Life Real Loud

by Bill Reynolds

  The slab that sits on top of the cooking island, in what would be called the kitchen if it were separated with walls, is gouged, pitted, pock-marked, and streaked. It is not burnished into a smooth working surface, so imagine an Edward Burtynsky photograph of open pit mines, miniaturized and in three dimensions. This bold aesthetic decision may require Nathalie Carles to break out the bleach regularly to eliminate food particles.

  Inside this impressive sanctuary, Lefebvre tells me, he still has his box of books from jail, and included in that box are a bunch of thoughts he scribbled down during his incarceration. It would be terrific to get hold of these notes, but right now is way too soon to ask for them. “I’ll have a look at them,” he says, “when it’s time to write some new songs.” With some prompting, he reluctantly agrees to go back in time, just once more, to sentencing day, October 25.

  It was a surprise when Castel told Lefebvre he was a good man who would continue to do good things. The judge did not give this kind of encouragement to the other Neteller cofounder, which means he may have noted the show of support from family and friends in court, along with Lefebvre’s thick record of giving. He hadn’t become a philanthropist the day after his arrest, and Castel understood that.

  There are the few minutes I remember, before the marshals took their man downstairs. From a distance, I can see Lefebvre beginning to remove his tie. He seems fine. He’s even smiling. Marella, Gluck, and Abernethy are with him. Now he tells me what happened:

  “I was taking off the Armani suit that was two sizes too small for me since I started eating pizza and drinking wine. They made me take off my tie and they made me take off my shoelaces in case I was going to hang myself. I said, ‘Are you guys serious? I can figure out way to hang myself with my shirt. So what are you going to do, take my shirt?’”

  Still I can see Hilary Watson and her beau hug. She is noticeably distraught, while Lefebvre is not. He’s been through this drill. Emily stands off to the side with her husband, waiting her turn to say goodbye, and then her dad is taken away.

  Outside, we mill around, unsure of what to do next. Hoggan chats with the lawyers, talking procedure. They tell him what’s involved in visiting, how to get books in, the post-sentence deportation procedure, and working the bureaucracy to get a fast-track document for whenever Lefebvre wants to come back to the U.S., as a convicted felon, to play gigs.

  “Are you going to be all right?” I ask Emily.

  “Yes,” she replies. “I’ll be fine.”

  If she is distraught, she conceals it well. She won’t betray her emotions to the writer, yet I suspect her stomach is not churning. Emily’s eyes normally display the dance of a powerful, playful intelligence. Looking straight at her, I convince myself I see a steely inner core: that’s that, let’s get on with it, the five-year nightmare will soon be over and Dad can come home. And that would be the exact correct demeanor—look forward, it’s almost over—because once Lefebvre is home, his one-year probation will flash by and then he’ll truly be free of the DOJ for good.

  In the elevator down to the first floor and toward the main entrance and past the guards and the baggage and body-screening machines, we discuss, in a feeble but friendly way, the possibility of going for a drink and a snack. This is not a bad idea and what Lefebvre might have wanted, but no one’s gas tank is on anything but empty.

  At this point, my wife and I feel like intruders, so we say our goodbyes and leave family and close friends in peace. The end of our story coincides with the curtains opening for the next act of Lefebvre’s protracted ordeal.

  • • •

  “They took me downstairs and made me dress in some orange jumpsuit shit,” he begins. “Then they marched me across and put me in this room. Probably in the basement and across the way to a building that was a prison.”

  Lefebvre was marched across Pearl Street, underground, to the building across from the Moynihan, the MCC, 150 Park Row, a Brutalist skyscraper opened in 1975. Its famous “guests” have included Gambino family crime boss John Gotti; the king of Ponzi schemes, Bernie Madoff; the blind Muslim preacher Omar Abdel-Rahman, who exhorted the 1993 World Trade Center bombers on to jihad; Ahmed Ghailani, the first Guantanamo Bay prisoner brought to the U.S. to stand trial, specifically for his role in the August 7, 1998, bombings of U.S. embassies in Nairobi, Kenya, and Dar es Salaam, Tanzania; Horst Walther Overdick Mejía, a.k.a. El Tigre, a cocaine trafficker who helped the Mexican Los Zetas cartel take over northern Guatemala; and Gilberto Valle, the New York Police Department officer who used police databases to compile a list of one hundred women he wanted to kidnap, rape, torture, murder, cook, and eat. Lefebvre’s eventual destination and temporary home is called 7 South, but first he’s brought into a room.

