. But his responsibilities at the company and his impact on the company was substantially more narrow than that.”
Castel is only interested in the money, though, asking, “How much of the stock did he own at the outset?” Marella is forced off his gambit and has to tell the judge that when Neteller went public in 2004 Lefebvre owned twenty-two percent of the stock to Lawrence’s thirty-six. Then he gets back on point, which is that Lefebvre’s initial concentration, in 2001–02, was to run customer service. “He was never involved in sales,” says Marella, “never dealt with what Neteller called the merchants, the gambling sites. If someone had a problem using Neteller services, they called customer support and that’s where he was involved.”
After that, claims Marella, by January 2003 the company had brought in professional management personnel, and Lefebvre’s role was phased out. In fact, in terms of “daily dealings” with the company, Lefebvre was “out of the operation of the company” by the end of 2002. And in 2004, he became a non-executive board member, owning twenty-two percent of the stock. The phase-out was completed in December 2005, when he resigned his board membership. “Frankly,” says Marella, “he wasn’t doing anything” except be a shareholder. “As you know,” he points out to Castel, “there are limitations on when insiders can sell stock. Mr. Lefebvre divested himself of Neteller stock, to the point where by December of 2005, when he resigned from the board, he owned five percent of the company—five percent. From that point forward, until the time he was arrested in January of 2007, that was his only connection with the company.”
After laying out the position that Lefebvre might have made a lot of money as a cofounder but hadn’t been involved for years when busted, Marella pirouettes to the mea culpa. Yes, Lefebvre has openly admitted what he did was wrong. Yes, he has accepted full responsibility. “So there’s no slicing and dicing here,” says Marella. “Throughout this entire process, which is now about four years and ten months, he has never tried to minimize.”
He follows with a personal assessment: “I can tell you from having dealt with him over this period of time that this whole matter has weighed very heavily on him. He is absolutely remorseful for what he did. And, Your Honor, frankly, he’s embarrassed and ashamed … and he’s lived with it now for a long time.”
Marella then discusses Lefebvre’s comportment over the protracted presentence period. First, he agreed to forfeit the proceeds from crime and “he’s paid every cent of it.” Second, his supervision has gone without a hitch. “Never had an ounce of an issue or problem at all.” And third, according to the government’s Section 5K1 letter, he cooperated fully. Marella starts to lay it on thick, saying the cooperation, more than full, was “extraordinary,” and in fact he’s never seen such proactive help in “my thirty-eight years.… The important thing is that this information, these people, witnesses, were beyond the government’s reach. They were not U.S. citizens.”
Marella is trying to convince Castel that Lefebvre went above and beyond. In the guidelines manual, Chapter 5, “Determining the Sentence,” Part K, “Departures,” Section 1, “Substantial Assistance to Authorities,” the court might reduce the sentence for one or more of the following five reasons: (1) the significance and usefulness of the assistance, with the court considering the government’s evaluation of the cooperation; (2) the truthfulness, completeness, and reliability or the information provided; (3) the nature and the extent of the assistance; (4) any danger or risk to the defendant or his family involved with cooperation; and (5) the timeliness of the help.
Substantial Assistance, Section 5K1.1, is what saved Lawrence from doing substantial time, and so Marella hopes to keep Lefebvre’s sentence to the minimum established standard here, forty-five days plus a last little mosquito bite, $1 million. But Castel thinks, not so fast, and calls Marella on his use of the word extraordinary. He wants to know if anyone was prosecuted because of Lefebvre’s help.
Marella is left holding an empty bag, except to say Neteller the company had to settle with the government. That’s the $136 million it forked over. The government received a lot of new knowledge about online gambling because of Lefebvre’s cooperation, no question. But regarding nailing other offenders, Marella cannot say: “In terms of criminal convictions, I am not sure, nor am I sure of where the government is still going.”
Castel says, well, okay, so he “did everything he was asked to by the government.”
Marella replies, “No, Your Honor, he did more than that, with
all due respect.”
Castel says, yeah, well, okay, he got his Section 5K1 plea agreement, which means he figured out “ways to make himself useful.” But, he asks, did Lefebvre “wear a wire, he didn’t put himself at personal risk or anything of the like?”
The two men haggle on this point for a while before Marella breaks the stalemate, saying, “There was one point in the investigation when the government was having significant problems in dealing with the computer system and how transfers were made and how it worked. One of the people that we brought in from outside the country was the head IT person, and he worked with the FBI to unscramble that omelet, Your Honor, and it was a major point. Enough said about the cooperation.”
The guy Marella refers to here is Neteller’s ex-head of IT, Steve Glavine. Lefebvre asked Glavine to fly to New York to be interviewed by the FBI for his case. Glavine, as Marella points out, did so at considerable risk to himself. He was one of the seven original Neteller founders, and there wasn’t much to stop the FBI from arresting him. “They assured me when I was there that they had no interest in me whatsoever,” Glavine told me in 2010 about his precarious New York meeting with the feds. “You know, are they lying to my face?” Glavine asked me. “Is it worth going and seeing if they are?”
No, it wasn’t, and so therefore Marella has scored his point about Lefebvre’s extraordinary reaching out. The irony of taking that chance for Glavine was that he told agents the exact same story everyone else had told them, down to the fine details, and yet they refused to believe Neteller’s operation was that simple. They accused Glavine of holding back information and warned him the real truth about the nefarious operation would come out, so he might as well cough it up right then and there. It was a bewildering experience, Glavine told me, and they weren’t necessarily posturing. They really did have trouble believing Neteller’s business model could produce that much revenue without some secret catch. The real problem was the agents just could not wrap their heads around the concept of the churn—the convenient, secure system had made a bettor feel at ease keeping his money in Neteller and making multiple bets, which produced multiple transaction fees for Neteller from the same bettor, over and over.
Life Real Loud Page 39