  He continues,

  The first holding tank, I was in with a guy who had cut himself and written on the wall in that really cool tag writing that graffiti guys use. I can’t remember, it was a four-letter word, like “WAIT” or “TIME,” and he scratched it on the wall in blood. Everybody does that. Sit there long enough and scratch your name into the bench with your fingernails.

  I asked Sam, my bunkee, who has shoulders as big as my head, “A lot of these guys in here gang guys, Sam?” When he smiles he looks like Jimi Hendrix. He’s twenty-five, twenty-six years old, built like Joe Frazier.

  “Nah, not really. I don’t think they’s any gang guys in here.”

  The next day, I’m playing chess with this guy named Grady. He’s a killer chess player; so adept. I say to him, “Sam says not many of these guys are gang guys.”

  He sits back and he folds his arms and he says, “Your bunkee? He Blood.”

  Lefebvre was discovering an order to the jail he didn’t know existed.

  One of the first things they asked me when I went in was, “You got any seps?”

  I said, “What? I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “If you don’t know what I’m talkin’ about you don’t have any.”

  “Separations,” says Lefebvre. He continues,

  So in my wing there were no Crips, just Blood. The Crips are in another wing. They ask you. The Crips know if you’re a Blood—they know ya. Somebody knows you. They know everything, right? So you don’t want to be in there. You don’t say, “I’m no Blood.” You say, “You can’t put me in with no Crip.” If you say, “I’m Blood,” that’s the same as saying, “I’ve committed the crime of racketeering.” So you don’t say that.

  So that’s why Sam said, “Ain’t no gangs in here.” But nine or ten guys in my tier were Blood.

  The first night, they put Lefebvre and everyone else who got processed that day in a space nicknamed “the hole.” This is a triage area where guards can cut new prisoners down a notch or three. They put all the men in handcuffs behind their backs so they can control them. They put however many they’re moving that day inside a single cell. Once everyone’s inside, they open the little meal slot. They tell each prisoner to stick his hands through so they can take off the cuffs. “There’s seven guys there,” says Lefebvre. “It’s tight, it’s crowded, it’s packed, it’s stuffy. An hour or so later they come around and you put your hands through and they cuff you. You’re ready to be taken to your cell. The hole is the place they take you to punish you.”

  That was humiliating enough, but then the new prisoners had to deal with a malcontent. Lefebvre recalls,

  There was one guy in the hole, in the first cell. You had to walk by him. The whole time we were in there, the whole night, he never stopped. In your cell, your toilet is right by that door. There’s a little glass window on the door, so when you’re going to have a dump what you do is, your cellee, he rolls over and looks the other way, and you stick this towel in the little window. They commonly use a toothbrush handle, and that’s enough to fix a curtain in there. And you’re allowed to do that long enough to have a dump. Once you’re finished you ha
ve to take it down because the guards want to see what you’re doing. Well, this guy in front, he wouldn’t take down his little towel. So they’d say, “You have to take down your towel.”

  “SUCK MAH DICK!”

  “Don’t make me come in there. It’s not going to go good for you.”

  “SUCK MAH MOTHAFUCKIN’ DICK!”

  That went on full-time the whole twenty-four hours I was in there. Well, he slept. But it was the first thing he said in the morning and the last thing he said at night.

  The guards never went into the pest’s cell. They never tried to stop him. He had the cell to himself, so they just let him rant.

  Lefebvre was a member of two minorities in 7 South, the white and the old. “Most of them are black or Mexican. Well, not Mexican—pachucos, Central American.” There were ninety-six guys on his half of the seventh floor, sixty percent black, thirty percent Latino, ten percent white, he estimates. And almost all were young. Lefebvre says,

  Killer, he’s twenty. He’s accused of killing four guys. The story goes, he was there and he watched it. And so they bust him and say, “You tell us who did it and you’ll walk.” And he goes, “Fuck you, man.” He’s awaiting trial.

  Another guy, Alejo, from El Salvador, never had a toke in his life; not one. Big, tall guy, a bit fat, kind of long black hair, spoke spotty English. His brother’s a drug dealer and he had a drug deal going down one day. This guy phones the house and says, “Tell your brother I’ve got two thousand for him.” Alejo says okay. And then they bust him. The way it works is, if your brother or anybody you know is in a drug deal and you happen to call him on a cell phone that day—you’re in, man. Then his brother the dealer says, “What the fuck do you have my brother for? He’s got nothing to do with this.” And then they say, “With what?” And then it’s, “Hey, you want to talk?” Equal justice for all—that’s the way it goes.

  On floors four through eight, Lefebvre says, there was a North and a South. Lefebvre’s block, 7 South, was like all the rest, a wide-open space about two stories tall on the inside. At one end there was a bubble, like the control booth of a sound studio. Inside, guards sat and watched. Left of center and right of center were tiers, one eight steps up, one eight steps down. Each section, A, B, and C, had eight cells up and eight cells down, and each cell had two men. That made ninety-six men in all. North was exactly the same, another ninety-six. And on it went, five floors of North and South equalled 960 jailbirds. Another floor held the library and the psychologists and the medical facilities, another floor was the permanent holding pen for the admin people, and the tenth floor contained the hole and protective custody.

  He explains, “The hole is not exactly isolation. There are two to a cell. You eat in your cell. You shit in your cell. You wash in your cell. And you can get out once a day for ten minutes to have a shower and once every two days to get some exercise.”

  There were other ways to get exercise. The elaborate sprinkler system throughout the maze came with large red pipes to feed the water. “There’s no risk of those pipes coming down,” says Lefebvre, “so everybody knows they’re a really good thing to do chin-ups on. There are these big black guys, well, some of them aren’t that big—their waists are as big as a wine bottle and their shoulders are this wide—but they’re touching the ceiling with their feet. Most of the women you know would have been really knocked out to be where I was, to see what those guys looked like. They live in a tough world—you gotta stick up for your own shit.”

  It’s not like Lefebvre hadn’t been in that underworld before. Whether driving an all-night cab in Calgary or experiencing L.A.’s detention center, he knew firsthand how to deal with the people society won’t talk about or hang out with: “I got along because I was able to fake it—a lot of those guys thought I was from New York. I talk like they talk, and I say the kind of shit I usually say. There was this one guy, Taz, when he was busted he said he was worth $140 million. I said, ‘Is that all?’ One tooth was surrounded with gold and it had a big diamond and the next was surrounded by silver with another big jewel in the middle. Taz was heavy shit, a heroin trafficker and a murderer.”

  Because Lefebvre’s sentence was so brief, he became a holdover and remained with the pretrial inmates. This situation had an additional advantage: pretrial cellees could not be forced to work while in prison because they had not been convicted. Lefebvre was free to indulge in the one pastime he knew could teleport him out of his new daily regime: he devoured nine books to forget.

  Jean-Paul Sartre would have been proud. Not only did Sartre turn around the Cartesian affirmation of existence—not “I think, therefore I am,” but rather “I am, therefore I think”—he also believed a prisoner was existentially, if not physically, free. And here Lefebvre was putting that old theory to the test.

  Some of that testing wore down his patience. Remember, Sartre also said hell was other people. Lefebvre says,

  They all listen to different radio stations, and when they talk to each other they yell over that. It’s fucking noisy in there—painful, all concrete. The Spanish guys are so loud! The black guys are bad enough but the Spanish guys: “Alegre! Alegre!” It means happy but it also means loud. The louder you are the happier you are, and they’re all jumping around trying to pick up each other’s spirits.

  When I was in jail in 1969–70 in Western Canada, there were some fifties greaseball guys, and it was different. Those guys, anybody makes any noise, it was, “Dummy up!” and everybody would shut up. They wanted it to be cool. Guys from the fifties, they know what cool really means. Guys from the nineties and 2000s, they wouldn’t know cool if it bit them in the ass. If they ran into cool they’d fuck it up right now by making a bunch of noise.

  What is cool, what is hip, what is hipster, what is bohemian, these terms have been in flux for years. I met a friend at a John Cale show a few years back and he said of the small crowd, “Take a good look around, this is what’s left of bohemia.” At the time I thought that was a fairly profound statement, but I’m impressionable. Lefebvre now had empirical evidence. Jail culture mirrored the mainstream society’s co-option of cool. As for his forty-one-day stretch, he figured, in retrospect, it could have gone far worse.

  “I don’t know whether it was intentional or just lucky/smart,” he says, “but they put me in with a bunch of pretrial guys. I was the only guy in there who had already been sentenced. Actually, the whole building was filled with pretrial guys, so they were on good behavior. They were going to save knifing people for when they were in proper prison. That saved me a little bit.”

  The routine was straightforward. At six in the morning, guards opened the cell doors. Prisoners were allowed to go have breakfast, which consisted of a bowl of cereal—Bran Flakes, Corn Flakes, or Cream of Wheat—plus an apple or two, a couple of small pieces of cake, and a quarter-pint or two of milk. “Guys get their cereal and their pieces of cake and their milk and they mix it all together into this great big pabulum, and then they eat that and get fat.”

  Unlike in MDC L.A., prisoners weren’t forced to get up and go to breakfast. The guards allowed the men who didn’t feel like eating until lunch to hang back.

  “Count” occurred, Monday through Friday, between 4 and 5 p.m. and between 8 and 9 p.m. On weekends, guards added one additional count, 10 to 11 a.m. This procedure allowed them to count the entire building, over and over and over.

  Except for the fact that you’re a prisoner and you had to be there, Lefebvre says the time wasn’t so bad. “You have the walk of the range, three double tiers that have tables running down the middle of them, like McDonald’s, nailed-to-the-floor furniture. Guys are playing chess and playing cards and just sitting and bullshitting.”

  The guards let inmates outside twice a day. Lefebvre tried it and decided it wasn’t for him: “You go out to this roof and you’ve got thirty-foot-high concrete walls and a big wire mesh across the top of it. And you’re lo
oking up at all these people looking down at you with magnifying glasses. And they’re playing basketball and shit up there. And it’s a sound sewer; so much noisier even than inside.”

  It was noisy enough that Lefebvre decided once was enough for him: “When everyone went up on the roof for an hour and a half, those were the most peaceful times. I figured early on that the best thing to do is to get up in the morning and enjoy that time.”

  The rules were a little different from the detention center in L.A. and gave the impression of a bit more freedom of movement within 7 South itself. Yet the atmosphere was loud and rude compared to the West Coast facility. He explains,

  When I was in MDC L.A., there was a TV on at that end of the room and there was a TV on at this end of the room. One of them was in Spanish and one of them wasn’t. And that was it.

  In MCC, there were four TVs over there and three TVs over here. And those three were in Spanish. And under each TV was a little FM transmitter that had a number on it, like 94.7 or 103.2. And then you had these little Walkmans you could put on FM local, and you had four preset buttons. And so you set the preset buttons to the TVs that were in the language you wanted to listen to. You touched one button and got the football game, and over there was MTV, and over here was Fox News. So everybody was listening to something, and whenever they were talking THEY WERE TALKING OVER THE TOP OF WHATEVER WAS COMING IN THEIR EARS!! It was brutal. MCC New York was way more animalistic.

  Turns out the first guy Lefebvre encountered on the way in, the one insistently demanding fellatio at top volume night and day, may have been the perfect, nasty metaphor. And while the guards weren’t necessarily “Bend & Separate!” sadists as in L.A., they were hardly a compassionate lot. About a third of the guards acted like human beings, he figures, but some of them were cruel. Still, in terms of time moving fast or slow, he looks back and says it went better than he thought: